Rick LaJeunesse – Terry

Somehow, lives cross over each other; there’s an overlay when you meet someone new. They have touched you, or you have touched them. In either case, it is God that brought the two of you together. He overlaid your lives.

I believe it was God who overlaid my life with Rick LaJeunesse’s life. Rick, like me, happened to be hunting in the Machickanee Forest of Oconto County in Wisconsin. It was public land close to the big city of Green Bay where we both lived. Our first meeting was in passing on a trail near what we later called the Big Oak tree. We referred to it if we wanted to meet somewhere in the forest. We had names for other places, too, like the garbage dump or the Taj Mahal. His monster truck was parked there, and I parked there, too; just off Timberline Road.

I was hunting with my neighbor’s son. Chad wanted to hunt but his father did not, so I agreed to take him out. Again, providence put a brief overlay between Chad’s life and mine. We met Rick and decided to let him get to a hunting spot while we waited. After ten or eleven minutes, we started moving around. The idea was to drive deer that were afraid of us toward Rick. Simple hunting technique. After waiting, we barely moved when a shot rang out. It came from Rick’s direction. We waited a few more minutes, then made our way in Rick’s direction. He had harvested a deer! It was a doe.

Our hunting done for the day, Chad and I helped Rick field dress his animal by each holding up a hind leg. When he was finished, we walked out with him to our vehicles. I helped him load the deer into the bed of his truck and we went our separate ways after brief introductions and hand shaking. I don’t even remember if we told each other our names. I knew the Big Mac would be a good hunting ground not far from Wisconsin’s third largest city.

The year was most likely 1993. I had moved back to Wisconsin three years earlier after many years of not hunting. Eight years living in Oklahoma and three more split between Michigan and Illinois passed before I returned home with my bride and three children. Rick, I later found out, had two daughters. He had been a lumberjack in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula growing up in Marquette. He and Mary came to Green Bay where he worked as a body man at a car dealership. His Ford F-150 was a blue souped-up monster truck. Very recognizable in the forest lanes of the Big Mac.

The next season for hunting, I met Rick again at the Big Oak. We hunted separately but near enough to each other that if deer were moving around one of us, they would likely come by the other one. My first harvest in the Big Mac was a season when we hunted near what we called the sand pit a bit north of the Big Oak. Rick went down into a ravine running north-south while I walked and hunted the creek bed fed by the ravine. On the north rim, I noticed movement coming out of the low area. A small buck was coming up out of the creek bed. I aimed and got off a kill shot.

Still somewhat of a novice hunter despite years afield, I was shocked the deer kept running. I fired again and within a few yards, the deer dropped. Rick had heard the shot and came up to me as I was field dressing the deer. So began a deeper friendship. We exchanged phone numbers and began scouting the Machickanee during summer months. We would find good deer territory and build makeshift blinds we could use come the next opening morning of the state’s deer rifle season. Only problem was, being public land, our blind was available to the first person to get there. We rarely got to use our blinds.

We enjoyed being in the woods, enjoying nature. We would take hunting breaks, leave our hunting stands (locations), and eat sandwiches with coffee on camp stools by our vehicles. I learned a lot about Rick and his family. He was surprised I would even talk to him. When I asked why, he told me it was because I had been in the Oval Office with the President of the United States and he was just a simple body man. I reassured him I was more comfortable sitting with him in the woods than the White House.

My son began hunting with us in 1995 at age ten. Two years later, he was qualified to hunt by himself but still came to the Big Mac with Rick and me. Thanksgiving Day was a warm one in Wisconsin in 1997. We chose to hunt a pine ridge to the southwest of our normal hunting grounds. It was a hike to get back to the ridge through tag alders. Up a rise to the ridge, my son positioned at the trail head. Rick went north and I went south to a point. Within forty-five minutes, I harvested two deer.

I walked back to get the other two, bringing them back to where I shot both whitetails (legally). Rick field dressed them both with my son’s assistance. It was a challenge, but after much effort we managed to get both deer back to the vehicles for the ride home. Rick enjoyed getting close to my son since he only had his daughters; they both ribbed me by dumping trash to get my goat. I played along knowing they would eventually clean it up and leave the area better than they found it. Always a good practice!

Still, now three lives were overlaid.

The last deer we harvested in the Oconto County forest was a nine-point buck during the 2002 rifle season. My son was a senior in high school, so it was Rick and I using our new technique. We surmised the popular hunting spots would be occupied. It had been that way for several years. Instead, we met early in the morning at Barley’s Deerfield Diner off Highway 41 in Suamico. After breakfast, we drove twenty miles or so to the Big Mac and drove lanes until we found an area we liked where there were no other vehicles. We had our spot.

I was about seventy-five yards in and set up under some low branches. Rick had gone to the east where a gulley bordered a different set of tag alders. As the buck approached me, I dropped him with a direct kill shot to the chest. We had walkie-talkie radios by this time. Rick called, asking “Was that you?”

“Yup. Got one.” I replied.

Rick filed-dressed the buck for me. We were elated and took a few sips of the whiskey bottle he had in his glove compartment. We loaded the buck in his truck and drove back to his house in Bellevue to show Mary, then back to my place.  The days after that were puzzling but understandable in retrospect. Rick sensed something was wrong. M. He was now divorced and working as a security guard for an armored car company for several years. Body work takes its toll on a man’s body. Rick and I became close friends the more our lives overlapped.

He stopped by our house before Christmas the following year on the 21^st to deliver us a present. Kristine and I were out for a Christmas party with one of my clients, so we missed him. That was unusual. Two days before Christmas, 2003, I tried to contact Rick but got his voice mail. His oldest daughter called me to ask if I’d heard from him. “No,” I told Jodi. She was worried, as was I. It wasn’t long before I learned Rick had suffered a massive heart attack while on the armored truck near Appleton. Paramedics arrived but were unable to resuscitate my friend. Rick was only forty-nine years old…just before Christmas.

I guess God needed someone to deliver for Him in time for the birth of His Son.

My son came home from college for Rick’s funeral. When we got home, we celebrated how our lives had overlaid with a whiskey toast to Rick in the front yard with a shot for Rick and one each for my son and me. My son told me he would not have missed the service because he considered Rick to be his second dad. That touched my heart to the core.

I still think of Rick when I’m in the woods, hunting or simply enjoying Mother Nature…in God’s presence.