I've never been hunting. I've shot guns, and I've shot at and possibly killed some frogs, but I've never gone hunting the way my grandfather did. He lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, on some land up in the mountains, from where he used to set out for days hunting elk, antelope, bear. Bear hunting will make a man.

I didn't know my grandfather very well, but I knew him well enough to know he was a hard man. Once, while in the mountains cutting down trees for the winter, only two months away, grandpa got caught by a portion of tree that had split from the trunk while falling. He was pinned, unconscious, his back broken from the impact, the trunk lying across his broken legs. He was alone, and he hadn't told anybody where he would be.

By the time night fell he was hallucinating. He told us of looking up into the branches and seeing birds looking down at him, crows, talking to him, and among themselves. He could hear the coyotes. It was quite cold, so he did his best to bury himself, digging his own grave and covering himself with leaves.

I imagine his wife, Joy, began to worry by sunset. By the next morning they were looking for him, on land and by helicopter. Apparently, he had parked his truck in a way such to make it invisible from the air, and had gone where nobody thought to look. It was clear by nightfall that Grandpa Bill was in some serious fucking trouble.

He had slipped into a coma by the time rescuers found him, sometime on the third day. Everything that could be bruised was bruised; the rest was lacerated, contused, concussed, ruptured, or collapsed. He was kept in a coma for I don't know how long, but he survived, and he walked again. Not a miracle, but a helluva recovery by one tough sonofabitch.

He was 76 years old when he went up into those mountains to cut down trees. Clearly not the most brilliant man, but possessive of an impossibly hardened individuality, tempered through a youth in want, war, and work. He was a boss in the Heavy Machinery Operators union, and he wore a gold union ring and had a huge wardrobe for union duties. He was a hunter, but he also drove a Cadillac. If he was not strictly monagomous, he was, from all I've heard, a decent husband, maybe as good as a hard man can be. The cruelties I remember I dismiss as anachronisms. I knew him as kind, but I know very little, almost nothing more about him.

My mother really didn't have a relationship with the man, and she made sure her two youngest children never got too close their grandfather. She had her reasons, but I believe she regrets not having given me the chance to be closer to Grandpa Bill. She regrets even though she loathed the hardness, the meanness, the masculine irrationality. He was the only grandpa I had. My father's father had died when I was still and infant, and she regrets not giving me anybody but my father to really know as a man. While she loves my father, she knows he has never hunted bear.

It's been really fucking hot lately. The apartment has no air conditioner, and it's sweltering. The other night, as I lay sweating in heavy air, I had a vision of my midlife crisis.

Suddenly I could see that the personality I have developed will be the same at 40, 50, 60, and that that will entail a crisis. For the first time I could clearly perceive that the range of possibilities I have to choose is pruned with each passing year. And it seemed completely natural that as this realization developed I may be driven to seize upon one of those ever dwindling possibilities and drop off, drop out, disappear.

I think I'm well positioned to have an epic midlife crisis. I'm childless, terminally single, and diabetes-free. I'm not gonna be the sort of guy who buys a sports car, or gets a motorcycle for weekend runs. I'm gonna move to the Pacific Northwest and plant trees. Just dig little holes for saplings. Or maybe Indonesia, where I can probably find work cutting 'em down.

A kernel of messianism has begun to take root in my thinking. Not really having accomplished all that I believe I'm capable of, not having developing any binding relationships, I have to have faith that if I continue with my eyes wide open, and take pains to be ready, an opportunity will show itself. I think about redemption, about the possibility of redeeming myself through performing a penance. Guilt arises in the space between actuality and potentiality, and there are often times I long for punishment. There are times when I am envious of the prisoners. Perhaps this is what Eric sees in the men he teaches: men taking hold of the possibility for redemption.

So I prepare for my midlife as though I am preparing for prison, preparing to be a prisoner. I do pull-ups, and push-ups. I don't overly spice the foods I prepare at home. I go without sex for periods of time. And regardless of whether that's a matter of choice or not, I'm gonna be ready to take hold of my redemption with an iron grip. When the day comes that I take a left turn, when until then I've always taken a right, I'm not gonna look back. Hell, maybe that'll even mean getting laid.



The Boss, indeed. Incidentally, I ran into Little Stevie Van Zandt at the newspaper stand this morning.

She's terrifying. She looks at the camera, or perhaps the cameraman, with, what is it? Contempt? Is it curiosity? Something predatory, unnerving. Something masculine. She is a beautiful woman.

She's the novelist Christina Stead.