Part One in a Series on Growing Up in America Today, from the March issue of Esquire
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1.“GIRLS SOMETIMES JUST DO THAT”
Ryan Morgan is seventeen and happy to be a guy. To be a girl would mean he’d have to deal with a lot more drama. He’d likely have to deal with mean girls. And he could end up a mom, which he doesn’t ever want, because being a mom is hard. Probably the hardest job in the world. Also, he might not think football was as interesting. He isn’t sure what would be interesting, but if it isn’t football, then he isn’t interested. Other than that, he doesn’t think there are too many reasons it would be better to be a guy than a girl—unless you’re from the Middle East or maybe the inner city.
Ryan lives in West Bend, Wisconsin, a town of just over thirty thousand outside Milwaukee. He has a kid face, with big brown eyes. His mom, Tori, usually cuts his hair, which he sometimes styles into a side sweep. He’s well-dressed and has a sizable sneaker collection. At six five, he’s taller than most of his classmates; taller than his dad, Owen; tall enough to get into a bar to watch football without getting carded. Ryan’s girlfriend, Kaitlyn, is also seventeen. They got together in eighth grade after she gave him a birthday card with a twenty- dollar bill inside. Ryan thought, Who does that? He’d had girlfriends before, but she is his most long-standing and most serious. They eat lunch together in the cafeteria of West Bend West, where they’re both seniors, and they make sure to cross paths in the hallway between classes, even if just for a moment, long enough to graze fingers or lock eyes. Sometimes when Kaitlyn is driving and he’s riding shotgun, she’ll pull up to a four-way stop and gesture to other drivers to go, go, go, even when it’s her turn. It is just one of those things Ryan thinks girls do. They are more tentative, no fault of theirs. Whereas he knows with certainty that he is decisive.
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Read the story behind this cover in Editor in Chief Jay Fielden's Editor's Letter
But there’s this thing that still bothers him. It has to do with an incident last year in the computer lab. It was a Friday, near the end of the period, and Ryan waited by the exit. He began absentmindedly opening and shutting the door. This girl he didn’t really know told him to stop. When he did it again, she smacked him in the face. He smacked her back. She clawed at him, and he fell into a row of computers. The bell rang, and the girl ran off. “The teacher asked me to report it right away,” he tells me, “but I had a bus to catch.”
.Ryan in his bedroom in West Bend, Wisconsin, where he likes to play video games.
Ryan went home with a cut on his eyebrow, two on his forehead, and another on his ear. Tori told him to take pictures. “That girl could go home,” Ryan recalls his mom saying, “slit the whole side of her cheek with a knife, and come to school Monday and say, ‘Hey, look what he did to me.’ ” That was news to him. He’d never even been in a fight before. In middle school, he and this other kid had agreed to punch each other in the face because they wanted to know what it felt like, but when the time came, they just went home. “I guess girls sometimes just do that,” he says. “It happened once when my mom was in high school. A girl purposely broke her own arm just to get another person in trouble.”
“Last year was really bad,” Ryan says. “I couldn’t say anything without pissing someone off.”He took photos of his face and went to the principal’s office first thing on Monday, like his mom told him to. “He was so upset,” the assistant principal tells me. “He didn’t know why he was in trouble.” Ryan spent a couple hours in the in-school suspension room. He got a ticket referring him to the municipal court, where he appeared in August. He pleaded not guilty. At a second meeting, Ryan spoke to a prosecutor. At least, “I think it was a prosecutor,” he says. “I think he felt like it was stupid that I got a ticket for this. The look on his face was kind of like, What the heck is this?” Ryan thinks that if he were a girl, he wouldn’t have been punished. “As long as I don’t get in trouble again for a year, I’m okay,” he tells me. “But I had to deal with it for a few months.” The kids in school, “they called me a woman beater. I don’t think anyone actually thought I was. They were just giving me crap. It was just a stressful time.”
Most of the year Ryan lives with his mother, two younger brothers, stepdad, and four-year-old half sister in a two-story house on ten acres in West Bend. His stepdad works in the printing business. Tori is a full-time mother, though sometimes she makes bear rugs or bartends for a little extra cash. Every other weekend and for part of the summer, Ryan lives with Owen, a taxidermist in Mountain, an unincorporated community three hours north, in the Chequamegon- Nicolet National Forest. He and Tori separated when Ryan was four, and the parents now have as little to do with each other as possible. The distance from one home to the other is 147 miles. “Exactly three miles short of the 150-mile maximum distance allowed by law between parents with joint custody,” Owen says. (He and Tori both okayed Ryan’s participation in this story, but Tori declined to be interviewed.)
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The Story Before the Story: Read Susan Orlean's December 1992 piece 'The American Man at Age Ten' on
West Bend is a blue-collar town with a strong German heritage in a county where Donald Trump won 67 percent of the vote. “If you’re a moderate Republican in West Bend, you’re a liberal,” Joe Carlson, a former school-board president, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2011. It’s also overwhelmingly white. Trump held a campaign rally at its conference center in 2016, where he declared, “I’m asking for the vote of every African-American citizen struggling in our country today,” even though only 2 percent of West Bend’s population is African-American. (Whites account for 95 percent.) Milwaukee is thirty miles south, close enough that West Bend is considered an outer suburb but still far enough that not many people consider commuting an option. The counties around Milwaukee are some of the few suburban places in America to remain firmly red. Ryan doesn’t think West Bend has changed much since he was a kid. The winters are long and cold. For fun there is the bowling alley, shopping at Hobby Lobby, or walking down Main Street. There is Big Cedar Lake and Little Cedar Lake, a winter sports park, and the Little Switzerland ski resort. Ryan has known most of his friends since elementary school. He met his best friend, Andrew, in third grade. They can’t remember anything interesting that’s happened. Andrew heard about a man in a tank top running through the Walmart parking lot and getting tased by the police. Ryan heard about a man who had his throat slit outside Fleet Farm. There were bomb threats at Badger Middle School. And that turkey with a broken arrow in its chest that attacked people by the river. Kaitlyn loves to watch the sunrays burst on tree branches after an ice storm.
.Ryan in a classroom at West Bend West high school.
On school days, Ryan wakes up around 5:30 a.m. “It sucks,” he says. “It’s not hard to get up, but I wish I could just stay in bed.” He goes to the local water-utility headquarters at 6:30, where he has an apprenticeship that earns him course credit and a small paycheck. “It’s kind of like a job thing,” he says. He hopes to get hired once he graduates—he wants to eventually work as an environmental scientist because he loves the outdoors—and he likes shadowing his coworkers. “I follow them around and learn. It’s fun and interesting, but I don’t do much.” His parents support the decision. “When Ryan started talking about what he wanted to do with his future, I was all in,” Owen says. “I’m not gonna tell him that he shouldn’t do it, even though I think he’s so smart. He’s ridiculously smart. And he could do so much more. Hopefully he’ll realize that.”
At 9:30, he returns home and gets ready for school. His mom drives him at 11:30 so he can have lunch in the cafeteria with his friends. He has a driver’s permit, but he’s not taking his driver’s test until later in the fall. “It sucks,” he says. “My mom has to drive me everywhere, but whatever.”
In the afternoon, he takes Advanced Placement Environmental Sciences and Government and Law. He also takes two online college courses that will go toward an associate’s degree in water-quality technology. He’s never loved school, and he didn’t try very hard until senior year. His freshman-year GPA was 1.8. Sophomore year, it was 2.4. The fall of junior year, it was 2.5, and in the spring it was 3.0. This year he’s expecting a 4.0. “I don’t mind going to school,” he says, “but doing all this stuff is not practical for life. Why do I need to take English Comp if I’ll be working at a water plant?”
"He’s ridiculously smart,” Owen says of his son. “And he could do so much more. Hopefully he’ll realize that.”After school, Ryan usually goes home. He doesn’t drink or do drugs. “Parties are stupid,” he says, “because it’s where guys get drunk and talk about threesomes. It’s lame.” He isn’t part of any social clique—not the football guys, the volleyball girls, the Pokémon players, the anime lovers, the choir kids, the guys who work on cars, and definitely not the “white guys who all hang out with their trucks and guns and say, ‘Heil Trump’ and all that.” Ryan tried playing sports, but he didn’t like any of them. He just doesn’t care about being popular. “I’m really happy with who I am,” he says. When he does hang out, he goes to Kaitlyn’s house or to a restaurant in town. He’s usually home by 10:00 p.m. At home, he likes to play his Xbox. He loves Madden NFL, Call of Duty, and Red Dead Redemption, about outlaws in the Wild West. Sometimes he plays a car-crash game on the computer he built using salvaged parts and YouTube tutorials. What does it look like to see a car slam into a brick wall at one hundred miles per hour? Ryan can tell you.
Ryan visits Milwaukee or Madison, home to the University of Wisconsin, a few times a year. He’s left the state a handful of times. Once, he and his dad took a road trip to Florida and saw the ocean. Another time, he went to Oregon to visit his uncle. “It felt so weird being in Portland,” he says. “It was a good experience, but so different. I would look out the window and everyone was smoking marijuana.”
2. “THE WHOLE SITUATION WAS CRAZY”
When I ask Ryan if I can meet him at school for lunch with his friends one Wednesday, he says okay, but he warns me that “teenagers say stupid things.” He doesn’t want me to think teenagers are weird.
I meet Ryan, who’s wearing khaki shorts and a black long-sleeved shirt, at the public library, and we drive to school. West Bend West is on the east side of town, in a building that also hosts another high school, West Bend East. It has been this way since 1970, when, to save money, the schools opened in the same facility. They consistently rank among the best in the nation. They share a campus, administrative staff, and some classes. The principals and the sports teams are separate. Together, the enrollment is more than twenty-three hundred kids, the largest in the state. We pull into the wraparound lot, where fourteen school buses are parked in waiting. The building looks like a five-acre Tetris block fallen in a grass field. A guard buzzes us in. The risk of school shootings is taken seriously, and the doors stay locked while school is in session. Police officers monitor the campus and loop the halls.
.Ryan and Kaitlyn in the hallways of West Bend West.
Kaitlyn, Ryan, and five of their male friends have one extra seat at their table in the cafeteria, a windowless room with a low ceiling and a yeasty smell. Kaitlyn smiles and gestures at the empty seat. She has long brown hair and blue eyes, and she’s wearing a denim jacket and a skirt. When I sit down, the others sort of stare at me, and when I introduce myself, they just say whatever.
Ryan gets a tray with a softball-sized pile of mashed potatoes, sliced apples, a carton of milk, and two wrinkled chicken nuggets. Lunch lasts twenty-five minutes, but Ryan finishes his food in about five, so he and I take off. We walk down hallways with speckled terrazzo floors and cinder-block walls covered with colorful murals, plaques with inspirational quotes, and rows of burgundy lockers. We go to the library and sit at a small wooden table in a bright study room carved into the back wall like a cove. Girls are lying on nearby couches, talking about vaping.
We talk about how he’s become more interested in politics in the past couple years. Then I ask about why he thinks the altercation with the girl happened last year. He’s still unsure: “The whole situation was crazy. She probably didn’t like that I opened the door.” He says he wasn’t trying to provoke her. “I didn’t process that she was mad at me, and I opened the door again. She hit me. I hit her back because I didn’t know how to react.”
He explains what he has learned by way of a hypothetical. “If a girl came in the library and hit me, I’d have to turn my back, try to get away, and if she kept on hitting, I’d probably have to wait, get pummeled for about five minutes, and then at that point I could turn around and knock her out.” Ryan is convinced that if it had been a fight between two girls, things would’ve been different. He has this idea that since I’m a woman, if I were in the same situation, I could do whatever I wanted. I could pull out a knife and stab a guy, and I wouldn’t get in trouble. He leans forward and clasps his hands. “Well, I don’t know. I still don’t really understand it. I know what I can’t do, I just don’t know what I can do.”
3. “TOTALLY STUPID AND NOT WORTH THE ATTENTION”
The fight with the girl was just one of a long string of recent events, most of them politically tinged, that have shaken Ryan’s sense of self. “Last year was really bad,” he says. “I couldn’t say anything without pissing someone off.” He says it started around the time of the presidential election—the liberal students became enraged and the conservative students emboldened. “Lots of drama over politics,” he says. “It ruined friendships and changed social groups. People were making friends based on their politics more than anything.” Kids started advertising their beliefs by hanging flags and posters on their lockers. They wore T-shirts that promoted Hillary for president, or Trump for president, or LGBT rights, or feminism, or Black Lives Matter. The most popular opinion at West Bend seemed to be anti-Trump. Ryan, raised in Republican households, was surprised by the vitriol. “Everyone hates me because I support Trump?” he says. “I couldn’t debate anyone without being shut down and called names. Like, what did I do wrong?”
The week I visit West Bend, the front page of USA Today reads, Is What Someone Does at Age 17 Relevant? in reference to Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual- assault accusation against Brett Kavanaugh. I ask Ryan if he has discussed #MeToo in any of his classes. “I’ve heard of that,” he says. “What does it mean again?” I also ask him about Trump’s reputation as a misogynist. “He is respectful towards his wife, as far as I know,” he says. “I don’t think he is racist or sexist.” Then again, he thinks the president tries to piss people off a little too much. “Sometimes I think it’s funny,” he says, “but I guess it’s really not that funny in the end.” Seventeen is the age when we begin to make such moral calculations, according to experts I spoke with. It’s when teenagers begin to “look at the world outside of their immediate environment,” says Adiaha Spinks-Franklin, a developmental pediatrician at Texas Children’s Hospital. “They begin to question their own beliefs, and those of their parents and peers.” At the same time, the teenage brain is still a work in progress. “Teenagers are expected to act like adults, but their brains are not ready,” says Pradeep Bhide, director of the Center for Brain Repair at Florida State University. But they’re close: “Everything they need for moral reasoning may already be there,” he says.
.Ryan’s mother Tori in her home in West Bend, near Milwaukee.
This past year, Ryan ran another gantlet: social media. He does not use Facebook or Twitter, which he thinks are mostly for older people. And he has no interest in Snapchat. But he, like most everyone his age, uses Instagram. “I’d post a comment,” he recalls, “and the replies would all be the same thing: ‘You’re stupid and that’s dumb’ or ‘You suck’ or ‘You’re straight, you can’t talk about something LGBT.’ ” One time, on a post he describes as “a feminist thing that said something about what men do,” he commented, “It’s not true, and that’s really stupid to say that.” The woman who’d posted it responded with something like, “What do you have to say? You’re a white man.” Ryan is still confused by her response. “Doesn’t she promote equal rights?” he says. “What if I posted the same kind of thing but about what women do? Like, if I posted a photo of a feminist march? But wait, feminist people hate when white men talk about stuff like that. That would be the end of me.” He pauses. “I guess they think since I’m not a girl, I don’t have an opinion.”
As Ryan grappled with progressive ideas on social media, he noticed that others did, too. Last summer, James Gunn, the director of Disney’s Guardians of the Galaxy, was sacked for a bunch of tweets he wrote several years ago. “He was fired because he said a shower in a hotel felt like a little kid peeing on him,” Ryan’s friend Andrew says. “Totally stupid and not worth the attention,” says Ryan. “Some jokes are pretty bad. But it depends on the context. If you’re honestly kidding, people shouldn’t get offended.
“Also, baseball,” he continues, referring to another incident from last summer, this time with Josh Hader, a pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers. “Just so happens that something Hader said seven years ago about hating gay people came up the day of a big game. Now he has to go to all these sensitivity trainings.” Ryan considers the leaker’s motivation. “Someone must’ve been jealous of him and said, ‘Oh, I have this message from when he was fifteen.’ It’s like, yeah, you say a lot of stupid stuff when you are fifteen.” (Later, I look up the tweets. Gunn said worse than what the boys mentioned, including, “I fucked the shit out of the little pussy boy sitting next to me!” And Hader, who was actually seventeen and eighteen when he sent his controversial tweets, used the n-word repeatedly and made an allusion to “white power.” One tweet read, “I hate gay people.” Another read, “Need a bitch that can fuck, cook, clean right.”)
.Ryan’s father Owen in his taxidermy studio in northern Wisconsin.
Ryan began to feel like social media was more trouble than it was worth. He even thought about erasing his Instagram account. “But I haven’t said anything too bad,” he says. And more to the point, he decided it is better to engage with other perspectives than to drop out of the conversation. He now watches both Fox News and CNN. He says he’s inched toward the center politically, and so have his friends. He’s even changed his wardrobe and now avoids shirts with words or anything else, save for an American flag, that makes a statement. “It’s better to be a moderate, because then you don’t get heat,” he tells me. “We want everyone to be happy.”
After our talk in the library, Ryan and I walk to his Government and Law class, led by Adam Inkmann, a social-studies teacher with a beard. “He is funny,” Ryan tells me on the way over, “but at the same time, he makes sense.” The class recently took a political-opinion poll that places students on a forty-four-point spectrum from Conservative Reactionary (22C) to Liberal Radical (22L). About two thirds of the class were moderate to liberal, falling between 1L and 22L. Ryan says a few kids landed at the extremes: one “conservative radical,” a boy, and three “liberal extremists,” all girls. Ryan is 2C—a conservative-leaning moderate, according to the spectrum. He supports the death penalty, and limits on foreign goods. He doesn’t support welfare, unless those who receive it are made to get a job. He doesn’t support needle exchanges. On issues of gender, Ryan is mixed. He doesn’t think abortion should be legal. He doesn’t support condom distribution in high schools to prevent pregnancy. If a man and a woman earning the same salary have a child, and if one of them must quit their job to raise it, Ryan thinks it should be the woman. But he supports marriage equality and the right to enlist in the military regardless of sexual orientation.
“It’s better to be a moderate, because then you don’t get heat,” Ryan says. “We want everyone to be happy.”In class, I sit next to Ryan, in a small desk chair in a fluorescent-lit room with about thirty other students. Mr. Inkmann wears khaki pants and a navy polo. On the wall behind his desk hangs a cardboard cutout of JFK’s head. The topic of discussion is still “the political spectrum,” and they continue working on an exercise about partisan stereotypes. “Who’s on the other side of Trump?” Mr. Inkmann asks.
“Kanye,” says a kid in the front row.
“Absolutely not,” Mr. Inkmann says. “Maybe Obama?”
Kanye West is a source of immense confusion for the students. “Do you think Kanye is liberal or Republican?” asks a kid snacking on Goldfish.
“Liberal,” says the girl behind him.
“No,” Ryan says, “he supports Trump.”
“I don’t think he can be both,” says another kid. “Unless it has something to do with him being bipolar?”
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Mr. Inkmann then has the students sing two songs written by another West Bend teacher. “The Liberal Song” is set to the tune of “Ode to Joy.” Mr. Inkmann offers to sing first before everyone joins in. “If I were a liberal, liberal, life would be so very great,” the lyrics read, “knowing that in liberal land this other man could marry me.” The students flip through their political-spectrum packets to follow along. One kid snaps his fingers, rocking out. “The Conservative Song,” set to the tune of “Beer Barrel Polka,” includes lines like “I hate social programs, they really make me want to puke / I would rather use the money for a two-ton nuke” and “Welfare is not good, before we had it, people tried / And I hope the biggest criminals are electrified!”
Next, Mr. Inkmann leads the class through an exercise. He walks around the room making proclamations—about smoking weed, loving guns, thinking gay men are great, thinking needle exchanges are wrong—and the students say who would be more likely to agree with each one, a liberal or a conservative, supporting their decisions with lines from either song. When it is Ryan’s turn, Mr. Inkmann says something about a man marrying a woman and having lots of babies. “Conservative,” Ryan answers. He looks down and reads a few lyrics. “I hate gay marriage,” he reads, “and abortion’s wrong.” Mr. Inkmann then plays “War of Words,” an NBC News segment from 2012 in which Ted Koppel explores the partisan slant of cable news. Steny Hoyer, a House Democrat, tells Koppel, “People tend to choose to watch the channel that doesn’t give them facts, doesn’t make them think, but makes them think that their views are the views [that are] accurate.” Mr. Inkmann paces across the room. “This was not the case ten years ago,” he says, “but you guys think this is normal.” Later, he hits pause to chat with the students, and the screen freezes on a close-up of Bill O’Reilly’s open mouth. “Before he was fired, O’Reilly was making $20 million a year,” Mr. Inkmann says. “One of the highest-paid and most popular hosts of all time.”
“What did he do?” a kid asks.
“Some things with the ladies he shouldn’t have done.”
After school I meet Ryan, Kaitlyn, and Andrew at Noodles, a restaurant in a parking lot between Hobby Lobby and Menards. We sit at a booth and eat bowls of steaming pasta. I ask what they are talking about at school, and they mention school shootings.
“It was easier for our parents,” says Kaitlyn, Ryan’s girlfriend. “They figured things out quick. Now there’s so much competition.”“I don’t know why it’s always white males shooting up schools,” Ryan says. “In the inner-city schools there are shootings and stuff, but it’s more like ‘I hate this kid because he touched my girlfriend, so now I’m going to shoot him.’ ” Kaitlyn tells me that a high school in a town nearby has active-shooter drills, but at West Bend they only practice lockdowns. Students pile stuff in front of doors and find objects to use as weapons. Teachers now know CPR. If a fire alarm rings, they check the hallway first, because at the school in Parkland, Nikolas Cruz pulled the alarm and waited for students to come out of their classrooms. There’ve been a few threats, but most of them ended up being nothing, just stuff written on bathroom walls or sent in emails. One kid wrote down what he called a “hit list,” and someone forwarded it to the cops, but it turned out to be just the names of friends he planned to call. Another kid was criminally charged after it was discovered that he was looking for an accomplice to help carry out a shooting at the school. Now he’s got a record. Ryan remembers him being a nuisance. “He’d be walking behind me, and I could hear it come out of his mouth: ‘I’m going to F you in the butt.’ I’d just be like, ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Ryan thinks for a moment. “He was short. He probably had trouble getting attention.”
.After a weekend with his father, Ryan meets his mother in a parking lot halfway between West Bend and Mountain. Tori and Owen park facing opposite directions.
Ryan and his friends look forward to graduating in the spring—no more worries about school shootings or what your shirt says. They are thinking more than ever about their future selves, and what worries them now is getting a job and making money. “I feel like it was easier for our parents,” Kaitlyn says. “They figured things out quick. Now there’s so much competition.” Ryan plans to stay in West Bend and work at the water-utility plant. Later, he’ll consider getting a four-year degree—he wants to be an engineer or work for the Department of Natural Resources. But he’s thinking at first he might live with his mom for a little while to save money. “I’ll be five or six years ahead of everyone who goes to college,” he says. “They’ll be looking for jobs, and I’ll be buying a house.”
Kaitlyn talks about applying to the satellite campus of the University of Wisconsin in West Bend. She’s thinking about being an English teacher, and Andrew’s thinking about being a pharmacist. But all three are skeptical about how useful college is and how attending might change them. “I grew up in a conservative family,” Kaitlyn tells me. “And my mom went to college and became more liberal.” “I’ve noticed that about college,” Andrew says.
“It sways,” Ryan says.
4. “THE RULES HAVE CHANGED”
Every other weekend, Ryan waits in the school parking lot or at the end of his mother’s driveway for Owen to pick him up. One Friday last fall, I follow behind as father and son drive to Mountain on I-43, along the edge of the Ice Age Trail, which traces the farthest reach of an ancient glacier.
Owen runs his taxidermy business out of a small building on his property. When we arrive, bear hides dangle from hooks in the garage and flesh-eating beetles feast on wild game in the shop. The freezer is full of meat. As much as possible, the family eats animals they’ve hunted, vegetables they’ve grown, and eggs from their chickens. Owen has taught Ryan that taxidermy is not about showing off the biggest thing you’ve killed; it’s about preserving memories. Each animal tells a story. Owen likes to do fun stuff with Ryan during their limited time together. They play catch, watch football, go hunting. Owen especially loves hunting with Ryan—it’s how he bonded with his own father. Ryan is a good shot, and he knows about his guns and his game, but sometimes he prefers to hunt more on his Xbox in West Bend than in the woods around Mountain. “When I’m older, I probably won’t hunt as much,” Ryan says. “I like nature, but I don’t want to sit in a tree for hours. There are fun moments, like when we shoot a deer. It’s like, ‘Whoo-whoo! Get that rush!’ It’s a good feeling. But you’ve got to gut it, and I don’t like doing that. Then you have to drag it out—also not fun.”
On Saturday morning, we get ready for a grouse hunt. We put on our gear—muck boots, orange hats, orange vests—and load Owen’s two spaniels into his truck. We don’t have to drive far, maybe twenty minutes, since Mountain is basically in the woods. On the way, Ryan tells me turkey hunting is his favorite because you do it before it gets too cold outside, and you get to walk around. To hunt a male turkey, Owen will drive around with the windows down while Ryan mimics the sounds of a hen. Then they’ll wait for the tom to call back: gobble. When they hear one, they’ll get out of the truck and hide in the woods. “We try to be a female,” Owen explains. “We’re like, ‘How you doing?’ And the male responds, ‘Hey, baby, I’m on my way.’ ” The tom puffs up, his
tail fans open, and he struts. “We don’t want to sound too interested,” he says. “It’s funny, they are kind of like human beings.”
“When I’m older, I probably won’t hunt as much. There are fun moments, like when we shoot a deer. But you’ve got to gut it, and I don’t like doing that. Then you have to drag it out—also not fun.”Last year, Ryan saw a turkey walk close to within a shooting range, pause, then walk away. A missed opportunity. “You feel down in the dumps after that happens,” Owen says. “Right, Ryan? How did you feel?” “Like I should have shot him in the head.”
We park the truck on an old logging road and hike into a forest of poplar, oak, birch, and pine. We walk in a line—Owen and the dogs through the woods, Ryan and I on the road. We go for about five miles without hearing any birds, so we break for lunch.
On the ride home, I ask Ryan about his stepsister, Ashley. “She’s quiet, and I’m quiet, too,” he says. “I guess that when you’re a teenager, you don’t really have anything important to say. You just sit there on your phone.”
When we get to the house, Ashley, a college student who loves to hunt, is wearing head-to-toe woodland camo. She’s coming with us in the afternoon to hunt bear while we squeeze in another few hours of grouse time. Her mother, Ryan’s stepmom, tells me that when a black bear gets shot, it lets out an eerie moan before it dies. If Ashley shoots one today, the whole family will come with knives, and they’ll skin the bear together in the dark. They’ll divide up the meat, load it onto the truck, drive home, and pack the freezer.
In the truck on our way back out to the woods, Ashley sits next to me. She has a black crossbow, her weapon of choice. She plans to kill a bear with an arrow to the heart. “What’s the hardest part about killing a bear?” I ask.
“Seeing the bear,” she says.
.Ryan on a grouse hunt with his father in Mountain, Wisconsin.
Owen asks her questions about college, but she mostly looks at her phone instead of answering. Ryan is in the front seat, also quiet. We drive to another old logging road and get out at a trail Owen made to a log pile, which he’s baited for months with leftovers and scraps. On our way in, Owen points out paw marks in the grass and fur tangled in a tree. He demonstrates how a bear scratches its back against the bark with a wiggle. The woods are dark and thick. We come to a clearing with the log pile. Owen lifts the logs with his hands, something only he and the bear can do. “Today’s the day,” he says. It is time for more bear bait, which this time is a five-gallon bucket of popcorn soaked in fruit jam. He returns the logs and we hike out. Ashley is already gone, and it takes me a second to find her, on a platform way up in a tree, looking through the scope of her crossbow.
Hunting that afternoon turns out to be a bust. “It’s not about killing things,” Ryan reminds everyone the next morning. Anyway, it’s now Sunday, which means that all attention is on the Packers. Owen and Ryan need to meet Tori at 3:00 p.m. in the parking lot of Perkins, a restaurant in Oshkosh, halfway between Mountain and West Bend. To watch as much of the game as possible, they leave early and head to the Wooden Nickel, a little bar with eleven televisions.
There’s seven minutes to go in the second quarter, and the Packers are down by 7. “They say domestic violence goes up in the state when the Packers lose,” Owen tells me. Clay Matthews, a player for Green Bay, tackles the Redskins’ running back but doesn’t get in trouble. The camera cuts to a close-up, and Matthews is visibly relieved—a week earlier, he got a penalty for roughing the passer. “You can’t tackle,” Ryan explains. “The rules have changed.” He’s watched football since he was eight, and he just wants to watch football, not a neutered version. “It’s getting kind of stupid. You can’t hit the quarterback’s head; you can’t hit him a second or two after he throws the ball; and if you’re going to slide, you can’t hit him. You can’t put weight on him. You’ve got to set him down gently, like putting him to bed.” Ryan is worried that in five years, hard tackling will no longer be a thing. Matthews tackles the quarterback in the third quarter, but this time he gets flagged. A bar patron curses at the screen. The Packers’ coach sprints toward the ref and starts screaming. “He doesn’t know what to do,” the television commentator says about Matthews, “what’s right or what’s not right.”
.This article appears in the March
Earlier in the game, another Green Bay player, Jaire Alexander, makes a tackle. A Redskins player starts jawing at him, and Alexander punches him in the face. “So if someone talks shit about you, you can smack them?” I ask Ryan.
“I guess so,” he says. “That’s what Alexander did.”
When the game is over, Owen and Ryan rush to the Perkins parking lot. But we are early, so we stare at the empty sky for a while. Owen always parks his car facing one direction, and Tori parks her car facing another. It makes things easier.
While we wait, Ryan tells me that he has a different personality in Mountain from the one he has in West Bend. A different attitude. He likes both versions, and it’s easy to make the switch. We wait a little longer. Ryan rests his backpack in his lap. He keeps looking behind him.
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