Opening Day
Nov. 15th, 2011 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
"If you should happen to need to go into the woods, don't wear brown. Or white." I paused a moment to consider. "On second thought, it would probably be better if you didn't go into the woods at all."
Teph looked at the calendar. "Oh, yeah. November 15th. Opening Day."
Ah yes, Opening Day, the Upnorth National Holiday, where there is nothing deadlier than a white handkerchief (if anybody carries those any more). Because when you yank it out of your pocket to catch a sneeze, it flashes and flutters around just like the white tail of a startled deer bounding away through the underbrush. It's likely to get your fool head blown off.
Not that this happens often, to give the hunters credit. Usually the drive up here is the most dangerous part of the hunt.
Back in the late 1950s, my relatives tell me, they closed the Upnorth schools for the first week of deer season because between the people gone hunting and the people working to sell things to the Red Army, as they were called back then, nobody was going to be sitting in any classrooms anyway. This was in the years before the freeway came this far north, and they'd close the state roads too, or at least the southbound side of them. Both lanes would be bumper to bumper traffic heading north, driving like mad, the night before Opening Day. If you wanted to go south, you'd have to creep southward along the gravel shoulder, facing the glare of headlights all the way.
Today, the Red Army has become the Orange Army (by law) and Opening Day isn't quite the big deal it was back when it was the only thing going on up here between Fall Color Tours and Spring Morel Mushroom Picking. But it's still pretty big. Last night the roads and stores and restaurants and bars were swarming with hunters.
Today, heeding my own advice, I took my noon walk through the driveways and parking lots of the box stores near my office, not in the empty woods out back. (We have urban sprawl here too, except without that "urban" part.) The parking lots were STILL swarming with people.
Which raises a bit of a question. If the hunters are supposedly hunting all day (although there is about as much all-night drinking and card playing and sleeping it off afterward as there is hunting, I'd guess) then who was doing all the shopping at noon?
Well, another tradition of Opening Day is that the lonely, upset, sorrowful wives, left behind when The Guys all go out to The Camp, stay lonely etc etc until The Guys are out of sight. Then they grab the checkbook and the credit cards, assemble in swarms akin to locusts, and Descend Upon The Stores.
In today's less sexist world we don't have quite the division of labor they did in the old days, but there's still a lot of that going on. Old Upnorth National Holiday Traditions die hard.
Teph looked at the calendar. "Oh, yeah. November 15th. Opening Day."
Ah yes, Opening Day, the Upnorth National Holiday, where there is nothing deadlier than a white handkerchief (if anybody carries those any more). Because when you yank it out of your pocket to catch a sneeze, it flashes and flutters around just like the white tail of a startled deer bounding away through the underbrush. It's likely to get your fool head blown off.
Not that this happens often, to give the hunters credit. Usually the drive up here is the most dangerous part of the hunt.
Back in the late 1950s, my relatives tell me, they closed the Upnorth schools for the first week of deer season because between the people gone hunting and the people working to sell things to the Red Army, as they were called back then, nobody was going to be sitting in any classrooms anyway. This was in the years before the freeway came this far north, and they'd close the state roads too, or at least the southbound side of them. Both lanes would be bumper to bumper traffic heading north, driving like mad, the night before Opening Day. If you wanted to go south, you'd have to creep southward along the gravel shoulder, facing the glare of headlights all the way.
Today, the Red Army has become the Orange Army (by law) and Opening Day isn't quite the big deal it was back when it was the only thing going on up here between Fall Color Tours and Spring Morel Mushroom Picking. But it's still pretty big. Last night the roads and stores and restaurants and bars were swarming with hunters.
Today, heeding my own advice, I took my noon walk through the driveways and parking lots of the box stores near my office, not in the empty woods out back. (We have urban sprawl here too, except without that "urban" part.) The parking lots were STILL swarming with people.
Which raises a bit of a question. If the hunters are supposedly hunting all day (although there is about as much all-night drinking and card playing and sleeping it off afterward as there is hunting, I'd guess) then who was doing all the shopping at noon?
Well, another tradition of Opening Day is that the lonely, upset, sorrowful wives, left behind when The Guys all go out to The Camp, stay lonely etc etc until The Guys are out of sight. Then they grab the checkbook and the credit cards, assemble in swarms akin to locusts, and Descend Upon The Stores.
In today's less sexist world we don't have quite the division of labor they did in the old days, but there's still a lot of that going on. Old Upnorth National Holiday Traditions die hard.
