Wanting to be an astronaut wasn’t my first dad-life crisis. Two months into dadhood, I bought a hunting bow on Craigslist. In an apocalypse-type situation, I wanted to be able to provide for my family without running out of ammo or attracting too much attention. I’d had a hunting bow in high school and loved to shoot, especially at the local 3-D range, where I had the chance to sight in on foam rubber lions and tigers in the Alaskan woods. Once, I had a live deer in my sights at fifteen yards, but it’s antlers had barely broken the skin. Since I thought I’d heard somewhere that the antlers had to be at least an inch long to be legal, and my dad was off scouting around and not there to correct me, I didn’t take the shot. That young buck was probably about my age, sixteen or so, in deer years. For about ten years after that, I believed that wild animals had earned their place, sleeping in the cold night after rainy night. It seemed wrong to kill one of them, then wander back to my warm house. Then I became a dad. Many mornings, I saw more moose and elk than I did cars on my commute. Moose trim the bushes around the driveway for us. It began to feel irresponsible watching all that meat walk by. I’ll gladly live on beans (pinto and coffee), rice, oatmeal, and apples, but I don’t see many sacks of them walking around our neighborhood. So I took some hunter’s ed classes in the fall and applied for deer and elk tags (Moose tags are hard to get in Colorado, since too many geniuses shoot them thinking they’re elk. I don’t have the guts to stick a moose with an arrow quite yet anyway).
A-dad-ptable
A-dad-ptable
A-dad-ptable
Wanting to be an astronaut wasn’t my first dad-life crisis. Two months into dadhood, I bought a hunting bow on Craigslist. In an apocalypse-type situation, I wanted to be able to provide for my family without running out of ammo or attracting too much attention. I’d had a hunting bow in high school and loved to shoot, especially at the local 3-D range, where I had the chance to sight in on foam rubber lions and tigers in the Alaskan woods. Once, I had a live deer in my sights at fifteen yards, but it’s antlers had barely broken the skin. Since I thought I’d heard somewhere that the antlers had to be at least an inch long to be legal, and my dad was off scouting around and not there to correct me, I didn’t take the shot. That young buck was probably about my age, sixteen or so, in deer years. For about ten years after that, I believed that wild animals had earned their place, sleeping in the cold night after rainy night. It seemed wrong to kill one of them, then wander back to my warm house. Then I became a dad. Many mornings, I saw more moose and elk than I did cars on my commute. Moose trim the bushes around the driveway for us. It began to feel irresponsible watching all that meat walk by. I’ll gladly live on beans (pinto and coffee), rice, oatmeal, and apples, but I don’t see many sacks of them walking around our neighborhood. So I took some hunter’s ed classes in the fall and applied for deer and elk tags (Moose tags are hard to get in Colorado, since too many geniuses shoot them thinking they’re elk. I don’t have the guts to stick a moose with an arrow quite yet anyway).