Short Loins: Chain Reaction

Chicks dig scars.  That's what we used to say while gushing blood back when we were young and dumb enough to bring about that condition fairly regularly -- and young and dumb enough to call women chicks.  I said it the time my left ear was half torn off my head in a particularly nasty scrum and the time I was wobbling around like a sot, concussed and bleeding with a ruptured ear drum on the other side.  That ear remains numb to this day, but the one that got yanked off around the top shows no ill effects other than a cool white scar around the crest when I pull my ear out taut.

Men love to talk about their scars.  Spend some time around a campfire with pleasantly tired fly fishermen or upland hunters for a while.  You'll see.  My hide sports the average number of scars for a man my age who, in the course of his life has played the roughest sports with relish, grew up with a pocketknife at the ready, splattered molten roux on his forearms, and occasionally consumed sufficient quantities of alcohol to be rendered incapable of dealing with the force of gravity.

On my left pointer finger, right at the first knuckle, there's a minor crescent-shaped scar that transects about a third the circumference of the digit.  It was earned through devious trickery and a jaw-dropping surprise that nobody saw coming.  Allow me to elaborate.

Roadkill at Lake Wisconsin, near Okee. Circa 1995.

There was a time long ago when Easter weekend meant that Roadkill and I would make a day's ride on our mountain bikes from Madison to either Governor Dodge State Park or Devil's Lake Sate Park campgrounds for some quality time around the fire.  Frisbee and Brian joined us a couple times too.  For the maiden voyage Road and I auspiciously carried all our camping gear on our backs, much to the chagrin of our tender backsides.  In subsequent years we wised up, and had my dad meet us at the campground fully provisioned.

On one such occasion Dad arrived, and I dug the hatchet out of his truck to split up some kindling and get dinner going.  In doing so I was met with the standard half-mocking admonishments from the crew about taking care with a sharp and dangerous implement.

They need not have worried, we all knew the truth.  My father had a great many wonderful qualities as a parent, friend, and outdoorsman.  Found nowhere among his burgeoning skill set, however, was the ability to sharpen tools.  The man simply could not do it.  He'd never owned a sharp tool after its second use in his life.  He was an outstanding mechanic, or so I'm told by people who understand such things better than I (one of my shortcomings being the steadfast, if unmanly, conviction that the internal combustion engine functions solely through some blend of gingersnaps and the prayers of virgins).  But given a dull axe, grinding wheel, and enough time, he could fashion you only a perfectly adequate sand wedge.  And that's alright.  We all have our weak points, and if the inability to properly hone edged tools is our most glaring, we should count ourselves very lucky.

So I took to making kindling for the cooking fire, and with my first mighty hack using the very hatchet I'd known to be dull as a mud fence my entire life, sliced neatly through the slab of firewood and a good portion of my finger.  I stood dumbfounded, reeling not at the sight of my filleted finger, but the fact that Pop had somehow managed to sharpen a tool to a razor's edge.  I honestly could not believe it, and still think he'd taken it to a person more skilled in sharpening, though he steadfastly refused to admit that in all the grinning retellings over the years.


Last week it was time to sharpen chainsaws.  One had grown dull from use in spring brush clearing, the other  larger saw was (and is still) staring a big upcoming job in the face.  I pulled down Dad's battered blue toolbox that houses the sundry little wrenches, files, and accouterments one acquires in the use and upkeep of chainsaws.  I inherited this toolbox from him, and it functions just as much as a touchstone to something we used to do well together -- putting up firewood -- as it does a place to store tools.

All was going swimmingly in the sharpening of the saw until I needed the depth gauge to hit the tooth guides square and level.  It wasn't in the upper tray of the toolbox where it should have resided, so I lifted that up, only to discover a dirty little secret that, when the realization of what I was beholding hit me, made me guffaw aloud.

When I used to come home from Madison, I would often sharpen things for Dad.  Not out of some weak demonstration of  feigned superiority -- it simply needed to get done.  I knew he wasn't the best at it, he knew I was fairly proficient, and so it just sort of became a tacit tradition.  Kitchen knives, axes, scissors, chainsaws... whatever needed undulling.  I failed to consider it at the time, but in hindsight the chainsaws never needed much more than a light touch up, which is odd considering how often they were used in the procurement of winter heat and brush clearing -- chainsaws do go dull fairly quickly.  And now I know why they always seemed to be in good shape.

In the bottom of that toolbox, hidden under the insert tray on top, was a stash of barely used chains.  Apparently Dad had been using them for one season (or less), then retiring them instead of trying to sharpen them.  This was a  man I once witnessed calmly use a metal nail file to get his car restarted while double parked in Chicago Loop rush hour traffic, something I could not pull off with every Chilton guide ever made and divine intervention. (he tore up the console when he smelled that acrid electrical burning/melting smell, and jumped the neutral safety switch, I'd be taught later. Insert serious childhood veneration)  But he'd given up on sharpening chainsaws, and decided to simply purchase a new chain when the one in current use got dull.

Now that may be seen by some as sidestepping a problem, but I (perhaps through the rose tinted glasses of sonhood) see it as a perfectly viable work-around.   It's important to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and use whatever you can to get around those shortcomings.

I took a moment to smile and thank him, shaking my head, and got back to the business of sharpening.  Thanks to his inability to do it well, I'm set for chainsaw chains for the next 20 years.

He Ain't Heavy

Note:  This post is darker and more graphic than most found on this blog, and is as much (or more) for my catharsis than for your reading enjoyment.  Continue reading at your own discretion.


It has been a bleak winter for the families tied together by our deer camps up north.  We've lost two of our elders in the camps -- grandpas and husbands -- to the cold winter winds.  Solid men equally adept at fixing tractors as they were gibbering to grandbabies perched in their callused hands; they lived long productive decades, and raised gorgeous, loving families.  I will not suffer so much as those families in the face of their great losses, but I can empathize.  Death has put me in a qualified position to do so.

There is a certain conversation that happens when I run into a friend unseen by me for a decade or so now.  I'm fairly adept at this particular catching-up confab, but that does little to ease its taking place.

We make our greetings, exchange in a little small talk, and it's then that I sometimes attempt to politely extricate myself from the encounter.  Not to preserve my comfort, but theirs.  I've had this dreadful conversation dozens of times before.  If the exchange goes on long enough, though, they come to the subject of my family as anyone would in that casual updating mode, not knowing that they're stepping into a conversational bear trap.

They inquire about my parents.  They ask about my brother Josh and my great love Erin.  The fishermen sometimes ask of my exploits with longtime buddy and salmon trolling fiend, Kirk, on Lake Michigan; an ill-fated and desperate attempt to steer the conversation toward brighter shores.  Time and again I'm forced to inform them, reticking the boxes on a worn list of despair, that all these folks are dead.  Taken.  Gone.

I'm the last man standing, though I've yet to figure out what I won.

The varying circumstances of their deaths no longer matter as much as the stark reality of their absences.  That there were a few years there when I wondered if the seismic emotional pummeling would ever stop.

Sometimes these surprised friends from my past cry, sometimes they hug me right there in the frozen foods aisle (which is nice, I guess, but uncomfortable), but most often they simply stumble through a clumsy apology, and wander off looking slightly bewildered after their impromptu encounter with an emotional wood chipper.  I always secretly hope they go home and hug their families.

I should go no further without making it known that throughout those three years of bottomless calamity, while everything was falling and broken, four men in particular remained unassailable and true for me.  The steadfast and centered Frisbee of that solid up north deer camp stock, unmoving and patient.  Spanky, a font of the greatest side-splitting rants ever witnessed in this hemisphere, always present with hilarity and that plain-spoken genuineness small town guys often have.  The ferociously bright and deep Bender, smartest man I call friend, our long conversations wending and ranging over the spectrum of our combined interests for hours.  And the indomitable, irrepressible, jarringly crass and sweet at once Roadkill -- so much the other half of me that we've occasionally been accused of speaking in (often gleefully profane) "Twin Talk." 

We don't see each other as much as we once did, The Boys and I, separated by both geography and my post-traumatic predilection for running solo most of the time, but I know if I picked up the phone in need once again, any one of them and a host more, would run through a brick wall to help me.  I'd return the favor without thought.


During the time in which my loved ones were tipping over one after the other, like metal plate targets at the range, my brother's passing was sort of lost on me.  The way things went down, the order they happened in, I didn't have time to really acknowledge he was gone.  When my dad died six months after my brother did, I'm fully confident that it was partly of a broken heart.  I'd barely had time to think about Josh in the interim.  There's no shame in that, it's simply the way things happened.

With the perspective of time, though, things have a changed a bit.  The pain of all the losses dims with time, but his remains more clear to me at times because I was unable to give it proper treatment then.

Josh was just over a year younger than me, and we grew up in that classic brothers mode of bickering interspersed with laughter -- him following me around with my friends, begging to tag along; always the last in a train of bikes, struggling to keep up.  We swam at the beach down the hill from home, and built jumps for our dirt bikes in the woods up the hill.  And there were all-out wars.  I've had a straight-back chair broken over my back (they don't explode satisfyingly like in a good Western) and a hatchet whiz right by me to come to a clattering halt in the woodpile.  The boy did not mince about when it came time to throw down.

He looked up to me for almost everything growing up, starting from a very young age.  When my parents and some ambiguous (to me) health professionals were fretting at his remaining speechless well past the age he should have, I knew better.  He only spoke to me in the secret comfort of our darkened bedroom.  Later he'd whisper to me in the half acre vinyl backseat of that olive drab Impala, and I'd make his wishes known to our parents up front.  When he did finally begin to talk in public, it was with a painful, often debilitating stutter, but that did little to dampen his zest for talking... and talking... and talking.  Josh was a singularly determined and unstoppable chatterbox from then on, prone to flights of fancy, and relentless to the point that he sometimes drove normally sane and serene people, family and relative strangers alike, to beg him to please, shut the hell up for two minutes!

As we grew through elementary and middle school, it became apparent that Josh was not progressing normally.  The incessant yammering and inability to keep up with his peers in the classroom landed him in remedial classes, the offices of mental health professionals, and eventually, in the worst case, jail.  Our paths could not have been more divergent.  While I was being carted off to advanced courses and programs with my fellow nerds, he was mired and frustrated and acting out.

By the time we were in our late teens, he'd been diagnosed as bipolar, having OCD, and being mentally deficient or whatever the acceptable term of the day was.  Not to mention a entire passel of other monikers.  Learning disabled, special needs, retarded... whatever.  The lay truth is that he was a naive 3rd-grader living in a behemoth 6'8" frame.  Easily lost and confused, easily led astray by any who wished to do so, and easily provoked into violence when those two situations arose in unison.  Or when some inelegant, about-to-be-mangled asshole made fun of his stuttering.  I never blamed him for that one.  I'd beaten them bloody for him until he was old enough to do it for himself.  He was labeled a dropout, an offender, and a delinquent by the time I was in college, when all he really wanted was to ride his bike and have me visit.

He wrote me heartbreaking letters from jail and halfway houses and and mental hospitals, in his jagged childish scrawl, about how I was going to come home someday, and he was going to get a Corvette, and we were just going to drive and drive.  I sat in 262 Witte Hall B, and wept for his simple beauty, his relentless hope over reason.

In the end, I couldn't save him.  Nobody could.  But we did one day, in a different way, long before then.


We were Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts together, Josh and I, and Dad was our Scoutmaster much of the time.  Dad wasn't much for bloated organizations like the BSA, or for regulations and party lines, but he was for getting young boys out in the woods, and that's what he did.  If you pack 8 boys in a van and head for the woods on your own, you're a creepy molester.  Add uniforms and some paperwork, you're a Scoutmaster.  Simple as that.

I was eleven, one of the oldest boys in our fledgling troop, and easily the most comfortable in the woods having been raised by my father, the winter we found ourselves camping and generally running around like little imps at a Scout camp in central Wisconsin.  We'd been there before as a troop in summer, and knew the sprawling grounds well, from the lake well up into the woods that surrounded the camping area proper.  After our mandated activities one morning, we were left free to scamper about the place until dinner was to be made.  I have no recollection what those activities may have been, but I'll bet they involved canvas or leather at some point, and fire.  And pocketknives.  If you've ever been part of (or come in close contact with) a Boy Scout troop, you'll know that every one of them is fairly bristling with pocketknives.  Big ones, little ones, sharp ones, dull ones; you could fashion and outfit an entire ark using solely the knives found in the pockets of any Boy Scout troop in America.

The snow was deep and dense that day-- outstanding for sledding -- as a few of us trundled off in search of a perfect sledding hill.  Josh was smaller than the boys my age, and as usual, soon found himself bringing up the rear of our group as we trekked overland most of the afternoon, always searching for a sledding run to top the last.

We eventually found one to our liking in the form of a steep and icy footpath that cut straight through the woods down to a clearing near the river.  It was slick and dangerous enough to be cool and a little hair-raising, but you didn't let on with that to your friends.  We took it one at a time, narrow and fast as it was, and laughed as we wiped out in a pile of snow pants and stocking caps at the bottom.

Josh went last as he'd gotten there last, and was taking forever, as usual.  I was getting impatient and ready to leave him behind yet again when he screamed my name.  A sharp, frightened scream full of adrenaline and need.  Not the prolonged, whiney... Looookisss, waaaait uuuup! I was accustomed to, no, it was immediately apparent, even hidden from view over the crest of the hill, that Josh was hurt.  Another yelping and pained Lucas, Help! sent me hurdling uphill as fast as I could manage.

The first thing I saw was blood in the snow, and a lot of it.  Splashes of bright crimson against the white.  He was lying flat on his back, head uphill, his right leg essentially case skinned from just below the knee to his ankle, boot peeled off in the fray.  There was a wad of "meat" balled up around his ankle like an old tube sock, its elastic long since given way.  I wasn't sure if his foot was still attached, but when I asked him to wiggle his toes, I could see tendons and muscles trying to work behind his shin and in his foot.  I froze for a moment, and we stared each other in the eye, both panting and scared.  Then he did the strangest thing in that moment.  He let out a resigned sigh, almost relaxed, and gave me the same comforted look he often did his entire life --  I'm in your hands now, big brother.  I trust you.  You got this. 

And here's the thing.  I did have it.  If ever there was an eleven-year-old prepared for this, it was one who poured over his dad's wilderness survival and first aid manuals at bedtime just as often as he read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries and Jim Kjelgaard. 

The blood seemed almost neon red in my amped-up state, and I was worried it was arterial, but there wasn't any real gushing or squirting, just seeping and dripping everywhere.  My young mind took that to mean no tourniquet and potential loss of limb.  We spun him around so his leg was above his heart uphill, and I had my buddy Jason apply heavy pressure to the inside of his thigh by kneeling into it right at the groin.  I flopped his fake-feeling and plastic-y skin back up and over his lower leg, packed some clean snow in there, and tied it all back together with his boot laces.  To this day, I don't know if that was the "right" move, but it seemed like it at the time.  We piled our coats on him to keep him warm and maybe treat for shock a little.  I told them to keep talking to him, and Jason not to lift his pressure no matter what.

Then I ran.

Like I never have before or since, I ran.  Hard.  Through the deep heavy snow until by teeth hurt and my hands shook uncontrollably.  Until the tunnel vision and peripheral firework sparklies of oxygen deprivation set in.  Until I vomited down my front, and still I didn't stop.  I ran with the fear for my little brother's life at my back, a flat out sprint for love through rough up-and-down riverine gullies, mainlining adrenaline and hope.

I got to the campsite, and Dad drove to us to a phone to call 911.  Honestly, it gets pretty blurry after that.  I do remember the medics arrived in slacks and dress shoes, apparently fresh from a meeting.  They couldn't get him up the hill once they had him stabilized, slipping and flailing on the icy slope.  A walrus-mustached sheriff's deputy was there by then, standing next to me and exhorting them from the top of the hill (in language I'd only heard Dad use after he'd stepped on a Lego in the night) to get their goddamn heads out their asses, and bring that boy up.

Once again, my little troop of Scouts swung into action, and rigged Josh to his sled to be pulled up the slope with a rope by the cop and Dad while the medics slipped and fell all over trying to get back uphill to their rig to call for... I don't know.  Boots, a crane... a clue?

As was later discovered, some Scout from one of those anonymous troops bristling with pocketknives had carved himself a stout and sharp, nice long spear, and then, meaning no harm of course, thoughtlessly cast it aside along that trail down to the water, where it froze solid to the ground, point uphill, waiting patiently for my brother to coming zipping right over the top of it kneeling in the front of a plastic sled.

I remember he had 300-some stitches and 38 staples to close up his initial surgery, figures that boggled my young mind then, and still do today.  There were more surgeries after that, and a handful of skin grafts, but eventually he recovered fully, and had a cool story about the badass giant scar on his leg.  He always painted me the hero in the retellings, looked at me with that same fawning, completely open trust.  I shied away with a wince of the undeserving.


If this were a weepy episode of Grey's Anatomy, I'd have been there to hold his hand when he woke up from the initial surgery.  But it was real life, and we never held hands anyway.  I slept at least as long as he did in my own bed an hour or more by car from the hospital, and when I was taken back there, he simply said, "Thanks, brother."

Anytime, brother.  Anytime.



I'm not much into cars, but if I ever do find myself in possession of the means and desire to own a classic American sports car, it'll be a 1967 Corvette in Rally Red, just for him -- just like he wanted when we were kids.  And I'll just drive and drive.

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.

Old Guys

I was in Milwaukee looking to hit a couple of the Lake Michigan tributaries for steelhead late last week, and needed a place to lay my furry head.  Since a tent set up in the parking lot of a corner gas station seemed like a questionable idea at best, I offered to provide dinner at my younger cousin's apartment in exchange for couch space.  A small group of friends, roommates, and relatives quickly agreed to join us for dinner.

I arrived early in the evening, and got to work, sort of spinning my wheels a little at first like you do cooking in a foreign environment.  You tread water and monkey around a bit looking for cutting boards and the like, but it eventually comes together.  Or you order pizza.

We had a few beers and shared more than a few laughs together, gathered in the kitchen as always seems to happen.  I put together salmon with mango relish and wilted spinach on ancho sweet potatoes and asparagus with lemon butter sauce while sipping beer and enjoying the din of a hot kitchen filled with friends.  The meal was fine, but I believe the Crave Brothers Petit Frère, paired with a torn demi baguette and medjool dates, may have stolen the show before I'd so much as peeled the taters.  That there is some cheesey goodness, I do declare.  I only stepped on the dog once during dinner prep, which I considered the foremost accomplishment of the evening

Hey Chucklehead, quit slopping the food around!

Confused when my alarm startled me from my couchy slumber, the strange quarters and belly full of beer conspired to complicate the matter of finding the bathroom in the dark.  Eventually, dressed and ready to go, I smiled as I crept stealthily down the back stairs.  It has been a while since I had to sneak my way out of an all-female apartment before the sun.

It was apparent as soon as got in the river that the spawning run was almost completely over.  I saw one deserted redd and one fish in a couple hours of fishing.  Like everything else outside this year, the fish had hopped a meteorological wormhole from the end of March to the beginning of May.  I was a few days late and a thousand dollars worth of fly tackle short.

Discouraged but undaunted, I hopped back in the truck, and pointed her due north, out of the city and up the west coast of Lake Michigan.  In the time-honored tradition of internet fishermen everywhere, all streams will remain nameless here, but I soon found myself standing in another burbling ribbon of tributary water, it too nearly devoid of spring chrome.

I know when I've been beaten.  I could've pounded the water, swinging flies blind with little confidence, but there are other species to prey upon out in the woods.  I walked the banks, kept my eyes peeled for new quarry, and eventually found it in the form of ramps.  Delicious spring onions that have since been pickled for use later in the year sprouted from the pockets of my vest until it resembled a poorly constructed ghillie suit.  And for the record, yes, I was on public land open to digging.  The fact that I didn't confirm that via the internet on my phone until later is unimportant now.

It was then, crouching in the sun on the bank of a glistening stream, that I felt something amiss. Nothing blatant, no neon sign blinking and buzzing.  Just a tickle, a niggling wisp of something out of place.  I'd caught the tiniest vibration of something not right, hiding in the periphery.

So I did what you do in that spot.  I became a squatting statue trying to ignore the sound of my own heartbeat.  I watched and listened and waited.  And there it was again, off to my right and downstream.  I still didn't know what it was, but I'd caught a hint of movement this time.  I remained still, struggling to see farther and clearer, trying to evolve into a hawk or a deer.

When it happened the third time, I had it pegged through the crash of riverside fallen trees and brush.  A puff of smoke.  Using careful woodsmanship and stalking skills honed through years of practice, I'd discovered one of the most coveted prizes on the stream and in the forest.  The mysterious and often cantankerous, old guy.

He was in worn, but well cared for gear, and eyed up my own tackle with a cynical stare as I approached.  Chewing on a dime store cigar and staring into the water as if to make the steelhead appear through sheer force of will, he looked as though he might've grown up out of the ground right there, as natural as any other tree stump.  I was greeted with the standard silverback brusque indifference.

You're too late.  Fish'er gone.

Thanks, Old Guy.  I can see that.  Why do you think I'm wandering around the forest with onion tops flopping out of my fly vest?

As is the case with with most of the wizened old cranks you meet out there, his initial bark was all show.  Once I'd demonstrated my worth in the form of passable fishing knowledge, an understanding of local weather patterns, and tacit agreement that the current evil incarnation of government (no matter the current evil incarnation of government) was out to destroy fishing and generally ruin the world, I was accepted into the fold.

We had a great conversation, if with a slightly more radical political bent than I normally adhere to, and I was able to glean a little more fishing knowledge about that spot from him.  The great thing about old guys who have been fishing a spot for as long as I've been alive is that they often share a lot of detail, even if it is buried in ranting and stogie chomping.

I hunt and fish with a lot of them.  For the purpose of a little definition, I'm referring to anyone old enough to be my father, and on up from there.  Brian is going to go ballistic when he reads this, but sorry dude, you're one of them even if you can still kick the asses of men a third your age.  Settle down, it's a term of admiration.

I love them for their stories, I try to shut up and learn when they speak, and I'm constantly amused that they just don't give a slippery shit what they say.  I don't know when you get that pass, when you've seen and lived enough to say anything to anyone, but I can't wait to get my membership card in the mail.  It is my sincerest hope that it only arrive without the stipulation to wear my pants up under my nipples.




I met Dennis back when we had an apartment on Orchard Street, just over the hill from Lake Wingra and Wingra Creek.  I'd seen him time and time again when I'd head down there after work, sitting half asleep in his lawn chair, a couple lines in the water.  Dennis was a devout carp fisherman with the optimistic and patient ways that accompany such an endeavor.  He'd worked for the post office for decades before he retired, and I learned a lot about the city of Madison from him.

Like most old guys, he was set in his ways.  As we became friends, I tried to help him out by attempting to update his ancient gear and techniques.  I made boilies and dough balls, taught him how to tie a hair rig, and got him a reel with a clicker.  Mostly, he was content to mash canned corn onto a treble hook, and drink his warm  PBR into nap time.  He could've caught more fish if he'd cared to update his fishing, but he'd probably caught more than his share already.

He did keep meticulous records of every fish he caught.  Date, time, size, and bait used were religiously recorded in his tattered little notebook.  That always gave me a laugh.  Even funnier to me, he was still a horn dog.  He could barely walk, but he was forever craning around to gaze upon the tanned college girls running the paved path behind us.  He once fell to a knee out of his lawn chair trying to get a good gander.  After I was able to compose myself, I dried my eyes, and offered to install bike mirrors on his chair.  He declined, stating that if he broke his neck staring at a woman, it would be a fine way to meet the Lord.




Our deer camps are predominately filled with old guys, using the definition above.  Some of them are just sliding into old guy-dom, while others have been comfortably there since I was invited to join them almost sixteen years ago.  If I stop to think that some of them will not be there to greet me any longer someday, I can get downright distraught.  Their stories and jokes are fantastic, their knowledge of the land and people is deep and indispensable.  And they've taken more of my money at the card table than I care to admit here.

I don't think they'll mind me stating that they don't always hunt as hard as they may once have, but there is nothing better for me than coming into a warm camp, and being greeted by their cheers and jeers from around the fire.

Old guys rock.