2015 KeyPAP MOTY Battle Royale: Dr. Funk

I got rice cooking in the microwave

I got a three day beard I don't plan to shave

It's a goofy thing but I just gotta say, hey,

I'm doing alright

– Average Country Song

A Year in the Life of the Funky One

This is my case for the KeyPAP Man of the Year 2015, or at least it is supposed to be. An undeserved crown is but a fancy hat, which is why I will not partake in the hyperbole that will no doubt spread throughout the other essays like a malignant tumor. As I muse about my year, two thousand and fifteen years after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, I keep returning to one day that I feel is an adequate representation of my last trip around the sun.

It was a quiet day in October, a day as ordinary as a common acorn. I woke up before the rising sun at a hunting camp that housed the memories of my father’s youth. I trekked out deep into the woods of central Pennsylvania. I walked behind my father as he gave me directions to my spot, referencing landmarks that were nowhere to be found in the recesses of my memory. I found the spot luckily, as I always do, quite unsure as to how this happened. I sat up in my tree stand and waited for the sun to come up.

The woods I have hunted in for the last 17 years are not immune to temporal changes. Our surrounding landscapes give us the illusion of permanence, perhaps a false glimpse into a span of time that is beyond our grasp. The truth is that this wooded expanse, a mostly untouched representation of a time long since passed, has changed as much as the people who hunt it. Gone are the days of constant action. It is not uncommon to go days without a single deer sighting, an event that would once seem impossible.

Entire species of plants that were once plentiful in my youth are nowhere to be found, changing the entire feel of the landscape. But why shouldn’t it change? As for the people I walked with out into the woods that morning, the change was more obvious. I was no longer a 12 year old boy who failed to grasp that you could get tired walking up a mountain. I don’t have to spend my time walking holding up my hand-me-down hunting gear made for a man twice my size. As I looked around that morning most of the people in the cabin had grayer hair and longer belts than they did when I spent my first days there over 20 years ago. Like the lost vegetation that changed the landscape of the mountain so greatly, the most striking difference in the people who walked the mountain that morning is the absence of some of them.

For all the changes that have taken place over the years, you still can’t escape that feeling of permanence that you get when you look at the rolling hills of the Unions 2nd state. Visually the surface may change, but the land is still as much the same as it is different. In the same way I feel connected to who I have always been when I am out there. I still stare at stretches of bark on the trees in front of me blurring their deep groves until they look like faces, I still believe that being ready to shoot a deer and actually seeing one are inversely proportional, and when I put the gun to my shoulder that day I looked into the same lens as I did when I shot my first deer all those years ago.

Objectively speaking this day was as uneventful as it gets. I woke up before the sun, sat in a tree by myself for 5 hours and shot an averaged sized doe. I don’t even think I bothered to take a picture with it. It was a day many hunters would trade for a long morning in bed. Maybe it was just the right combination of factors but I was able to take it all in that day. I felt that connection, to the past, to the woods. I was grateful to be able to bring home food that I killed myself. It all felt right. There is no trophy to hang on the wall, no crazy story to tell. Just a hum drum day in the woods that for some reason, I find myself remembering more fondly than almost any other. This is much like my 2015, I certainly have done nothing to win any awards, especially one as illustrious as the KeyPAP MOTY award, but I can’t help feeling like it was one of the good ones. 2015 was one of those bland uneventful years that you never forget. Every common acorn has in it, an entire oak forest. 2015 contained as little and as much in it as any year I can ever recall.