As a young boy, Ben Osha watched his dad and grandfather head off to the backwoods of Orange County, where his family has maintained property since the 1970s, in search of bucks.
“I remember always seeing the Johnson Wool red checkered shirts heading out to deer camp and thinking ‘I want to do that,’” he said. “Magically they come back and they have a racker, and you’re like, ‘Whoa!’”
When he got old enough, Osha, now 24, went from hunting the family farm to joining the men at camp.
“Going from watching it happen to being included, it’s so much more meaningful,” he said. “Each year you’re granted a little more responsibility.”
In Vermont, where almost 1-in-8 people hunt, the 16-day rifle deer season is a collective experience on par with Town Meeting Day or the emergence of black flies in May. For many, the season is defined by a trip to camp. It’s a ritual and coming of age opportunity passed between generations, sacred to those who spend the weeks reconnecting with family and the mountains.
Though hunters have had the opportunity to harvest deer with a bow for weeks, rifle season, running Nov. 15-30, is far and away the most popular hunting season of the year. Pickup trucks gather at general stores with deer draped on tailgates. Onlookers gawk at the wide-racked bucks hoisted in the air, guessing the final weight as the scales tick upward.
For some Vermonters, rifle season is their one annual vacation. Families gather not just for the Thanksgiving holiday but in the woods, disconnected from the internet and inaccessible without four-wheel drive. To better find deer, many pray for snow — a wish Mother Nature seems to have granted this year.
Osha, director of workforce and training for the Vermont branch of the Associated General Contractors, said the joy of camp is in the family connection and the quiet of the woods. Those same qualities, far away from the overstimulation of a noisy job site, make the deer hunting tradition important to many contractors and tradespeople, he said.
“When you look at the construction season, spring and summer is go go go,” Osha said.
“Deer season for a lot of these contractors is a time to mentally recharge and kind of get themselves centered again, because you’re alone. The only person you have to talk to is yourself.”
At camp, that time away is heightened.
“It’s very surreal: The ability to not only be in the wilderness all day but come back to camp and sleep in the wilderness,” Osha said.
‘To be a child again’
Hunting culture in Vermont — and the Northeast more broadly — revolves around the tradition of deer camps, setting it apart from other regions of the country.
The phenomenon has drawn anthropological interest from those interested in the unique annual bonding ritual.
Growing up in Coventry, Vt., in the 1950s, photographer John Miller remembers people heading out of villages and off to camp during November. They seemed to him to be drawn into the woods by an almost animal urge that accompanied the changing of the seasons.
In the 1980s and 90s, he returned to the area to photograph and study deer season and its people, transforming his observations into the book, “Deer Camp: Last Light in the Northeast Kingdom.”
“It’s a time of pause from everyday life, spending so much time in the woods by yourself, listening, observing,” Miller, who lives once again in the Northeast Kingdom, said. “The senses are very much intensified. And so too are the experiences between people magnified. I think people are more open.”
That openness earned Miller invitations into deer camps across the Northeast Kingdom, where he documented the families, the antlers and the outhouses of those two November weeks.
The images and accompanying narrative depicting the camps offered a rare window into these secretive backwoods fraternities of 30 years ago, where most would rather stay mum than tell a reporter which ridge holds the biggest bucks.
Explaining the draw of camp life in his book, Miller found himself enchanted by the same forces that attracted his subjects.
“I am here for similar reasons: to enjoy companionship in a place and time removed from the everyday, repetitive monotony of home, with its responsibilities and stress. To be a child again, curious, open, frightened, and in good physical condition,” he wrote.
The deer hunting tradition, Miller contended, is one of independence.
“People here, hunters, (they) want their young people to learn how to survive and take responsibility for generating food,” he said. “Many of the people I’ve worked with, they hunt, they garden, they freeze, they dry, they fish.”
And even for those that didn’t hunt, the 16-day season did not pass unnoticed in 1980s and 90s, with corners of the state shutting down. Miller recalled having his roof replaced one fall, only to find the workers had covered the half-finished project in plastic and decamped to the woods until the Monday after Thanksgiving, when rifle season was over.
Today, while some small businesses sign off for those two November weeks, others thrive. Deep in Essex County — the heart of deer camp country — David T. Leidy owns the Lake View Store. The shop sits near the Norton, Vt.-Averill, Vt., line, two towns with scarcely more than 100 permanent residents combined.
Between Labor Day and rifle season, Leidy might only see one or two people a day. But that will change starting Saturday.
“It’s almost like a county fair,” Leidy said of deer season and the winter months. “There aren’t many bad moods.”
The Lake View Store serves as a big game reporting station, and Leidy said people come to weigh their deer from as far west as Jay, Vt., and as far south as Burke, Vt. The 16 days brings more company than business — snowmobile season is the real money maker, Leidy said — but he enjoys the tradition of November, as people head up to camp in search of deer.
“Especially if it’s like a son or a grandson, everyone’s very excited,” Leidy said, describing the weighing process, which he might do 100 times a season. “And I’m excited right there with them, I can’t help it.”
Central to all of it is snow, which many hunters rely on to track down a buck.
Asked how important snow is to Essex County’s deer season and his business in the winter months, Leidy laughed: “That’s like saying how important is sunshine to the crops.”
Camp culture wanes — and changes, too
Though many deer camps live on, Miller, the tradition’s chronicler, said the heritage has declined for a slew of reasons, not least a general decline in Vermonters who hunt. Land and property maintenance are expensive, he said, and some camp owners lost their land leases when thousands of acres of paper company land turned into the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge in Essex County. In other cases, people’s interests changed, according to Miller, or the patriarch of a family died.
Often, the camps were places for two or three generations of men — warmed by wool and woodstoves — to swap stories, cook and play cards.
“The nurturing would often take place between a grandfather and a grandson, or an uncle and a nephew,” Miller recalled of the unique intimacy of deer season.
The male-dominated camp culture is apparent to Cheryl Frank Sullivan, a research assistant professor and entomologist in the University of Vermont’s Department of Agriculture, Landscape, and Environment, who started hunting in college.
“I’ve never been exposed to the camp culture of hunting, and I’m very envious of that traditional camp culture,” she said. “Historically, and even now, it’s always been very male dominated. I think it’d be really cool if there was a camp of women.”
But Sullivan said that history is changing, and she participates in programs that introduce women to hunting, like Doe Camp Nation.
Camp or not, Sullivan has found joy and success in deer hunting, harvesting bucks in the Midwest and New England. Deer hunting — particularly bowhunting — is a rare opportunity for her to step away from a busy life.
“I live, eat, breathe, sleep bowhunting for whitetails,” she said, noting the preparation and scouting that makes the hobby a year-round endeavor.
Sullivan prefers the challenge of bowhunting, the steps needed to have a deer walk within 30 yards, but she walks the woods with a rifle, too. Already this fall she’s had successful hunts in Illinois and New York, and she plans to hunt Vermont’s rifle season this weekend.
While coworkers take time off to head for warmer climes, for Sullivan, each fall is marked by multiple “hunt-cations.”
“I can disconnect from my phone and my computer, and I can just go sit in the woods,“ she said. “It’s really the only place I can go and be left alone.”
This story was republished with permission from VtDigger, which offers its reporting at no cost to local news organizations through its Community News Sharing Project. To learn more, visit vtdigger.org/community-news-sharing-project.