Words and Photos by Russell Worth Parker
In my 40s, I realized, “No matter what you said you were going to be when you were a kid, what you are now is likely it.” In my 50s, I’ve accepted that fatalistic assertion as truth. Still, stalking through South Carolina’s Sumter National Forest I could not help but think, “This is not the way it was supposed to go.”
As hunters, we make the most of what life presents us, particularly on public land. That ethos had already seen me and my hunting buddy, novelist David Joy, shift our plans. Joy had to go to France for a month-long book tour. I had to respond to health concerns that come with parents suddenly aging even faster than you. So, the planned western-style foot expedition for North Carolina mountain whitetail became still hunting in upstate South Carolina. Then Hurricane Helene destroyed a swath of Georgia and South Carolina, flattening much of where we planned to hunt. I was en route there when Joy texted me, “I’m not exaggerating when I say everything I’ve spent 10 years learning is gone.”
Fingers of fire from the early sun reached through a mixed stand of pine and hardwoods, awakening the mist-laden draw I was working through in hopes of finding prey. Joy was 150 yards to my south. I stood with my Beretta Silver Pigeon draped over my forearm. Both of us scanned the overstory for squirrels.
Yeah, squirrels.
Like I said, this is not the way it was supposed to go.
A 12th-generation North Carolinian, David Allen Joy grew up in a place since pulled asunder by Charlotte’s sprawl. That loss primed him to fall in love with western Carolina’s Jackson County, where he lives and writes amongst place names that speak of the Cherokee, themselves unlanded and forced from the mountains. In a 2023 essay for Garden and Gun Magazine, Joy wrote, “Place is the intersection of a landscape and a people, two things melded together in such a way that one seemingly cannot exist without the other.” Substitute “David Joy’s writing” for “place” and you begin to understand his work. The natural world is so integral to Joy’s own, that trying to separate them is pointless. “I grew up hunting and running through a cow pasture every day to fish. I started fly fishing when I was 10 years old. There were years I fished every day of the year. Now, I don’t fish nearly as much as I hunt.” Surrounded by storytellers, Joy “didn’t ever want to be anything else. I started writing stories before I could spell.” Joy lives his life by the seasons, making it unsurprising that his first book is a fishing memoir. Of “Growing Gills” he says, “[T]hat was kind of what I envisioned some of my work being. I was very much kind of following in [John] Gierach’s footsteps.” There is “one more sporting book, probably. I’ve got 20 years of notes of trying to wrap my head around it. The essay I am obsessed with from that encapsulates everything that I believe about life and death and spirituality and God through the lens of hunting.” For all of that, it was his first novel that got my attention. Living in Arlington, Virginia, in 2016 at the behest of the Marine Corps, exiled to a place where the houses are too close and the grocery store has a single aisle for “Southern Food,” I was homesick and deep in the southern/Appalachian canon of authors like Larry Brown, Daniel Woodrell, Donald Ray Pollock, and Ron Rash. On my way out of a bookstore, I saw a book cover with a ramshackle barn on it. The title read “Where All Light Tends to Go.” My stable life may explain why a book about desperation, methamphetamine and questions of blood and love consumed me. Churned out during four months of sleep deprivation, it’s a book as wild in the writing as in the reading. Joy says it was not a matter of choice, the book demanded to be written. The same could be said of the instinct that now saw him more focused on making up for hunting days lost to a month in France. If he has a muse, it’s compulsion.
I have no fear of fried squirrel on a fresh biscuit, squirrel dumplings or squirrel and gravy over rice, but my appetite runs to larger game and birds. Joy is more omnivorous and epicurean than I, but squirrel hunting is about more than the palate.
“Squirrels were the first thing I ever hunted. There’s a nostalgia for them, and for the fact that I come from small game hunters, from men who kept pens of beagles and feists to chase rabbits and squirrels. My father eventually set down his rifle, but he was a squirrel hunter who’d grown up on squirrel gravy and squirrel dumplings. It’s also just that they’re an incredible animal to chase. I think most folks underestimate them, but if you can put up a limit in late winter you’ve really done something.” To that end, I’d already decided my squirrels would go in his pot which, if the sound of his .22 was evidence, he was steadily filling.
Sitting on a fallen pine, my back against the red earth of a root ball ripped from the ground by winds moving faster than I drive, my eyes flitted amongst the limbs arcing above me. I heard the scratch of a squirrel on an oak 15 yards away, raised the .20 gauge, and blasted the gray into a blowdown. I ran to recover it. It was as if it had evaporated. Crawling on hands and knees through the hurricane-twisted knot of limbs and leaves, I moved deadfall, scraped at leaf litter, and excavated under trunks. The squirrel was gone, and with it some of my Posewitzian moral authority.
I was pondering fair chase when Joy’s .22 cracked again. Looking towards the noise, I saw a cat-sized black fox squirrel. The Beretta came to my shoulder almost on instinct. And then came another gray. At least we’d eat.
Selling a book, and the 19-city book tour that followed, was a heady experience for Joy, who had never been on an airplane before flying to New York to sign a contract. A decade and four more novels later, he’s sanguine about business, in inverse to his concern for the words. Whether a poem, a book of essays, or a novel, “It has to carry the same amount of weight. I can think of poems that were 30 words that have wrecked me, versus your average novel which is 100,000. It’s like the difference between tungsten and lead shot, it’s just so much more weight in such a tiny space.” It’s an apt analogy for the work he’s chosen. In “Where All Light Tends to Go,” “The Weight of This World,” “The Line That Held Us,” “When These Mountains Burn” and “Those We Thought We Knew,” Joy takes on violence, family bonds, moral obligation, race and addiction. Now he’s working on a love story of which he says, “I woke up in the middle of the night, and a woman was talking. I just started screaming, ‘Give me paper, give me paper!’ I couldn’t figure out what the hell I was talking about, but that woman told me the opening line, the last line, she told me the plot. She told me what she wanted the book to do. I woke up and I knew every bit of it.” And if the topic is too hard for a reader to engage with? “I especially don’t care. I want to be emotionally, spiritually and philosophically challenged by literature. I don’t ever want to read something safe. I think the average American doesn’t read. But the ones who do, read in the same way they binge–watch Netflix, just tuning out. The idea of not having the time to read 5,000 words that could completely alter the course of your life strikes me as about the most lazy thing I can imagine.” Lazy Joy is not, though his markers of success differ from many Americans. “My lifestyle requires very little. If all you’ve ever had is not very much, having a little less isn’t terrifying. Knowing that I can scrape by is an empowering thing.” Still, he says, “If I had the stability to set myself up the way I wish to be, I would have two books written within this next year, almost three. They’re that developed in my mind, and a lot of it’s already done.”
Back at the camp by early afternoon, once we skinned and cleaned squirrels, like pulling off a too-tight dress sock, the call of the fire, to tell and hear stories, to laugh with real people, was strong. Moreover, it’s important. As Joy wrote for Time in 2018, “More than just the hunting, though, what we hold onto is a microcosm of what the growing urban-rural divide has erased across much of the rural South. It’s that old-time communion that used to be commonplace…At camp, we hold on to tradition, and as the moon rises behind the ponds, the old men talk and I listen.” I took a cue.
Zeno Ponder said of his morning’s hunt, in which he killed a wild hog, “There was an eight-point and a six-point out there. But I think they moved all that land to Alabama.” Joy began a discussion of “bears and other charismatic megafauna” which morphed into discourse on chainsaws and downed trees. Edie, David’s dachshund mix with a keen nose for a blood trail, sat on my chest as we passed around a bottle of homemade applejack good enough to tempt me off the wagon. We gave thanks for the safety of a man called Son-in-Law, whose own son-in-law saved him from his mountain home with a jon boat at the height of Hurricane Helene. We admired a knife and a teak birdhouse crafted by members of the camp. Someone said, “Teak is hard as a minister’s dick” and I wrote it down because a phrase like that is a gift to a writer. Eventually came enough dinner to feed three of each of us and then we slept because mornings come early in a hunting camp.
What David Joy said he was going to be when he was a kid, he is now: an outdoorsman and a writer of books that matter about things that matter. Fortunately, it’s all he ever cared to be.
This is exactly the way it was supposed to go.
After a career as a U.S. Marine, Russell Worth Parker is the editor in chief for the Tom Beckbe Field Journal, a book author and magazine writer published in the New York Times, Garden and Gun Magazine, Outdoor Life and numerous other print and electronic outlets. Worth lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, with his family. He is a hunter and angler who fortunately knows his way to the grocery store, a sub-mediocre but enthusiastic surfer and a notorious BBQ snob.
