Outsider

Things have gone too far.

 

I have tolerated Don’s embrace of the outdoors, even though he restrained himself from that embrace until we were well into our marriage. Waited until we had kids and car payments and gravity had taken its toll and nobody was going anywhere.

 

I have endured hikes that are always sweltering or freezing but nothing in between. I have supported trips to The Cabin where I live in fear of freaky Cabin amoeba infecting my brain. I have put on a brave smile when friends bring taco dip and rocky road brownies to parties where we bring sous vide venison, butchered in my kitchen like that’s what’s supposed to happen.

 

I even adopted a retired hunting dog, one who drags me off the trail during our backwoods hikes. His beagle nose tracks in the dirt, searching for rabbits in thick underbrush littered with snakes and frogs and who knows what other kinds of nightmares.

 

But now the whole outdoorsy thing is invading all corners of my life. Corners I thought safe. Corners I protected. Corners that were my sanctuary on days when another freezer materializes in the garage because we have too much game meat for just one freezer.

 

 

 

It started with The Outsider. Not the baby Brat Packers movie – and book, which is marvelous and I’ve read eleven times. The Outsider is a book by Stephen King. Last year, Jason Bateman turned it into a mini-series.

 

Which explains the italicizing and underlining of the same title. Books are underlined. Television shows are italicized. I wish I could let that go but my Obsessiveness won’t let me. So now you’re stuck reading about The Outsider (TV show) and The Outsider (book). I’m sorry. I love you.

 

 

 

I read the book when it first came out, while we were on vacation.

 

I sat engrossed one day, oblivious to the ocean crashing outside my window. Don settled in next to me, kissed my cheek.

 

“I’m going to take a shower,” he told me.

 

“K,” I responded, really absent in the conversation because, you know, Stephen King.

 

“No,” Don said. “I’m going to take a shower.”

 

“O-K,” I said again, now a bit testy because Don knows better than to interrupt Stephen King to tell me about a shower or that dinner is ready or that it’s time to leave for that funeral.

 

“Good book?” Don asked, as if Stephen King is capable of anything but.

 

“Yes,” I said, turning the page. The detective had found a handprint. This handprint was just impossible and yet, in true Stephen King fashion, entirely probable.

 

“I can tell,” Don grinned.

 

“What?” I said, not evening bothering to hide my perturbance at being interrupted.

 

“You’re immune to my charms when you’re reading a good book.”

 

Oh. It was that kind of shower. Well, I had to see the handprint thing to its conclusion. I wished Don well in his bathing endeavors.

 

 

When the mini-series began last year – wow. Jason Bateman was so good. Even better, he brought along one of his Ozark costars to play a staple of Stephen King stories – the tangential bad guy. Not the central evil force that drives his stories, the tangential bad guy is human rather than supernatural (as in It) or preternatural (like Cujo).

 

But sometimes, those tangential bad guys get caught up with the supernatural/preternatural bad guys. I love when that happens.

 

I was happy with The Outsider mini-series. Thrilled with Jason Bateman. Thoroughly enjoying the tangential bad guy.

 

Until the tangential bad guy – Tangential Bad Guy is really the way to go, I think – had to feed the Supernatural Bad Guy during the mini-series. So he killed a deer for him.

 

What’s the problem, you ask? I’ll tell you what the problem is. I got angry. Not because he killed a deer – I reconciled that whole thing long ago, which is just a story for another day.

 

No. I got angry because it’s not that easy to kill a deer.

 

You can’t just decide you’re going to hunt a deer and – boom! – be successful. The National Deer Association says only 41% of hunters were successful in 2017. In all of hunting season.

 

Now, I will grant you the Tangential Bad Guy was likely not following hunting regulations, which make bagging a deer harder. But still. Do you know how many weeks before hunting season Don is washing his clothes and body in scent-erasing soaps? How many weekends I spend at The Cabin entertaining our children while he scouts hunting locations? The afternoons I’ve spent in the township office waiting for hunting license applications or at the archery store for archery stuff?

 

My anger intensified when I realized the frustration triggered by the erroneous plot development would never have been incited had I not promised to have and to hold a guy who regularly uses an outhouse.

 

In other words, Don’s hunting ruined my precious moments with The Outsider.

 

 

 

It gets worse.

 

Last week, at a friend’s urging, I suggested Don and I try watching Yellowstone. It’s set in Montana, where Don and I have both been and hope to move to someday after a lot of people who need us here die.

 

Yeah. I mean Willie and Indy. And yes, they know I feel that way. And yes, I really mean just Willie because, as Indy’s favorite person in the world, I know he’d follow me anywhere.

 

I was good with Kevin Costner. I was good with the gratuitous nudity. I was good with Kevin Costner’s house, which is the house I will live in when I move Indy to Montana.

 

Then a few characters went fishing. On horseback.

 

“Wait, can you do that?” I asked Don. “Is that practical?”

 

And when Don said no, his frustration with the scene clear, I knew Yellowstone was done in the Rank household.

 

And I thought back. Thought back to the girl I was when Kevin Costner’s movie Rumor Has It came out. That girl, who swore she’d never go to The Cabin. That girl, who bought every single issue of People magazine that covered Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt’s impending divorce, because she was Team Jen.

 

And now I am this girl, tapping out after one episode of Yellowstone because I found a fishing scene improbable.

 

A FISHING SCENE.

 

 

 

I kept my frustration to myself. Although Don’s outdoorsy nature has ruined my beloved affinity for the celluloid, I have ruined far more for him. He had plans on being a bachelor into perpetuity, with the disposable income to show for it.

 

Now, with kids going off to college when he’s in his mid-fifties, he’s more likely to work into perpetuity. And that disposable income? Well, let’s ask the sofa, ripped to shreds by the cat that died nine months ago, now outliving that cat because we just can’t see our way to dropping money on a sofa that is hogged by the dog and paint-splattered by two teens who should know better.

 

Thanks for the joke, Don.

 

When Yellowstone proved to be a no-go, I settled into my book, The Names of Dead Girls.

 

Now, I know you’re thinking that between Stephen King and The Names of Dead Girls, Don should be sleeping with one eye open. And you’d be right. Macabre is the only way to go, unless you’re my book club. They’ve banned me from picking any more books.

 

Some of the girls had nightmares.

 

I was figuring a book with a title like that would be one of those safe corners. No fishing on horseback. No easy deer hunting. Just murder.

 

And it was. Until the passage about deer hunting. And the other passage about deer hunting. And the other passage about deer hunting.

 

I flipped to the back of the book, to the page about the author. He grew up in Vermont where he spent his childhood fishing, hunting, and hiking.

 

The outdoorsman’s trifecta.

 

Well, at least the deer hunting passage was accurate.

 

 

 

Things grew even more dire when I retrieved the mail this week. A postcard, addressed to me, suggested I subscribe to the Game News.

 

Because, you know, it’s the state’s premier periodical on hunting, trapping, and the outdoors.

 

Don snatched the postcard from my fingers, asking if it was for him. I snatched it back. This was my subscription invitation. Not his.

 

In a personal sphere that has become increasingly peppered with outdoorsy people and things – in the last year, I’ve spoken and written a total of four times for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, earned more Hike to Hunt donations than Don, fired one gun and butchered two squirrels – I’ve realized if you can’t beat them, you need to join them.

 

Also, I really don’t want to beat them. I just want to watch TV.

 

How do I join them? Well, Don and I usually spend a weekend away every February. It’s just the two of us, where Don can part ways with his disposable income down at the Kimpton Hotel Monaco. I get a massage. We go to a nice restaurant. We day drink.

 

That’s not possible this year. So I said something. Something I shouldn’t have said. But the “join them” spirit moved me, and now it’s done.

 

I suggested we go to The Cabin instead.

 

A romantic weekend. At The Cabin. Where I refuse to play Parcheesi. Where the spa is The Cabin bathroom Don’s mom and I decorated with a Wal-Mart bath mat and shower curtain. Where the Old City restaurants with fancy drinks and fancier seat cushions are viewed with just a little bit of scorn.

 

The Cabin. Where Don will have to turn on the water – normally shut down for the winter – because I’ll rupture every organ in my pelvis before I use the outhouse. The Cabin, where my dinner is likely to be any animal with the misfortune of being legal in February.

 

Which, checking my trusty Pennsylvania Hunting and Trapping Digest, is raccoon, fox, squirrel, pheasant, rabbit, quail, and woodchuck.

 

Hey! I know how to butcher squirrel!

 

Why do I feel like I’ll be spending that weekend covered in squirrel fascia?

 

And why do I feel like you’ll be reading about it?