That One Time - A Different Kind Of Poetry

 

It was admittedly an untidy schedule-

A mish-mash of events congregated in close proximity.

I did not take the time to figure it out-

Why would I take what I do not own?

Nor did I make the time-

How does one create what already exists?

Time bestowed?

Perhaps…

Time gifted?

Grateful and thankful if so…

150 miles traveled North by Northwest-

An open site to soak up what light made it to Earth.

Donning waders I plunged into silver water-

Rays of a setting sun bounced off the highest of trees.

If 2 is company and 3 is a crowd-

They say the answer to “what is 4 and 5,” is 9.

Of brown trout…

I caught a “crowd.”

Keeping one to eat with yellow summer squash…

Both were cooked over an autumn fire.

Night was cold-

Riding the freezing line.

I myself was toasty-

Sandwiched between woolen blankets, notable constellations, and the Aurora Borealis.

The later danced in the Northern sky-

Lulling me to sleep, while enticing me to dream.

The Big Dipper
A Part Of URSA Major (The Great Bear)

The Northern Lights - Aurora Borealis

The Entire Constellation Of
Orion The Hunter

Christmas in October?

Red and green decorated the Northern heavens…

And I in my cap?

Settled my brain for a long evening nap…

Our own star was well positioned when I emerged from the nest-

Oatmeal with all the possible toppings my fuel for the day.

Nigh upon noon I again sought the trout-

In a different section of a squiggly blue thread.

A background of moving water against foundational bluffs-

Created an angler’s smorgasbord, and a mixture of brooks and browns.

A Brown Trout - Salmo Trutta

A Brook Trout - Salvelinus Fontinalis

Chunks of fish and syruped acorn squash…

Were enjoyed around a campfire.

Cool air enough…

For a cup of hot chocolate.

After the day’s activity I entered my tent with the darkness-

Prepared to sleep like the dead.

Serenaded throughout the moon filled night-

By owls, coyotes, and raccoons.

Now in nature’s cycle-

I woke at first light, and read for a spell.

My Tent & Campsite In The Background

Do adventures lie in the map?

I studied and fantasized…

What trails should I run?

Loops, switchbacks, and routes of many colors…

I drove and parked at a designated trailhead-

Well tread paths went up and down in sharp contrast.

New shoes gripped rocks and roots-

The duff of pine the filler between.

Vistas with occasional creek crossings-

Everything was pristine and fresh, with an explorer’s spirit.

My heart thumped…

While lungs pulled air.

Nearly 9 miles of trail…

Run wide-eyed in wonder.

Though physically tired-

Voids filled with content.

If not for time…

Time would have continued to be utilized.

Once packed and loaded-

I rinsed refreshed, before the drive home.

How is the spirit of the Northwoods?

Alive and kickin’...

And what of the spirit within?

Grateful and thankful as time itself would tell…

A View Of The Terrain - October 2024

I’ll see you along The Way…

Immersion

The Transparent Waters Of A Wisconsin Trout Stream
An Adventure From: Monday, August 24, 2020

Breathless is the air.  Stagnant.  I can feel the heat inside and out and yet throughout today I have been totally immersed within the nature surrounding me.  For several hours this morning I was fortunate to have waded a Wisconsin trout stream and it’s cool, clear waters.  And for several of those hours I actually managed to wear a long sleeve shirt.  It’s a shirt from a small country store that’s nestled in the valley and community I grew up in, beside the white cedar swamps of a blue river trout stream further Up North and on the Eastern side of Lake Michigan.  It’s a connection.

Now I sit in my camp chair with a book in my hand beneath towering white pines, their needles without a quiver in the unwavering heat.  It’s what remains of a once planted grove.  Yet beneath their lofty branches is the thick brush of maples, oaks, and wild, young, white pines now taller than me.  The first time that I came to these woods beside this creek, the sapling conifers were only knee high.  How magnificently these trees are able to leach the nutrients necessary to grow from this sandy, acidic soil.  While finishing chapters from Sigurd Olson’s book, Listening Point, a doe stuck her head out of the thicket and into an overgrown lane.  Although she could not smell me, she watched me stock still for several minutes; only the occasional twitch of her tail and ears gave her away, a reaction to the flies.  Once she deemed me as non threatening, she turned and disappeared, immersing herself into the wall of plant life.

It was at this time that I pulled out my journal; the paper and pen my means of capturing moments.  Although today’s cloud cover is thin, a few light sprinkles have occasionally spit down, and I pulled my chair under the open hatch of my Jeep.  Earlier, following a packed lunch that I had brought along in a cooler, I had opened the back of the Jeep and lowered the windows before taking a short nap.  Even in the thick air I was able to close my eyes long enough to take the edge of sleepiness off and revive my senses.  The culminating activity, before I put my waders and boots back on, will be to swim and immerse myself within the creek.  Its spring fed waters will cool and cleanse me enough to have one more go at the stream’s wary trout before nightfall.

Today, in addition to immersing with the air and water, is the immersion of time spent without restraints for one last summer day.  While it’s been a difficult last couple of months for associating with people and building relationships throughout social distancing, I have honestly got to say that I have thoroughly enjoyed every second of the summer.  It’s the first time in decades that I haven’t had to take a class, or lead a camp, or prepare lessons.  After teaching through this past spring and it’s remote e-Learning, I put every aspect of that experience in a box and crammed it towards the back of the top shelf in my brain.  It felt good.  It was refreshing!  In its place I ran, I worked outside and inside of our home, I spent time with my family, and I read several books.  I immersed myself into other things for once.

And with that immersion I am now ready.  Ready for what exactly, I’m not quite sure.  Teaching school will look much different than what I’ve grown accustomed to for the last three plus decades.  And while the unknown can be scary, beginning tomorrow it will be time for me to take that box full of school experiences back down from that top shelf in my brain and begin to sift and sort through it to see what I can use.  I’ve literally left it up there for as long as I possibly could, and it felt great.

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and perhaps it does.  Whatever I do, I strive to do it well; it’s how I’m designed I suppose.  And so as a light breeze begins to stir out of the west and the sun finds a small seam to shine down through the thin layer of clouds, after this summer I’ll be ready to teach again and find the energy to make a difference.  But before I do, I still have this afternoon to finish strong with some unfinished business.  It’s time to go jump in the creek and immerse myself in the refreshing waters of the creek!

See you along The Way...

An Early Morning Sunrise After A Two Hour Drive North

Sandhill Cranes In The Early Morning Fog

In The Middle Of Nowhere, A Pipe With Fresh
Spring Water That I Drank From...

A Beautifully Colored 14" Brown Trout

With The Hatch Open I Took A Nap In The Back Of The Jeep!

Despite The Heat I Was Able To Sit, Read, And Journal

A Lane Through The White Pine Grove

Click The Video To Watch My Immersion In The Creek

It was Refreshing!

(To watch the video you may need to change the "view version"

at the bottom of the page)

The End Of The Day & Summer

Opportunities To Escape

I’ve escaped and gone fishing numerous times these past few months.  I vowed that I would go after being bound to completing graduate level classes for the last couple of summers and then coming off from the hecticness of E-learning this spring.  I wouldn’t say that I felt like I had earned the opportunity to be somewhere on a lake or creek.  Far from it in fact.  However, I would say that I was looking forward to calling my own shots, being surprised by something unforeseen lurking under the surface, and immersing myself into nature’s frontier.

Water draws me like a magnetic field.  When you are born and raised in a state once known as a territory, and has a motto that claims, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you”,  then the spirit of adventure and water itself are distinctly and firmly established into the lifeblood of your soul.

I’ve been fortunate to fish in several different venues, but I’ll save some of those outings for a later blog entry and instead narrow the focus to the three recent times I’ve hit creeks for trout.  Compared to past experiences, and with a keen eye for when the fishing is on, I can honestly say that my three outings were marginal at best.  Still, an outing is an outing and being a relative optimist, each opportunity to escape held surprises that solidified the excursion as worthy of being documented and therefore remembered.

My first escape was back in May.  I hit a creek that I fondly refer to as my “Home Creek” because I know it so well.  Although I hadn’t visited this creek in several years, I did relatively well on this trip.  The weather, albeit a little too sunny for a trout’s liking, was absolutely beautiful.  I got up a little later than usual, thankful for a chance to sleep in, but managed to be in the water by 8:00.  Of the eleven or twelve trout that I caught, all of them were brown trout.  A couple of them were 14 inches, most were about 12 inches, and a few were 10 inches.  I did lose one 16 inch trout after it launched right out of the water at me.  I almost had to use my pole as a fencing sword to defend myself; something I had to do decades ago when I accidentally walked up on a nesting goose.  When a mother goose is camouflaged on eggs with her neck stretched out flat to the ground, while you stumble along in your waders looking for an entry point into the creek, the explosion of honks, wings, and beak can surprise the heck out of you!  Once I gathered my wits, I narrowly escaped the feathered mauling by quickly backing up, and jousting in the air with my fishing pole, while trying to keep from falling over onto my butt.  My Dad was with me on that day, witnessed it all, and still laughs about the attack when the story comes up.  Anyways, I escaped the launching of the brown trout too, but also never caught and landed it.

My second escape was during the third week of June and in a favorite little creek in South-central Wisconsin.  I left home in the late afternoon when storms were predicted.  I drove undaunted and was in the water by 6:00 p.m.  The mosquitoes and deer flies drove me crazy from the beginning.  Soon after pushing through high grasses and red osier dogwood to get to the creek, I cast my lure ahead along the bank of a relatively long run.  As I began to reel, I felt that sudden, easy retrieve when a fish takes a swipe and pushes water around your lure, yet never touches a barb.  When the spinner reached my side I glanced down and saw a hog of a brown trout turn right next to my leg.  Things like that tend to stick in your head and push you onward just in case another would try the same thing.  Around the following bend, the heavens unleashed and I was instantly soaked through down into my waders.  Typically fish can start hitting in such weather, but from the look of things as I had hiked in, the area had already received some rain before I had arrived.  In spite of this, I managed to catch 14 or 15 trout; half were brookies and half were browns, and most were really small.  They were hitting softly so it was hard to react.  As the rain passed through, the temperature went down ten degrees and by the end, as darkness fell, I shook from being cold and wet.  It was time to quit and escape back to somewhere dry and warm.

Trekking like I did in the dim light, and in another squall of rain, it reminded me of silent trudges I’ve had while fishing with my cousins; when you just keep your head down and walk.  The fishing was poor to medium but somehow “fun-ish” once I was back to my Silver Jeep; my fingers wrinkled like prunes.  Sharing an experience like that sometimes makes for a better story than living it.

My last escape was the first week of July.  It was on the front side of what promised to be a long period of unusually hot, humid, and rainless weather.  I woke too early, but after watching a little TV, falling asleep for another hour, and then bouncing up, I left at 5:00 and was in the creek by 6:30.  As I drove. I stopped three different times.  Between the full moon setting and the sun rising, it was an absolutely beautiful scene.  I couldn’t pass up capturing some of it in pictures.  Temperatures started in the high 60’s that morning, but by the time I left to return home hours later, it was nudging 90 degrees.  The slight breeze was out of the East by SE, which does not bode well for fishing, but I had decided to try anyway on a hope and a prayer.  Overall I caught six small brook trout and one 13 inch brown, all in the first hour or two, but still I pressed on.  I fished that section until I had a relatively easy place to get out and start the hike back to my Jeep; baking under the sun in my waders.  Once there, and apparently as a glutton for punishment, I decided to try a lower section of the same creek.  It was a new area I hadn’t fished before, and I wanted to explore, try something new, and see if any of the “big boys” would surprise me and come out to play like they are wont to do.  Generally big browns will feed in the darkness of night, but on occasion I have seen them charge out from a bank in broad daylight as well.  The problem is that by then you’re hot, you can’t remember the last time you had actually brought a fish to your hand despite some magnificent casts, and then they strike when you least expect it.  That happened twice in that section of the creek.  The first flew out from a shallow overhang, grabbed my spinner, and then rubbed it off on some underwater grasses just as I tried setting the hook.  It was huge!  The second rose off the bottom of a pool, took two swipes, missed, and was never seen again.

It was at that time that I broke down my pole and started my hike back, munching on several handfuls of blackberries as I went.  It was brutally hot by then, and I downed an entire thermos of ice water once I reached my Jeep.  All in all the experiences were a chance to get out and both wet my line as well as enjoy time on my own without any deadlines or people needing my attention.  For that matter, although the fishing wasn’t spectacular, the opportunities to escape were priceless.

See you along The Way...

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Some Pictures & Videos from the "Escapes"

Sunday, May 3rd, 2020

Monday, June 22nd, 2020

Click on the short video below to see the squall on the creek:

Sunday, July 5th, 2020