The plan for today was a long hike in the woods. Rain or shine. Or snow. Whatever. We were ready. Until yesterday morning. One of my co-workers, in random conversation, mentioned that this Saturday (that’s today) was the opening of the firearm deer season. Duh. Why did I not remember that?

I am not anti-hunting. I am not even against guns. I know some o’ y’all are. We’ll have to agree to disagree. I have never shot a gun myself and I don’t have any particular interest in shooting anything but a camera. Er, except for the time back in the 1990s when some *$#-hole serial killer was hanging around in the vicinity of my walking route beating women to a pulp and leaving them for dead. At that time, I was ready to train every woman on the Planet Ann Arbor to use a gun and station them at every corner. I also knew how ridiculous that pipe dream was. But I was angry about having to live my life in fear of such a mentally wounded human being.

Hunting? I *personally* could not kill an aminal* for sport and I think it would take me some time to get used to killing aminals for food if I needed to. I don’t have a whole lot of experience with hunting because my family didn’t hunt. Except for one thankfully unsuccessful goose-hunting expotition by a pajama-clad Grandroobly but that’s a whole ‘nother story and probably a better one. I do know that hunters are not bad people and by far, most of them are responsible about following hunting rules and regs and gun safety practices.

But every segment of the population has its outliers and I know that there are always a few amateur or inexperienced deer hunters/gun users out there who may not know all the rules or may be a little quick to pull the trigger. And we won’t even talk about alcohol here. Which I am also not against (uh, bartender, I’ll have a manhattan, please). But there is a certain festive atmosphere that happens up here at the start of the firearms deer season and it’s all fun but I don’t want to be mistaken for a deer. I don’t own any blaze orange hiking gear and I decided that, this weekend, we were not gonna hike in the woods. Anywhere. The hiking season is long. It lasts most of the year. If you own some of those long skinny sticks that you put on your feet, it lasts the whole year. I’m willing to give up the woods to the deer hunters for two weeks.

* Any words mispelled on this blahg are intentional and have a long history behind them.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2008 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.