MY FIRST bleary-eyed thought as I wake up in my apartment at 3:30 in the morning: If there’s a bus running right now, I don’t want to see what kind of people are on it. It’s close enough to when the bars let out in Philadelphia that any public transit will probably be full of folks coming off the tail end of a long night. There would also be those who’ve elected to wake up at the crack of dawn—the real weirdos, in my mind. Reality doesn’t set in until I take the sales tags off my thermal underwear and pick out the heaviest coat I own that I don’t mind getting blood on. By the time I call an Uber, I’ve accepted that I’m actually smack-dab in the middle of a Venn diagram of those two demographics. After all, I’m about to go hunting for the first time in the middle of one of the biggest urban areas in the country, and I spent most of last night bragging about it to anyone who’d listen at a beer-and-a-shot joint downtown.
I’ll be moving to a new city soon, and for my last week living in Philly, I’ve wanted to do something that can’t be found on any best-of list or blog. And when I found out it was possible to hunt deer within city limits, I knew what I had to do. I applied for a mentored hunt on the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum through a lottery system and won, which meant that I’ve spent the last few weeks attending a basic hunter-safety course, clocking some hours behind a crossbow, and taking lessons on all the other things being a first-time hunter entails. This got off to a rough start: Spiders crawled all over my arm as I learned to set up a blind. A couple of folks—thankfully not me—found themselves covered in ticks after tracking a fake blood trail. I now assume that whatever awaits me at the refuge on the first day of my hunt could very well involve creepy-crawly things too.
I roll