Long-time Washington Post political columnist Dana Milbank recently purchased a home in the rural Virginia Piedmont. In a recent piece, he revealed that he has now purchased a Spanish-made Bergara B-14 bolt-action 30-06 hunting rifle (called a “thirty-aught-six” for you gun novices). His intention? To curb the overpopulated white-tail deer that outnumber people by a margin of two-to-one in his part of the Commonwealth. Run, Bambi, run.
You simply have to imagine the dogmatically liberal Milbank traipsing around the forest in the latest camouflage offerings from Cabela’s, lumbering up his thirteen-foot deer stand and eagerly anticipating his approaching prey. Or at his local gun range testing out a .308 (my preferred hunting rifle). He brags about his “marksmanship” at the range, noting with pride that he hit a fifty-yard target on his first two tries. That’s about equivalent to making contact with the ball at the batting cage with the machine on the second-slowest setting. But hey, from one hunter to another, welcome to the club, Dana.
Milbank’s article on hunting, like a few others he’s written about life in the rural Piedmont, is a welcome reprieve from his usual political coverage. In a November column, he recounted how he’d bought the country property as a “pandemic-inspired idea of finding peace in nature.” He writes of his horror at discovering “Asiatic bittersweet and porcelain berry, kudzu and Japanese honeysuckle, invasive wineberry and aggressive Canada goldenrod had devoured the place, turning forest and field alike into tangled masses of vines and thorns, and murdering defenseless native trees by strangulation and theft of sunlight.”
So he hired professionals to clear out the brush. But they barely made a dent. A local business specializing in brush-eating goats was unavailable. He attempted a plug-in backyard hedge trimmer, a machete, a lopper, and finally a Stihl hedge trimmer, all to no avail. This leads to an observation about how the Appalachians are “about the most intensely infested region in the country,” according to a local naturalist. It makes for good reading, especially for someone like myself, whose family across several generations has battled invasive plant species on farms and homesteads in the Piedmont and Blue Ridge Mountains.
Interesting as well is his December column about stumbling across twenty-three snakeskins in the attic of his new home. He learns that some snakes (like black snakes) are actually good to have around the property, since they eat vermin. He also found wolf spiders, mud daubers, and carpenter bees. Milbank should be thankful he doesn’t have groundhogs, which ate most of my green beans and cabbage last year, and regularly threaten the foundation of my uncle’s barn.
Milbank should consider doing this genre of “city slicker collides with the country” more often. Though his observations are largely the types of things country folk have learned by the time they’re teenagers, they’re nevertheless entertaining. And they’re exposing him to a whole ‘nother world, one which he’s devoted two decades to predictably ridiculing.
It would not be too much to say that Milbank’s op-eds are insufferably formulaic in their antipathy towards all things conservative and Republican. “The new House majority uses the levers of power to stoke paranoia,” reads one February offering. “House Republicans bring the bread and circuses,” is a January headline. “Can you govern on a lie? House Republicans give it a try,” is another one from January. You get the idea (if you don’t, just start scrolling his WaPo bio). His opinions are about as unsurprising and lackluster as a Washington Commanders’ football season — and not nearly as funny as the Babylon Bee’s “AOC Article Generator.”
But now that Milbank is regularly “goin’ up the country,” hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, there may be hope for a little de-programming. He’s learned that most American hunters are not fascist reactionaries, but part of a tradition that is increasingly necessary to maintain some level of ecological balance. Of course, he does use his reflections to take some digs at the NRA (I suppose I’m okay with that though). And it would have been even better for him to mention that hunters and fisherman happen to be some of the most outspoken and enthusiastic conservationists you’ll ever find.
But it’s a start. I’ll take what I can get, if it means fewer robotic reflections on politics. Milbank plans to donate whatever venison he doesn’t eat to Hunters for the Hungry, a nonprofit that processes and donates deer meat. “There is no other option if we’re to reverse this man-made ecological disaster,” he explains. It’s a noble gesture, and I hereby congratulate Milbank for joining the veritable ranks of generations of hunters in the Old Dominion.
Though I should add that Milbank makes no mention of tracking or field-dressing the game he intends to shoot from atop his tree stand. You do know, Dana, that shooting the animal is typically the easy part? Happy hunting!
