SPOTTING

The night air was impossibly chilly for the first week of August; my carefully sunblocked arms almost a joke under my inadequate sweatshirt layer.  Amazing how the temperature falls with the sun in these mountains.

Tioga County is a place where my spirit is restored. With every stroke of the canoe oar, every frog refrain, I can feel those bothersome pinprick daggers of stress just draining away. It is my last slice of summertime heaven each year before the inevitable return to fulltime work. 

My husband rented an enormous red pickup truck for this year’s trek to Nauvoo.  This is his idea of great fun, driving along in a vehicle large enough to climb atop mountains and flatten innocent Volkswagens without any noticeable interruption in the rhythm of his glee or in the torturous blaring of country music on the radio. 

It was our first night at the house and I was doing my annual duty, taking a turn “driving” for deer-spotting.  (Another benefit to having a gigantic red pickup truck at our disposal is being able to stuff multiple eager bodies into the flatbed of the truck for this nightly ritual.)   I go along to drive once or twice during the week so that Jim too has the opportunity to stand precariously against the back of the truck cab, brandish the blinding light, feel the cool breeze drying out his eyeballs, and try to steer clear of the sometimes unavoidable side effect of kamikaze bugs in the teeth.  My son and daughter were with us.  And this year we’ve got the extra blessing of my daughter-in-law to be, joining us for her first foray into the wonderfully bizarre subculture of spotting for deer.  If you thought deer-spotting was just for hunters, you were wrong.  We, the bleeding heart bug-rescuing anti-hunters, are also avid fans. 

I’ve driven many a vehicle on the roads of Morris and Nauvoo over the past 22 years as my family and friends spot for deer and tally marks to our nightly animal counts.  Driving a vehicle in this manner is practically child’s play.  The mood is festive, windows open, the night is black, and other cars and trucks are an extreme rarity. The speedometer never goes above 19 miles per hour and is more likely to linger around 6.  We pretty much crawl along the roads (many of them dirt) and scan the cornfields, meadows, and wooded lots for animals.

It takes about an hour for our usual tour.  We take turns shining our incredibly bright light into the darkness of the peaceful Tioga landscape.  Great jubilation is experienced when we spy a set of beady little amber eyes, reflecting the light back to us.  Buck with racks so imposingly heavy we wonder how they can hold their heads upright.  Communities of graceful doe, flicking their sensitive ears at the annoyance of our clan’s admiring clatter while their fawn, spotted and curious, rise on their knobby uncertain knees to check us out from their carefully smashed beds of clover. 

Our spotting is not limited to the deer population. As we hope for bear sightings, we count raccoons, opossum, fox, rabbits, scraggly kittens, toads and skunks.  We’ve heard the horrible scream of bobcats but haven’t yet encountered one during spotting. Only cows and horses, captive in the fencing of local farms, are exempt from our count.

Many family memories have been born while spotting in Nauvoo.  Standing upright through the sunroof of a Saab holding the lamp with winter gloves against the extreme summer night chill.  Gripping the roof rack while seated precariously on the side window of a Volvo for a better view.  Accidentally spotting the same poor old horse year after year, finally determining we have permanently blinded him; since requiring that we greet him with “Poor thing, he’s only GOT the one good eye…”  Eerie strains of a song by Adele inexplicably and creepily emanating out of a seemingly deserted field of corn. My noble father-catching my arm at exactly the last possible moment before I fell headfirst off the back of the old spotting truck in my haste to switch seats just as driver Jim was pressing his foot on the gas…

On this particular night, things felt a bit atypical behind the steering wheel.  This was because the raised curve of the dashboard on Jim’s new red toy was about even with my eyebrows.  I felt like a kindergartner in the teacher’s chair.  It didn’t seem helpful to share the potentially disheartening information of the blind driver’s challenge with my passengers, so I kept it to myself.  In retrospect I should have circled back for one of my pillows to give myself a boost. I saw pretty much nothing of the road in front of the truck and gauged my approximate location by best guess.  At the leisurely speed I traveled, my method worked well until the final right turn - at which point several of my flatbed riders complained that the entire right portion of the overlarge truck was apparently no longer on the road at all.  Oops. (Let’s just say I don’t think Jim will be letting me take the truck into Wellsboro for shopping…)

But all was well.  Because there is something too marvelous to describe about traveling at a snail’s pace on a dark country road with the people I love in tow.  Hearing their comfortable murmuring alongside the nighttime cricket-song is a symphony.  And the remarkable barefaced stars are my witness; their twinkle unconstrained by the artificial lights of any town.