A Diminutive King and Fallen Castle

This blog entry has been written in concert with a tying tutorial I did for my bluegill fly pattern, the Disco Cricket, over on The Fiberglass Manifesto, and author Cameron Mortenson's "Year of the Bluegill" initiative. Please head over there and check it out.  You fly fishers in particular should really enjoy the entire site.



I know a lot of us began our fishing careers chasing the humble little bluegill.  We stood there on shore, some of us with a cane pole and a bobber, and flicked squiggly globs of leaf worms to lily pads in the shallows, in hopes of hauling in a fish or two.  We didn't notice the differences between the varied species of these diminutive scrappers, nor were we aware of their many names -- long ear, shellcracker, pumpkin seed, red ear -- they were all bluegills to us kids, probably bream ("brim", as they say) to our southern counterparts.  Honestly, I still have trouble keeping all the different, brightly painted little guys straight sometimes.

Many of us learned to fish on bluegills because they are often so willing to bite.  As any muddy little kid with a sunburn and a Zebco can tell you, they will sometimes even bite on a plain gold hook when the bait can runs dry.  That makes the sunfishes royalty of the novice youth fishing world.

They're also very accessible.  Almost every splotch of blue on the map has at least a handful of sunnies patrolling the shoreline, darting into the weeds when you walk up to the bank.  Nothing is better for a kid learning to fish than actually being able to see what he's going after.  The fishing itself can be a very visual affair as well.  You can see the curious little ones swim right up, and take a nip at your bobber.  I know for myself, I wasted many a childhood afternoon trying to figure out how to catch those guys, matching wits with a three inch fish and losing.

When you do finally get a couple years of bluegill fishing under your belt, you know even more what to look for.  And what to listen for.  When the day finally comes that you spot those pie pan spawning beds laid out like honeycomb on lake bed, when you hear that little spluck! noise they make sucking in bugs from the surface, you know you're in for one of those days we fishy folk dream of.

The final part of the equation has to be the tremendous fight these buggers put up.  A bluegill flat-out pulls his little butt off.  They dart and dive, and the bigger ones do that fun spinny thing, like a maple seed falling up in reverse.  All great fun to cut your teeth on.


Then comes the time in our fishing lives when some of us are overtaken with the need to find and fight the big bluegills.  This is no longer a matter of simply flopping a bait into the city park pond, and waiting for the fish to come play.  The bruisers aren't so easily fooled -- as the saying goes, that's how they got to be bruisers, after all.  They hang out in deeper water than their slimmer brethren, they're often much more finicky about what they'll eat, and they'll yank on your 4lb. mono until they've buried your hook in the weeds, and you're left with nothing but a glob of muddy salad to show for it.  We're not in the minors anymore, this is the show, and it's wonderfully fun.

Not incidentally, bluegills are my favorite freshwater fish at the table.  Always have been.  I know the walleye and perch people will be up in arms of over this, not to mention you brookie guys and those weird, scary catfish dudes, but that's the way it is.  Given my druthers, it'd be a beer batter bluegill fry and sweet corn, with a couple thick slabs of tomato, still warm from the garden sun.  Pass me a PBR.

That's what you drink at a bluegill fry, by the way.  Go ahead and check, it's in the Constitution.  Bluegills are not craft beer fish.

For the novice fly fisher, just as the young gear fisher, bluegills are often there to help learn the sport.  Newbie fly geeks are often nearly as helpless as any kid with his first cane pole, so it works out that the quarry would be the same.  Personally, when I picked up my first dime store fly rod, and began to cast to the dink sunnies in the shallows, I was swept back to the age of dunking worms with my brother, when we'd spent more time throwing rocks than trying to catch fish.

And again, the progression with the fly rod remains the same as it was with the cane poles and spinning rods.  Obsession grows.  Sooner or later you find yourself casting past dark out with the ticks and mosquitoes, seeking advice and articles, dreaming of truly giant bulls on a fly rod.  These are not the mythic salmon of Scotland or high mountain cutties, but bluegills, through some combination of their tenacity and willingness to bite, can become downright addictive.

I don't think we need to employ Cold War era spy craft, using double secret codes and marking park benches with chalk at dusk (as is the standard internet tradecraft of covert fly fishing operatives everywhere) when mentioning that Lake Onalaska, over on the western edge of Wisconsin, is home to some of the best sunfishing you'll find anywhere.

They've pretty much put the word out.

The lake is formed by a dam on the Mississippi River.  There are miles and miles of braided water through a stand of islands at the north end of the lake where the smallmouth bass and pike fishing can be excellent.  We've spent many days up there, and occasionally nearly had to spend the night there too, after losing our way in the dozens of  near-identical looking channels.  For some reason, I was always the one who had to get out, and pull the boat over a sand bar while Brian yelled threateningly from the back of the boat, "If I have to put this beer down..."

The allure of "the chutes" as they are known locally, all those back channels and wandering paths between spits of river mud and sandy little islets, is great, but the real action happens down in the bluegill water.  Spring and fall especially, when the bite is on, you won't have to ask where, just follow the armada.  Massive sparkle fleck bass tournament rigs, fairly bristling with every fishing electronic known to exist, pull up beside plastic, roto-molded jon boats in the shallows, and everybody catches bluegills.

Lots of fish. And big ones.  Consistently over time, the biggest 'gills I've ever seen in person.  I've heard every theory out there concerning how and why this place is a sunfish factory (I like the one about the river current washing scuds and other yummies down to the pig bluegills lying in wait), but I don't think anyone really knows how exactly it works.  The important thing here, as a far as the angler is concerned, is that when the time is right, you can fight the fattest 'gills you've ever seen until the basket is full, and get up to do it again the next day.  I have, and I can personally guarantee you that none of those fish have gone to waste.



Brian inherited the trailer from Marty years before I started coming to Onalaska for bluegill bonanza weekends.  "Ol' Number 14" had been laid to rest some decades before, deemed unsafe for human habitation by any sane person, on the top of a small wooded rise in a campground right on the water, lending great views of the lake and fall sunsets from the picnic table parked out front.

Getting unpacked for another weekend at the very swank No. 14

Lest you get the wrong impression, all was not Midas gold at the trailer.  The first time I was invited, the temps dipped well below freezing for our ice fishing weekend.  When we arrived after dark, there was no power in the campground and the furnace would not run.  Within minutes, Brian spilled the Coleman lantern he was attempting to light, sending a river of flaming white gas down the counter top.  The trailer didn't burn down, but only because it was too rotten to ignite.  That night my pillow froze into a point on one end, conforming to the inside corner of the trailer as I dozed warmly with my brandy sodden dreams on the floor, stocking cap pulled down tight.  I was immediately in love with the place.

Brian and Dad, the power back on

No matter how many times her roof was resealed with blackjack, scrap sheeting, and prayers; rain always managed to run in, especially through the roof vent over the dubiously designated "living area."  Which was convenient, actually, because that's where the hole in the floor was for it to drain out.

She did have a working cook top and tiny oven, the latter of which hovered at random temperatures somewhere between glumly cadaverous and positively solar.  We used it to alternately freeze dry and vulcanize meals brought from home.  Bluegills were fried outside on the reliable old green Coleman stove, and we quickly learned where the local pizza place was.

Her greatest feature, though, was most shocking.  Literally.  After a long, soaking rain or in spring when the frost was coming out and the ground was wet, all of her metal surfaces would become electrified to the touch.  I'm not an electrician, but I remain fairly positive that wasn't right.

Brian and I would get quietly giggly on Blatz and Korbel back then, and invite fellow campers from around the grounds over for a drink.  The entire time just dying inside, waiting for them to unknowingly brush up against a wall or range hood and be jolted into a cussing streak. Yes it was mean and juvenile.  It was also some of the greatest fun I've ever had.  Closest I've ever come to peeing myself from laughter.

Buddy quickly learned that track would sting his little paws. Built in puppy barrier.

The allure of living in constant fear of being zapped, drenched, frozen or broiled alive on those summer smallie trips aside, the real reason for being there was the bluegill fishing.  At the right time of year, a limit of heavy 'gills could be acquired in plenty of time to spend the rest of the morning in junk yards looking for trailer repair parts.

Big, thick gills, too heavy for a heron, apparently.

It was not uncommon to catch them two at a time...

... or four...

... or simply have one greedy fish inhale every bait you could throw.

Ol' No. 14, beauty that she was, is gone now, trundled off to the big campground in the sky where the fish are even bigger and nobody gets electrocuted by leaning against a window air conditioner.  She brought us together, became our base camp for a lot of wonderful outdoor pursuits.  Not the least of which was embodied by the small but mighty, pugnacious king of the panfish in my mind, the ever-ready bluegill.

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.

The First Time

Young hunters are required to take a safety course before they are able to obtain a hunting license here in Wisconsin.  I remember how nervous I was taking that class as a kid.  Not that the material was difficult -- I'd spent my formative years in the presence of hunters and woodsmen who shared their vast knowledge freely.  It was that there was so much riding on it.  If I failed to make the grade, I'd never be allowed  to carry a gun alongside those men, never be treated to the joy of following happily working dogs in the sun, or so I thought.  It was for all the marbles in my pre-teen mind.

The jitters of taking the course and the test were a mere foreshadowing of the first time I would carry a gun in the woods.  It was a squirrel hunt with Dad and Brian in the Kettle Moraine State Forest, and I was rattling like the last oak leaves clinging to the trees in the autumn wind.  I carried the same Savage .22 that I still use and love today, handed down to me from Dad on that bright morning like a rite of passage.

Still as alluring as she is dangerous

A moment like that, Dad giving you his gun, is a monumental mark on the timeline in the life of a boy.  Pride and gratitude fall around the place like confetti on New Year's Eve.  My dad was "a hugger," there was never any shortage of those, but I remember there being something deeper about the embrace we shared over that elegantly plain little rifle.  It was one of the first times I felt like a man.  I remember how startled I was to notice the wetness in his eyes, and how conflicting shame and happiness overtook me as mine grew dewy in response.  I wanted nothing more in that moment than to shoot straight and make him proud.  A lot of times, that's all I want these days.

We saw one running squirrel that day, in what was probably a short hunt for the adults but seemed like one of the great adventures of my life to me.  I grew up within driving distance of those woods.  I knew them fairly well.  But until that point I had been a bystander on the path, observing nature in action, being taught everything from bushcraft to glacial geomorphology by my elders.  I knew what a food web was, but that morning was the first time I was granted the chance to take an active role in one.  I was finally off the bench and in the deadly game that has been happening since some primordial predator first chased down its prey in the goo.

I will admit now that my predatory instincts got the best of me then, in a move that I would frown upon today.  My young urge to shoot something grew nearly unable to be contained as we walked the kettled oak forest, until I eventually spied a chipmunk stuffing his cheeks in the leaf litter on the forest floor.  He fell that day, for no reason, to my unbridled hormones and excitement.  While age and wisdom have overtaken the heady need to fire haphazardly at anything with fur or feathers, I don't look down my nose on former me.  It was a waste, yes, a moment youthful indiscretion, but the seed of distaste it left in me has since grown to guide me in shot selection and general conservation -- a fine legacy for a hapless chippy with a cheek full of acorns.

I remember also watercress, and how surprised I was that a plant so lush and verdant, plucked from one of the many gorgeous little springs that dot that patch of the country, could be so piquant and bitter.  My entire life experience with leafy greens to that point had been with iceberg lettuce from the grocery store and spinach from the garden.  That a delicate little thing such as watercress floating on a spring-fed pool could be so bold and peppery struck a strong chord with me, obviously, since I just wrote a paragraph devoted to it almost three decades later.

I've gathered a lot of squirrels and watercress since that first childhood hunt, almost exclusively using that same rifle (for the squirrels, the watercress is more easily convinced into the game pouch), none of which diminished my enthusiasm for taking my hunting buddy Frisbee and his daughter on their first pheasant hunt last Saturday.

Frisbee is an avid whitetail hunter, but he'd never chased pheasants before.  When he mentioned that his oldest daughter wanted to go pheasant hunting I was thrilled.  It took us a while to juggle schedules and make things work, but we finally got it on the calendar.

I'd warned Frisbee during the protracted planning phase, that if they weren't ready when I arrived I'd have to wake the entire family with the doorbell in order to meet the rest of our party on time.  I had little reason to worry.  Nearly as soon as I pulled in the driveway, Sierra came bouncing out the front door in the dark, ready to go.  When I asked her what made her want to try pheasant hunting as I pulled on my boots for the day, she replied matter-of-factly, "I just like hunting."  Well, alright.

We arrived at our appointed rendezvous with the rest of the hunting party to find a chilly still morning, and acres of pheasant cover under gray morning skies.  I stepped out of the truck to greet dogs and men, and stole a glance Sierra's way.  She looked to be furtively taking it all in, asking hushed questions of her dad and slowly warming up to the hyper dogs as we all milled about with a bit of an edge, waiting for the appointed hour.

The hunt itself happened just as you would hope when you have a kid along for the first time.  We had not walked a couple hundred yards into the tall grass when one of the dogs got hot.  It took me a few years of bird hunting to be able to tell when a flushing dog was getting birdy, and they are all a little different in their mannerisms, but Maddy was making it abundantly clear to all that she was on a pheasant.

We were soon greeted by the boisterous flash and cackle of a rooster clawing for altitude.  Murph dispatched the bird and we were officially under way.  That field brought two additional birds to our vests, both relatively close to Frisbee and Sierra, which is all that can be hoped for with a new, young hunter in the group.

I think the smiles say more than I ever could

We were granted a couple more flushes in the next hours, in the grass and drought-pummeled corn, but were unable to shoot because of buildings and boundaries.  While I would've been thrilled to have more shots on birds, as I thought about it later, I was glad that Sierra had been there to see some hunter's restraint.  I can only hope that she saw in us the ability to discern safe and responsible shooting on the run, and that she had as much fun as possible.  I have a niggling suspicion that she may have also added a few choice phrases to her vocabulary, as Murph lacks any ability whatsoever to censor himself in front of children, cops or anyone else.

Frisbee and Sierra had to leave after that.  They had things to do back in the world, and I think her little legs had had enough tromping through the cover for one day.  We gave them our pheasants as we parted company and continued hunting minus the newest members of our crew, with hopes that they'd enjoyed themselves and that they might join us again after gun deer season in the cold hard fields of December, where the birds are tougher to hunt, but somehow even more beautiful in being so.

Then the Internet Happened

There's a state of mind that comes about sometimes.  I'm grateful when it does, I actively seek it out, and I believe a lot of us who spend time off the pavement are seeking it as much as anything else.

When I sit in my ice fishing shanty, nothing but the hiss of the heater and the gentle glow of the flasher to keep me company, I find myself sucking into... myself, if you'll permit me the horrible turn of phrase.  The world outside that thin layer of canvas disappears and, for at least a little while, there is nothing to be found in the galaxy other than what I can touch within easy reach.  It's a cocoon, a hideaway.  It is, to me, supremely comfortable.  The catching of fish, at that point, is so remotely inconsequential, it nearly fails to enter the equation.

On the right lake, you can sometimes have the whole place to yourself

When I walk through the woods.  When I walk through the woods until that perfect state arrives in which my feet are not yet sore and barking, my legs are heavy but not yet gone to clay, I'm tired but in the midst of a slow-motion runner's high, and the quarry no longer matters.  I walk to achieve this state as much as I do to powder a grouse in the slanting morning light or put fungi on my table.  And I do it alone a lot.  Not that I dislike the company of those I hunt and fish with, but things just seem to make more sense when I'm on my own most of the time.  There's no keeping pace, subtle competition is nowhere to be found.  If you've ever tried to coordinate a deer drive or bird hunt through heavy cover and over rugged terrain with a large group, you know that it can be, at times, more hassle than it's worth.

And so I remained happily alone in the dark, so to speak, for quite some time.  I've spent time with my "Madison friends" (so delineated not only by their geographic existence, but their relative disinterest in outdoor sports) during the week, and wandered off to chase protein and sunsets alone quite often on the weekends.  It was fulfilling, and obviously interspersed with weekends I treasured with my outdoor buds. 

The difference between alone and lonely is mostly a matter of comfort with oneself, and that works for me.  Whether I ever produce anything worthwhile again or not, the fact is that this ginormous melon on my neck not only barely fits in most hats, there's also a creative mind sloshing around in there that craves quiet time to think -- sometimes deeply about the meaning of things, often about the perfect piece of pie... and redheads.

In the span of a couple years I suffered a great many painfully sickening losses.  So for a time I'd been cruising along in solo mode, adjusting to a life irrevocably wounded.  People worried about me.  They talked of me in hushed tones and "stopped by" a lot.  They used kid gloves with me during the holidays, knowing that almost everyone I'd had was gone.  Somebody gave me a canned ham once, which would've been very sweet if I were a 1970's housewife with a surplus of pineapple rings and maraschino cherries.  They marveled at my "toughness," which never really existed, and when they'd had enough cocktails, awkwardly congratulated me for not becoming a lop of weeping goo.  Insert vaguely uncomfortable man-hugging.

It was all very overwhelming and sweet, and I am forever indebted to every one of them for their love and compassion, but my one true respite throughout it all was grabbing a rod or a gun or a kayak paddle, and pointing my sniffer into the wind, alone.

Eventually we all got on, family, friends and I, with being the ones still above ground together, and things got as back to normal as they ever will be.  I continued my lone jaunts even as I began to treasure my time in deer camp or with the bird hunting boys more and more.

Then the internet happened for me.  A social media explosion, more precisely, akin to the big bang; Google Earth, GIS and all the other useful outdoor cyber-tools notwithstanding.  Before the pulverizing avalanche of heartache beset my family and I, I'd joined an ice fishing forum.  I remember the day.  People were sick and in the hospital.  I wanted to go fishing, but obligations with out-of-date waiting room magazines bound me from the ice.  So I clicked around and found the forum, which will remain nameless here because I was later ejected for being too likable and funny.  Also for toeing the line right up to profanity, quite creatively, I thought. 

While I am and was an electronics junky, far from a stranger to LEDs and touch screens, I'd never joined an internet forum before that.  I'd never used any social media.  I was content to eat my lunch quietly on a stump in the swamp, and look at my own pictures when I got home.  I only begrudgingly use Facebook now to halfheartedly promote this collection of rambling drivel, and then not very often.  My current Instagram addiction may be a different matter, but I try to convince myself that it's only related to my affection for, and envy of, quality photography.

It turns out the sweaty palms and butterflies associated with joining that first ice fishing forum were completely unfounded.  While that community could not abide my penchant for playfully twisting the language right to the edge of acceptable public use, I did meet there a group of outdoorsmen I'm still in daily contact with today.  All of us too fantastic in form and thought to mix with the great unwashed, we formed our own private outdoor forum that still thrives to this moment.  I can alt+tab over to it as I type this, and they will probably razz me for being a verbose, blathering donkey when they read it.

This is a group of men who have grown together, built cyber-camaraderie over the last half decade.  And not just over the ether of the interwebs.  I've flown halfway across the country to fish with some of them.  One guy actually had the impudence to move to Montana without taking the rest of us.  I hope to sully his home with my presence and frightening fly casting someday.

It has become more than an outdoor forum.  It's a community.  I know their kids' names.  We share our real life victories and defeats.  They comforted me when everyone was dying.  I stood up in one of their weddings.  All because some nerds at MIT and DARPA wanted to talk to each other back in the day.

Draw a horizontal line across Wisconsin from La Crosse to Sheboygan.  Rotate it clockwise a tick, and you're damn near connecting my house to that of my good friend Adam, but we never would have met without the internet.  Packer games, ice fishing, talk of girls, booze-soaked rowdy wedding receptions; we could have shared none of them had we not each clicked on the link to that ice fishing forum.

After years of chatting through the screen, Adam and I finally meet

I belong to many internet forums now, some related to the outdoors and others not.  I'm even starting to get the hang of this Twitter fad.  As is true for all of us, though, my closest  personal friends will always remain nearest my heart.  The Lathrop Street gang from back in the days when a house cup and a marginally clean shirt made you a celebrity, the guys I marched with, the retired crew up in deer camp who are probably hoisting one and talking about how cool they used to be right now, and Brian, who was there with Dad when I was born and still shoots woodcock faster than I do -- these are my people.

This blog is a form of social media I never imagined myself being involved with, but it has led to acquaintances all over cyberspace.  I read some of your wonderful writings, see your gorgeous pictures, and am inspired to write and cook and chase game more than I ever have been.  Thank you.  But while we're at it, what's up with all the stickers?  I may be a relative social media noob, but where are you people sticking all these things?  Seriously.

Still, I often find it most comfortable to go it alone.  If you're ever in Wisconsin and you see a lone fly fisherman casting like he's being stung in the face by invisible hornets... or a solo bird hunter miss an easy passing shot... or a solitary mushroom seeker arresting a fall in the brush with his face, stop and say hello.  It's probably me.