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“We are here such a short while; we are in the great beyond forever….You live and go deer hunting and the big buck eludes you. But who cares? Life is short and then you die. What a life, eh?” --Happy Ole Hump

It was a rainy day at Camp Shack and deer season was only a few short weeks away.
In these uncertain times when the world seems to be crumbling, when madness is a regular caller at humanity’s door, there is never a better time for shack levity, for a good dose of shack mentality, than the present.
I looked at the old “Picture of Nothing” hanging on the wall and reflected. Yes, I actually reflected, since there was nothing in the frame but glass and a black background. There is no picture. To me it’s like looking into the universe. Well, a universe with my face reflected back at me.
One visitor asked, “Why don’t you put something in that picture frame?”
“What,” I said, “and replace the ‘Picture of Nothing’? Then it would be something, something finite, something that you get your little imagination around and say, ‘That’s the Mona Lisa’. Then it’s something. I don’t want just something. I want nothing. I want the Infinite. I want everybody to see something different in that frame on the wall.”
Avid shack goers will know what I mean.
Just as I was going to pontificate or ruminate or become didactic in one way or another without being condescending, The Exalted Shack Master, resplendent in his cummerbund and sash, bumped me aside in a cleaning frenzy. The Exalted Shack Master is one of those guys who seems to be wearing a clean shirt even when he’s shoveling coal or burning the bacon. He’s one of the few people I know who can pull out a clean shirt in the third week of a canoe trip and still have a clean-shaven face when the rest of us Neanderthals grunt around the fire and bust rocks to use as kitchen utensils.
“That’s Exalted Shack Master to you,” he said as he stood back and admired the stove he’d shined so bright you could read by the light of it. He looked at his watch and then out the window.
“Time to check the stove.”
Camp Shack, overseen by Swedes, Norwegians, Finns, Irishmen and Scots, is in the middle of a long term stove deterioration study funded in part by the Leinenkugel Institute of Environmental Learning and Drinking. The old shack stove sat patiently out by the shed, in the rain and hail, sunshine and snow, slowing rusting into oblivion. Our shack family decided to participate in the study as a generational gift to our many descendants who will inhabit the shack long after we’re gone The stove may or may not outlast us, but it will be something that the kids, grandkids and great-grandkids can enjoy for many years to come. Once every half-year or so, we venture out and examine the status of the stove and report back to the Institute with our findings.
There is one question on the study, accompanied by a space in which to record the date.
The stove is deteriorating:
__slowly  __medium  __fast

The Institute rewards our dedication to the study with a free keg of beer at the start of simulated deer season (the day after the last day of real deer hunting season) and a nice personalized tour of the famous brewery. We have never taken the tour, so we instead write a weepy letter to the brewmaster saying why we need another keg to fortify ourselves before we can drag ourselves away from this most important study. The letter usually gushes with personal tragedy. This year we told the heart-wrenching story of how The Exalted Shack Master broke his leg during elk hunting and dragged himself for seven hours out of the mountains, clinging to his only source of sustenance, a bottle of his favorite brew, fortified with vitamins and minerals and all the other stuff essential for life as we know it.
We’re awaiting the brewmaster’s reply.
I’m not quite sure how we got on the subject of reincarnation the other night, but that’s the beauty of shack mentality. After much talk about Lutheranism, Catholicism, pantheism, atheism, agnosticism, bullets and what we all wanted to be when we grew up, I decided that if such a thing as reincarnation is real, I wanted to be the Fitger’s ashtray sitting right there on the shack table next to the bell we ring just in time for another round. I wouldn’t mind having cigars put out in my face as long as I was at the shack.

Keep things simple is my motto.