Buy now: $26, bookshop.A humorous and rousing set of literal and figurative sojourns as well as a mission statement about comprehending, protecting, and truly experiencing the outdoors, fueled by three journeys undertaken by actor, humorist, and New York Times best-selling author Nick Offerman No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Random House. Either way, we had gone through a hell of a lot to get to this pitch-black, freezing parking lot where we were, by God, still in love.Įxcerpted from Where the Deer and the Antelope Play: The Pastoral Observations of One Ignorant American Who Loves to Walk Outside by Nick Offerman. I can’t recall if one of us played a song on our phone or if the music was just in our heads. It was truly overwhelming, and we stood chest to chest and looked up and held our amazing dog and then we slow danced. Holy Gila monster, the Milky Way was like a vast, psychedelic puddle of sparkling galactic vomit, to make a figure of speech. Lesson 5: When you have no electricity and it’s night in the desert, look up. But no, it’s a way more deluxe modern appliance hooked up to an electric thermostat and electric starting mechanism, which unfortunately requires electricity. Maybe you’re savvy to these things, and you were already saying, “Why don’t you just fire up the propane heater?” I thought the same thing, pal, okay, and once again the answer to the question is “death by technology update.” If it had been just a propane furnace that had a pilot light I could even light manually, we would have been golden. The trickle charge from the Expedition to the Airstream batteries while we drove was not nearly enough to overcome the severe depletion I had laid on the system while it was parked at our house. Ha ha! What a dependable captain I was turning out to be. And let me now also remind you that we had no goddamn electrical power. It was November 15 and we were in the high desert, closer in feel to Flagstaff than Phoenix, so it was in the ballpark of 36 degrees outside. We might as well have been in any parking lot anywhere, for all the good this place was doing us. On that first night, however, I’ll repeat, we had no hookups.

Nick offerman where the deer