I was a teenager. My grandfather was the pastor of a little church on the south side of Chandler, where a lot of my family had settled after migrating from Texas and Oklahoma in the early 1900s. My parents had moved to Phoenix, so some Sundays we went to the church downtown instead of making the drive back to Chandler.
The elders and deacons often pulled the young men in for meetings. We spent a lot of Saturdays working on the church in Phoenix and the sister churches in Chandler and Coolidge. During one of those meetings, Elder Loring suggested a camping trip to Sedona with one of his coworkers.
A few weeks later the brothers packed up the church van and headed for the mountains.
We spent most of the two-hour drive doing what young men did back then — arguing about superheroes, which rappers were better, and a little about girls. We decided Halle Berry and Mariah Carey needed their own separate category.
Somewhere in the middle of a DC versus Marvel debate I stopped talking. The view outside the window had changed. Red rocks. Ponderosa pines. Actual green. I had seen real woods and water before on fishing trips to Oklahoma with my dad — he was always chasing new water and still talks about the first alligator gar we ever saw. But in Arizona, canal fishing with my dad was my only real taste of the outdoors. This felt completely different.
The road climbed. The pines got thicker. The dirt turned a rich cocoa color. Then I saw a group of animals standing near the road. They were bigger than anything I had ever seen in person, with thick necks, short tails, and white rumps. They had horns.
“What kind of animal is that?” I asked. “Some kind of horse?”
I stared at them while the van crept past. I couldn’t believe something that looked like that existed only two hours from home. We were only a short drive from the campsite.
We pulled into the campsite and the first phase of “man camp” began. A group of city kids trying to pitch tents for the first time. We were hopeless. It took a lot of help from our hosts just to get them standing. By the time we finished it was dark.
We had mostly brought snacks. The assignment was to survive and catch fish if we wanted to eat. As we sat around the fire opening bags of chips, our hosts passed around small pieces of meat.
“What is this?” I asked. “Steak?”
“Elk,” one of them said.
I looked at the piece of meat in my hand. Same animal we had seen on the way in.
I didn’t spend much time thinking about the morality of it. My stomach was empty and the first bite settled the argument. It wasn’t just good — it was something I immediately wanted more of. I asked how they got it. They started talking about tags and draws. It sounded like another language.
We woke up early the next morning, ate a late breakfast, and headed to the lake. Trout fishing was nothing like catfishing. The light setup felt foreign, and no matter where I cast I couldn’t buy a bite. My brother got distracted by the crawfish in the shallows. He made a snag line and started yanking them one by one into a bucket. A few of the other guys joined him while the group across the water was catching fish left and right.
My line stayed empty, but my head was full. The smell of the pines. The trees all around us. Then an eagle dropped out of the sky, hit the water, and came up with a fish in its talons. It felt like I was watching a movie happen in real life. That feeling stuck with me.
The other group ended up with enough trout for everyone. We cleaned and scaled fish together, ate as much as we could hold, and my brother threw his crawfish into a small boil. My dad had brought baked beans. It wasn’t fancy, but it worked. One quiet lesson settled in that day: if I was going fishing, I didn’t eat first. The goal was to catch something or go home hungry. It wasn’t always the smartest rule later in life, but it stuck.
On the last day we did a short hike. On the way out we passed the same stretch of road and saw elk again. I had been hoping to see one near camp and never did, but seeing them one more time felt like enough.
The trip had been uncomfortable in places, but something in me had shifted. Those few days — the struggle with the tents, the empty line, the shared meals, the eagle, the elk — stayed with me. Years later, whether I was in the field in Georgia or Louisiana, or at Fort Sill in Oklahoma, the woods still felt like home. Even when I was far from Arizona, I could find peace out there. I would think back on that first trip and the first time I tasted elk, and it still felt close.
Now I take my daughter fishing the same way my dad took me. We camp. I show her how to build a fire. She’s mostly interested in digging holes, turning sticks into charcoal pencils, and flipping rocks, but she’s outside. She’s getting her first taste of it the same way I did.
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