34. Wake up in a tent in the rain.

35. Shoot arrows at pumpkins. I was once wandering around Northport, Alabama, in search of barbecue, when I came across an old guy who had set up a kind of archery range in a little 0.2 ha stand of tilled land directly off a county road, just past the city limits. I stopped for directions, and approached him slowly. He was aiming his bow at a patch of pumpkins growing toward the rear of the plot. The largest pumpkin must’ve had seven arrows stuck in it; the smaller ones were speckled with them. He wore a bright blue blazer and a baseball cap, with a cardboard box full of busted-up arrows beside him. This was clearly not his first time out there. As I walked up, he yanked the string back vengefully and let fly. The arrow made a beautiful, slick sound when it hit the pumpkin. He hit his target twice in a row, then looked at me. “I’m him,” he said. “Who?” I asked. “I’m the man who shoots them pumpkins up,” he confidently answered.

Pumpkins grew too hard and green in his land, but he planted them in any case, because he’d come to love them as targets. He’d done it every year, he said, for ten years now. I watched him shoot for a while. He hit about once every three times. “I’m not very good,” he said. “But you’re the only one who does it,” I said. That made him the best. It was a private sport, a personal ritual, a public eccentricity. For him it was an undeniable pleasure, one that he would prepare for throughout the year – planting the seeds, tending the vines, buying additional arrows at garage sales. It must’ve signalled something for him: the passing of a season, the observance of an unseen holiday, the years ticking on and on.

I remember thinking I needed to do something no one else did. Something I did alone. An exercise with meaning only to me. Something I didn’t try to sell to anyone else, or pass off as therapeutic. I do it now: I pile rocks on my property. I collect hotel keys on a table in my bedroom. I walk the covered bridge outside my house at night and stand there when it is too dark to see a damned thing. I am the only one who knows of these tasks. They help me know myself, past and present.

I watched the pumpkin archer for 15 minutes. I never even asked to try it myself. “I used to be pretty damned good,” he told me. He pointed back over his shoulder, then turned to

take a look. “I used to stand way back there.” It was just more field, and an pretty old magnolia tree, and a bench. The distance seemed to take him by surprise. He raised both eyebrows and looked at me. The thought of what used to be just made him perfectly happy, as did the moment he was in. Then, as now, he was shooting arrows at pumpkins. Inexplicably, it made perfect sense to us both. – TC