A new year. Time to think about time and how it slips past. A few weeks back, the subject of an interview, Elliott Woods, posed a question: How has America changed over the past decade? He was asking about how the country has changed since we went to war, but sometimes questions, like rivers, are hard to contain. I started thinking about what’s different in my life and in the world around me and I couldn’t stop at 10 years.
I went all the way back to 1997, the year I graduated from Princeton, because, by coincidence, I ended up reading Russell Banks’ book Rule of the Bone and he was teaching there then. The story is a proto-indie retelling of Huck Finn with Jim as a wise Rastafarian weed dealer and Huck as a teenaged dropout trying to escape sexual abuse and a dead-end town in upstate New York. There’s a scene in the book where the 14-year-old protagonist, Chappie, imagines killing his mother and stepfather and grandmother in graphic detail. It made me think about Beth Walton, our colleague, who was murdered last year, along with two of her children, by her son. We won’t ever understand what happened beyond knowing that a family was wiped out by someone they loved, who wiped himself out as well, most likely because he felt despair but also possibly because guns, like credit cards, have their own logic.
The Columbine High School shooting happened in 1999. We went to war in Afghanistan in 2001, in Iraq in 2003. Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007. The last U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011. We are still at war in Afghanistan. In March Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales was accused of 17 murders after he allegedly executed a drug-and-alcohol-addled killing spree in an Afghan village. Two weeks ago Adam Lanza killed 27 people wearing combat armor and carrying an assault rifle with hollow point ammunition. I am connecting dots.
As a Gen X-er, I came of age in a world of material plenty and felt that there was something terribly wrong. Something spiritual that kept me from wanting to engage. I watched people a little bit older than me ride the dot-com wave. I watched contemporaries drift, toward finance in some cases, and toward rock bands in others. Fifteen years later, the material plenty has vanished. There is still something wrong. I am fully engaged, and I still don’t know how to solve the problem.
City and county officials head to Austin with members of the local business community in February. File photo.
Despite a last-minute flap over cost, Charlottesville and Albemarle are sending staff and elected officials to Austin next month for talks and tours they hope will help city and county replicate some of the Texas city’s economic successes here. But even as details of the trip take shape, some are still concerned it’s a waste of money.
Local travel agent and Charlottesville-Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau board member George Benford came up with the idea for the Austin outing, and said about 20 people are expected to go. Six of them are elected officials and senior planning and development staff from the city and county, and at about $1,550 a head, their participation in the two-night trip will cost taxpayers in both municipalities a total of about $9,000.
So what will they be doing?
A lot of listening, said Benford, whose travel agency will get a commission of $80 for each member of the delegation—not enough to cover the time he’s put into the trip, he said, but he doesn’t mind. The schedule is pretty packed: They fly in Tuesday, February 26, and participate in paneldiscussions from 1 to 5pm. Talks start again at 7:30am Wednesday and go until 5pm, and there are two seminars and a debriefing Thursday before everybody flies home at noon.
There are dinners and visits to music scenes scheduled for the evenings, including a potential behind-the-scenes tour of the set of Austin City Limits, which is filmed next door to the posh W hotel where the delegation is staying—at a special reduced rate of $259 a night, Benford pointed out. But “there’s no free time whatsoever,” he said. “This is not a fun trip.”
Benford has had help in planning from the Richmond Chamber of Commerce which organized a similar trip to Austin last year. The schedule isn’t finalized, but Benford rattled off a list of more than 15 Austinites who had agreed to meet with the delegation, and it’s diverse: the city’s deputy director of economic growth and redevelopment; the music editor for the Austin Chronicle; the dean of the business school at the University of Texas at Austin; the superintendent of the city school system; venture capitalists and angel investors; and many others. They’ll cover a lot of topics, Benford said, but there will be a strong focus on the development of the technology, music, and film industries; energy efficiency; redevelopment; and ways to get government, schools, and private companies working together.
Austin is a decade or more ahead of Charlottesville on a number of economic development fronts, said Benford, and there’s a lot to inspire when it comes to urban planning. There’s the Pecan Street Project, a grant-funded initiative to develop smart-grid technology that officials hope could inform a total overhaul of the way the city delivers electricity, and has given rise to an entire neighborhood of homes with advanced energy technology. There’s busy, beloved Zilker Park, 350 acres of bikeable, walkable waterfront. And there’s Rainey Street, where tiny, shabby bungalows have been renovated into a string of little bars, helping create a thriving street scene and nightlife.
The city has also had some big ideas that have paid off. SXSW—now a $167-million-grossing festival of music, film, and ideas—“started out like Tom Tom,” said Benford.
The Charlottesville City Council unanimously approved the trip in November, and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors gave it the O.K. shortly before, despite the objections of Supervisor Duane Snow. Some are still unhappy with the use of taxpayer dollars. Albemarle County Board of Supervisors Chair Ann Mallek unsuccessfully tried to push the Board to reverse its support earlier this month after she said she realized too late they’d be paying to send an elected official—Supervisor Ken Boyd—as well as two staffers.
“My initial reaction was ‘Why?’” Mallek said. She participated in a lot of continuing education programs as a teacher, “and I know how difficult it is to carry substantive information home and put it to work.”
She’s also less than starstruck with the destination. For one thing, Austin’s metropolitan area population of more than 1.5 million is about 10 times that of Charlottesville’s. And Mallek said it’s important to note that the Texas city’s big strides in development aren’t seen as good news by everybody. “There are many people in Austin grievously concerned about their rapid growth,” she said.
A far cheaper way to get some insight would have been to head to Richmond and learn about the city secondhand from officials who traveled there last year, she said.
They could, said Benford, but to immerse yourself in a new place with peers is much more valuable, as local officials have found during other planning retreats and city visits.
“It’s sitting down to dinner and talking to somebody next to you and saying, ‘What did you think of that discussion’—that’s where so much of the value comes from,” he said. “If they come back with one idea for, let’s say, sustainable energy, it could save every taxpayer so much money.”
Mallek said she’ll remember that argument when Board members balk at giving money to groups like the Piedmont Council on the Arts, which she said offers a great return on taxpayers’ investment. In the meantime, she’s calling for “a real schoolteacher session” when the travelers return, with serious presentations of what they learned in Austin. “That’s their challenge and their assignment,” she said. “That they’ll make it worth our while.”
Community leaders—including city and county elected officials and staff traveling on the taxpayers’ dime—are headed to Austin next month to see how the city’s successes could inform policy here. They’ll meet a lot of movers and shakers in Texas, but some at home are still not pleased with the plan.
If you are reading this on New Year’s Day, then chances are that even your own inner reading voice is hurting your head. My husband was born on the first of the year and never got to have birthday parties on his actual birthday, because, oddly, every single one of his friends’ parents (and his own) weren’t feeling well.
Hangovers and New Year’s Day go together like rum and Coke, tequila and lime, Kahlua and cream—oh, sorry, is this making you queasy? Well, it might be too late to pull you from the brink of death, but ever wonder why some nights you can tie one on and wake up feeling fine and other times like you’ve been trampled by a herd of Clydesdales?
We all know that dehydration is the cause of a hangover (actually, drinking alcohol in excess is, but you don’t need a lecture when you feel this lousy). Alcohol’s a diuretic and every time you urinate, your organs’ become thirstier and thirstier, and a thirsty brain responds by banging on your skull like a gorilla in a cage. Consuming water throughout your night certainly helps your cause, but it turns out that certain types of alcohol cause worse hangovers.
Congeners, toxic chemicals produced during fermentation and aging, are the biggest culprit. They wreak havoc on our nervous systems while our livers metabolize the alcohol. They come in varying concentrations depending on an alcohol’s distillation process. Every time a liquor is distilled, it loses more congeners. Generally speaking, dark liquors like bourbon, brandy, whiskey, tequila, and red wine contain more congeners than clear liquors like vodka, gin, and white wines. Bourbon, for example, has 37 times the amount of congeners that vodka has.
Though they are considered impurities, congeners are a large part of what give dark liquors their color, aroma, and flavor and why clear liquors are virtually flavorless. You can pretty much bank on the fact that plastic handles of booze (no matter the color) haven’t been distilled as many times as the top-shelf bottles, so the next time you are tempted to save a dollar, remember that cheap drinks come with consequences.
Of course, red wine hangovers can be fierce, no matter whether it’s DRC or Two Buck Chuck. Red wine contains a high level of congeners, but there’s more at play. Sulfites, too often the blame for headaches after red wine consumption, are actually a problem for less than 1 percent of the population. Histamines, tannins, prostaglandins, and tyramine have all been identified as potential contributors to why mornings after a red wine binge are uglier than those after a night spent drinking white, but the specifics would make anyone’s head ache.
You can’t go by congeners alone though. A bottle of Bud contains six times more congeners than a Long Island iced tea, yet only a fraction of the alcohol, so two Buds are going to go over a lot more comfortably in the morning than two Long Island iced teas. And certainly, mixing liquors into one drink (or through the course of an evening) is the fastest route to Nauseatown. Then throw a bunch of sugar in there too, so that your blood sugar spikes when you are invincible, tearing up the dance floor and then comes crashing down when you are defeated, lying on the bathroom floor.
So what to do after you’ve hit the bottle too hard? Even if you didn’t intersperse units of water with units of alcohol during your debauchery, try to drink 16 to 20 ounces before going to sleep. In the morning, as tempting as coffee or a “hair of the dog” may sound, skip it until you are feeling human again—they’ll just dehydrate you more. Take ibuprofen or aspirin over acetaminophen (your liver’s already working overtime), eat some carbs, and go back to sleep.
Somehow through modern research, hangovers have been estimated to cost the United States $148 billion in lost productivity each year. Imagine how high that number would be if we were required to work—or plan or attend birthday parties—on New Year’s Day. Way to start 2013 off with a bang! Shhh, keep your voice down.
If someone had told Charlottesville native Ellie Kates 10 years ago that before age 30 she’d be living in Rwanda running an international jewelry business, she likely would have smiled and said, “You’re probably right.”
For the 29-year-old artist and entrepreneur, traveling, creating, and helping others has become a way of life. Kates is co-founder and head designer of Songa Designs International, a company that partners with networks of artisans in Rwanda to export handcrafted jewelry to the United States. Songa’s philosophy revolves around fair trade, inspired by the work Kates did with NGOs during her first year in Rwanda.
“It’s certainly a social enterprise, but it’s also a business,” she said.
Kates spent the holidays at home—only her third trip back to Charlottesville in three years—and has big plans for her little business.
Before graduating from UVA in 2006 with a bachelor’s degree in political and social thought, she caught the travel bug while studying in Latin America. She found herself on a plane to Rwanda in early 2010 to spend six months working with non-government organizations and African charities.
After spending a year in the Maryland-sized country, hopping from village to village offering education and training to female artisan cooperatives, Kates and her friend Sarah Dunigan were inspired to develop a business that could provide families with a steady income and the ability to plan ahead—a foreign concept in Rwanda, where she said many in impoverished communities live in the moment and don’t think about tomorrow.
“The crystallizing moment for me was when a woman stood up at a meeting and said she had to choose between coming to computer training and gathering tomatoes to sell so she could feed her kid,” Kates said. “They need money for the luxury to do trainings, but what about today?”
Songa is a for-profit business with a focus on creating jobs and developing skill sets. Over 150 women who have spent their lives handcrafting accessories, but never developed basic business skills, send their products—fully assembled jewelry or pieces to be combined with others—to Kates and her handful of Rwandan employees. Halfway across the globe in San Diego, business partner and co-founder Dunigan handles the webstore and distribution in the U.S.
Kates said they’re not trying to train artisans from the ground up, but rather to help them refine their skills and make a living doing what they already know how to do.
“For example, if they’re basket-weavers, we don’t teach them how to make cupcakes,” she said. “We help them develop their techniques, and combine and mix in new materials.”
Kates said combining materials—like dyed banana leaves, handmade fabrics, recycled paper, and cowhorn—adds depth to the products, opening doors to new marketplaces.
The company’s latest endeavor is selling products through Indiegogo, an online crowdfunding tool. Kates said the plan is to build a central workshop in the capital, Kigali, to house production, distribution, and training. The campaign has raised more than $4,000 of the $20,000 goal.
Songa is coming up on its second birthday in January, and Kates wants to see the African side become self-sufficient. It’s one thing for a foreigner to be at the helm of the business, she said, but eventually a Rwandan should take on a leading role.
“That’s why I’m purposely staying away,” Kates said. She left in September and has spent the past four months traveling in South Asia in search of new marketplaces for a similar model, but said she’ll continue to visit Rwanda and check in as the company grows.
Golden Glasses new release, Your Chance to Win, combines serious talent, jazz chops and infomercial topics in a tongue-in-cheek delivery. (Publicity image)
Steve Snider laughed when I asked him to list every Charlottesville band he’s played in over the years. “There’s like, more than a dozen,” he said. “I’m not totally sure I can even name them all.” Among the most memorable are the jangling indie-rock of the Fingerpainters, the yelping keyboard-punk of Cataract Camp, the anthemic shoegazer metal of A Cosmonaut’s Ruin, the energetic art-rock of Tapeworms, the sprawling hardcore of GD Airlock, and the furious free punk of Great Dads. Some of his bands—like the memorably named Night Prison—only lasted for one show, while others recorded albums and toured repeatedly. Though many of these groups shared members (in addition to Snider), they were stylistically distinct, united by a common left-of-the-dial sensibility and an appealing aggressive energy, anchored by Snider’s powerful, relentlessly exciting drumming.
Snider’s latest band, Golden Glasses, is a solo project. Snider plays drums and sings, simultaneously. The result is unusual, but the formula is unquestionably successful. He has sung in previous bands, despite occupying the drummer’s seat. “When Cataract Camp was on tour, in 2006,” he said, “I’d always be set up before everyone else. And while they were loading in all the amps I’d be sound checking, just playing and singing by myself. One day [guitarist] Thomas Orgren said, ‘You know, I’d be perfectly entertained, just listening to you do that on your own.’”
The project eventually came to fruition at a solo performance at The Bridge PAI in 2010 and was dubbed the Golden Glasses. “I’m a fan of alliteration,” he said. “When you’re named Steve Snider, and play in Cataract Camp, you kind of have to be.”
In recent months, he’s recorded a full-length album Your Chance to Win. “I actually put it on BandCamp just this morning, I signed up for [digital music distribution service] TuneCore, so it should be on Spotify and iTunes pretty soon,” he said. “Right now I just want it out there, being heard, so I’m giving it away. It would be great if there was a label that wanted to press it up on vinyl, but that’s not really something I can afford to do on my own.”
Vocally, Snider speaks as much as sings, talking and shouting in a fragmented monologue, occasionally punctuated by his high, anthemic whine. The live show features a vintage rotary-telephone headset comically mounted on Snider’s face, and the vocals on the record have a similarly compressed, thin quality that contrasts nicely with the crisp drum recording. The songs eschew conventional topics in favor of contextless conversational phrases; repeated refrains include “Uh, Hi! You don’t know me, but… I live in your building?” and “Excuse me sir, I need you to take your hands off me!” One song, “Ephemerol,” is a miniature science-fiction narrative framed as a sketchy lawyers’ late-night infomercial pitch. “Etiquette” is perhaps the most conventional, sounding something like an ’80s D.C. hardcore act with the bass and guitar channels entirely muted.
This not-quite-serious delivery, anchored by the seriously impressive performance, is reminiscent of Sun City Girls or early Captain Beefheart, but the real draw is Snider’s percussion, which can be compared to everything from the Japanese prog-punk duo Ruins to the big band innovations of Buddy Rich. “[Jazz is] a big influence,” he said. “Though I don’t have a degree in it or anything. I didn’t really get to study it, other than playing in jazz groups in school. But if you keep digging on your instrument, you’re going to run across that stuff.”
Freed from the constraints of the rock band format, Snider has the space to show off his technical chops and restless creative energy. Snider was always impressive playing in punk, metal, and hardcore bands, often the highlight of any act he joined, but the solo setting allows him to stretch his range and investigate new territory as a player. “Golden Glasses is kind of a thing that can only happen as a solo performance,” he said. “A lot of it is improv; when you play ‘free’ stuff, and you want it to be cohesive and communicate something, you can either do it solo, or you can do it with a group, where you have to play together for 5 or 10 years before you learn how to communicate well enough to make that work.”
“It’s American,” he says. “It’s so American. We’re all in the race, trying to care for our own stuff — this way, I don’t need to schedule practices. It’s kind of like there’s a lot of bedroom pop and electro now, you can make it in your apartment by yourself. It’s becoming a weird, old art form to play the drums. If you’re a songwriter, why would you ever hire a drummer? You can spend years learning how to play the kit well, or you can spend 10 minutes with a plug-in. I kind of feel like drumming is becoming an anachronistic skill, like glass-blowing.”
Lucky for us, Snider is still practicing his craft, and among the finest contemporary players in Charlottesville, no matter the genre. Golden Glasses performs at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar on Friday, January 4th. Will Bollinger and the Spiders and a Harrisonburg act called Guitar as Spacecar open. Doors are at 8:30 and the cover charge is $5.
Have a favorite Steve Snider song title? Post your answer below.
A formerly gun-shy news editor gets familiar with a .44 magnum rifle on an intitial hunting trip, and gets a skinning demonstration at Johnson's Deer Processing in Madison. Photo: Graelyn Brashear
A few weeks ago, I stopped at a gas station on 29 just north of the Albemarle County line and texted C-VILLE staff writer Laura Ingles. I had just spent some quality time with an eviscerated deer.
“That. Was. Awesome. I’ll send you a gory photo if you want.”
Then came the picture of a buck with a small saw at its neck.
“Oh…my goodness,” she texted back.
The whole thing started in November with a conversation about deer meat.
We were at a picnic on her cousins’ property outside Scottsville, sampling a heavenly, savory venison sausage dip. Somehow—rather quickly—we got from “This is delicious” to “We should go hunting” to “We should write about it.”
The point we made to each other was hardly revolutionary: If you want to eat local, eat clean, reduce your food’s carbon footprint, and have a real relationship with what you consume, you can’t do much better than shooting a deer and packing your freezer with venison.
So why the wide cultural gulf separating people who grew up taking a sick day on the first day of general firearms season and those who spend a solid chunk of their paycheck each week on locally sourced groceries from Whole Foods? Why is hunting for rednecks and grass-fed beef for snobs?
We’re squeamish about killing things. We didn’t grow up doing it. And, maybe most importantly, guns freak us out.
But none of our reasons seemed all that sound as we scarfed the dip. If you want to eat an animal, you should have to face the fact that it had to die first, we thought, and we’ve grown to like a lot of things we never touched as kids. Brussels sprouts, for instance, and bourbon. The guns were harder to get our heads around. How do you get past a deep distrust of firearms, especially when you’ve spent two and a half decades developing it? When you are that friend on Facebook who takes the bait every time and starts the fight about gun control? When the sound of shots fired—even on TV—stops your heart for a moment? When stories of tragedies caused by madmen with assault weapons ignite painful memories?
We had an idea of where to begin, anyway. We drove to Walmart for apprentice hunting licenses and blaze orange caps, and went in search of some teachers.
In the weeks that followed, we found some answers. While we never dragged a deer out of the woods, we did get a pretty comprehensive hunting education, from firing first shots to feasting. And the experience has sparked many more conversations—about killing animals, about whether it’s O.K. to like the feeling of your finger on the trigger, about the disconnect in our gun culture that sends people running to their familiar corners when the conversation turns political. And that’s been the best takeaway. If two girls like us can learn to appreciate a deer rifle and the job it does, maybe next we can talk about outlawing hollow points. Over venison.
Graelyn: “I have to start here.”
The first time we meet Charlie, we’re in the cramped parking lot of Wyant’s Store in White Hall, and he’s about to take us to a remote hollow and hand us loaded guns. An old friend and neighbor plays poker with him weekly, and set up the outing. Charlie’s not wild about us using his last name—the weapons he’s brought along are valuable and a popular target for thieves, and he grimaces at the thought of any more people knowing he has hunting acreage up against the mountains.
But the 62-year-old Crozet native is still willing to lead our little caravan—me, staff writer Laura Ingles, my photographer husband, and the mutual friend that brought the motley crew together—to his property. The word of a friend is enough for him.
We drive up 810 and onto gravel roads with names like Slam Gate and Break Heart, then ease into a field dotted with shrubby evergreens. Buck’s Elbow Mountain—where I grew up, and forever home to me—is about a mile distant, but the day is so clear and bright it feels close enough to touch.
Charlie’s grandmother owned the land before him, and he’s hunted there since he was a kid tagging along after his dad. It’s good deer land, he explains, mixed field and forest, with water here and there. It’s also a good place to learn to shoot, and Charlie is the right instructor for us.
“I’m what you’d term a gun nut,” he says, matter-of-factly. He has a big collection, and he’s brought five weapons with him today, some sleek and beautiful, others bought for practicality or nostalgia. A civil engineer, he takes obvious joy in the workings of his guns, explaining to us at length the difference between the lever and bolt action rifles, how the caliber affects recoil, and how the way the metalwork is screwed onto the stock influences accuracy. He loads his own cartridges and has even been known to cast his own bullets.
A lot of this is lost on me, to be frank.
When my siblings and I acquired a second-hand Nintendo in 1995, my mom threw away the plastic shooter that went with the Duck Hunt game. We never had Nerf guns, and even squirt guns were frowned upon. More than once she stormed out into the woods after spotting strangers with shotguns walking up the hollow behind our house to order them off our property.
Guns were dangerous, and a love and fascination for them unhealthy. So then, by association, was hunting. To wield a weapon and go out of your way to take a life was suspect behavior.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t know a lot of hunters growing up. At Western Albemarle High School, season opener days were understood holidays for a lot of my classmates. I just grew up bringing colored pencils and a sketchbook into the woods, not a rifle.
I’m grateful for that upbringing. But I’m also curious as I eye Charlie unloading his weapons, and I want to know what I’m capable of. I don’t believe firing a gun—even shooting a deer with one—is going to make me depraved. Nor will it instantly imbue me with some kind of deeper cultural understanding, or make me a member of a club I was shut out of before. But I do know if I want to try my hand at hunting, I have to start here.
Laura Ingles takes aim with a .243 Winchester. Photo: Christopher Seiz
Laura: “Oddly satisfied.”
“All right. Now, which one do you want to shoot?”
I look from the lineup of rifles on the ground to Graelyn, then back to the guns. Which one do I want to shoot? Not a question I ever thought I’d have to consider.
Like Graelyn, guns had never been part of my culture growing up a middle class suburban girl from Charlotte, North Carolina. Aside from firing a BB gun at summer camp when I was 9 and hearing rumors of a pistol going off in some idiot’s pocket in my high school cafeteria, my experience with weapons was essentially nonexistent.
I enjoyed eating venison my aunt prepared for family gatherings in Powhatan, but the world of firearms and hunting was completely foreign to me. I didn’t hate guns, per se, but having never been given a reason to develop a strong opinion, I spent most of my life impartial.
In the spring of my freshman year in college, my feelings toward guns changed. I developed a hatred so deep that the mention of a gun, or the sound of shots like in the M.I.A. song “Paper Airplanes,” gave me goosebumps. And not the kind you get looking at a sunset.
So even though I knew it was coming—hell, I signed up for it—I freeze when Charlie takes the guns out of their bags. I stare at them, hands shoved in my jacket pockets, and am suddenly back in Torgerson Bridge on April 16, 2007, the day Seung-Hui Cho opened fire in Norris Hall at Virginia Tech and killed 32 students and faculty.
I wasn’t in one of those classrooms, and I don’t claim to know how it feels to face a gunman. I didn’t hear shots from down the hall, watch my professor barricade the door to save my life, or curl up in the fetal position under my desk praying not to get hit. But I have friends who did, and I’ll never forget standing silently at a Torgerson window, watching police cars fly across the hallowed Drillfield (a beloved part of campus never touched by vehicles, comparable to UVA’s Lawn).
Not a day has gone by that I haven’t at least briefly thought of those hours I spent on lockdown wondering why my roommate wasn’t answering her phone, or remembered the following weeks of dodging TV cameras every time I stepped out of my dorm, where the first round of shooting occurred. Five years later I still brace myself when people ask me where I went to school, and visiting the Drillfield memorial on my trips to Blacksburg still puts a lump in my throat. And when tragedies like the recent shootings in Aurora and Newtown hit the news, my heart breaks all over again.
“Um…that one, I guess,” I say, pointing to the bolt-action .243 Winchester that Charlie had said kicked the least.
The rifle I’m about to shoot is on the opposite end of the firearm spectrum from the deadly semi-automatic handguns and more than 400 rounds of ammunition used by Cho, but it doesn’t matter—guns are guns, in my mind.
He nods, and I slowly lean down to pick it up.
“What about the safety?” I ask, jerking my hands back. “How do I know if it’s on?”
Charlie smiles and picks up the rifle.
“See this?” he says, showing me a silver switch. “That’s the safety—it’s on. And none of these guns are loaded right now.”
We situate the gun between two adjustable leather rests on a table in the middle of the woods. Charlie shows me how to unlock the safety, load the bullets, and hold the rifle properly. Once I am (relatively) comfortable with holding the gun tight against my shoulder and going through the motions, I unlock the rifle I never dreamed I’d be holding, adjust my plastic ear covers, and carefully peer through the scope at the two paper targets 25 yards away.
I’m still surprised at how calm I was. I don’t remember what I was thinking as I lined up my first shot, but I’m pretty sure it was less “Oh my God oh my God!” and more “Huh. This is weird.”
After several seconds of squinting and aiming, I take a deep breath, tighten the butt against my shoulder, and focus on the right-hand bullseye with my finger on the trigger.
My buddies from Tech who are seasoned deer killers told me I’d love the feeling of shooting a gun, that it was a rush like no other. Until this moment, I simply did not believe them.
I’m not prepared for the surge of power that floods my entire body. I immediately let go of the rifle and jump back, stunned but oddly satisfied. (Graelyn caught my face in this moment on my camera, which can only be described as completely befuddled shock.)
With no shooting experience and a sense of aim that leaves much to be desired, the thought that I might have actually hit the target doesn’t cross my mind. Charlie squints into the distance and says “Well that’s a dead deer, right there,” and I scamper to the stump to look at my target like a child running to retrieve a putt-putt ball.
Photo: Graelyn Brashear
The experience of picking up a firearm and later taping my paper target to the wall next to my desk didn’t change much for me, except now I feel slightly safer around someone handling a gun. I also have a new appreciation for the stories my second cousin—two generations my senior and the host of the picnic that started this story—loves to share about the years he spent as a child running around in the woods of West Virginia with a 12-gauge single-shot shotgun.
As the fifth boy in the family, Albert Booth “got the dirty deal” when he went hunting with his brothers, and was always the one to haul the squirrels and pheasants back to the house. Until one day, when it was pouring down rain, and their dog ran a tiny brown squirrel to the top of a grape vine.
“He was just sitting there, all hunkered down like he was freezing, and I heard my brother Lloyd say, ‘Hey, let Albert shoot it!’” Al said.
So with a carefully lined up shot from a gun balanced across his brothers’ shoulders, he shot his first animal—from about 12 feet away.
“It was all shot to pieces,” Al laughed. “There was nothing to eat of that thing. But it was my first squirrel, so I took it home and skinned it. I kept that tail for a long, long time.”
As his brothers entered high school and discovered sports, hobbies, and girls, the family shotgun became more readily available, and Al just couldn’t get enough. By the time he hit sixth grade, he carried the gun with him on his 5-mile walk to school, sticking any winnings under a rock in the creek and stashing the gun and shells in the warehouse of a little shop half a mile from the school.
“As soon as school let out I’d run down, grab the gun and those shells,” he said. “Usually I just got squirrels going back and forth to school. Never deer.”
Seventy years later, Al hasn’t outgrown his boyhood fascination, and proudly shows off his downstairs trophy room and collection of 20-plus firearms. He started out as a little country boy running through the woods with a shotgun as big as him, and is now a big country boy riding through the woods on a fancy 4-wheeler, checking his night-vision deer cams and climbing into one of half a dozen tree stands he’s built on his property. Aside from the year he spent in the military, he said, he has brought home at least one deer every year since he turned 11, and visitors never walk away from that house without half a pound of venison in hand.
I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve had preconceived notions of hunters and their culture. Though camouflage and taxidermy still don’t particularly appeal to me, I’m starting to understand people like Al and this passion of theirs.
Graelyn: “I’m starting to get it.”
Target practice is over. Laura has headed back into town and lunch—hot beans and barbecue from Wyant’s—is behind us. I climb into the back of Charlie’s pickup and we rattle down the road, through another access gate, and across a field waist-high in bluestem, the mountain looming in front of us. I am thinking about the conversation we had an hour earlier, when Charlie asked me what I’d do if I did bring down a deer this afternoon.
“I would—” is as a far as I got. “I hadn’t really thought that part through,” I said sheepishly. I refrained from adding “Hopefully not freak out?” We talked then about field-dressing and the availability of enough cardboard boxes in his truck to tote deer parts, and whether I had a cooler at home large enough to ice meat down in. It was around the point where I was contemplating bloody deer haunches in a box in the back of my Honda Fit that it really hit me that I might actually end up killing an animal within a few hours.
When we come to a stop, we hop out and Charlie helps us get our bearings.
“Right over there is where we’re headed,” he says, pointing across an open, stream-fed hollow to a low rise thick with trees. “I got a big buck there not long ago. They have a tendency to come right over that ridge.”
He is a good and patient teacher, carefully explaining things that have been second nature to him for decades: Move slowly in the woods, and that includes your head and limbs. Should you see a deer, don’t gasp or shout. Don’t expect to see or hit anything more than about 100 yards away—the undergrowth is too thick.
Even though I’ve been shooting guns all morning, I feel a little jab of unease when he hands me the .44 Magnum rifle I tested out earlier. But I remind myself that there’s no bullet in the chamber yet, and I pull my blaze orange cap down and sling the gun’s incongruously cheery purple strap over my arm. We tromp off, falling silent as we step over the brook and into the woods. I try to do the fox walk I was taught as a kid, stepping down on the outside of the foot, mindful and quiet. Turns out it’s hard to do in three layers and Ariat boots with a rifle on your shoulder. I’m certain my crunching steps are sending unseen deer running.
We regroup at the top of the hill and scope for hides within waving distance of each other.
“This is perfect,” Charlie says, pointing me to a brushy spot next to a tall white pine. “You can lean up against this tree, and these branches will break up your line a little bit. If you need to get my attention, just whistle.”
He heads back to his own spot and pulls out his iPhone (“I’m not a very patient hunter,” he explains). I have no service, but even if I did, I know I wouldn’t be playing Angry Birds. I’m too preoccupied with staring in front of me, alternately scanning with binoculars and gripping my gun with my gloved hands. I’m well aware I’m sending mixed mental messages out into the underbrush. I am both willing deer to step into sight and hoping they all have pressing business elsewhere.
Eventually, I chill out. I spent much of my childhood sitting in the woods, so that part comes naturally to me. I settle into the remarkable feeling of doing very little with purpose, and revel in the sense of unfocused calm it brings. It’s not unlike the mental loosening that comes after two or three days of backpacking, when you’ve knocked out the items at the top of your consciousness and have long spells when you actually run out of things to think about.
I’ve never been a meditator; I am the fidgeter in yoga class, the one thinking about grocery lists instead of downward dog. But I think this—this mellow alertness, this active waiting—is a pretty close estimation. In the past, when people would tell me they loved to hunt because it afforded them quiet time in nature, part of me would silently call bullshit. After all, you’re headed out to kill things. Loudly, most often. But after a couple of hours, I’m starting to get it.
I’m starting to get stiff and cold, too.
What I don’t get is a deer. The sun is dropping low. I have work waiting for me at the office. I ease out of my hide and chirp to Charlie, who follows me out a few paces to say goodbye and then returns to his tree. I hike back to his truck alone, stash the rifle, toss the keys in after, and head out across the field in the direction of my car, my feelings waffling between relief and disappointment. Lesson of the day: Hunting is often uneventful.
I still don’t know how I would have handled an actual kill, but I was a little shocked at how much I liked learning and trying. When I talk to Charlie on the phone about it later, he’s not surprised.
“Because of the Wild West images—Matt Dillon and Miss Kitty, Gunsmoke and John Wayne and all that—it’s usually the menfolk doing the gunplay and the women being worried about them,” he mused.
“There’s sort of a macho residue from that history of how guns came to be such a part of American culture.” But he’s heard from others that females are the faster learners among the ranks of novice shooters. “And I think I saw this the other day,” he said of our woods workshop. “The women really take to it, and are more proficient more quickly.”
I’ll buy it. Though I’m still thinking about a buck with my name on it.
Graelyn: “I didn’t kill it, but I could have.”
It’s a Google search that brings me face-to-face with my first dead deer.
Joe Johnson is a meat cutter by training and a Madison County farmer to his bones, and I find him online, on the webpage devoted to his side business, Johnson’s Deer Processing. His family has owned land in Northern Virginia since 1770, and while he learned his trade in supermarkets and the slaughterhouse, he always wanted to raise his own beef on his own land.
His wife Carol wasn’t born to the same life. “I’m a Yankee,” she says, grinning. A Queens native, she came south in 1987 to work for then-New York governor Mario Cuomo in Washington. “I loved the governor, but I didn’t like the politics on Capitol Hill,” she said. “Imagine that.”
But she’d grown attached to Virginia, so she went to work for a NoVA law firm. Not long after, she met Joe through a friend—at a rodeo, of all places. “Joe’s gonna lie to you and tell you he was riding the bulls, but that’s not true at all,” Carol laughed.
Since then, cows—and pigs, and, increasingly, deer—have been a big part of both their lives. Running a commercial slaughterhouse on their own farm was too costly an endeavor, but Joe built their processing facility so they could butcher animals for their own table. At first, they just took in deer for a few hunter friends, but then word spread. Twenty-five years later, they’re busy almost nonstop once hunting season starts. From October through early January, Joe said, “we cut every day but Saturday.”
It’s late afternoon when I pull up at their place (“turn left at the sign with the antlers on it”) and park behind a beat-up pickup with farm plates. When I walk through the bay doors of the barnlike processing building, I’m greeted first by a warm and smiling Carol and Joe, then by the sight of a gutted buck propped on its back on a sawhorse, legs akimbo, torso gaping wide and emptied of organs. We’ll get to him later.
“You want to try one of our hot dogs?” Carol asks, pointing me to the vast walk-in where they store venison sent away to be made into specialty meats. “We’ve got chili cheese dogs, regular dogs. I’ve got kielbasa, and some brats.” My money’s no good here—bring a deer and you can get the ground meat turned into sausage for a fee, but it’s illegal to sell game outright.
A quick tour of the other refrigerated rooms charts the path that buck will take. There’s the cutting room, where the expert knife-wielding happens and loins and sirloin tips are vacuum-sealed, and then the main freezer, where customers’ boxes of cuts are decked out with their kill’s antlers.
But first comes skinning and deboning. Back out front, I look askance at an eye-level hook clotted with blood and bits of fur. “We always get a hanging weight first,” Carol explains, because head, hide, and bones are heavier than some hunters realize. That stiff buck waiting for the knife looks big to me—I keep thinking of the dimensions of an oversized Irish wolfhound—but it will likely only yield 30 pounds of meat, says Carol, and that’s assuming the gunshot didn’t cause too much tissue damage. We lean over the carcass, and she points out the cuts they’ll get from it.
“This here is the true tenderloin of the deer—what we call the fish loin,” she says, pointing to a pink, loaflike section of muscle visible through a veil of connective tissue in the lower back. “Then the loin, or backstrap, is what runs down the whole animal in the back. Out of the hindquarters, you’re going to get your sirloin tip, which is your thigh, and then your bottom round and top round. That’s your London broil cut in the store.”
The Johnsons’ young friend Eric Robinson, a neighborhood kid who’s been helping them out during the busy season for a decade, takes it from there. His hand saw whines through the forelegs before he grips each front hoof and snaps it off with a brittle crack. Then, with a few deft touches of an ultra-sharp skinning knife, he slits the hide down the leg, grasps it, and tugs. It pulls away from the muscle with a sound like someone tearing a thick rind off an orange. He works quickly, cutting and peeling away the hide, sawing off the head and dumping it in an industrial-sized garbage bin—all the leftovers go to Valley Protein and then to bone meal or dog food—then stringing the carcass up by the hind legs to finish the job. I watch in silence with Carol and Joe. A country music station is playing in the background. Eric takes three songs to strip the deer completely.
As it dangles there, now just a meaty mass, Carol asks if I want to hold the hide.
“Sure!” I say. It’s only later, when I’m listening to my recording of the afternoon, that I realize I was trying really hard to sound chipper.
I don a single blue rubber glove and take what she hands me—a surprisingly heavy thing, like a soaking wet beach towel, furry on one side, patchy-slick on the other. It occurs to me that it’s the removal of this droopy, ruglike, and rather lovely thing that has, in my eyes, turned the creature in front of me from animal to dinner. From a recognizable and recently living thing that runs and sleeps and eats to something that, well, I would eat. I didn’t kill it, but I could have. I think.
And I’m O.K. with that. I think.
While I’m a little relieved when Carol, so comfortable weighing the heft of raw, red muscle, admits she used to be a little squeamish about all of it, I find myself wanting to emulate the relationship they’ve built with their food. They’re far more comfortable knowing where their meat comes from. And like Charlie with his handmade slugs, there’s craftsmanship in what they do, and they take pride in it.
“It is an art form,” Carol said of cutting up an animal. And considering how many Americans eat meat, it’s one that’s understood—let alone practiced—by surprisingly few. “Even in the grocery stores today, there are so few trained butchers any more. I mean, there are meat cutters, and they do a good job. But they really wouldn’t know how to break down a carcass. Everything they get in a grocery store comes in a box.”
To say nothing of shoppers. “People have no idea what they’re eating,” Joe said. “They really don’t.” But he thinks attitudes are changing. Some of it has to do with the recession. People who hunted only as a hobby are hunting for food now, he said—they’ve watched customers’ interest climb in recent years.
And others are coming into the fold. “The foodie crowd is educating each other,” said Joe. “There’s nothing healthier than a deer when it’s done properly.” Organic—check. Free range—check. Tasty—check, depending on who you ask.
“I understand there are some people out there who don’t live it that way,” said Carol. “But that’s the nature of the beast.”
Those words stick in my head as I wipe blood off the soles of my work flats, get into my car, and drive off with a wave. We could all do with a little more understanding, I think, of the nature of our beasts.
A few days later, I take some thawed venison chuck from my fridge and ponder it. The deer it came from once wandered a few miles from my home in the city. This ground and flash-frozen hunk of its hindquarters was given to me by Laura’s cousin the night we first started talking about trying our shaky hands at hunting.
I decide on meatloaf: easy and familiar, ketchup glaze. Nothing fancy.
It is delicious.
This started out as a story about food, and as something of a social experiment. And, if I’m being honest, a bit of a gimmick. Us hunting, we thought. Girls with guns. That’d be a trip.
We set out to see if there was a place for us in the Cabela’s culture, if there was room in the ranks of the pickup-driving, gun-toting hunters for a couple of girls who have never had more than an intellectual understanding of the fact that our meat was once alive. Laura wanted to know if she could shoulder and shoot a rifle. I wanted to see if I could handle some blood on my shoes—and maybe my hands—from an animal I planned to eat.
We could, and we did. And we gained some perspective. If you’ve never handled a single-shot deer rifle, you don’t understand that it’s not the same thing as a Bushmaster semiautomatic, and until you get that, you don’t understand that you can like one and want to outlaw the other. That you can be a hunter and support an assault weapons ban. That a society that lives with guns, owns guns, fires guns—and yes, genuinely likes guns—doesn’t have to turn its back on regulating guns.
As with every difference of opinion, the solution often springs up out of the common ground. Maybe it’s not so ridiculous to think we can find that common ground in a lever-action repeating rifle designed a century and a half ago, a few hours with friends in the woods, and a venison loaf.
And there’s still time to bag that deer. If you’re looking for us on January 5—the last day of hunting season—we’ll be in the woods.—Graelyn Brashear and Laura Ingles
First Friday is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many Downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. Listings are compiled in collaboration with Piedmont Council for the Arts. To list an exhibit, please send information two weeks before opening to arts@c-ville.com.
First Friday exhibitions: January 4
Angelo 220 East Main St. “Honeyvine,” a group of Giclée prints of mixed-media collages by Loes van Riel. 5:30-7:30pm.
Cafe Cubano 112 W. Main St. Paintings by Denise Nunez. 5-7pm.
Chroma Projects 418 E. Main St. A solo show titled “Stuff & Nonsense” by Richmond artist Lester Van Winkle featuring wood sculptures in the Front Gallery, “Mad Tea Party Redux” by ceramic artist Tom Elliott in the Black Box Gallery, and “Mnemonic Devices” by Kim Boggs continues in the Passage Gallery. 5:30-7:30pm.
Maya 633 W. Main St. “Paradise Revisited: A Glimpse into Polynesian Culture,” photographs by Abe Costanza and Karine Morgan. 5-7pm.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “abstractreal realabstract”, a group exhibit by Nancy Bass, Robin Braun, Margaret Embree, Lindsay Freedman, and Tamra Harrison Kirschnick in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “New Members Show” in the Hallway Galleries; 5:30-7:30pm.
Second Street Gallery 418 E. Main St. “She Says” featuring work by contemporary Italian artists Elisabetta Benassi, Daniela Comani, and Alice Guareschi. 6-7:30pm. Talk by guest curator Leslie Cozzi at 6:30pm.
Warm Springs Gallery 103 Third St. NE. “Museum Studies” featuring paintings by Bradley Stevens. 6-8pm.
WVTF and Radio IQ Study Gallery 216 West Water St. “Reiterations of a New Landscape” features drawings, sculpture, and photography by Elizabeth Kleberg. The adjacent space to WVTF will be transformed into a New City Arts Pop Up Gallery where the artist will create a large-scale installation involving sculpture, light, photography, and projection. 5-7pm.
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Past Forward>>Contemporary Aboriginal Art” includes works from the permanent collection.
Milli Joe’s Coffee 400 Preston Avenue. “Succession,” photographs by Peter Krebs. Reception on January 5, 10am-12pm.
Over the Moon Bookstore 5798 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Fury’s Hallowed Trace,” featuring photographs by Bill Mauzy.
Speak! Language Center 313 Second St. SE, Suite 109. Rick Weaver’s watercolors of the plazzas and marketplace scenes of Cortona, Italy in the front space and Jennifer Byrne’s black and white photographic studies of Italian architecture in the main room. A collaboration with Chroma Projects Art Laboratory.
WriterHouse 508 Dale Avenue. “Obsessive Compulsions” features work of photo-realistic oil painter Sandy Wilcox and the mixed-media works of Stephen Balut. Reception on January 11, 5:30-7:30pm.
Check out PCA’s Google Map of local galleries and cultural hotspots to plan your visit.
