The most comfortable mattress I have ever slept on came out of a dump in Colton, N.Y., some 15 years ago.
The mattress, taken from the town dump by my brother Tom, had apparently been left only hours earlier. It lies in the bunk room of Camp Swampy, a 1950s logging camp situated in a broad, gorgeous stand of cedar trees and converted into a deer camp, just south of the Canadian border in northern New York.
If only the rest of deer camp life was as comfortable.
The old wood stove has to be fed every few hours, like some smoke-belching monster of years ago, the outhouse seat is oh-so-cold to the posterior, all fresh water and food must be trucked in, and we battle the mice almost nightly.
Ah, but I wouldn’t give up a few days at Camp Swampy for a week at the Ritz-Carleton in New York City.
There’s a magic to the place, in addition to the fact that the deep, dark cedars surrounding the old camp have surrendered a good number of really nice bucks over the years.
Camp is a place of bad jokes, good food, practical jokes, sometimes-rowdy behavior and, believe it or not, a firm policy of no alcohol.
Some bad behavior on the part of a few guests in long-gone past years prompted Tom, who owns the camp, to prohibit drinking.
But we still have a great time. Tom, who at 67 is three years older than me, is a real clown, and when I show up each October for a week of muzzle loading deer hunting and then, about 10 days later for another week of rifle season, he will welcome me with some bizarre hat or other regalia to prompt a couple of cheap laughs. This year it’s a hat, topped off by a fake bear skull.
We eat like kings at camp. I bring venison chili, a pot of hamburger soup and maybe a container of spaghetti and meat balls. Tom carries in stuffed peppers, a variety of chicken dishes and that unbelievable crumb cake that vanishes all too quickly.
The only power we have coming into camp is man power.
Propane lights give us illumination, and a propane stove heats our food.
We rise at 4 a.m. every day, hunt hard and come back to camp after nightfall. Then we gather — three generations of Jensen men — around a warm stove to talk about what transpired in the woods that day.
Talk ranges from a variety of topics, but it is always deer that is the focus of discussion.
“I was tucked just inside the corn field when I happened to glance into the woods and watched a really nice 8-pointer pass by, not 10 yards away,” Tom told us excitedly during our last hunt. “He slipped into the cedars before I could even get my rifle around.”
Interestingly, it is often the bucks that elude us, bigger bucks that get that way because of how they have learned to avoid humans, which are the focus of our attention and our most memorable stories.
It’s really nice to have the younger boys in camp. They listen, wide-eyed, to the tales of the older hunters, tales of big bucks like “the Mud-Slinger,” a giant whitetail buck so-called because he slung mud over the snow by way of his sheer weight and long gait. Tom hunted him for days on end, but never even saw that old brute.
Everyone pitches in at camp, including Tom. There is no hierarchy, in terms of who does what job. The worst task of all, in my opinion, is washing dishes. I’d rather split and stack wood for three hours than spend a half-hour scouring pots and pans out in the cold.
One rule, carried out each year, is that the first person to hang a buck in camp must become camp orderly. Your tag is filled, pal, and that means your hunting is over, so you’ll have plenty of time to keep the fire wood container filled, the stove going, dinner ready when the troops come back from the woods and the dishes washed and put away.
It’s kind of sad to see the boys head out before sunrise, while you’re back in camp, alone. A shot rings out, perhaps a half-mile away, and you wonder, “Was that Greg? Andy? Tom? Paul? Tyler?”
Over the past seven years, I have had to assume this role of camp orderly, but I am not complaining. The gods of the hunt have been very good to me at Camp Swampy.
We process all of our deer in camp, boning out all of the meat.
Tom, a retired meat cutter, is a true professional when it comes to butchering our bucks. But we all help out in the process. It’s a demanding task, but it is the last stage in a very ancient ritual that combines finding your deer, aiming true, dragging it out of the woods, hanging it (if the weather stays good and cold) and then processing it.
That is all a part of what makes deer hunting, for all of us, such a great challenge and so rewarding.
After a long day’s hunt, a good dinner and a few puffs on a cigar, it’s bedtime. We hit the sack, generally, about 8:30 p.m. There are no card games, no drinking sessions late into the night at Camp Swampy. A tough day in the woods rules out any late-night shenanigans.
Then I slip into the most comfortable bed I’ve ever known and a deep sleep — brought on by another long day in a cold paradise — takes me away.
