Deer Camp!

Every year, for as long as I can remember, the weekend after Thanksgiving, my father would head to the hills in search of the ever elusive White Tailed Deer. This tradition known to most as Deer Camp consists of a week-long Manfest in the woods, joined by a handful of your Manfriends, everyone enjoying copious amounts of Eating Manfoods, Drinking, Smoking, Story Telling, Card Playing and other Manly pastimes*. Then at 4am Monday morning, the men roll out of bed, eat a huge breakfast and head up the mountain in the darkness to their stands to wait for Sunrise and the hunt to begin. Some choose to use a blind, some a treestand, and some, like my father and I, choose to stalk the hillside in search of a trophy or in our case, a freezer full of Venison.

Around the age of 14, I was allowed to join in the fun (see below, hah!). As the youngest member of our camp, I was known as "The Greenhorn" for years. My duties included getting wood, water washing dishes and tying an old man's shoes (RIP Don). Over the years, I earned my keep and became a respected member of the Squirrel Inn gang.

Over the years, my father spent his free weekends keeping up the Squirrel Inn. He built foot bridges (flooding destroys the bridge every few years). He re-sided and put a new roof on the Cabin. He even put an addition on the House for Mazie. Most of all, we got innumerable cords of firewood down off the mountain to heat the cabin and neighbors, which I might add is one of my favorite pastimes. All in all, I think it's safe to say that my Father deserved to be left in charge of the Squirrel Inn and Burkhart Estate.

 

Happy Birthday Dad!

My duties here haven't changed much since I moved in. I still get the water and wood. But now I have some added duties. Like keeping the place clean, washing the sheets, and warming it up for guests in the winter months. I'm really looking forward to updating the cabin's furniture and cleaning out the years of junk that has accumulated in the sun room. I've already added WiFi to the list of services provided.

all that firewood ain't gonna cut itself...

The Squirrel Inn is going to be seeing much more than just hunters in the upcoming years. Hopefully all of you will come out for a visit. I want to share all of this beauty with as many people as possible. Maybe then you'll see that this world is a marvelous, magical world full of endless beauty and possibilities (the POSSIBILITIES!!) and not such a terrible place to live after all...

Photo by Matt Behling - Appalachian Trail, VA

*The only woman to ever grace us with her presence at camp was one Mazie J Burkhart, owner and proprietor of the Squirrel Inn. Therefore, it's a Manly pastime. Sorry, that's just the tradition of it all. Leave the Wives/Girlfriends at home!

I now walk Into The Wild.

I suggest you listen to this while you read on.



It seems Act 2 of this blessed life is upon me. After a long year of celebrating life and freedom I've relocated to the beautiful country side of the Appalachian Mountains in up state Pennsylvania. I am now the proud caretaker of the Squirrel Inn founded by a dear family friend, Mazie Burkhart. She passed away and named my father executor of her will. She wanted her property to live on and be protected from the evils of the gas industry and since my father knew the property better than anyone and lived down the road she left my father in charge of everything.  On the sprawling 160 acres of pristine Pennsylvania hard wood forest there's a small house,

a rustic back woods hunting cabin,  

 a 2 car garage with workshop,

and a small barn*.

My family and I had the delightful duty of cleaning out the house after Mazie left a lifetime (including her ancestor's) of possessions behind. Mazie was a rock/gem collector (had her own rock/gem shop in Williamsport for years) and the property shows it. There are small rocks and stones, some even cut and polished, strewn about her gardens and window sills. She was also quite the carpenter. She left a few pieces of her work behind including an octagon table with granite top. One of the benefits of this process was getting to claim small things like that table for myself. After weeks of boxing countless antiques and nicknacks, we moved the boxes and furniture out, now awaiting estate auction.

And now the settling in is underway. My cats and I have been living here for a few weeks now. They spend most of the day sleeping in the closet while I make myself at home in my new house. As I've been unpacking, I've been re-evaluating the "stuff" that I've moved along with me and have found much of those things getting packed right back into boxes from whence they came. So many unnecessary material objects, accumulated over years of living, moving from place to place, always acquiring more and more stuff. It dawned on me after I moved the 3rd Old TV I'll probably never plug back in, I really don't want any of it. I want to live a completely different life than the one that all that "stuff" represents. So to the estate auction that life goes, awaiting a new life with someone else.

Which leaves me here, staring out on a new horizon, mind and heart bursting with excitement at all the possibilities (the possibilities!!!), awaiting whatever the new day brings. I guess you could say I'm being borned again...

"You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, 

there is no telling where you might be swept off to."

Special Thanks to my brother Jason for all his help moving

and sharing the first Hookahs with me.

*The barn was used to house a horse during Mazie's late 70s. She took care of the horse all by herself including shoveling manure and carting it away in a wheelbarrow across her proprety to "the dump". I find it very impressive that a woman of her age could perform such a grueling physical task. She was always doing things like this up to her dying days. I guess that's saying something about the mountain air.