A Rare Gift for the Gathering

[blue rare]

I have never snared a rabbit in the woods, eyed a 12-point buck down the barrel of a rifle, or blown a passing waterfowl out of the sky with a 12-gauge shotgun. Which doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes have the desire to do so. It is only natural that humans have a primal inclination to seek out tasty and rewarding animal prey. I certainly don’t refrain from hunting on any sort of moral grounds. My freezer is currently well stocked with animal flesh, both domestic and wild. Roast chicken and meatloaf are in weekly rotation at my table. It just means that, being a city guy, leading a citified lifestyle, I have, for better or worse, sublimated my innate urges.

Of course, metropolitan living has skewed my instinct for gathering, as well as hunting. So, instead of searching on the mountainside for mushrooms and blackberries, I can be found picking out chanterelles at the farmer’s market, or jars of antipasto at the Italian deli. On any given Saturday afternoon, rather than hiding in a duck blind, I am hunting down freshly roasted coffee beans.

Thinking about what drives me, I see many ways that my suppressed hunter-gatherer impulses rise to the surface and influence my actions. I will frequently leave the safety of my den and spend hours of my day searching for  rewarding sustenance in the world around me. Beachcombing, for example, or hitting the summertime garage sale circuit. Rooting through craft and design stores seeking out Edwardian-style textured wallpaper and tapered beeswax candles for the living room. Even when I’m indoors, this drive to find and devour remains strong. I can easily spend half a day on Spotify searching out musical morsels for a playlist of progressive rock songs referencing mermaids, or examples of seventeenth-century Latvian lute music.

Nothing quite stokes these deep-seated desires to hunt and to gather, though, like Christmas shopping season does. I fairly salivate over the prospect of finding what I consider to be the perfect gifts for the important people in my life.

Which is why I so despise the idea of people telling me what they want me to buy for them. (And don’t even get me started on the appalling practice of giving cash or gift cards in lieu of presents.) The purpose of gift giving is not so that people can receive things they want (or, god forbid, that they need!). The whole point is to receive things that they would never in a million years have thought that they wanted or needed, but it turns out they really did. A taxidermied cane toad, for instance, or a  glow-the-the-dark garden gnome. The collection of leather and pressed tin shadow puppets that I just gave my nephew is perhaps the perfect example. Like my distant ancestors before me, I headed out into the wilderness and didn’t return until I had bagged my prey. That it might ultimately make its way back into the junk shop ecosystem, or some obscure storage space in attic or basement, does nothing to change the fact that I have – once again – proven myself to be a first class-forager, and a credit to my clan.