I don’t know what kind of duck hunter’s spouse you have, but let me tell you about mine.
In 36 years of marriage and an additional five years of—well, we don’t really know what the heck was going on way back then . . . but the point is, across some 40 years, Julie has gone duck hunting with me exactly zero times. If there were a way to go duck hunting a negative number of times, she’d probably sign up for that. She did go duck scouting with me once, during those heady early days of courtship when young loves are trying to impress each other. I was in the canoe, holding it close to the bank, when she slipped five feet down the steep, muddy hill and tumbled into the boat. I’m pretty sure I was laughing when I said, “I’ve never seen anyone fall into a canoe before.” So that was the end of that.
Julie is no wilting flower. She will backpack, winter camp, sleep on airport floors, and bash through rough ocean inlets. When she’s outside, she’s all in. Happy as a clam.
Except for duck hunting. “No thanks,” she says. “You’ll have to work through your own crazies.”
But she is hands-down the most supportive waterfowling spouse the world has ever known. And I’m not just saying that because the season has started and I am overdrawn on brownie points. Because I am always overdrawn on brownie points.
Julie didn’t grow up in a hunting family. Things that come naturally to me are foreign to her. When we first met, she had never seen a glow-in-the-dark thumbtack—the ones you use to mark the trail through the woods to the super-secret duck hole. Incredible. She did not know that a diver and a dabbler were different sorts of ducks. She had never checked a shotgun to make sure it was plugged. She had absolutely no idea that ducks land into the wind, always. It was almost a hard stop for me. That was a tough day, working that out in my mind. But she wore black leather pants to dinner that night, so I decided to forgo any misgivings I might have had about her lack of waterfowl hunting knowledge.
Her parents were equally innocent of the ways of the outdoors- obsessed. Once, during a Christmas visit marked by a pre-Santa duck hunt, her mother, Martha, asked her, “Where does Eddie go that no other human goes? Where does he find all this mud?”
Early in our marriage, Martha was spending a weekend with us and opened the refrigerator. Between September and January, you do not open our refrigerator unawares. Especially if you are headed for the vegetable crisper drawer. That’s where I age my ducks. My mother-in-law was nonplussed.
“Julie,” she called out. “Do you know there are varmints in your refrigerator?”
Julie might not know how to set up a jerk cord, but she comes from pretty solid stock.
This time of year—wait, I mean, particularly during this time of year, especially during this time of year, my marriage to Julie is top of mind. I realize that I don’t make her life easy, especially during hunting season. Julie is not a clean freak, but close. She likes things neat. She doesn’t like clutter. It’s taken many years to help her understand that camouflage gloves on the living room hutch for weeks at a time are not clutter, but gear carefully and strategically placed to be available when I need it. I genuinely believe that she is grateful for these opportunities to step outside of herself and her day-to-day point of view and see the broader world and the many ways other good people live. She’s never thanked me for this, but I’m holding on to hope.
What never fails to astonish me, however, is how she goes out of her way to maximize my time in a blind. She will change her own plans, micromanage the family schedule, and even fine-tune her own leisure activities to get me outdoors as much as possible.
“It’s simple,” she once told me. “I like you better when you’ve been out there, doing your thing. Believe me, you’re a lot easier to live with when you’ve been hunting a bit.”
A less confident fellow would wonder about all that. Still, it’s true. I am a better husband, father, and friend. I’m easier to get along with when the balance sheet of my life includes as much hunting and fishing as it does all the other stuff required of one in the 21st century. When I’m gone too long from wild and wet places, I feel unmoored and unfocused. That’s no good for anyone in my life. Julie may not be a big fan of my last-minute schedule changes, but she knows that when the wind shifts to the north, we’re all better off if I have a little swamp time.
On hunt days, she even offers to set a backup alarm two minutes after mine on her side of the bed to ensure that I don’t oversleep. Only once do I recall needing it. I set my alarm for p.m. instead of a.m. and woke up to her kicking me with her bare heel.
“Hey,” she said, voice slurry with her interrupted sleep. “Get up. Go on. You know you’ll regret it if you don’t.”
I don’t know what you think about that, but I know where I stand. Man, that’s a woman.
