Deer Wars: Science, Tradition, and the Battle over Managing Whitetails in Pennsylvania

10 In the Eye of the Storm

10 in the eye of the storm Gary Alt doesn’t look like your prototypical leading man. If Pennsylvania deer management was a James Bond movie, the folks in casting would probably take one look at him—short, bespectacled, with less hair than any action hero this side of Bruce Willis—and make him agent 0031/2. Alt’s appearance, though, belies a startlingly intense passion for Pennsylvania’s natural resources. I found this out early one midsummer morning. It was about 8:15 a.m. on a Monday when Greg and I pulled into the parking lot of the McDonald’s in Lords Valley, Pike County. We made one trip around the building, but Alt’s forest-green Ford Bronco was nowhere to be found. Our hearts sank. “Great. Just greeeat!” Greg said, his voice rising to a yell as he leaned forward until his nose was just inches from the steering wheel. “Did I mention how much I hate my job right now? I hate it. Haaate it!” I probably made things worse but, slaphappy from a lack of sleep, I couldn’t help but laugh. Greg and I had been traveling all over the state to talk to people about deer. We were doing some research for a series of newspaper articles and were working primarily on our own time to do it. We’d already worked about fifty-odd days in a row without a break when we set up this particular weekend’s interviews. Our schedule called for us to leave my house at 5:00 a.m. Saturday, then travel three hours to Harrisburg to do a couple of interviews, starting at 8:00. We were to stay there Saturday night, backtrack ninety minutes south and west for a 9:00 a.m. interview Sunday morning, then head east for interviews in Valley Forge and Philadelphia Sunday afternoon and evening. Finally, we planned to drive from Philadelphia to Milford Sunday night, catch Alt in Lords Valley at 8:00 Monday morning, then drive five hours home. The plan dissolved into misadventure pretty quickly. We had worked until 2:00 a.m. Saturday and so couldn’t stay awake when it came time to drive across the state three hours later. We had to cancel our first interview to sleep in our compact rental car in a truck-stop parking lot. After keeping our second appointment, we hustled north from Harrisburg to Millersburg in an attempt to squeeze in an unscheduled interview with Audubon Pennsylvania’s Ron Freed. He was working Audubon’s booth at the Ned Smith Center Nature and Art Festival. By the time we got there, though, all that remained of the festival were the bare skeletons of empty exhibit booths and the occasional napkin tumbleweeding its way across the park lawn. Saturday wasn’t any better. Having underestimated the distance between interviews, we were late for every appointment. We also ran into a storm that flooded the roads while trying to leave Philadelphia. I remember looking out my window as we were inching our way through the water. A glass bottle , like something tossed into the sea by a lonely man on a deserted island, floated past us in the slow lane. It was all too much for Greg. When we finally made it to the hotel, he bought a case of beer and a bags of chips, vowing to ease his suffering—at least temporarily—with a good binge. Two Old Milwaukees and twenty minutes into Burt Reynolds’s Smokey and the Bandit, he was snoring, and I had to turn the lights out and the TV off. Now we were at McDonald’s, but without the man we had come to see. We didn’t know if we were at the wrong place, or if Alt had gotten tired of waiting and 228 deer wars Dr. Gary Alt, former head of the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s deer management section, shows the racks from two bucks in the same age class but with different antler growth owing to habitat. left, or if he had forgotten about us altogether. None of the possibilities were good. Of all the people we would interview about deer, Alt was the one we had to get, no matter what—not only because he was the newly appointed head of the Game Commission’s deer management section, or because he was proposing the kind...