Winter Adventure

One evening before dinner the boy and I took a walk around the block.

Here is what we saw:

Then I turned the flash on:

Something that I remember from childhood is that these small outings are way more valuable to kids than adults probably realize. It did my heart good to watch the boy prance around in the snow while we took that leisurely walk, with no agendas or deadlines pressing down on us.

The world is still big enough to him that walking around the block really is an adventure. To think otherwise is the accompanying curse that comes with ownership of an adult mind.

Afterward we warmed up and had hot cocoa:

Clever Title Goes Here

We have reached that critical mass point in the summer where fellow bloggers are apologizing for not posting more often due to busyness or 'unblogworthy' content. Surmounted by work, too busy with play, 57 channels (& nothing on), etc.

I'm guilty of all of those things but won't apologize here. Instead I will try to distract you with photos from my little excursion to Coon Lake with the boy a couple of weeks (already) ago.

The shakedown went well. The motor ran, the depth finder worked, the boat didn't leak, and everyone made it back to shore safely. Sunfish were caught and the fishing bug is now coursing through the boy's veins.




Of course so rarely are things perfect. The lake itself was a haven for jet skiers, tubers and drunken party bargers. These guys actually were some of the tame ones... I just took their photo because I thought their pontooon modification was impressive. In the second photo they are very close to a fishing boat though in all fairness I don't know who approached who.




Ultimately the boy needed to be dragged kicking and screaming off the lake, which secretly pleased me to no end. On the way home we stopped for a dilly bar, which seemed to go a good ways toward smoothing things over. As a man, I have the inexplicable need to take photos of my vehicle and my rig. I believe it is the Y-chromosome equivalent to females needing to take pictures of the food whenever there is a party.



That is all.

Smile, you son of a...

Roy Scheider played the reluctant, aquaphobic police chief-turned shark hunter who killed Jaws (No, not THAT Jaws). Scheider has died at age 75.

Scheider's character Brody mouthed one of the most memorable movie lines of all time ("You're gonna need a bigger boat") which according to IMDB was improvised and not in the script.

I don't know how much if ever I will blog about the movie Jaws again so I will also mention in passing that this movie contains one of the best monologues of all time (Though performed by co-star Robert Shaw, not by Scheider).

Scheider was an accomplished actor who appeared in a lot of other stuff too, but I note his passing due to the formative effect that the movie Jaws had on me. I very much identified with Brody's fish out of water (No pun intended) sense of insecurity and misplacement on Quint's boat. The conflict between Quint and Hooper reminded me a lot of the conflict in my family between my two brother in-laws. In fact it was the Quint-like one who took me to see Jaws while it was running in the theater. That would have made me maybe 7 years old at the time. That's a pretty heavy movie for a second grader to try and process.

Around that same time my family had just put a temporary end to our gypsy approach to camping & fishing and had settled into a cabin on Leech lake. The cabin was owned by my sister and the Quint-like brother in-law, so much like the movie, we had the similar experience of trying to coexist in Quint's domain. And all the while I was confronted with Leech lake - this big, wonderful yet mysterious body of water, dangerous as any ocean and scary as heck to a seven year old. Local resorts and bars contained photos and mounts of enormous Muskellunge, which saturated my subconscious with fears of swimming, fishing and even boating in that lake. A bigger boat sure sounded like a good idea to me. Yet like Brody, some conflicting sense of duty and curiosity called me out on to the water to confront these hobgoblins of my mind.

Predictably, around that time I went through a brief shark craze, a lot like the kids nowadays are into dinosaurs. All my reading and attention went into studying and understanding this phantom limb of my subconsciousness, voraciously eating up books as often as I could get to a library. Then snap, the informational feeding frenzy was over and I was on to something else. It's amazing how there is always something available to personify whatever fears we are dealing with. In the movie Brody went through a shark craze too, and came out the other end alive. Thanks Roy, for helping me get through mine.

In the cold distance

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

On Saturday 08/11/2007 I went on a road trip to Northern MN to flyfish for trout.
This is what I saw.

	Friday night to Saturday morning it stormed. I drove north through the aftermath with lightning crackling through the clouds above me as I drove. The river was going to be muddy and I knew it. But there was nothing else to be done. My fishing day was my fishing day, and I had to take it come rain or shine. I had several potential entry points circled on my map, and as I prowled the back country roads I happened across a whitetail family set up near the road. They gave me all the time in the world but by the time I had the presence of mind to dig out the camera and snap a photo, they were all but gone.
	After exploring several of the tributaries to the Nemadji River, I finally settled on an entrance point on the river proper, where Highway 23 passes over it. There was a nice parking area that was empty, except for a fellow who was scouting for grouse hunting spots. I wasn't much in the mood for company. It is hard enough to find a free day to depressurize once a quarter. Added to that I recently lost a cousin from complications involving a gall bladder removal. She was 43, died three days after my 39th birthday. She still is 43, and always going to be 43 from here on. I had been been easing into the mindset where I realistically know I could go at anytime, but now the 'easing' phase is officially over.
	The river was muddy as I suspected. I spent a long time along the banks, watching for activity. It looked pretty dead. Given the lack of surface activity I started out nymphing, using a black wooly bugger with a strike indicator. After only a few casts I had two separate hits on my strike indicator. I quickly switched over to a #12 wolf adams and promptly hooked this little baby through the nose.
	I worked the river for a few hours and that chubby little shiner was the only luck I had. I practiced my casting. I listened to the world around me, paying no mind to the occasional bridge noise in the distance. There was no sense to be made from my cousin's death. I hadn't seen her since my mother's funeral, had scarcely even spoken to her then as there were just too many people to talk to. I had no idea that she was even having the surgery. I was not a factor in her life, nor she in mine really. And that is what the sadness is about, the guilt. The feeling that yes, we played together as kids and that somehow that childhood friendship should have carried over into adulthood. Up to now I had been able to live with the idea that there was time to make that connection, that it was ok to put it off for now. Except that now there isn't any more time. I finally crawled up a muddy bank and set back to my truck for some lunch. There was no real trail to speak of so I bushwhacked through the forest, keeping the the river in earshot. I have humped through some tough brush in my day, and this was some of it. It was definitely not a friendly environment for a chubby guy lugging a flyrod. After I ate I broke out the camera and explored for some good shots. Several attempts netted me some local insect life. Insects live hard and die fast. They don't have complex emotions like guilt and angst. They just get on about their business and make way for the next generation. The local plant life echoed that sentiment, as the air hung thick and sweet with the smell of pollen and nectar. Every plant and tree was in the midst of a giant bender, drunk to the gills on the rainwater from the previous night. The cicadas trilled from the treetops, like an alarm to let us know that September is coming. And when it does the nights will turn cold, and no insect plant or tree will wonder why nobody told them that it was coming. I didn't have much heart to try the river again in the afternoon. I packed up the truck and made my way a few more miles up 23 to a scenic overlook. I have passed it a few times and never taken a picture there. Since I had the tripod with me I did a panoramic. After that I turned to the south and made my way back to my family like a homesick puppy.

Owl be back

I am having more outdoor urges today. Partly because it is sunny and warm, partly because the wife read my desperate plea for help from last friday and suggested that we could "maybe" go somewhere this spring. Wherever it is I hope that they have trees. Of course stories like this also get me itchy to go into the woods. Owls large enough to carry away children and small livestock. Sign me up!

I don't know what it is about owls that captures my imagination. As a toddler the story goes that whenever we drove past a red owl store I would get excited and point up at the sign. My Red Owl obsession was apparently acute enough that my grandmother took notice and made a Red Owl pillow for me. At the farm where my grandparents lived there was a wooded pasture inhabited by a great horned owl. I canot recall if I ever actually saw the bird myself, but what I do recall is that I had some very wild ideas about the appearance of any creature with the words "Great," "Horned" and "Owl" in their name. I envisioned some sort of ultrabird, a super-owl. Perhaps a man-sized owl with horns like a bull. In the mythology of my childhood the great horned owl that lived in my grandparents' pasture was like a flying minataur. Except instead of being mean he was wise, of course. Not just because he was an owl, either. this creature had decided to live on my grandparent's farm and to me that seemed like a pretty wise move on the owl's part.

These days I take in information and it just sits in my head like the wool fluff that you find in a pillow. I look back to those days and I reallize that the way a child can take that wool fluff and spin it into a golden tapestry, designed to suit their entertainment needs. It's a lost art, insofar as we all have it and by growing up we lose it. Day-to-day living, task-oriented activities, and duty-Duty-DUTY suck the creativity out of us, until we can scarcely remember what it was like to think like a kid.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but very soon I will return to the woods and look for my old friend the great horned owl.