On a much-anticipated trip to her cabin, junior Aubrey Sieler’s Fourth of July went awry when she took on the responsibility of saving the life of a fish.
It’s tradition in her family to spend the holiday in Cadillac at their water-side cottage and light fireworks over the lake, but the year Aubrey and her cousin began throwing firecrackers in the water to watch the smoke bubble to the surface, she learned the consequences of the customary early-July pyrotechnics.
“The fish started swimming up to [the firecracker], and we were both saying ‘No, no, don’t go toward it,’ and it ended up swallowing it,” Aubrey said. “We heard a little thump, and it floated to the surface. This is the weirdest part, but sometimes when you start shaking a ‘dead’ fish, they’ll come back, so [we got in the water], grabbed it by the mouth, and started shaking. It finally just swam away, but I don’t know how it was still alive.”
Memories such as the fish incident swim to the forefront of her mind when she is asked to reminisce about a time when she felt carefree. Her outdoorsy family—with her dad and uncle being the biggest mentors in her fishing and hunting game—passed down the genes that signify how she thrives in the open wilderness.
Although she doesn’t have much of a history with camping, it’s just the general time she spends in nature that has shaped her wild heart. Despite her travel destination usually being the dock at the waterfront of her cabin, Aubrey has a bucket list of destinations to give her a change of scenery. At the top of her list is Australia, and even though every other animal a person comes across in the country is lethal in some way, her desire originated after her discovery of wildlife conservationist Steve Irwin and a wish to keep his environmental legacy alive.
“We’ll camp maybe once a year, and I like road trips, but we don’t go a lot because I have a big family with four siblings,” Aubrey said. “[Being outside] is just a big break from everything. You can just be by yourself, but I like to do stuff with my family. That’s when we get to go fishing, and when I’m stressed out, that’s all I really want to do. There’s one small spot that’s right off the end of the dock at our cottage [that I love].”
Aubrey’s weekend voyages to her cabin, though it doesn’t give her much variety, are something she looks forward to all week. Not to mention that it also provides her with a specialized understanding of the waters she’s fished for so many years; she’ll know the lake surrounding her cabin better than the back of her hand by the time she’s through high school.
Along with the traditions of her cottage, the familial love for nature (represented mainly through her dad and uncle) came full circle when a hunting trip ended with her taking down her first deer in the same field they had many years ago. Thanksgiving break on her grandma’s farm, which her uncle now owns, proved to create the perfect environment for her first shot, even though the initial couple of days left her empty-handed.
“On the third day, I didn’t want to go out because it was so cold—probably around twenty degrees—and I was so comfortable inside,” Aubrey said. “But, they woke me up at 5 a.m., and [I ended up going] because it was the last time; I figured we wouldn’t see anything. We had a heater [in the blind], so I went to be near the heater. I was in the blind, and I’m pretty sure I fell asleep because they woke me up, and around thirty minutes later, a big buck came through.”
Her first buck was a proud moment for the whole family, especially since she went into the experience blind. Though she had gone hunting on previous occasions, Aubrey had never even shot minor game before.
Acknowledging that her enthusiasm for hunting, and even fishing, is unique among her peers, she maintains the stance that, under the best circumstances, she wouldn’t want to pass the time doing anything else. In comparison with the generation that proceeds to age in a predominantly online world, the time she spends on her phone leaves her in a different headspace than when she contributes her hours to an activity in nature.
“I feel like when I’m on my phone, I think it’s a break, but afterward, I’m more stressed out,” Aubrey said. “When I get to actually go and do something, I feel so much better. [Being outside] is a big stress reliever; it feels like an escape, and I end up feeling more excited over stuff when I’m not [inside or] at school.”
The difference between being confined in a smaller place and feeling the extensiveness of the world when she’s outdoors has brought her to understand the creative liberty she acquires when in nature.
Besides the benefits it has on the more innovative and tranquil part of Aubrey, the memories made with her family in this particular environment continue to influence the way she chooses to live the rest of her life. It’s not the Instagram updates from childhood friends or the endless hours of YouTube that she has yet to explore that she wishes to remember, it is the camping trips, her hunting excursions with her dad and uncle, and the notion that she has an endless number of fish to catch that keeps her moving forward.
“When I finish scrolling through my phone, I say, ‘Where’d all the time go?’ and I feel like I could have been actually doing something,” Aubrey said. “But when you’re actually [being productive], you just feel good about it. Then you have stuff to remember. In twenty years, I don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, I just scrolled through my phone my entire high school career.’ I want to remember things.”
