Introduction

For readers of The Stranger in the Woods and H Is for Hawk, a beautifully written and emotionally rewarding memoir about a father, his three sons, and a scrappy 100-acre piece of land in rural Michigan.

Some families have to dig hard to find the love that holds them together. Some have to grow it out of the ground.

Bruce Kuipers was good at hunting, fishing, and working, but not at much else that makes a real father or husband. Conflicted, angry, and a serial cheater, he destroyed his relationship with his wife, Nancy, and alienated his three sons-journalist Dean, woodsman Brett, and troubled yet brilliant fisherman Joe. He distrusted people and clung to rural America as a place to hide.

So when Bruce purchased a 100-acre hunting property as a way to reconnect with his sons, they resisted. The land was the perfect bait, but none of them knew how to be together as a family. Conflicts arose over whether the land-an old farm that had been degraded and reduced to a few stands of pine and blowing sand-should be left alone or be actively restored. After a decade-long impasse, Bruce acquiesced, and his sons proceeded with their restoration plan. What happened next was a miracle of nature.

Dean Kuipers weaves a beautiful and surprising story about the restorative power of land and of his own family, which so desperately needed healing. Heartwarming and profound, The Deer Camp is the perfect story of fathers, sons, and the beauty and magic of the natural world.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of May 2019: Dean Kuipers's dad was a deficient father, prone to rage, mild violence, and a great deal of manipulation and emotional abuse. Bruce was a worse husband, abandoning his family for weekends, months, and years at a time in wanton, mostly and open pursuit of other women, returning occasionally to re-assert control over the lives of his wife, Dean, and his two brothers. The fallout was obvious and predicable: Nancy withered away under all-consuming stress as she struggled to singlehandedly raise three boys; Dean and Brett filled with rage and resentment toward their delinquent father; and Joe, the youngest, turned to alcohol and drugs as his life careened toward a tragic, early end.

When Bruce called out of the blue to announce that he had purchased 100 acres of prime hunting grounds near their Michigan home—intended as a place of reconnecting with his three outdoorsman sons—Dean and his brothers, although intrigued, refused to take him seriously. But the land—a mix of sand, wild grasses, and scrub forest reminiscent of Aldo Leopold's plot from A Sand County Almanac—captures their imaginations, even as Bruce strains to maintain the same autocratic control over the wild space that he wielded over family. But Dean, Brett, and Joe are persistent, gradually eroding Bruce's stubbornness and initiating a project to restore the land, Leopold-style. To Dean, everything—the river system, a single person, or even the totality of human thought—can be imagined as part of the hierarchy of a universal system, constantly thinking and testing remedies to threats, internal or otherwise. His damaged family was a piece of that whole, and as the environmental scars of the deer camp were healed, or at least mitigated, the old familial wounds became manageable, if not eradicable. (A little Jane's Addiction doesn't hurt, either.) The book is raw, personal, and deftly written, and it seems likely that it was both a necessary and sometimes difficult project. The Deer Camp will please readers of two kinds of history: natural and family. --Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review

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