A Big Two-Hearted River Day

He walked along the road feeling the ache from the pull of the heavy pack. The road climbed steadily. It was hard work walking uphill. His muscles ached and the day was hot, but Nick felt happy. He felt he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs. It was all back of him.

I have always enjoyed the short story by Ernest Hemingway, “Big Two-Hearted River.” I first read it in high school, and it made an early impression on me for reasons I can’t quite explain. Since then, I have reread it about once a decade, whenever situations or events trigger the desire to revisit Nick Adams and his solo fishing and camping trip into the hills of northern Michigan. It became a phrase we used occasionally in our household when I told my wife I was heading out for a “Big Two-Hearted River Day.” That meant leaving the house before dawn with a rifle, a fly rod, or a walking stick, plus a small backpack with water, lunch, a book, a poncho, and a thermos of coffee, and not returning until well after dark. Perhaps it’s a reset, a reboot, an intentional journey of solitude with purpose but no specific, tangible goal.

Some might say this is a dull story. The plot is indeed thin, resembling more a stream of consciousness than an exciting thriller. The reader follows World War I veteran Nick Adams as he hikes solo into a wilderness area to camp, fish, and find solitude with his thoughts. You’ll join him in routine tasks like pitching his canvas tent, catching grasshoppers for bait, making camp coffee, casting for trout, cleaning a fish, and building a fire. He is a man alone in the woods, content simply to be. There lies a certain healing in doing mundane, repetitive tasks with your hands, allowing the mind the freedom to disconnect, to wander, to seek restoration.

One of my earliest memories of a “Big Two-Hearted River” day was during Marine training in Quantico, Virginia. It was a long-distance, daytime solo land-navigation event. You head out early in the morning with a map, compass, water, and an MRE (Meal, Ready-to-Eat). You have seven hours to navigate by azimuth, pace count, and terrain association to locate a dozen or so navigation points that are miles apart. You are hiking solo across ridges, valleys, rivers, swamps, and thickets, covering 10-plus miles over the course of the day, annotating the numbers printed on hidden ammo cans scattered across a vast training area, a map-and-compass scavenger hunt, if you will.

The day was going well this time, anyway. I felt confident about the points that I had already found. I had two hours remaining and one point to go. If I head down this draw, the last point should be at the bottom, and then 500 meters to the assembly area for final check-in and the grading of my points. I was reveling in the solitude and had time to spare. There was no sense in rushing back to the green masses, the “hurry up and wait,” and the demonstrative drill sergeants.

I happened upon a beautiful grassy glade with a creek meandering through it. A couple of sprawling oaks offered shade. I had been going hard, so I paused, which turned into a longer respite as I checked my watch. I pulled out what was left of my MRE, even used a heater tab to warm up the main entrée, and leisurely ate it, probably the first meal I had eaten slowly in weeks. I took off my green canvas-topped jungle boots, rinsed out my socks, and placed them on a warm, sunny rock to dry. I soaked my swollen feet in a pool of the clear, flowing creek, which bubbled over the pebbly riffles. I felt the blood begin to recirculate in my feet in response to the cool infusion of creek water.

I shut my eyes. Just for a moment, I told myself. The swaying oak leaves created a mosaic of sun-and-shade amoebas drifting through my closed eyelids. I awoke with a sudden jerk and panic as I dreamed of sleeping through ENDEX, a search party being formed to find a lost Marine who was eventually “found” sleeping soundly under a tree. It has happened before. Whew. It had just been a couple of minutes of dozing, thankfully.

I needed to be more intentional if I was going to do this. I backward-planned, giving myself a little extra time for the unforeseen, and set my Casio G-Shock watch’s alarm for 20 minutes. I laced the sling of my M16A2 through my legs and folded my 1:50,000 map, crinkled with well-worn lamination and covered with smeared grease-pencil lines and pace-count notes, into the right cargo pocket of my sweat-soaked woodland BDU trousers. I did not want a roving instructor (or a pranking fellow Marine) snatching my rifle or map, leaving me to return from an exercise sans rifle or map, the ultimate shame and cause for recycle.

I checked my surroundings for signs of other people, cautiously closed my eyes and, surprisingly, entered a shallow but refreshing nap on my warm, firm Beautyrest slab of granite. My eyes fluttered open 30 seconds before my alarm chirped. I felt wonderfully refreshed. I replaced the moleskin covering a blister on my left heel, slid on a fresh pair of socks, laced up my boots, and repacked my ALICE pack, making sure to leave nothing behind.

I found a clear spot in the flowing creek to refill my empty canteens, then dropped an iodine tablet into each and shook them well. I consulted my map, redrawing the line of direction from where I thought I was to the final target eight-digit grid coordinate. I pulled my lensatic compass out of its small pouch, affixed and dummy-corded to the left vertical strap of my H-harness, and shot the azimuth. I targeted a broad-trunked hickory tree about 250 meters away in my line of sight. I tucked my map and compass away and resumed my pace count, walking toward the tree and eventual ENDEX.

That was 40 years ago, and while I have forgotten much over those ensuing years, I remember that brief moment of peace and solitude with perfect clarity. A “Big Two-Hearted River” moment indeed.

Years later, now out of the Marines and in the Arkansas Army National Guard, I jealously protect Veterans Day for three reasons. One, it is a federal holiday, so no work. Two, I want solitude to reflect upon and remember my friends, both living and dead. And three, it falls during the early portion of Arkansas deer season.

As an active-duty Guardsman, I have access to a red zone hunt, meaning that traditional artillery and small-arms impact areas are closed for several periods during the holiday/deer season, and only active-duty or retired military members are allowed to hunt in these ranges due to liability reasons. You have the possibility of encountering UXOs (unexploded ordnance) dating back to World War II. If you happen to run across suspected UXO, leave it be, record its grid coordinates, and mark it so EOD can come back in and render it inert. I cherish the opportunity to hunt acres of pristine land where the general public is never allowed. The training area is vast; the deer grow large and are unpressured.

I look forward to this day each year, as I declare to my wife the evening before that it will be a “Big Two-Hearted River Day.” I will leave before dawn and not come home until well after dark. I pack lightly, opting to hunt from the ground, so I do not have to carry a bulky climbing tree stand. I throw in a thermos of coffee, lunch, water, and a book and set off.

At the check-in area, I sign the ledger, notifying the authorities which zone I’m hunting that day, and drive the long, dusty roads to my parking area at the MOUT (Military Operations on Urbanized Terrain) training area. I walk through the dark, barren streets of the urban mock-up city, illuminated only by the narrow cone of my headlamp. I feel like I’m being watched by zombies peering out of third-story hidey-holes in some post-apocalyptic scenario. My senses relax somewhat when I leave the austere, movie-set city behind and reenter the forest along a narrow firebreak.

I find, in the predawn darkness, a wide-trunked red oak, pull out my collapsible seat cushion, and pile some limb debris around me, making a little makeshift ground blind. I nestle my back into the groove of the oak, slide a shotgun slug into the chamber of my Remington 11-87 (shotgun-only zone), unscrew my thermos lid, and pour a steaming-hot cup of black coffee, warming my chilled fingers against the worn metal cup. I feel the heat caress my throat, reveling in the simple delight of a warm drink on a cold, frosty morning.

It is still dark, but the predawn light is just beginning to reveal itself, and the early-rising birds start their morning melodies, welcoming the new day. A pair of wood ducks startle me with their whirring wings and their high-pitched squeal as they disappear into a cypress swamp a couple of hundred yards behind my right shoulder. I cease movement and start scanning the open Arkansas oak flat to my front, my eyes slowly adjusting to the shifting shadows and grainy, black-and-white aperture of a predawn forest.

My heart rate increases as I hear the rustling of leaves to my left front. I slowly raise my binoculars only to locate a raccoon meticulously washing its hands in the little creek as it prepares to sleep the day away in the cozy cavity of a tree snag. Thirty minutes later, a doe and a yearling cautiously cross the same creek, materializing out of nowhere, somehow not making a sound in the dry oak leaf litter. I watch them with my binoculars, but they will get a pass today as I am after a mature buck.

The base biologists require that you harvest a doe before you can take a buck for herd management reasons. I shot a doe on a red zone hunt the weekend prior, giving me a green light to take a buck today. It can be the ultimate frustration and integrity check to have to let a majestic eight-point walk because you have not shot your doe yet.

Don’t get too hasty, though. Two years ago, I shot what I thought was a doe at first light. When I approached the downed deer, I quickly saw that it was a little buck, its 2-inch spikes hidden by its large ears. I shamefully and dutifully took it back to the club biologists, checked it in, and paid the $50 fine for mistaken identity. What was worse, my red zone season was over, since I had erroneously taken my one buck.

This time, I can relax because I already have some protein-rich venison in the freezer and can take my time while I wait for the big boy. Besides, I don’t want my “Big Two-Hearted River” day to end too soon.

After a couple of hours nestled in my morning oak tree, I slowly rise, gather my belongings, stretch, and start moving slowly up a gentle slope to a ridgeline to my south. I am in no hurry. Step…step…step…pause 30 seconds, scan the woods for the twitch of a tail, the horizontal outline of a back, the shuffling of cloven feet. The breeze is in my face. It feels good as my fingers and toes slowly warm from the movement.

I make a game of it. Slow down. Find the rhythm. Spend more time still than moving. Try to see the deer before they see (or smell) me. If I startle a deer and it runs off with its tail raised high, one point for the deer. If I see a deer first, I freeze and watch it amble off unconcerned and unalarmed, then one point for me. The deer usually have the most points, but it is entertaining and makes me slow down.

It is hard to turn off the internal “hurry-up” clock. It is ingrained in us from a young age to be productive, to achieve our goals, to rush on to the next agenda item, so it is extremely difficult to slow down and find quiet and stillness within our minds and bodies.

After about an hour of slow-hunting, I am three-quarters of the way up the ridgeline. It is midmorning, and I am where I want to be. For some reason, as the day warms, the deer like running the ridges. I find a nice leaning rock slab with a good view of the vale below. I take a seat, sip some water, and pull out a granola bar and an apple.

The sun is rising over the ridges, casting its warming rays on me and my rock perch. I pull out the thin, obscure book These for Remembrance, by John Buchan. A good Marine buddy gave it to me years ago as a silent tribute to another Marine friend, Dave, who died far too young. We both agree to read it at least once a year to remember Dave and many other fallen comrades.

Buchan writes moving tributes to six of his close friends who died in the “war to end all wars,” World War I (if only that maxim held true). He wrote it for his children so that they would understand a little about the great men he served with, who never got to come home to their families. He writes in the high, erudite language of an early 20th-century Brit, but through it you can feel the depth of loss that still torments him years later. In the foreword, he writes to his children:

So I want you to cherish the memory of the war because of the price that was paid for victory-victory for you. When you realize what riches of heart and mind, what abounding zest for life, what faithfulness and courage, were bartered for six feet of French or Flemish soil, you will come to think of those years as a consecrated stage in the procession of time.

Dave was my first loss as a young servicemember, but unfortunately, not my last. As I sit in the solitude on that peaceful hillside, I pray for the safety and welfare of our National Guard infantry brigade that is currently deployed to Iraq. I think of all the young men and women who are serving that I “put in boots” over several years as a career National Guard recruiter.

I recall sitting around the kitchen table with their parents, explaining that their son or daughter would mature, gain responsibility and discipline, earn money for college, and learn marketable skills as a young soldier in the Army National Guard. Besides, the Guard rarely sees combat; it assists with tornadoes, floods, and other state emergencies. Little did they or I know that they would be deployed to a hot, kinetic combat zone in Iraq a couple of years later.

What if one of my recruits comes home in a body bag? How would I face those very same parents again after they’ve received their folded flag at the Arkansas State Cemetery? I’ve had a couple of my enlistees get wounded, but thankfully, no fatalities yet.

Snap out of it! How can I be so egocentric, thinking of how it would affect me rather than the lifelong impact that loss of a loved one would have on those poor, bereaved families? Years later, I would learn firsthand what it is like to be one of those Gold Star parents, but we will get to that later.

Today, I am shielded from what is to take place in the coming years. It is a strangely blessed thing that we don’t know our future. If we were to “know” future things, our lives would be a tormented existence of angst and foreboding. It would destroy us from the inside out, rendering us utterly unable to find any joy in the present moment.

But on this day, in these woods, I am dealing with my “non-deploying guilt.” I can’t shake the feeling that if I am recruiting and sending my young soldiers overseas, I should be there too, facing the same dangers and challenges they do. Yet even after volunteering, my command says, “No, we need your skill set here, recruiting the next generation of ‘warfighters.’” That does not sit well with me, yet, if I am honest, a part of me is also relieved to be “commanded” to stay put. And because of that, the conflicting feelings multiply the guilt I feel in my heart.

I glance up from my book and my thoughts to see movement along the ridgeline below. Five deer are cruising at a brisk trot just below me: two does, two yearlings, trailed by a small four-point buck. Nothing I would shoot, but I watch them for a few minutes as they meander out of sight.

I walk to the ridgeline to survey the valley on the other side. I won’t go there. I’ll save it for another day. As the sun peaks and begins its descent into the afternoon, I slowly retrace my steps, making my way down the hill and settling in for an evening sit under another sprawling oak until dusk envelops me. I return home well after dark. “Big Two-Hearted River” day in the books.

I’m not sure if Ernest would agree, but I will take the liberty of saying that a “Big Two-Hearted River” day does not have to be a solo event. I look back and fondly remember one of my last father-son adventures with my son.

It was the last week of December 2020. Quint had completed the long and grueling Special Forces Qualification Course as a medical sergeant, as well as Spanish language school, and had a couple of weeks’ leave before reporting to the 7th Special Forces Group in the Florida Panhandle. He arrived at our home in Northeast Florida with his 2006 Toyota Tacoma, pulling a U-Haul trailer loaded with all of his meager worldly possessions, primarily an impressive collection of surfboards. We were glad to see him for a few days during this transition period as he searched for an apartment at his new duty station.

A few days after Christmas, we took a little “hike” together. Not far from our home is the expansive Osceola National Forest, which contains a section of the 1,500-mile Florida Trail. We selected a 10-mile stretch and used a self-shuttle, dropping off one vehicle at our destination and circling back to the starting point with a second vehicle.

I pulled a couple of cobweb-laced, well-worn ALICE packs from my garage that I had saved from a past military life. I chose a small one and outfitted it minimally with water, a bag lunch, a national forest map, and a rain jacket. Quint chose a large one and raided my woodpile, stuffing it with oak logs and topping it off with a couple of 10-pound dumbbells for good measure. We draped blaze orange vests over our backpacks since hunting season was in full swing. Hopefully, hunters are not perched alongside the Florida Trail, but you never know.

We reached the trailhead after completing our vehicle shuttle and set out on our hike. It had been a wet winter so far, so our boots were immediately soaked as we waded through ankle- to knee-deep sections of cold, standing water. We talked casually while I tried to pry some information and stories about the nearly two-year training pipeline he had just completed to become a Special Forces medic. Befitting his nature, he was pretty close-lipped about his professional life, and we ended up talking more about life at the Glen and the family that had gathered for Christmas.

After about a mile and a half, I could tell I was holding him back. To me, this was a challenging yet leisurely hike. To him, it was a training event. He was about to report to his first ODA in 7th SFG, and he wanted to be ready; rucking under a heavy load was one of the hallmarks of performance on Green Beret teams.

I told him to go on ahead if he wanted to stretch his legs, and I would see him down the trail. He immediately found another gear that I did not know existed and pulled away. It was not a jog, but I would have to break into a run just to keep up. His legs just pumped in a high-tempo, short-stride rhythm, akin to speed walking that just ate up the miles. It was humbling to remember that I had maybe 10 pounds on my back, while he was carrying 50-plus pounds of firewood and dumbbells.

Soon, he was an orange blip on the trail ahead. I would occasionally get a glimpse of him when he circled back to do what I’m sure was a safety check on his “old man,” to be sure that I did not pass out on the trail. Of course, he had his aid bag with him too, so I was in good hands for any unforeseen emergency.

We met again at the end of the trail at our staged vehicle. He had arrived at least an hour ahead of me and had our picnic lunch spread out on the tailgate of his truck. We had a leisurely lunch under the winter azure-blue skies of North Florida, where we enjoyed guy small talk and just being together. It was good. It was right for reasons I had no idea of at the time.

I recall this father-son adventure with fondness and yearning, wishing I could go back and replay it over and over again. After that day, Quint deployed with his 7th SFG company in Central America, where he became an integral part of his ODA. When he returned stateside, he went to Freefall School, Sniper School, and finally Ranger School.

On Aug. 9, 2022, our world was turned upside down when a stoic party of uniformed Army soldiers informed us that a tree had fallen during a sudden storm on Mount Yonah during the Mountain Phase of Ranger School, killing Quint Taber and Evan Fitzgibbon. His teammates, arrayed in their dress blues, provided the honor guard as he was laid to rest at Jacksonville National Cemetery. It is a poignant moment to watch them solemnly pound their freefall, Ranger, or Special Forces insignia into the mahogany coffin that held our 30-year-old son.

Now all that remains are precious memories. Moments in time I will never get back. Big Two-Hearted River days help me remember. They help me forget. They ground me in the earth, the present, the now, while reconnecting me with the timeless, the eternal, and the hope of things to come, which are so much larger than this fleeting, transitory life we live in our small, finite earthly bodies.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12:

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

Hemingway, through his Nick Adams persona in “Big Two-Hearted River,” concludes:

He sat on the logs, smoking, drying in the sun, the sun warm on his back, the river shallow ahead entering the woods, curving into the woods, shallows, light glittering, big water-smooth rocks, cedars along the bank and white birches, the logs warm in the sun, smooth to sit on, without bark, gray to the touch; slowly the feeling of disappointment left him. It went away slowly, the feeling of disappointment that came sharply after the thrill that made his shoulders ache. It was all right now.

_____________________________

Tab Taber is a Gold Star father and retired Marine Corps and Army veteran who runs a fourth-generation wholesale plant nursery in Northeast Florida. He served eight years in the Marine Corps and 15 years in the Army before retiring from military service in 2014. For The Havok Journal, he writes personal reflections on grief, remembrance, family, and military loss, shaped by the death of his son, Staff Sgt. George L. Taber V, a Green Beret medical sergeant with 7th Special Forces Group, during Ranger School on Mount Yonah in August 2022. He can be reached at tabtaber7@gmail.com.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.