Doe Season

In the story “Doe Season” David Kaplan’s character Andy is going through a transition from childhood to adulthood. Andy sees the woods as being “the same woods” (456). This description is how Andy sees her childhood. Her childhood stays the same and makes her feel good and safe. She knows what to expect already from her childhood but she isn’t sure about being an adult. She feels the same of being an adult as she feels about the ocean. She finds the ocean (and her transition into adulthood) to be scary. An example of this in the text is “Everything lay hidden. If you walked in it, you couldn’t see how deep it was or what might be below; if you swam, something could pull you under and you would never be seen again” (459). Andy was too afraid when she visited the ocean to go into water or to become an adult. Parts of being an adult even embarrassed Andy and made her uncomfortable like when her mother’s top came off in the water or when Mac brought up the conversation about her seeing a “pecker” (460). This showed how innocent Andy truly was. In order to go into adulthood she has to, in a sense, lose some of that innocence. Until Andy was ready she couldn’t cross the barrier of being a child to being an adult. Andy must step out of her comfort zone of feeling safe and having everything be the same and enter into a world where “everything lay hidden” (459). At the end of the story Andy had finally lost some of her innocence and realized that the ocean (adulthood) was too close to turn back on. An example of this in the story is “like the ocean where her mother floated in green water, also calling Come in, Come in, while all around her roared the mocking of the terrible, now inevitable, sea” (467). Andy had no choice but to become Andrea and enter into the world that was full of unknowns like the ocean and leave the safe world of the unchanging forest behind her.