The deer stand has been leaned up against a post on the back of my shop since early October. At Marion’s insistence, we and about five other grown men took it down from a tree in the south end of Fulton County.

Please note that seven people were involved in the removal of this deer stand. Six of them were full grown men. Several of them in their late 30s, early 40s. This will be a critical factor in understanding the rest of this story.

Once we got it down and separated the sections, we loaded it into the back of Marion’s truck and made the 80 mile trip south. The stand made it as far as my shop, and there it has sat for over a month; the fall leaves pushed up around it by the wind.

Deer stands have changed a lot since I killed my first buck in 1969. Back then, my dad and I would look for a triple trunk tree in which we could nail up some 2x4s for bracing, and some 1-bys for a seat and a footrest. Sometimes we’d nail up boards for a ladder to get up into the tree. Other times we’d just drive in a series of 20 penny spikes that could be climbed.

These days, we have manufactured tree stands. A lot of engineering and purposeful thought has gone into these contraptions. Metal tubing. Wire mesh deck. Locking rachets. Padded seats. This describes the one propped up behind my shop, and it’s just the VW version of what’s available today.

The Cadilac deer stands have a roof, tinted windows, swivel seats, a space heater, coffee maker, and a satellite linked Wi-Fi for keeping up with the latest TikTok videos while the hunting is slow.

My dad would shake his head in disbelief.

We had a homemade version of the modern ladder stand years ago. It was light. Made of aluminum. One person could easily carry it. It wasn’t any taller than about 12 foot. Which isn’t very tall, but it worked well enough when you set up on a hillside overlooking the hard woods below in the creek bottom. You don’t have to be 24 foot up a tree to be out of site.

Yesterday was the day that Marion and I decided to set up the deer stand. Deer season is well underway. It’s getting colder. The rut is on. The leaves are falling, which means that a hunter might actually have a chance of seeing a deer moving through the woods.

We’ve been putting out mineral blocks. There’s a few rubs and a scrape or two that we found. And we’ve got a couple of nice bucks on the field camera. So we know where we’re gonna put the stand up.

The main body of the stand that goes on top of the ladder is a two-person platform that probably weighs something close to my own body weight.

File this piece of information away for future use.

With one of us on each end, we lift and start our trek down into the woods. This thing is about as wide as the front end of my truck. We’re catching sweetgum saplings. Vines are getting tangled. Stepping over a log has to be timed just right so as not to throw your partner to the ground.

We arrive at the base of the chosen tulip poplar. Just the right girth. Straight as an arrow. We set the frame on the ground and stand up stretching the kinks out of our backs.

“Are we gonna be able to do this by ourselves?”

“I dunno. All we can do is try.”

The walk back to the shop is all uphill. The wind is howling at around 30 mph. It’s one of the coldest mornings so far this season. The sky is cobalt blue. The clouds are changing every few minutes. The leaves are falling like rain. I’m actually a little too warm inside all these clothes.

Marion grabs the top section of the ladder, and I grab the bottom two sections. Once again, we weave our way down through the woods to where we dropped the main part of the stand.

We haven’t thought through this completely. We have experience with the basic concept, so we feel good about our chances. But once we get the ladder put together and everything attached to the stand, and we’re looking at it laying there on the ground, it hits us that this may be tougher than we thought.

Getting it to stand up with brute strength is not going to work. There are two of us. There were a whole bunch of grown men who struggled to get this thing down without killing anyone. I’m not sure why we’re trying this by ourselves except for the fact that we are both pretty stubborn about figuring out ways to do stuff that may, at first, seem impossible.

This is how we ended up with two ladders, one pulley, 60 foot of rope, two slings, and one hammer in the woods with us. The plan was to MacGyver this stand up against the tree. Extension ladder set up to one side well above the stand height. Pulley attached to the top ladder rung. I’m pulling on the rope. Marion is guiding the bottom of the ladder.

Let me point out a simple matter of physics and mechanical advantage. The entire deer stand apparatus probably outweighs me by about 75 lbs. This, to no surprise, gives the deer stand the clear advantage. The rope is cutting into my gloved hands. I am leaning every ounce of my scrawny butt into the effort. I can get this contraption about 6 foot off the ground and I’m done.

Meanwhile, a gangly piece of metal that weighs more on one end than the other tends to get out of balance really quickly once it gets any distance off the ground. My beautiful assistant got herself tangled up with the deer stand in a series of unfortunate events.

I tugged on the rope. The balance shifted. She tried to steady the load. When the whole thing rolled to one side, she had to let go. I couldn’t drop it because she was under it, and she wound up with a goose egg on top of her head.

We disassembled the stand and tried to get it up in pieces. That worked some better, but in the end failed. We were just whipped. Not wanting to admit our age or our limitations.

We finally put the stand back together and laid it out on the ground. I climbed the extension ladder and set up a sling and pulley. Tied the rope to the frame of the stand.

It’s all still down there in the woods just like we left it when we walked away from it. I’m hoping I can get some friends to feel sorry for me. Maybe they’ll help me finish setting it up later this week.

Oh well. I’ve been watching deer from my back porch for weeks. Warm blanket. Good coffee. Comfy seat.

Who needs a stinking deer stand down in the woods, anyway?