Frank
The alarm goes off at 4:15 AM and it’s forty degrees outside. You’re pulling on layers in the dark, trying not to wake anybody up, and you’re doing it completely by choice. Nobody assigned this to you. There’s no meeting afterward. There’s no deliverable.
That’s the part nobody explains when they try to describe why hunting matters.
You Can’t Multitask in a Tree Stand
I work in IT. I run a homelab. I build apps in my spare time. My default state is having six things going at once, and my default response to a problem is “there’s probably a smarter way to automate this.” I am, in other words, exactly the kind of person who struggles to sit still for longer than it takes to compile a Docker build.
But you can’t automate a deer. You can’t optimize your way into a successful morning hunt. You can’t have a background process running while you’re perched twelve feet up a pine tree in Jones County at 5:30 in the morning, because the second your brain drifts, you miss the snap of a twig in the brush twenty yards out. Or worse, you move wrong and blow your entire sit.
The woods demand a specific kind of attention that modern life actively trains out of you. Not the frantic, multithreaded attention of keeping up with Teams and patch deployments and service tickets. The old kind. Patient, quiet, single-threaded.
I didn’t fully appreciate how rare that had become in my life until I noticed I couldn’t do it anymore without effort.
Middle Georgia Doesn’t Look Like a Postcard, and That’s the Point
When people picture hunting, they usually picture Montana or Wyoming, and I get it. I’ve got a soft spot for that kind of country myself. Big sky, elk country, the whole thing.
But I grew up in Middle Georgia. Pine trees, red clay, creek bottoms, kudzu pushing up against everything that holds still long enough. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t photograph the way the Rockies do. It’s flat and dense and humid nine months out of the year, and the bugs will carry you off if you give them the chance.
It’s also mine. I know what the land sounds like before light. I know which creek crossings flood in October and which ones hold up. I know the difference between a deer walking and a squirrel doing its best impression of one (sometimes), and for a while there, I forgot how much that knowledge matters to me.
Gray, Georgia is not a tech hub. There’s no startup culture, no coworking spaces, no artisanal anything. What there is: woods, fields, good fishing water, and a tradition of people who know how to use them. I grew up around that. I am, whether I think about it consciously or not, shaped by it.
When I spend enough time away from it, something goes a little sideways.
What You’re Actually Doing Out There
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud: the hunting is not always the point.
I mean, it is. You’re there to hunt. You’re serious about it, you put in the time scouting, you know your land, you’ve got a reason for sitting in a specific spot on a specific morning. That part is real.
But a lot of mornings end without a shot. And those mornings aren’t failures. You watched the sky go from black to gray to pale orange. You heard the woods wake up, layer by layer, bird species by bird species, until there was full daylight and the whole thing was moving. You sat with your own thoughts for two hours with no phone, no notifications, no inputs from outside.
That’s not nothing. That’s actually kind of hard to come by.
I’m not a morning person by nature. My brain tends to come alive late at night, which is why a lot of my best homelab work happens around 1 or 2 AM. But there’s a different quality to an early morning in the woods. The quiet isn’t the same as late-night quiet. It’s not the quiet of everyone else being asleep. It’s the quiet of something else being awake.
The Identity Thing Nobody Talks About
I got my first tattoo at 52. Some people found that surprising. But to me, it was just catching up to things I’d been carrying around for a long time.
Hunting is the same kind of thing. It’s not a hobby I picked up, it’s something that was baked in early. My son Logan grew up watching me head out before dawn. My daughter Lauren knows what a successful season looks like. It’s part of the family grammar.
When I spend too long in IT-mode, homelab-mode, systems-engineer-mode, something gets thin. Not in a dramatic way. More like a guitar that needs tuning. Still functional. Still making noise. Just not quite right.
Getting back in the woods corrects that in a way nothing else does. Not the gym, not a long drive, not even a good evening of building something that actually works. Those all help. But the woods are specific. They put me back in a version of myself that existed before the job title and the server rack and the Docker containers.
That version isn’t better or worse. But losing access to it has a cost.
The Practical Takeaway (Which Isn’t Really About Hunting)
If you’ve got something like this in your life, some physical, non-digital thing that you came from and keep drifting away from, the drift is worth paying attention to.
Not as a productivity hack. Not as “balance.” Just as a signal. When was the last time you did something that required your full, undivided, un-automated attention, and gave you nothing back except the experience of having done it?
The woods don’t care how many years I’ve been in IT. They don’t care about my homelab setup or my Exchange environment or whether I shipped a new feature to HookHouse-Pro this week.
Out there, I’m just a man in a tree stand at 5 AM, watching the dark turn into something.
That’s enough. That’s more than enough.
