Loving the Tasmanian Devil: Ooh! I Love the Falling Snow Thing!

For the longest time I thought Field and Stream was a girlie magazine. I must have heard a joke about it at around age eight that clearly implied it was a magazine for males, and I made an incorrect intuitive leap. I avoided looking at it in drugstores, good girl that I was. I grew up in the city, so no one I knew subscribed nor did their parents, which would have corrected my misconception.

Nowadays, we actually have our own subscription and piles of issues sitting in our downstairs bathroom. Of course we live in one of New York State’s top destination counties for whitetail deer hunting, where it’s more unusual to not hunt than to hunt. Shotgun season is such a big deal here that they actually used to close school on Opening Day because none of the bus drivers would show up. It was labeled on the school calendars as Deer Day, but due to negative P.R., districts started having a Staff Development Day on Opening Day. Most teachers are female, and even the male teachers (aside from Phys Ed and Social Studies) tended not to fall into the hunter crowd; you don’t need the absent bus drivers and janitors on a staff day.

Lately, in its great wisdom the state has moved opening day of shotgun from a Monday to a Saturday because so many employers in other industries, such as automotive service and trucking, complained about absenteeism on Opening Day Monday.

I confess openly that Deer Season drives me crazy. As a teacher, especially as a teacher of Environmental Science and Agriculture, I used to get really mad when my male students would give me a knowing grin on November 1 and say “Just so you know I am going to be sick on November 22.” I would glare back and say, “OK, but I want a two-page typed description of the hunt.”

I drive the ten miles to work and see pick-ups beached along the side of the road like flotsam on the riverbanks, their drivers vanishing into the woods in blaze orange. “Don’t you people have any originality?” I scream through my closed windows to the abandoned trucks. “Oh gee, hunting. What an original hobby.” Are you catching the sarcasm here?

I have taken to calling hunting season the Perpetual Male Adolescence Festival. Eighteen-year-old young men revert to age fifteen. Thirty-year-old newlywed grooms revert to age fifteen. Fifty-year-old fathers of three children revert to age fifteen – for over a month straight! They think, week after week, “How fortunate am I to be eternally fifteen, with no spouse and no children and no job and to be able to just spend hours and hours at a time in the woods.”

Thus the term Hunting Widow. This is not the wife of a man who has been shot in a hunting accident but the wife of a man who might as well have been shot in a hunting accident for all she sees of him during November and December. (Some women love this and see it as a vacation of their own from their man. They shop and go out with the girls.)

So I must say that hunting seems to turn all men slightly Aspergian. One clinical “symptom” of Asperger’s Syndrome is what is termed the “Special Interest.” It is actually one of the major criteria in the diagnostic description of Asperger’s in the DSM-IV: “Restricted, repetitive and stereotyped patterns of behaviour, interests, and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following” with number one being “encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus.”

Marble statue from Pompeii

I at first found this characteristic to be one of the strangest, like saying that a required symptom of having allergies is an unavoidable urge to constantly walk around with your hand on top of your head. Not all people with AS exhibit the special-interest trait, but might instead demonstrate routines or rituals, motor mannerisms such as hand flapping, or fascination with small parts. “Stimming,” as it’s called, is a way to relax a persistently overexcited nervous system. Many psychologists posit that the “special interest” is an alternate method of anxiety relief.

Other psychologists hypothesize that loyalty to a hobby or activity takes the place of neurotypical social loyalty, which is often confusing and unpredictable for an Aspergian. If you take the obsessive loyalty a typical nine-year-old has for his best friend and replace it with obsessive loyalty to something like fishing, you can start to understand it. I remember my obsession with my friend Julie at age nine. I wanted to spend all my time with her. If being her friend had been beyond my comprehension or abilities, I might have instead pledged my energies to my bicycle or birds or something more predictable and inert.

Perhaps this is why Andy pledged himself to fishing. When he was a kid, Andy disappeared whenever possible to fish. Luckily, Andy had the Bartlett family camp on Riga Lake most of the summer, a creek behind his house, and the Connecticut River once he got a little older.

I have heard his brother’s tales about the Bartlett family’s cross-country camping trips and how when they would finally arrive at the campground each evening, everyone else would be setting up camp and Andy would disappear with his rod. I used to feel angry solidarity with my brother-in-law, who still protests the unfairness of that situation, but in light of the Asperger’s, it makes perfect sense. I also realize that Andy’s parents probably found it easier to let him go than to deal with the battle of corralling him into helping. I am sure he must have been completely over-stimmed by the onslaught of lights, sounds, and physical proximity on a long car ride.

When we moved to New York State, the farm had to become Andy’s special interest. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that he could loosen his grip on the business enough to pursue a hobby. He held out for a long time against hunting, repelled by the mania and social obligation surrounding the sport here, but he finally gave in, thanks to our neighbor up the road, nicknamed The Crow for his eagerness to pluck fresh road-kill venison off the side of the road. Hunting made sense as a hobby that matched Andy’s life and location: he can walk out our back door and hunt on our own land; he can also drive three miles and fish.

So Andy has joined the local obsession, except in his own Aspie way. He started with shotgun and then got into bow and finally black powder. And of course his specific neurological gifts allowed – or forced – him to excel. Successful hunting requires that the hunter can predict the movements, locations, actions, and behaviors of the deer. In Andy’s case, it’s not that he can think like an animal, it’s that he does think like an animal. Therefore, he mastered hunting very quickly because he saw that the trick was not to out-tech his prey but to out-think it. Andy is known at the local sportsmen’s store as “Hat-Trick Man” for his ability to get a deer with each successive season’s weapon: bow, shotgun, and muzzle-loader. This is next to impossible for an NT and has made him somewhat famous locally. It’s like being married to Pa Ingalls or Nathaniel in Last of the Mohicans (well, make that Daniel Day-Lewis).

Of course, also in Aspergian fashion, the hunting can become obsessive and problematic, beyond the normal mania of the season. “Normal mania” is watching Andy and Tim and The Crow stand around and talk. Every half-hour conversation sounds the same to me: “Blah, blah, blah, blah, tree stand. Blah, blah, blah, blah, fifty yards. Blah, blah, blah, blah, sights must have been off.”

All men who hunt are very focused during the season, but as any wife of an Aspergian will tell you, the special interest can take on a life of its own and cause tremendous problems when it eclipses all else, like the family. For me, it means that besides teaching, caring for the kids, and doing calves, I often have to take over some of Andy’s farm duties if he is out in the woods.

Several years ago we were honored to be chosen as one of three local host farms for an inter-collegiate Dairy competition; Andy isn’t even in our official photo because he was hunting. I remember one day when we temporarily had only one car and I was 15 minutes late to teach my own class because Andy had gone to the bow shop.

Then there is all the hunting and fishing information to be mastered and so many tangents to explore and gear to play with. If one hunts, there is goose season and turkey season and deer season. Then there are the hunting weapons: bow and shotgun and muzzle-loader. There are all the types of fishing: trolling, fly-fishing, line casting, ice-fishing, shore-fishing, boat-fishing. I finally had to set up a large bookshelf for the fishing books that flooded in all winter, with such titles as Walleyes, Bass, Salmon, Trolling the Great Lakes. The farm is big enough and successful enough now that Andy could buy himself a fishing boat and deck it out with down riggers, sonar, and 2 different GPS receivers. We’re talking about stuff. The Spring 2008 Cabela’s catalog has 1,507 pages. Yes, 1,507.

Part of the special interest component of Asperger’s is mastery, figuring it out, knowing all the details, getting it right. In his book The Catch: Families, Fishing, and Faith, William J. Vande Kopple, whom Andy suspects of Aspie-hood, says, “What is great about fishing has to do with clarity: Do a certain thing at a certain time in a certain way and a certain place under certain weather conditions and you will catch a certain kind of fish … all this talk about dumb luck or natural caprice or unwavering patience – is the babble of the ignorant.” As Andy and Sully from Nobody’s Fool both like to say, “Luck has nothing to do with it.”

Although the adult, sophisticated version of angling focuses on the mastery of expert techniques and access to the appropriate doo-dads, Andy’s fascination with fishing comes from a much more childlike place. I know that as a young boy he was entranced by The Wind in the Willows, especially the adventures of Rat and Mole alone on the river. He loves to quote the Water Rat: “There is nothing – absolute nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”

I have seen the pictures of Andy and his grandfather in boats up at camp, and we have lately acquired quite a collection of boats ourselves. We started with a canoe and a kayak and have added another kayak, a motorized fishing boat, a Starcraft Islander, and a Hobie catamaran as a gift from our next door neighbor.

In The Wind in the Willows boating is actually the route to enlightenment. I think Andy would agree. Rat and Mole set out at dusk to look for Otter’s missing child, and when the sun rises, they are led by mystical music into the very presence of The Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

Hunting and fishing both involve accessing the mysteries of dawn and dusk, liminal times of days. Hunting requires being in the woods in the dark before the sun comes up or as the sun goes down. This is when the deer move carefully out of the forest edges into the fields where they graze. As Andy always says, edges are special places: the edges between forest and field, between air and water, between water and shore, between night and day and between day and night. The edges are where things happen, and Andy’s animal instincts are sensitive to them.

There is also the fact that Andy’s special interests involve the outdoors and the wild, not anything man-made or mechanical (aside from the thousands of dollars worth of “stuff”). I know that what Andy actually likes is the woods, the water, the wilderness, and he always has. The technology just allows him to justify his time there by ensuring he always comes back with food.

As James Taylor once said, “I find comfort in writing about and projecting and thinking about the seasons and the sea, things like that, because I have no control. I find comfort in fatalism and inevitability … I wish I were really part of the environment, part of the land instead of a successful Caucasian.” I know Andy feels that way, too. If Andy had his way he would let himself go all the way wild and stay that way, but since he is human and Aspergian, he needs to make a living too, and do it as close to perfectly as possible.

Annie Dillard describes a situation when she locked eyes with a weasel, an experience I know Andy has shared, and she realized how pure are the emotions of wild animals, how they grab onto their prey with pure-minded necessity. She says, “We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild.”

Special interest or not, hunting and fishing – field and stream – these are the places where Andy can relax, where his nerves can vibrate but in a way that is natural, animal-like, harmonious. Harvard-trained scientist and mystic Joan Borysenko maintains that nature is one of seven traditional mystical paths to God. Path one, linked to the first chakra, allows mystical connection to the divine through the natural world. The other six paths include creativity, service, love, discipline, contemplation, and faith. Andy is most definitely a first-chakra mystic.

During November and December, as I sit home with the kids on the weekends while Andy is in the woods, or in January when he is out on the ice fishing, or all summer when he is either waist-deep in a salmon stream or on a boat out in the middle of a huge lake, I acknowledge that such sojourns are both relaxation and spiritual practice for him. They are also escape from the overwhelming slew of details at home on the farm.

Also, they allow Andy to revert to his most natural, most child-like, most weasel-like self. I see it happen to his face as he pulls out of the driveway or lopes off toward the woods, and I whisper under my breath, “Just remember to come back home.”