The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [171]
W AIT A MINUTE. Did I really write that last paragraph? Without irony? That’s embarrassing. I’m actually writing about the hunter’s “instinct,” suggesting that the hunt represents some sort of primordial union between two kinds of animals, one of which is me? This seems a bit much. I recognize this kind of prose: hunter porn. And whenever I’ve read it in the past, in Ortega y Gasset and Hemingway and all those hard-bitten, big-bearded American wilderness writers who still pine for the Pleistocene, it never failed to roll my eyes. I never could stomach the straight-faced reveling in primitivism, the barely concealed bloodlust, the whole macho conceit that the most authentic encounter with nature is the one that comes through the sight of a gun and ends with a large mammal dead on the ground—a killing that we are given to believe constitutes a gesture of respect. So it is for Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher, who writes in his Meditations on Hunting that “the greatest and most moral homage we can pay to certain animals on certain occasions is to kill them.” Please.
And yet here I find myself sliding into the hunter’s ecstatic purple, channeling Ortega y Gasset. It may be that we have no better language in which to describe the experience of hunting, so that all of us who would try sooner or later slide into this overheated prose ignorant of irony. Or it could be that hunting is one of those experiences that appear utterly different from the inside than from the outside. That this might indeed be the case was forcibly impressed upon me after my second trip hunting with Angelo when, after a long and gratifying day in the woods, we stopped in at a convenience store for a bottle of water. The two of us were exhausted and filthy, the fronts of our jeans stained dark with blood. We couldn’t have smelled terribly fragrant. And under the bright fluorescence of the 7-Eleven, in the mirror behind the cigarette rack behind the cashier, I caught a glimpse of this grungy pair of self-satisfied animal killers and noted the wide berth the other customers in line were only too happy to grant them. Us. It is a wonder that the cashier didn’t preemptively throw up his hands and offer us the contents of the cash register.
Irony—the outside perspective—easily withers everything about hunting, shrinks it to the proportions of boy’s play or atavism. And yet at the same time I found that there is something about the experience of hunting that puts irony itself to rout. In general, experiences that banish irony are much better for living than for writing. But there it is: I enjoyed shooting a pig a whole lot more than I ever thought I should have.
2. A CANNABINOID MOMENT
Part of me did not want to go. The night before I had anxiety dreams about hunting. In one I was on a bobbing boat trying to aim a rifle at a destroyer that was firing its cannons at me; in the other the woods were crawling with Angelo’s Sicilian relatives, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember how my gun worked, whether the safety was on when the little button popped up on the left side of the trigger or the right.
I had tried out my rifle only once before taking it to the woods, at a firing range in the Oakland Hills, and by the end of the morning my paper target had sustained considerably less damage than my left shoulder, which ached for a week. I wasn’t ready to buy a gun of my own, so Angelo had borrowed a fairly basic pump-action rifle, a .270 Winchester with an old-fashioned sight that I had trouble getting used to. After my session at the range, the first-order worry that I wouldn’t have whatever it takes to fire a rifle aimed at an animal was overtaken by a second-order worry that, assuming I did manage to pull the trigger, nothing of consequence would happen to the animal.
The plan was to hunt boar in the sparsely populated northern reaches of Sonoma County, on a thousand-acre property