Tolkkinen: Deer hunting unites country families and city kin

Rural Minnesota took on a holiday feel this past weekend.

Families added an extra leaf to the dining room table. They stocked the refrigerators, washed the bedding and made sure they had extra toilet paper.

It was all for the opening weekend of the firearms season for deer hunting. Throughout greater Minnesota, the homes of empty nesters once again rumbled with life as college kids came home, sometimes bringing their friends to hunt on farm fields and in woodlands. City friends and relatives drove hours to crash on couches or spare beds then rise well before first light to make their way to deer stands hoping to provide meat for their families and a trophy for their walls.

Emily Wolf, a potter who lives on a 17-acre hobby farm in Osakis, welcomed home her 19-year-old son Marcus from North Dakota State University who shot a deer on opening morning.

“He was giddy and couldn’t sleep the night before,” she said. Next weekend her daughter, Anna, 21, will also come home and the family will hunt together.

Hunting traditions bring together country folk and city kin, retirees and teenagers, people across the political spectrum. When falls are cold and you can see your breath, you dole out the hand warmers and share in the pleasure of the wood stove when you get back. When they’re nice, you might hang out together by the barn smoking or planning next weekend’s hunt. Everyone in blaze orange, carrying their rifles or shotguns.

Adam McKinley of Gaylord in southern Minnesota proved to be worth his weight in venison when he first started hunting with his in-laws south of Mankato four years ago. He took over the time-consuming and messy part of hunting — skinning and quartering up the deer and packaging the meat. To top it all off, his father-in-law had shot a nice buck, so he turned the skull and antlers into a European mount, an expensive process to have done professionally.

The next year, he was not only invited back, but to stay the weekend.

“I was like ahhh yeahhh,” he said. “I hadn’t really deer hunted since the early 2000s, maybe once or twice on public [land] and those hunts were disasters.”

He continues to do all the processing of the deer: “My way of showing my appreciation for the invitation to hunt his property.”

At our place, my brother and his kids come up every year. This year we had beds for them all, but some years they’ve slept on the couch or on blow-up mattresses. Sometimes they get a deer, sometimes they don’t. One of my nephews is now married with kids, and a couple of times he’s brought his family along, too.

My brother and I have our differences about things. Our growing-up years were steeped in political debates, and we bickered and sulked (well, I did) until we realized that family and connection matter more than our differences. We could either spend time together and dote on each other’s children and make each other gooey brownies or a dinner of broccoli-beef braids, or we could only nod icily at each other at funerals every few years.

Sharp differences exist in the world. They exist in our country. This election awakened fears of same-sex couples that their marriages might be nullified, that their parenthood might be questioned. Parents of transgender children, too, are alarmed, wondering if their children’s process of transitioning might be halted by an unfriendly administration. And for every woman who has ever longed to see a woman in the White House, it was especially bitter to see Americans choose a man who had been convicted of sexually abusing a woman. And when you hear people mocking women for their worthy and noble aspirations, it’s hard not to resent the voters who made that happen.

But how do we move forward? Some have chosen to cut ties with family, friends and businesses on the other side. It might help to bind up our wounds. But separating ourselves only feeds our division in the long run.

Coming together in one house, sleeping in the next room, sharing morning coffee and stories of the day’s hunt remind us that we share this earth, this nation, this state.

The difficulty is in remembering that connection when we go our separate ways, scrolling and clicking and sharing things that aren’t true, written by people we’ve never met and probably never will, people who don’t know our names and don’t care about us, who will never help us get the deer home, skin it and butcher it. And will certainly never make us meatballs and mashed potatoes or prepare a lovely European-style mount.