Into the Deep

Earlier this week I was invited to attend a lecture concerning the stewardship and preservation of local geological features with an eye toward public history.  It had been quite a while since I sat in a classroom and watched a PowerPoint, but I was interested in the subject matter and happy to have been asked to attend.  The presenter, a family friend, was deeply knowledgeable and committed to his subject matter, and I came away from the lecture not only with a deeper understanding of my geologic surroundings, but thoughts of the web of connections we outdoorsmen and women can take part in when we see fit.

While none of us, professional guide to occasional weekend warrior, can truly take part in the entire twirling kaleidoscope of interconnectedness that surrounds us while we pass our free hours afield, some of us do try.  Others do not, and that's fine too.  To each their own and all that.

Take, for example, "Don the Deer Hunter."  Don is a guy I just now made up, but he seems like a pretty amiable chap.  He's a good dad and husband.  He hoards his vacation days to hang out in a tree stand with a bow or rifle, and hunt big bucks.  Beginning sometime around Memorial Day each year, he sits entranced by deer hunting articles and TV shows.  The post counts of Rackstabber169 (Don's internet alter-ego) soar on BigRacks.com and CervidAssassin.org, his chosen whitetail internet forums.  His truck is a rolling billboard for makers of specialized hunting gear and equipment.

He hunts quite a few days in the fall, a dedicated man this Don, and does very well for himself.  The walls of his den are adorned with many trophies, testaments to the majesty of nature in antler form, and to Don's commitment to his chosen passion.  He scouts year-round and dreams of the rut at night.  Don is a highly skilled specialist, and quite content being just that.

Don, by the way, cannot recognize a single constellation outside the Big Dipper or any dangerous or edible plants. He starts his fires with lighter fluid, gas, or not at all.  His knots are of the Swiss navy variety.  He has some experience identifying the flora a whitetail browses on throughout the year, but only because that is vital information to his specialization.  He has no idea how the lake he can see in the distance from his favorite tree stand got there, how old it is, or what's in it.  These questions may not even have occurred to ol' Donny, face painted and bow hanging on the $30 "proprietary" (the maker painted it camo) extreme, lightweight space-age screw hook in the tree next to him.

Even though he makes a dumb joke every time he hears the term "climax forest," and has never heard of forest succession as a concept, I hold no ill will toward our good fellow, Don.  He is, without a doubt, a more accomplished whitetail hunter than I am or will ever be.  His entire life's purpose outside of work and family is to put a drop-tine on the wall.  He is a specialist.  A deer hunter, not a woodsman.  That is a point of distinction, not a point of contention or derision.  There is a difference, and that is all.  Spatting over how we choose to spend our time in the woods is ridiculous and uncalled for.

I know a few of these Dons in the deer hunting world, and a few more in the realm of fly fishing.  They are completely comfortable narrowing their focus down to one species or technique or body of water.  In the testosterone-fueled check this shit out! world of today's internet fly fishing, to be recognized as one of the the tribe, one has to specialize.  To fish 300 days a year behind designer shades, throw perfectly tight loops out to 100 feet at all times, and have designed at least three fly patterns with names not fit for repetition in mixed company.  Or have a pink reel and cleavage erupting from an implausibly strained Columbia fishing shirt.  And sadly, that seems to be the entire point a lot of the time -- to get noticed.

I will never be recognized at the fore of most tribes because I'm not an extreme specialist.  I am decidedly not an expert in any single outdoor endeavor other than falling asleep in blinds.  Whether through lack of commitment or the simple urge to learn the next thing (maybe they're the same), I have become a happy generalist.  I would like to sit down with Donny, however, and pick his brain on the subject of whitetail hunting for a while.

Perhaps it's because I am not a joiner by nature.  If you've been reading here long enough, you know by now that I take joy from harvesting my protein well, cooking it with some modicum of respect and care, and sharing it with family and friends when I can.  But all the organic locavore, glossy farm-to-table onanism going on lately makes my skin crawl sometimes.  Not that the terms or concepts bug me.  Quite the opposite happens to be true.  I'd simply like to shoot a couple rabbits and make my gnocchi, or pickle a passel of ramps for my gimlets, without having to attend a club meeting to pat each other's backs over it afterward, thank you.

To my great dismay, I do occasionally feel a petty, initial tinge of jealousy in the face of those we deem to be expert-specialists in the fields I wander through.  The lauded oracles of fly fishing, foraging, and convincing animals to tip over for the pan.  The rock stars.  It's completely ridiculous and unfounded.  When I first came upon MeatEater and Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, to name but a couple, my initial, admittedly shallow and embarrassing reaction to them was an over-critical, sotto voce muttering... who are these knuckleheads doing what I love?  Only better.  Of course, almost immediately I began to enjoy and appreciate their blogs and books, my knee-jerk (emphasis on jerk) immaturity not withstanding.  Their efforts, in part, have not only improved my foraging and hunting, but have also paved the way for hundreds, maybe thousands, of outdoor blogger-types like yours truly.  I will never again be without reading material as long as my phone is charged.

Not that I'm writing in a vacuum here.  Truthfully, I get a charge out of watching my readership here grow, there's no denying that.  And I understand that products have to be sold, money has to be made, and that there apparently exists a glut of Dubstep music out there, written entirely for the the purpose of being lain under fly fishing videos on YouTube.  I'm just asking: What happened to going fishing without a GoPro duct taped to your every appendage, then having a beer by headlamp on the tailgate and heading home?



While still a dirt-covered youngster, I was exposed to, and the recipient of great gifts from, a comprehensive outdoor education program in elementary school.  Dad and Brian, and most of my aunts and uncles were also lead through this science curriculum, sometimes, in one of those quaint circle-of-life small town circumstances, by the same teachers I had.  In "OE," as we called it, every science class of a 5th-grader's school year was dedicated to learning about the outside world.  We learned our birds, fish, wild flowers, rocks, and mammals.  We gave stuttering presentations on environmental concerns and mumbled tours of the school's arboretum with our new-found knowledge to parents, family, and local dignitaries.  But more than that, we were introduced to the bigger concepts.  Evolution and adaptations, patterns, the cycles of water and carbon, the ice age that shaped our surroundings... even isostatic rebound, come to think of it, though they didn't call it that to us back then.  All that, combined with a bushcraft enthusiast father, led to my tremendous head start in not only knowledge of flora and fauna, but thinking of the entire works as one big system, and I am forever grateful for that.

"Practice while you're warm and dry, so you can do it when you ain't" ~Dad

Years later, I was introduced to the concept of "deep mapping" in a eureka moment when I stumbled across a copy of William Least Heat-Moon's PrairyErth at the Frugal Muse bookstore in Madison.  His massively immersive tome is a deep look into the geological, natural, and human history of a single county in Kansas.  From the folklore to the history and formation of the soil itself, it's all in there.  The author spent six years obsessively familiarizing himself with every nook and cranny of the place, and I'm not the only reader to have deemed his work a masterpiece.

This concept of deep mapping -- the act of collecting multiple qualitative and quantitative data as it relates to a place in order to create a near-complete spatial picture and narrative -- struck a heavy chord with me as it relates to my outdoor pursuits.  That a person could become immersed in the seemingly unconnected minutia of a place to build a more complete picture of the whole... when applied to tromping around outside with a gun or gunny sack, that thought still gets me going.

Back to what brought us here, that geology presentation earlier this week.

The unique geology of Wisconsin alone is a subject worthy of study and admiration, even to a simple layman carrying a pheasant gun and a bruised-up apple in his vest.  We have a treasure trove of accessible and easily researched areas and formations here, and just because we choose to spend our time chasing turkeys and mushrooms in and on them, that does not preclude some of us from wanting to learn more about them, geologists though we'll never be.  The Kettle Moraine, smushed up between two lobes of an ancient glacier that bears our state's name, on which I have passed nearly my entire life; the far-reaching Niagara Escarpment, the Baraboo Hills and Devil's Lake, the verdant Driftless area with untold miles of burbling trout water, the staggeringly beautiful Dells -- all of them appeal to me, not only as they relate to my weekends shooting behind woodcock and jumping the hookset on topwater bass, but as individual parts of the larger whole.

Top o' the world, Ma!  On 1.7 billion-year-old Baraboo Quartzite at Devil's Lake. Photo cred: Spanky

I meet these things under my boots and as vistas before me.  They've helped to mold who I am because I exist in the biome they support.  And that's just the flashy geology I, a member of the lay general public, am acquainted with through books read in anticipation of hunting, foraging and fishing trips.

At the opposite end of the same great spectrum from our single-minded specialist buddy Don, I am a generalist outdoorsman.  Duck misser and faller-downer.  Occasional practitioner of coercing fire from rocks and sticks and getting lost just to get un-lost.  And a deep mapper of my small part of the world.

Here's to us, we curious life-long students of the outdoors.  We experts of nothing, we who fish and hunt, navigate with map and compass, forage and paddle.  We who start matchless fires in the snow for practice, who stop to read historical markers on the shoulder of the road and consult the tattered copy of Roadside Geology of Wisconsin stashed behind the truck seat; all with a pittance of expertise and an abundance of awe and enthusiasm.

To Light Winter's Dark

I have loved the cold my entire life.  Not merely tolerated it, not pushed through it until spring, but reveled in it.  My shelves are disproportionally populated by the books of arctic and antarctic explorers, their amazing feats of human conquest and mind-boggling maunderings into reckless folly equally chronicled.  Winter fiction and nonfiction editions alike expand into chilly ranks on the shelves, their spines consistently stark white and muted gray. I read To build a Fire obsessively as a child.

I've performed In the Bleak Midwinter numerous times (if you know where to look, you can even find an out-of-print album of that title on which I am a performer).  Wandering a bit from the message of the lyrics though, hauntingly beautiful piece as it is, it has never resonated with me.  I've never seen winter as bleak, and I can't get past the title.

The gear and outdoor clothing we don in winter appeals to me without fail.  Dank wool and poly-pro base layers are my armor.  WindStopper fleece and rabbit fur, my crown.  I've been involved in more than one immature internet row concerning the best ice fishing creepers one can strap to one's boots to walk on the ice.  Things got embarrassingly personal during one of these dust-ups because the kit of the northern outdoorsman is a subject near my heart, and I still feel like an ass for my behavior as an interwebs noob in that discussion, these years later.  Most often, I now hold my tongue (and my typing fingers) when discussions of such things arise.

Stomping around in snowshoes, tending to the the manliest of facial landscaping, slipping into the snow camo that makes me feel like a ninja sniper, that tickle of frozen nose hairs that strikes when you step out the door, the way hardwood pops apart under the maul when the mercury nestles comfortably below zero; I find myself enamored of it all.

Even my 'stache jewelry, earned splitting firewood in the cold

There's something in particular about the freight train sound of icy wind, all fury and daggers, barreling down from the north that brings about the basest instincts in me.  I want nothing more than to take it on. The soundtrack in my mind drifts to the dark, foreboding Russian dudes like Prokofiev and Mussorgsky, and I yearn to run out there and roar back in it's face.  Like an athlete bouncing on the sidelines before the match begins, it's all adrenaline and manic pacing.  Sometimes, when I know nobody's around, I do run out there and let fly my fiercest primal scream.  It still snows and blows, but I feel better for having gotten the evil out.



Eventually, all the high adventure and common drudgery out in the frozen winterscape must come to an end, and the other great joy of winter comes to pass.  You get to go inside, to the comfortable glow of home.  Second only to the joys of being out there in it, are the joys of returning to the sanctum.  It is the light to winter's dark, the reassuring respite from winter's cold steel fist. 

I've talked at length here about my long history with heating with firewood.  It's how I grew up, toddling along behind Dad in my footie pajamas with an arm-load of kindling.  Heating with wood is difficult, time consuming, and so very rewarding on those blustery, arctic nights.  Nothing is more reassuring than staring into those glowing coals, and knowing we'll make it to dawn at least once more.

Burning wood has not gone without it's share of trying moments, though, large and small.  Trips to the hospital to get sewn up, that interminable frozen wait for the house to warm some mornings, splinters under fingernails and burn marks in the carpet from flying embers.

We had two wood burning stoves in my childhood home -- a squared and squat cook stove in the kitchen and a cast monstrosity of a parlor stove out in the living room.  Early memories of that house are dim, but I remember that the cats would begin winter mornings on the pad in the kitchen, curled up under the stove itself as it was slowly rekindled to life.  An hour later, that stove burning hot and fast, you'd find them all the way across the room, tucked into the toe-kick under the sink, having migrated slowly across the floor as it warmed.

And the Christmas Morning Disaster of 1981.  We'd gathered in the living room, after the torturous wait I think my parents enjoyed a little too much, to open presents.  Just as my brother and I were getting into the glorious chaos of clawing gaudy paper from gifts, sitting there on the floor between the glow of tree and wood stove, a stupendous crash startled us from our gluttonous glee.  A thump you feel in your chest before you realize what's happening, followed by clouds of dust and debris filling the house.  I don't know which one of us started crying first, but I was scared out of my little mop-headed mind.

After years of warming and cooling above that parlor stove, the ceiling plaster, beginning directly above the stove and radiating out over most over the ceiling, had given way en masse and plunged unceremoniously onto our yuletide celebrations.  Nobody was hurt, and we laugh about it now, but that remains the most startling and memorable Christmas morning of my life.  I got a Speak & Spell which remained unharmed by the murderous intentions of falling plaster, so all was well.

There's stew in winter too.  Lamb, venison, squirrel and rabbit, beef; whatever's on hand.  Browning hunks of protein in a cast iron pan on a weekend afternoon, knowing that they will be joined with, and transformed by, those dense root vegetables, that glossy, redolent... stew juice born of stock and maybe a little wine -- that's magic right there.  Just building a roux gets me going this time of year, before anything else even sees the pan.  The big beefy herbs like rosemary, sage, and thyme get to come out and play more often too. But the captivating power of the spell is greatly diminished once June bugs start doinking off the screens in spring.  To really lose myself in a good stew, I need a few players to be present: snow drifts, buffeting winds, crusty bread, a fire in the wood burner.  Add a deep caramel-y porter, I'll probably unbuckle my belt and reach for seconds.  Keep a safe distance.

And flannel.  Come on.  We know now that cotton is about the worst fabric you can have next to your skin out in the cold.  It almost completely loses any insulation value when it gets wet, and takes forever to dry.  The days of waffle cotton long johns are passed for those of us who spend our free hours afield, and good riddance.  I adhere to the adage "cotton kills" while out there chasing fish and coyotes and dreams, but in the house, flannel rules.  My flannel pants with the fish on them, who can't love those for lounging?  And, fresh from a hot shower, sliding into flannel sheets still warm from the dryer... thank you, Jesus!   

The winter cocoon would not be complete around here in the absence of good reading material.  I'm a prodigious consumer of words, granted great joy through the turning of pages, and yes, the flicking of digital pages across a touch screen.  While I read almost whatever I can lay my paws on all year long, the habit does suffer a bit in warmer months when there's so much more to do outside.  Not so in winter.  The days are already lengthening now, but there will still be plenty of chances to hunker down with a page-turner and keep the fire going.

But first, more firewood needs to be moved into the garage...

  

Me Make Pretty Someday

Since I was a child, I've had in me the desire to create pleasing things.  It has manifested itself, in many iterations of success and failure, throughout almost my entire life.  Writing, cooking, singing and playing music, innumerable photographs -- drifts of attempts to bring into existence something of grace and polish; they pile up in my life.  Found among them, infrequently and often by serendipity like Penicillin and Play-Doh, are a few rare examples of success.  I am decidedly no artist, but when the moon is in the second house and Jupiter aligns with Mars, I can sometimes hack together a chunk of something that is marginally not abhorrent to the eye, ear, or spirit.

My journey began with one of those mind-boggling 70's-era parental decisions we now smile fondly upon in the fuzzy penumbra of the past.  I was given a crystal radio set and a soldering iron somewhere around the time I was still struggling to learn my multiplication tables.  It was somehow deemed perfectly safe to bestow the allure of molten lead upon a being who was routinely and abruptly cast off his bicycle for no apparent reason, came home with worms in his pockets, and bathed only under direct threat of mortal violence.

Regardless of how it came to be, I found myself in unsupervised possession of a makeshift branding iron, and with the help of my father's coveted woodworking chisels, attempted to make one of those routed and wood-burned family name signs out of a piece of split firewood.  The house didn't burn down, nor did I, but I was on my way to trying to make handsome things, ugly as that sign was.

Fly tying fits in a category of its own for me in this quest to make pretty things, being that the flies themselves, while sometimes pleasing to the eye, will always be a function of their end goal as a fish catching tool.  I don't tie well enough for my stuff to be displayed in a lucite box on the mantle, nor would I want it to be.  But that doesn't mean I don't wish my functional flies to be beautiful either.

It's bit of a balancing act.  There comes a moment in the tying of almost every fly when it would be good enough to catch fish, probably fool them quite handily, but it is also not yet finished because it's not pretty enough to snag the angler.  There's the thing -- the tyer could stop right there, when it's still a tad ragged, doesn't have the last bit of embellishment in a little glossy head or the perfect set of sparkling eyes, but I often can't.  It's not enough that it entice the fish, the fly must first enchant the fisherman or it will never leave the box.

I'm not a production tyer most of the time.  My flies are for me.  I tie for my edification and for my fishing, but I'm also a prodigious producer once things start to roll, so I often end up with a cache of flies to be sold on Craigslist or to like-minded friends and acquaintances who chase the same species I do.

All my personal fly boxes are full.  The current overstock pile.

I've never felt more like a drug dealer than the time last year when a vaguely sketchy Craigslist fellow (everyone you  meet through Craigslist feels vaguely sketchy, if not downright frightening) met me in a Pizza Hut parking lot, and began peeling twenties off a gangster roll to buy a big batch of my smallmouth flies.  That doesn't happen very often, but it was fun in that salacious, pretend-you're-a-villain just-for-a-second kind of way.

I started tying sometime in the mid 90's.  Those were the heady days of mangled wooly buggers and dry flies from the minds of horror movie directors.  I tied a March Brown Comparadun once that, had it become known to the government, would've been whisked away in the dark of night to be studied in some little-known bunker under the Mojave Desert, then killed with fire.  It was that grievously malignant and horrifying.  A puppy saw it and immediately began to cower.  Angels wept.  I decided that if I was going to continue tying, it would be in the realm of bigger streamers and topwater bugs for brown trout and smallmouth bass... for the good of mankind.

One of my earliest attempts, circa 1994.  Saved as a reminder that things get better.

Things idled along for a few years with fly tying but a dull murmur in the background of my life.  We fished with waxies under bobbers for the biggest bluegills I've ever seen, spring and fall, out of the fishing trailer in Onalaska.  (You know it's a renowned bluegill spot when greeted with a gargantuan, 12-foot long Lepomis statue at the city limit.)  Our limits of thick-shouldered 'gills were often almost too easy.  There were mornings when the fish basket could hardly be lifted out of the water in less than a couple hours.  While big fish were sometimes taken off their beds in spring using a fly rod, the flies employed were most often bubble-packed poppers bought at the gas station.  And the fish didn't care because bluegills almost never do.

We trolled Lake Michigan for many years, chasing salmon and trout.  I'd happily stumble from the bunk while a lot of people my age were just getting home from "last call," to be on the water before the sun came up.  My boat mates, Kirk and Steve, had been fishing there since childhood and had the program absolutely nailed.  Never before or since have I witnessed two men with a better shorthand and intuitive sense of what the other was doing on the boat.

When I first began fishing with them, in terms of the angling, I was little more than three more lines in the water and a sport to winch the fish in.  We became a team over time, and though I never approached their masterful knowledge of that fishery, we did very well in the tournaments and I tied a lot of Howie flies.  Lashing tinsel to tubes never really caught my fancy though.  It was strictly a matter of putting pounds in the cooler.

We catfished in the dark, all stink and mud, with atrocious smelling baits and cut up bait fish.  We chased muskies with heavy baitcasters on the big lakes up north before almost anyone had thought to get after them with a fly rod -- fly rod muskies being quite the rage these days, incidentally.

Then I discovered a website dedicated to fishing smallmouth bass in rivers, and the bug bit.  Hard.  I began as a spin fisherman, but quickly blew the dust off the vice, and began to chase the bronzebacks with bits of fur and feather clumsily fastened to the hook.  Like many in the beginning stages of any new-found obsession, I adapted the tools and techniques I'd learned from other arenas to fit my new needs -- essentially fishing bass with slightly outsized trout flies when you get down to it.  And it worked quite well.  Still does, if you want to do it that way.

I tied and fished in that happy milieu until Kelly Galloup kicked off an awakening in my tying when I saw him speak and tie at the Great Waters Fly Fishing Expo in Minneapolis a few years ago. (I also met and spoke with musky guru Brad Bohen for the first time at a writer's symposium there, which coincidentally, led to the existence of this blog, in a roundabout sort of way.)

Rodg and I had driven from his house in the Twin Cities suburbs to a hotel convention center in the gloom and slush of a late winter metropolitan snowfall.  We had a sub-par brunch in the hotel restaurant, wandered around the vendor floor for a while, then the speakers began.  Of all the presentations and guest tyers I took in that weekend, the infectious Mr. Galloup was the most concise and clear, and also the most engaging and fun, at least for me.  I don't think he was tying articualted flies yet, at least not during the show, but watching him tie a Zoo Cougar right in front of me was a revelation.

A quantum leap had taken place.  I came home and set to, armed with an entirely new outlook and thought process concerning fly tying for smallmouth bass.  While Mr. Galloup ties and fishes for brown trout the majority of the time, his entire treatise on fly tying works for smallies, as do some of the flies themselves.  If I may be so bold as to paraphrase, his thinking goes something like this compared to the more traditional way of thinking -- go big.  Go huge.  Tie monstrous, gnarly flies and pound them aggressively.  They will elicit predatory strikes from the biggest fish in the river.

Hulking, beefy flies as long as your vice arm

That works for me.  Not only do the flies perform on the river, but the tying of them is an adventure in itself.  Flies that take a few innings on the radio to tie and require a multitude of bits and bobs be fastened on. Flies that would give the 2-weight driftless guys flop sweats, that require every technique and material in my arsenal to come together.  There's an ugly beauty in them, and when I get to rolling at the bench, when I'm kicking it to a fat stack of horns in the earbuds and my hands are functioning almost strictly through muscle memory and habit, I find them unerringly prurient.

Fads, by definition, come and go.  I believe the push toward ginormous streamers has outgrown the fad stage.  I wasn't around for the bead head revolution in fly tying, so I don't know what that felt like, but I think this shift in the tying landscape has taken a similar permanent foothold.  And I'm glad to be a part of it, sitting in hermit mode at my vice, tying gloriously nasty articulated pig stickers and grinning like an idiot.

With plenty of practice since 1994, things have gotten better...

I am by no means an expert.  While some of the flies above are of my own design, most are my take on flies from the minds of  Kelly Galloup, Mike Schmidt, and Rich Strolis.  Should you find yourself interested in the tying and fishing of pork chop-sized streamers, fire up your Google machine and point it at them.  Their flies, patterns, and videos are all over the interwebs.  And if you're already a proficient tyer, check out the mesmerizing, absolutely outstanding tying videos by guide Brian Wise of Fly Fishing the Ozarks on YouTube.