Jay and I braved the dark of night, thunderstorms and high winds to get to South Dakota last weekend for the Opening of Pheasant season.
My daughter in law is a South Dakota gal and Pheasant Opener is a bigger deal for her family than Christmas. As many members of the family as can make it, gather for food, fun and pheasants. It’s their version of Hubbellpalooza but instead of golf, they hunt pheasant, which is really a lot like golf: you spend hours walking through gorgeous nature, taking shots at targets you miss much more often than not. It’s a lot of fun.
We hit the road hours before dawn and drove through a tremendous thunderstorm just before we hit the border. Just as we passed the Welcome to South Dakota sign, a rainbow appeared in the sky and the speed limit bounced up to 80.
South Dakota: where they aren’t afraid of fireworks or fast cars and every American owns a gun. I LOVE it!
The weather was colder than forecast but we layered on the clothes, topped everything off with blaze orange and hit the fields. It was lovely! One thing I always forget about the Dakotas is the wind; it never stops blowing. Ever.
I didn’t carry a gun but I walked the fields, helping to flush the birds. We saw a lot of them but hit very few. As soon as they got high enough into the air to take a shot, the wind would catch them and whip them away faster than anyone could draw a bead. It was still a lot of fun.
We had a great big dinner down in the Quonset hut they use for big gatherings. It’s perfect: big, open and hung with hundreds of twinkle lights. Those same lights twinkled in the ceiling the night Tyler and Megan got married. Of course, it was about sixty degrees hotter that night. This time we kept the doors closed.
The kids had a blast climbing around on the stacked hay bales while the adults tucked into a buffet of crock potted delicacies.
After dinner, some of the guys played craps. That went on far too long for me: I had been up for eighteen hours and was beat.
Jay and I stayed at Megan’s brother’s house, which sits on the property right where the drive turns off the road. He’d built it since the last time we came to hunt. It’s a lovely house! Much bigger on the inside than it looks, with gorgeous views of the farm out every window. The basement is a terrific, open family room with a feature wall covered in reclaimed barn wood that they built themselves.
Sunday was even nicer than Saturday. It was still very windy but the sun came out and the temps were a bit warmer.
Ty had to be back in town early so he and Megan couldn’t stay to hunt. Xena and Babalouie weren’t happy about leaving so we said they could ride home with us and therefore spend a few more hours hanging out with their cousins.
All the little kids (age range 9 to 3) came into the field with us. They were decked out in blaze orange and for the most part stayed in the pickups. Back at the house, they all had toy shotguns and spent a lot of their time running aound yelling “Bird! Bird!” and aiming into the air.
Babalouie is not fond of loud noises. He didn’t like the fireworks on the fourth of July because of the noise. He didn’t much care for the firing range where the hunters had some practice skeet shooting but he didn’t seem to mind the sound of guns out in the field. Possibly because they weren’t real close or because it was so intermittent.
I couldn’t help but wonder if part of the problem with so many young people these days being afraid of guns, as though they were animate and can just go on shooting sprees all on their own, is because of parents like me, who decided back in the day, not to let their kids play with toy guns. Jay and I were on board with that foolishness until the day I realized Tyler and Katie (when they were 5 and 3 respectively) were building guns out of their tinkertoys.
Giving your kids a toy kitchen may spark their interest in cooking but you certainly wouldn’t let them try the real thing until you’d taught them kitchen safety regarding how to use a knife, how to use the stove, to beware of hot burners, etc. Giving your kids toy instruments may spark their interest in music but you wouldn’t give your child a flute without teaching them not to run with it in their mouth, would you? Of course not.
The kids on the ranch were playing with toy guns, being told repeatedly to point them at the sky while being carried, to only shoot high and never to point them at people. Out in the field, they saw that everyone practiced trigger discipline, carried their weapons safely and emptied their chambers at the end of each field. Safety, safety safety.
At one point in the afternoon, a young girl was walking through the trees between me and her Mom, who was carrying a shotgun. It was beautiful day but quiet and kind of eerie beneath the trees, in the thick underbrush.
“I’m scared!” she said. I knew what she meant; that hyper excitement you feel while playing hide and seek or kick the can.
“Why?” her Mom asked.
I thought to myself “You’re surrounded by people who love you and they’re all carrying shotguns; you’re as safe as anyone has ever been.”
Turns out, so were most of the birds.
It was a very fun weekend.