By Ben Smith:
It cuts through the dark like a bad decision. You’re in the deepest sleep of your life and all of a sudden you’re rattled into a moment of instant regret. For the next few minutes, you lie there still, trying to remember why in the heck you thought this was a good idea to begin with. The bed is warm, the house is quiet, and there’s not a single logical reason to move from that spot. But yet, you still get up.
Every fall, and lately more in the spring, I keep setting that alarm. I keep swinging my legs over the side of the bed in the dark, doing my best not to wake up anyone else. I’ve gotten better about laying out all of my clothes and gear the night before to keep from making too much noise but still end up fumbling around for something that I forgot. I’m a horrible morning person. Recently, I joked with a friend that there’s only three things I get up before daylight to do: hunt, fish, or go to the bathroom. That’s it.
From an outsider’s perspective, it doesn’t make much sense, and I get it. You’ve got to be a little off balance to keep doing it when the rewards are usually minimal at most. And being a night owl as opposed to a morning person, I get it too. You could sleep in. You could stay comfortable. You could avoid the cold, the bugs, the long sits, and the all too often possibility that you’ll not see what you got up to see. A lot of times this column writes itself but if I’m being honest, most mornings in the woods don’t come with a storybook ending. I could get up ten mornings in a row in the spring to hunt and maybe one of those mornings end with a story about hearing a gobbler. I might hunt an entire deer season’s worth of mornings and never see a shooter buck. Fishing is generally the exception to the rule in that I rarely go fishing and not actually catch fish, but not every fishing trip ends with a banger of a story. Most mornings are quiet and yet; I still get up and go.
It’s easy to say I’m doing it for the thrill of the kill, but if that were totally the case I would have quit a long time ago. Sleep is that important to me and I’ve already killed just about everything in Mississippi that you can. Success can’t carry the whole weight of why I keep getting up. If it did, the empty mornings would far outweigh the full ones and eventually the math wouldn’t add up. So, why do I keep getting up?
Part of it is the quiet. There’s a level of silence you can only get before the sun comes up. It’s not the same as nighttime quiet. There’s a different feel to it. Have you ever sat alone in the woods in the dark ahead of a sunrise? It’s like the world is holding its breath waiting for that first hint of light. When you’re sitting there in it, you realize how loud life normally is. And since I can barely hear out of my left ear these days, that’s saying something. For just a little while, it’s just you and the woods. And that does something to you.
Even if you’ve hunted or fished all of your life, there’s still that feeling that today might be the day. That day when everything you’ve dreamed of finally comes together. That day you’ll replay in your mind or write about later on. It doesn’t matter how many slow mornings you’ve had, there’s always that quiet belief riding along with you in the dark. Hope is a powerful thing.
But possibly more than anything else, I think I keep getting up because it connects me to something we don’t get much of anymore. There’s something honest about being in the outdoors. It doesn’t bend to fit your needs. It doesn’t care about your schedule or your expectations. You can do everything by the book and still come home empty-handed. Then you can mess up everything and still get lucky, which seems to happen to me more than getting it right.
Now, if you’re lucky, those early mornings don’t always have to be lonely. Sharing those days with friends, family members, or a kid you’re trying to pass down the tradition to make it worthwhile to get up. Some of the best conversations I’ve ever had weren’t at a conference table at work…they were in a duck blind or on a boat. There are some really honest chats sitting in the dark before the sun rises, and I’m grateful for those moments. And sometimes nothing is said at all and that says enough.
Years from now, most of us won’t remember how many fish we caught, how many ducks we killed, or every detail from that morning buck. The numbers just won’t matter as much as we thought they would. But we’ll remember the calm of the morning just before the light pierces the darkness. We’ll remember the cold air and trying to make that fuzzy image in low light a giant buck only to later realize it was a bush. We’ll remember the feeling of peace and of being exactly where we were meant to be.
So, keep setting that alarm. Keep getting up. Keep returning to a world that asks a lot of you but keeps giving back more than you deserve. There will always be that brief, honest moment where your body tells you that staying in bed is the better option. Fight it and get up. Years from now you’ll look back and be glad you did.
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