July 7, 2024

Heat Exhaustion

I woke up feeling rested, although several days of prolonged sitting in my ground blind had my back aching. While drinking our morning coffee on the couch, my wife had a sudden realization: we hadn’t been out to eat breakfast this weekend. Excitement ensued as we both threw on our official breakfast uniforms, rushed out the door, and zipped off the property in glee.

Breakfast at the Cracker Barrel included platefuls of sausage, eggs, and buttery, syrupy pancakes that smothered our plates. When we were driving out of the parking lot, my wife spotted a stray calico cat between the restaurant and a nearby hotel. It was skittish, but obviously hungry. My wife enticed the stray cat with a container of food we kept stored in the car. Hopefully, Garbage isn’t reading this right now.

My wife dumped the food on the curb and came to the car to get a second container. After a little patience and used car level salesmanship, the cat was eating a big breakfast of probably the best food it had ever tasted. My wife wanted to catch the cat, but we had nothing to put it in. And once she remembered a previous incident that involved being scratched and bitten by a stray cat, she decided the day before a final examination was not the time to introduce a rabies factor into the equation.

When we arrived home, my wife got busy studying while I gathered my things to go sit in my ground blind in the woods. The terrain was still wet from the recent rainfall and the humidity was remarkably high. Sometimes, when the rain poured, it dried out the sky, making it feel cooler. This was not one of those times.

The temperatures were cooler than yesterday when the heat index soared to 107 during the hottest part of the day, so I felt like the heat would be easier to deal with, especially since it was so cloudy. Before getting in the blind, I replenished the bird food and deer corn. There were some old holes made by woodpeckers on some branches in the feeding area. Yesterday, I poured bird seed into the holes, and today, I could see something made the holes bigger when it was getting the food out. The most likely culprit was a raccoon in the dark of night.

When I zipped myself in the blind, the heat index was only at 90 degrees. I prepared all of my gear, making sure I wouldn’t have to battle with zippers or velcro that were loud enough to spook a deer at close distances. Then I sat down and waited, making a few notes on my phone since the forest needed a good half hour before its normal activities resumed.

I continuously wiped the front of my lenses and the glass on my electronic viewfinders for half an hour before they warmed up. The humidity was uncommonly bad this morning. When I looked down at a spare lens in my opened camera bag, it was dripping from the condensation that had gathered on the cool material. Within twenty minutes, the palms of my hands were damp with sweat and moisture, and they would stay that way for the next four or five hours that I was in the blind.

A couple of squirrels showed up to feed. The feeding area was devoid of birds for an hour, and then four or five different species suddenly showed up. Today, I saw wrens, tufted titmice, cardinals, bluejays, and a mourning dove. I also saw two of my favorite birds in the forest, a downy woodpecker and the large pileated woodpecker.

During my first forty minutes in the blind, a lone doe showed up, but she was extremely cautious. At one point, she stared at me for twenty minutes straight, during which time I could barely make a move or sound. It was intense, especially in the heat. She finally broke her gaze to feed, and I could finally reposition my body. I grabbed a short video of her, but it was nothing spectacular. I sure worked for it, though.

A few hours later, I saw something moving east at a distance. It was dark and had a long tail, but I only caught a brief glimpse as it disappeared into the forest in a matter of seconds. I never saw it again. An hour later, I heard a deer bark, but it never presented itself.

On my fifth hour in the blind, the heat had become suffocating. It would have felt more tolerable, except there were no animals out to shoot. It had been a few hours since I finished my last water, and I was feeling a little lightheaded. I decided I would leave the blind, walk the trails with a camera, and then return to the blind to grab the rest of my equipment before heading home.

When I got to the creek area, I heard a deer bark seven or eight times in a row. I jokingly rolled my eyes, because this same dramatic deer always hid in the thick brush here, and every time it alerted, it did so repeatedly. I looped around to Beaver Tooth Rock, but there was nothing going on there. It was just too damned hot for anything alive to be out in the sun.

When I was almost back to the blind, a herd of deer spooked. I saw them get up from their bedded position and move south. I had waited five hours for them to arrive at the blind, but the whole time, they were lying down in the shade a mere sixty yards away.

I arrived back at the house dehydrated. My wife was still studying for her exam, and I raided the refrigerator for anything cold, eating watermelon, cucumbers, and finally craving a bowl of ramen noodles for its salt. Within thirty minutes, I was sick to my stomach and showing signs of mild heat exhaustion. My wife made me an electrolyte drink called Liquid IV. 

For the rest of the evening, my body shivered, and I felt nauseous. My wife left for the store to get out of the house since she had been studying all day, and I took a cold shower and lied down between bouts of being sick. When my wife returned, she recounted a funny story about the dead deer we saw yesterday. Today, when she drove by, there were over a dozen vultures and she almost hit them all, as the large birds flopped around trying not to get run over or crash into each other. The cartoonish picture in my head made me laugh.

My wife made an early dinner and after I ate, I felt a little better, finding the energy to do the dishes and put some laundry to wash. In the evening, my wife and I sat down outside to relax. The monochrome sky displayed an entire spectrum of shades, ranging from deep black to bright white, making the weather look ominous. We hoped for rain as the thunder rolled into the area, but the water never fell.

I sat in one of the rocking chairs, staring up at the large dragonflies hunting high in the sky. Just one of these dragons could slay a hundred mosquitoes per day. Our dogs’ barks broke the silence and when we looked into the pasture, we saw deer moving back and forth, getting ready to bed down for the night. My wife recounted she had seen the pair of twin fawns today while she was studying, and I was happy to hear they were growing strong and doing well.

Tomorrow was a special day in two ways. Most alarming and exciting was my wife’s six hour exam she had to take at her university in Durham. The most meaningful, however, was that tomorrow was our anniversary.