Comfort with Discomfort

It would be easy for the uninitiated reader of all the wonderful outdoorsy books and blogs out there to assume that all we do in the outdoors comes with ease and comfort.  One can read entire shelves concerning life afield, and never encounter a mention of biting ticks and mud and soggy feet.  In much of our literature there exists a dearth of reality, in which the protagonists always bag the game with ease and aplomb, and usually have some schmaltzy life-affirming quip to back up their legendary shooting.

Never having experienced the sport, a novice might wade into fly fishing, quite literally, without any consideration given to the fact that they might someday find themselves staring, rather startled and vexed, at an impromptu piece of feathery jewelry dangling painfully from an appendage they'd not intended to pierce.

It ain't always wine and roses out there.  In fact, it rarely is.  A lot of times, it's even gonna suck a little.  If you do what we do outside, you're going to sunburn and shiver, bring home scrapes and bruises along with a full game pouch.  Or end up with a fish thrashing on the other end of a crank bait buried in your leg.  Them's the ropes, but it isn't often addressed in the glossy mags or erudite literature, and I think a touch of reality is in order.


Excursions for most of us common folk begin with throwing the gear and some food in the truck. Then we do what we do all day, and haul it all back out of the vehicle, slightly more muddy than it was when we left home.  There are no dog handlers, no chefs, no maître d'.  It's up to us to power through the slogging and sorting, the cold and wet and tired, bird cleaning and deer gutting by headlamp, because this is what we love to do.  The vast majority of the time there are no panoramic vistas or transcendental moments.  Those are the rare treasures we seek but seldom find, and they are that much more powerful in their rarity after countless hours sitting in the cold or stumbling around on slippery river rocks until we take an unplanned swim.

The following is taken from an email I was forced to send to my entire contacts list years ago, as referenced in one of my very early (and pretty amusing, if I do say so) posts here -- Falling Down

It was going to be a glorious morning.

Waders on, fly rod in hand, I made my way down a slick bank to enjoy a few casts before officially starting my day.  It was then that I suddenly found myself flailing at nothing, enjoying a rather pleasant -- if unexpected -- weightlessness.  Followed immediately by a free fall to a muddy, wet finish.  I stuck the landing with my chin, and the Romanian judge gave it an 8.6 with a the full level of difficulty rating.

My phone is toast.  The screen shattered somewhere between the second and third full twist in the pike position, with no way to retrieve the contacts.  It also feels like I bruised my duodenum and sprained sixteen ribs, but that's not the point of this message.  Please reply here with your contact info if you wish your number(s) to be in my phone.  Or don't, if you're sick of me.

Of course replacements are currently backordered, so Verizon has kindly provided me with a lovely Bakelite rotary-dial eight-pound loaner to lug around in case the need to call in danger close air support should arise.

Have a nice day.

It was actually an abysmally useless early Windows phone for the sake of setting the record straight, but that isn't what we're driving at here.  This is: Much of what we do outside leads to a lot of hanging around slightly bored, getting frozen solid or cooked like a brisket.  Yes, there are those glorious moments of accomplishment, but there's also a lot of waiting around in the rain -- and trust me, there's a very fine line between the badass-ery of hunting in the freezing rain and simply sitting in a sopping duck blind like you were dropped there by a short bus.

I recently listened to Meat Eater's Steven Rinella among a panel of guests on a very popular podcast.  In the course of their discussion about the physical demands of hunting, one of the guests (I can't recall which) summed it up by saying that sometimes you just have to become comfortable with discomfort.  I'd never heard it put more succinctly, nor had I realized that was precisely what I and many other outdoorsy folks do without ever thinking about it.

Years ago I took my neighbor and friend in Madison ice fishing for his first time.  He was a professor at the UW, southern by birth, and a hell of a good dude.  An outdoorsy kid decades before, after years cooped in classrooms and meetings he was finding his way afield again in his free time, and I was frankly honored to take part.  He mentioned that he'd like to try ice fishing, so when I knew the bite was on we bundled up, and hit The Triangle on Monona Bay right downtown.

It was a steely hard mid-winter morning with blustery winds, but I didn't own a shelter big enough for the two of us at the time, so we braved it on upturned buckets like everyone used to do.  We caught a passel of fat bluegills before the whirring glow of the Vexilar, and I called it for the warmer climes of home just when I began to worry he was going to turn blue and topple off his bucket in one big frozen chunk.

Months after that, as we drank beer and told stories in my living room -- I think he often took great pleasure in escaping what he termed the "insufferable droning of academicians" with me -- he shared that one of the things he was most struck by from our day together on the ice was that I hadn't worn gloves while I fished.  His wife corroborated this sentiment, stating that he'd repeatedly mentioned it and stared at her dumbfounded when he'd returned home. 

Now, any jigger of panfish through the ice will attest that when the bite is hot, you can't really wear gloves and remain effective.  They eventually get wet and useless or gooped up with fish slime and useless, and you can't really tie a knot or bait a tiny hook with them on anyway, so you end up tossing them aside to get your jig back in front of fish faces with as much alacrity as possible.  And your hands get cold, but you deal with it.

I don't share this story through some need to express online machismo (fishing without gloves had never occurred to me as exceptionally "tough" or even "fucking crazy," to quote our shocked looking southern professor friend), but to demonstrate a reaching of comfort with discomfort.  My hands get as cold as anybody's, but we ice fishermen know that putting gloves on in that moment isn't the right play.  You just ride it out as long as you're on the school.  First your hands sting, then they ache, then it goes away.  As long as they turn pink and not blue or white, you're fine.

Pro Tip- Occasionally huffing and puffing on frozen hands, whacking them on your legs and cussing, or boinging around furiously with your hands thrust between your thighs like you just smacked your thumb with a hammer are all perfectly acceptable substitutions for gloves during short fishing breaks.  But you don't do any of them in front of your male Arkansan neighbor.  You sit somberly and give your best Intrepid Ice Guide thousand yard stare from behind the beard and mirrored shades.  There is a manliness protocol when taking southern guests ice fishing.

When asked how I can stand to sit on a frozen lake or hunt in the rain for hours by my "city friends" I often equate this becoming comfortable with discomfort to being hungry in a meeting or sometime when you can't eat.  You acknowledge it and move on.  Toughen up, Buttercup.  Or alternatively, if you're gonna run for the truck every time you spring a leak and spurt a little blood... or take a massive digger on snowshoes right in front of your buds Pike and Rum Runner moments after proclaiming your expertise to them on said appliances...  maybe stamp collecting is a better option for you.

I'd love to try a hunt of ease and luxury someday.  Maybe a proper English driven pheasant shoot with a scatter gun that costs more than my first car (which isn't really saying much -- almost every shotgun at Dick's costs more than my rust and powder blue Volare station wagon did).  I'd make long passing shots with grace and humble wit, then retire to the library, all herringbone and tattersall, for scotch and talk of favorite dogs in front of a warming fire, the birds and guns left to be tended to by handlers and cooks.  

But my hunt will almost assuredly never end that way.  Instead, I track mud into the house, and drink PBR while starting dinner.  Brian combs burrs out of Buddy and carps about city people.  Or bird watchers.  Or people who ride bikes ("goddamn hippies")... mostly anybody who isn't us.  The man has issues and a rare talent for colorfully entertaining vehemence, but he knows his way around the woods better than almost anyone I know.


Just occasionally though, after all the discomfort, just when you've made your peace and accepted it, there does come that perfect fish or deer or bird.  Or simply a moment of grace, a pittance of quiet understanding at the feet of the natural world.  Perhaps a short escape into that perfect panorama.

Huginn's Aerie

A wind storm came through about a week ago and left the place a wreck.  The clean-up endeavors involved a vast array of tools from weed whip to chainsaw, and most everything in between.  During the course of my chores I was reminded, once again, that there are plenty of usage and meaning voids in the English lexicon.  I think we need a term for that particularly enraging inability to get lopping shears around the branch you want to cut due to the inability to see it through the other branches or the skewed angles at which one is often forced to attack the offending branch through the brush.  "Lopper Rage" seems many degrees too banal and not nearly visceral enough for that moment of blinding white infuriation when you can't get the mother$*!#&^% blades... around this mother%$*$#(@ branch... !!  Shwew.  Sorry.

Minor clipping conniptions aside, I soon found myself wandering between a good amount of brush, piles haphazardly dotting the yard.  I decided to drag it to one corner that abuts the woods in back, and just yards beyond, a steep drop off to the forest floor deep below.  It had occurred to me in the past that this would be a nifty spot for a ground blind as it overlooks a rather open section of the forest often flooded by the creek when it overflows its banks in spring.

I hadn't gotten around to building the ground blind before now, in part, because I am not a bow hunter.  Nor am I predisposed to be one, truthfully.  For decades, autumn weekends have meant tromping along behind a good looking mutt or two, and swinging on startled birds as they claw and flap for altitude before the backdrop of standing corn or golden leaves.  I've suffered more than a moment's pause thinking about trading all that to sit in a tree waiting for a deer to walk by.  Still, with the weeknight opportunity staring me right in the back deck (I could see the blind as I sit here if I cut just two spruce trees down), that personal opinion is bound to change.  I only wish the urge had truly struck in time for me to be ready to bow hunt now.  That, of course, would involve the possession of both a bow and the ability to shoot it well, apart from a good many other things, none of which I see laying about here.

So I rearranged a few landscaping ties between a tree and couple well-driven re-bar stakes on the precipice of the the drop-off, and screwed down a scrap of plywood to give myself a fairly level platform on which to park a handy chair.  If the whole works isn't actually cantilevered out over the abyss, it's close enough to feel like it sometimes.

All that was left was to drag in my recently trimmed brush, and have a good sit., which I did almost immediately.

Huginn's Aerie- with all the eye rolling, tongue in cheek pomposity I can muster

I've dubbed this new blind Huginn's Aerie partly because, if you're gonna pose as a faux-pretentious douche bag on the internet, as I sometimes find to be enjoyable here, you have to really swing for the fences to make it play.  And, more to the point, if you've managed to pick up some Norse mythology from anyplace other than the Marvel movies, you may remember that Huginn (or Hugin) is one of the ravens that flies all over the world and brings news back to the big cheese, Odin.  The name Huginn comes to us from the Old Norse "thought," and so I chose him for a namesake because that's what you do most of the time in any blind -- you sit and think.

Sometimes you ponder the actual hunting happening in front of you, but just as often the mind wanders wherever it pleases.  In a few short evenings of sitting and cogitating, I've already seen a respectable array of passers-by including the resident pair of great horned owls (I'd guess Jacinda has flown the coop for greener patches of hardwood, but I know little of juvenile owl habits), the somewhat more secretive (but still a local denizen, I believe) sharp-shinned hawk, a red fox, a family of three lumbering raccoons, annoyingly screechy blue jays (of course), plenty of deer, and chippies and squirrels too numerous to count. The most comical and consistent visitor thus far is one spectacularly unafraid chipmunk in particular, who seems to quite enjoy gnawing hazlenuts right in the blind with me, well within kicking range were I so inclined.  I'm probably the interloper, probably built the blind right on little dude's house, but he seems happy enough for the company and we get along in any case.

Almost all the green you can see in this view from The Aerie (except the
blind itself in the foreground) is invasive buckthorn,
about the only deciduous plant still green in the woods.

I got to thinking about buckthorn while taking in the sunset the other night.  If you've ever left the gravel parking lot at the trail head anywhere in this part of the world, you've encountered buckthorn.  You can't not have.  It's as ubiquitous as it is detrimental to native plants.

One of the main "ploys" buckthorn uses to out-compete native species so effectively lies in its ability to green up first in spring and stay green longer than most other woodland plants in fall.  With just such an extended growing season, it has little trouble sucking up more sun and nutrients, growing faster and longer, and choking out the less aggressive species around it.


Check it out.  This nimrod is about to wade directly into a possibly derisive religious discussion right in the middle of his perfectly harmless little outdoor blog.  Idiot...

I am and almost always have been more of a science-y guy when it comes to explaining the universe and everything in it.  It's more comfortable for me, but due maybe to my upbringing, I do believe there is a higher power out there somewhere as well, humming along in the background.  It, this higher power, is just very much more hands-off in my mind than it is in the minds of some of my more religious friends.  It may be there, but we don't hang much.  And I don't go in the for the big beardly guy sitting on a cloud either.  If anything, I hope it's Morgan Freeman in an all white suit.  That'd be pretty rad.

Nor was I ever much of a "be one with the forest" crystal-wearing spiritual New Age type, until one day when I thought about it through the prism of the periodic table.  If you look at the most populous elements in the universe and the most common materials in us as people, it's the same stuff.  Excepting helium which doesn't really do much for us at the temperatures we hang out in, you check off the list of stuff floating around out there... hydrogen, oxygen, (hi, we're predominately made of water), carbon... we are quite literally one with the forest, not to mention everything else that ever has been.  It's all from the same box of Legos.  Everything that is ever gonna be was puked out in a few seconds or so, and that's it.  We're molecularly one with most everything... or at least the four percent of the universe that isn't dark matter.  That's a different blog entirely.

So as I sat there, elementally at one with the roley-poley raccoons and brave little chipmunk, wondering how many gallons of  Roundup I'd need to put a dent in the local buckthorn population (now is the time of year, after all), it occurred me that maybe it was "meant to be" in some grand plan.  Maybe God or whoever is in charge has decided that buckthorn should take over this corner of the world, and that's just how it is.  And that kind of thinking brought me to thinking, in a roundabout way, of the classic God of the gaps conundrum.

God of the gaps, simply stated, is the practice of inserting God into any situation that science cannot define or explain.  It is taking the holes in our understanding of the world as proof of God's existence.  I have no problem with that on the face of it, except that it leads, without fail, to one massive problem.

Think about when there was a lot more stuff we could not understand scientifically.  Gravity, Newtonian physics, the motion of the stars and planets, self tanning lotion.  Many of them were given to God of the gaps through the ages -- the universe revolved around the Earth because God said so.  Fair enough.

Until we are able to put the observations to a thing, to formulate hypotheses, run ever-evolving experiments and prove scientifically why or how something happens or doesn't.  When that happens to a phenomenon previously attributed to God of the gaps, that deity becomes, by definition, nothing more than an ever-receding shadow of the unknown.  I don't like the thought of that.  It's jarring to me.  I much prefer the Morgan Freeman model, as a matter of fact.



This is what happens when you get some time in a new blind to hash things over.  At least it is when I do.  I'm old enough now that I can occasionally have upwards of five to seven complete thoughts before boobs pop in again, and put everything else back on hold.  I'd be babbling about even more random topics here if it weren't for the one thing I'm most excited about in The Aerie.

There are deer here.  Seemingly lots of them, to my frame of reference.

I'm used to deer hunting in the much larger, much thicker northwoods where deer have not been nearly as common as they are down here for quite a few years now.  There are wolves and bears and inexorably long, cold springs up there that often lay waste to the deer herd.  And there aren't thousands of acres of corn and soybeans for the deer to leisurely grow fat and abundant on up there, as there are down here.

I saw 5 deer the first evening I sat in Huginn's, and that was mere hours after I'd been in there stomping around, raising hell with the chainsaw and stinking the whole place up.  I've gone entire rifle seasons up north without seeing that many deer.  Hell, I think I've gone entire consecutive rifle seasons without seeing that many deer.  Not that you'd ever convince me to hunt during gun season anywhere but The Camp as long as they'll have me, but it is rather exciting, even somewhat startling, to actually see deer every half hour or so while sitting on a stand.  What a novel concept.

I may have to get into this bow hunting thing, after all.  And quickly.

Buckthorn about to block the vitals.  Imagine that.  Call in the Roundup truck.

Stop Sucking

Holding expertise does not always result in good teaching.  We've all had the express displeasure of being taught by less than stellar educators.  Not just in the classroom, but also in life, and for the purposes of this blog, in the field.

I've been told many times that I should've been or still should be a teacher.  The numbers are probably skewed simply because I know a lot of teachers and everything looks like a nail to a hammer, but it happens fairly often that somebody says, only half mockingly, "Dude, you shoulda been a teacher."  I disagree.

Even in the few areas in which I hold a modicum of expertise, my teaching style often leaves quite a bit to be desired.  Holding the knowledge is not the same as being able to express it in an articulate and useful manner.  I can easily recall more than one instance in which a session showing somebody how to tie a fly or make a roll cast devolved into near-silent charades, ever increasing in intensity until both of us were frustrated almost beyond caring.  Monkey see, monkey don't.  When I get flustered in a demo situation, my usually acceptable command of the language largely sublimates into the wind, and I'm reduced to mumbling idiocy.

Stop sucking, just do the shit like this! may have actually passed from internal mantra to verbal exhortation on occasion, though only with the buddies I know can take it while happily pointing out everything I stumble over.

Pro Tip: if you ever get the urge to teach your significant other to fly cast, just slam your head in the truck door a few times, and get it over with before you start.  The only time I've bickered more intensely was the time we tried to put plastic film up on the windows together in an old apartment.  That stuff that probably saves three nickles on the gas bill, but takes a year off your life due to the stress of putting it up together -- divorce lawyers should sell that stuff in bulk.

Zeke gives spinning a shot on my vice by lantern light

I will say that when it goes well, introducing somebody to a new skill can be very gratifying.  A while back I was in New York for a fishing vacation with some friends from an internet forum.  My buddy Zeke and I sat down at the vice for a lesson in spinning and stacking deer hair on the hook.  I managed to remain coherent and somewhat informative, he didn't get frustrated, and all went swimmingly.  As it ended up, a line of people formed at the table to take their turns at spinning hair, and I had to rush at the end to catch the evening bite out on the lake, grateful and humbled to have been looked to for a bit of instruction in something I am fairly practiced at.

It doesn't always go so smoothly.  I once found myself watching late night baseball with an inebriated Argentinian college student in a dorm room in Portland, Oregon.  You heard me.  We'd returned from a long night on the town with a group of students, and I was none too sober myself.  I don't recall now what happened to the rest of the group, but there we were, suddenly alone with the Mariners on the tube.  Saturday night rock stars.

While I'm no baseball expert, I am a patriot and fan with a comprehensive understanding of the rules.  Twenty-some years of fandom, however, did little in preparation to explain the simplest of baseball regulations to a wobbly South American struggling mightily to understand the game and remain upright on a bean bag chair.  Our little vignette here opens with a foul ball down the third base line.

"So, nothing happens if the man hits the ball outside those white lines?" slurred our foreign friend.

"Not exactly. It counts as a strike unless he already has two strikes.  If he has two strikes, then nothing happens.  Then it's basically out of bounds and a do-over."

The catcher then immediately fielded a foul pop to end the inning.  Slowly assuming the form and posture of a garden slug in the bean bag, "I thought you said nothing would happen?"

"Yeah... unless the defensive player catches it on the fly.  Then it's an out."

"What's 'on the fly'?"

"... so... you play soccer?"

Which goes to show there comes a point in our understanding of any subject or activity wherein we are able to pass over the details to take in the entire picture.  The little stuff becomes given that the big picture may play out.


Experts hold "conditionalized knowledge," meaning the knowledge they hold reflects context and situation, and they can retrieve it quickly without much additional effort in the corresponding instances.  Novices, by definition, cannot be so lucky.  They have to slog their way through seemingly important patterns and facets that may mean nothing in the big picture, but appear to hold the key to cracking the code at any moment.

We woodsmen look at the woods and see individual species.  How they might be useful to us or relate to the species we're chasing, be they feather, fur, or fungus.  We see systems and interconnectedness and where we'd build the lean-to if we had to spend an unplanned night.  The novice can't see that.

On the other hand, if I look at a spreadsheet full of numbers or a malfunctioning carburetor, my brains starts to go all soft and tallowy.  I hear the Benny Hill theme, and feel the need to go fishing.


No matter our level of teaching proficiency, it is our duty as outdoorsy folks of all stripes -- fishers and hunters, foragers and wanderers alike -- to teach.  To get outsiders involved in our favorite activities.  Not only to bring to them the same joy we feel out there, but to preserve our outdoor way of life.

I used to bristle at that thought.  My personal manner of getting outside involves a lot of getting away from, well... everybody.  That's not the right way or the wrong way, but often when I head out there, I'm hoping to pass my time without seeing another soul.

The thought of bringing others into it only to clutter up the joint once seemed so counter intuitive.  Why would anyone ever want to see more chuckleheads clogging up the trout stream?

The answer has become obvious with age and accumulated knowledge.  If we don't encourage others to partake, vast libraries of personal knowledge and experience will be lost forever.  Not only that, but when there's nobody left to practice our lifestyle it will be deemed outdated and inconsequential, ancillary at best.  It will wither on the vine.


The proliferation of technology as it pertains to our outdoor pursuits is a massive subject due an entire blog entry of its own here (and much more), but I will say that there are many examples of how it can be used for teaching and learning in the arena.  For me, YouTube plays a very large role.

I watch a lot of fly tying demos.  I have shelves full of fly tying books, and while they remain both useful and sometimes beautiful in their compositions, nothing beats seeing it happen right in front of your eyes, sometimes in high definition, with the ability to pause and rewind at will.

There are all sorts of fly tying teachers floating around out there in the YouTube ether.  They range in style, quality, and teaching ability across a wide spectrum -- from Brian Wise, whose videos of chunkalicious streamers are played back on fast forward to thumping music for those of us who have existing knowledge of the materials and techniques used, to Davie McPhail.  His very comfortable pace and euphonious brogue lend themselves to in-depth and relaxed, comprehensive instruction.  If you ever zoned out to Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting on PBS back in the day, that's the neighborhood Mr. McPhail inhabits to me in the fly tying world, and his videos are as mesmerizing as they are instructive.  A happy little pine tree lives right here...



This post is sort maundering out of control at this point, but I think what we're driving at here is that if you know how to do something, especially something outdoorsy where this blog lives, I think you should teach others how to do it.  Don't mind the fumblings and stumblings if your teaching style is as abrupt and stilted as mine sometimes is.  They'll be happy for the instruction.

Brian has been shooting woodcock since before I could dress myself.  When I think of proficiency in an outdoor activity, I often think of him.  The way he powders a bird, then thumbs another shell into that ultralight pump gun as an afterthought.  I'm grateful for his years of instruction, and happy to report that the young buck here can now often hit the bird before he does when we swing on the same one.  Sucks getting old, I'm told.

Of course, all the experience in the world, mountains of teaching and learning, can do little when the birds simply aren't there.  Sometimes you just have to follow the old guy's lead when he says...

... Piss on it, dude.  Let's go get a burger.

Zoning Out

I played golf once in college, and that was about the third time I'd ever been on a course other than to float tiny "boats" down streams and generally stomp around in winter.  I don't remember the circumstances that lead to me suddenly finding myself, squinting slightly dazed and out of place, on a driving range with my buddies Ace and Dean, but there I was giving it a shot.

I had an excellent teacher in the Aceman.  He was a single-digit handicapper at the time with the long, flowing swing employed successfully only by those of athletic grace unknown to most of us.  (An athletic prowess, by the way, that also allowed him to almost casually throw at extremely snappy velocities.  I can easily recall that distinctive rocketing hssssss of an Ace-thrown baseball -- the hiss you only hear when a ball has been fired from a serious arm cannon.  And the startling mitt POP! that would make people stop and look while we threw the ball around in the green space now occupied by the Kohl Center.)

There we stood on the recently rain-soaked range with a bucket of balls and a teacher whose very moniker had been earned through achieving a hole in one not once, but twice.  Ace is a good friend, so with undying patience he instructed me from the ground up.  Tips and pointers I don't remember about hips and elbows.  How this should feel and that should look.  Keep my hands here, pause there, and remember to breath.

I was headed for the PGA, and I hadn't even hit a ball yet.  After absorbing all the instruction I could hold, I stepped up to the tee for my first colossal hack, and unceremoniously buried the face of the club deep in the mud about a foot behind the ball.  A ball that remained frustratingly inert on the tee, completely unmoved by my ungainly thrashing.  It was then that I further considered dedicating my free time to becoming a mediocre fly fisherman rather than an awful golfer.

Somewhere in the midst of our later 9-hole round a wholly unexpected thing happened.  I'd hit a decent drive (one that didn't fly off on some oblique trajectory, actually landed in the fairway to the amazement of all),  and under Ace's instruction, I lined up my iron shot.  In that mystifying and elusive moment that happens only so rarely, I swung easily and made a fine shot.  More importantly here, I felt it almost immediately on the strike.

It landed pin high, on the left edge where he had told me to aim, and followed the natural slope of the green down so near the cup even I could make the putt.  I walked up, read the break correctly, and put it in the hole.  The remainder of my round was an ongoing and unmitigated catastrophe the likes of which they should've written brooding Norse sagas about, but for the briefest of instances, I'd known what it felt like to be "in the zone" on a golf course.

I don't think we really know what "the zone" is.  The fact that it may be different for everyone or may come in varying degrees of intensity for the same person make defining it even more difficult.  For me it involves a full immersion in the activity at hand.  Complete focus and control in that time span also play roles.  And the infamous time distortion people mention.  It felt like everything was happening in slow motion -- we hear and say that a lot when we talk about the zone.



It's a rare and beautiful thing to find oneself in the zone.  Even rarer to suddenly blip into existence there right out of the gate.

I took a walk in the woods behind the house this past weekend, armed with my much-loved bolt action .22 and thoughts of fried squirrel.  Hunting seasons had just opened that morning in Wisconsin, and I was primed and pumped to gather some protein.  A shotgun is often a more logical choice for early season squirrels, often obscured from the shooter with all the green still up, but my first tree rat hunt of the year will be with that nimble little Savage rimfire until one of us is in the ground.

I grew up shooting that peep sight, and had a bit of a tough time adjusting to scoped rifles when it became clear I was going to get more shooting opportunities using them in the low light conditions when bucks often appear.  I got comfortable enough eventually, but there still exists a smidge of hesitation and adjustment when I put my eye behind a scope that isn't there behind the Lyman.

It's to the point now, using that .22 with the peep on shots that test the limits of both gun and marksman, that it becomes nothing more than a matter of feel.  Meat conserving head shots are paramount to me on small game such as squirrels.  When Mr. Fluffy Tail appears before me at such a trying range that he is almost completely obscured by the front sight post and I lean the barrel against a tree for support, I hold on the center of his body, and give the slightest nudge with my cheek or left thumb as I take out the last bit of trigger creep. (I actually clench my teeth when I need to push left, making that little knot pop out on the corner of my jaw, and that does the trick).  I settle there, and with the lightest, almost inadvertent addition of pressure to the trigger, when I'm in the zone, the lead is well on past my dinner's far ear before he even begins his tumble to the forest floor.

I gave up, and contented myself with stealing his dinner.

It doesn't always happen that way, but it did twice on Saturday morning.  A welcome and surprisingly abrupt return to the sweet spot in a breeze barely hinting at the cold to come.  Monday morning I missed a much closer squirrel twice with a scatter gun.  Though, as if to present a convenient excuse for me which I'll gladly employ here, he was bounding along up in the thick green tops.


Comfort, and even a little time in the zone, did eventually come with the scoped rifles.  I remember the first buck I shot when I used to hunt over by the rifle range years ago.

I had a tree stand parked on a thickly poppled knob overlooking a beaver pond and the game trail that encircled its perimeter, supported by an aspen roughly the diameter and tensile strength of overcooked rigatoni.  It was a nice spot, but there was plenty of pucker factor in that little tree on windy days.

I'd grown comfortable enough with the scope by that point, but by some happenstance unknown to me, I found myself running through the process of the shot in my mind all through the season that year.  Even on the drive up, I concentrated obsessively on sight picture, trigger pull, and follow through.  While hunting, I ran the imagery through my mind on a near-constant loop like an athlete would do before a contest, as a way to remain alert on the stand.

Quit making me laugh, ya bastards. This is serious.

When that massive northwoods buck (OK, it was just a little forky) stepped into view, I was prepared.  For the first time in my brief career as wielder of a scoped centerfire, there was no need for pause or adjustment.  It was about the only time I've ever set the crosshairs immediately and precisely where I wanted them on an animal.  One of the very few times I pulled smoothly and saw the impact happen through the scope, saw the insides explosively become the outsides on the other side of his rib cage as clearly as if it had happened five feet away.  I guess sometimes you can pick the locks, and force your way into the zone.  I don't know why I don't more often.  I miss often enough that I certainly should.


That sweet spot of perfect execution is not limited to shooting, of course.  I most often encounter it at the fly vice and sometimes in the kitchen or sitting here spewing forth these tales of outdoor triumph and failure.

The doing of repetitious small tasks often leads me there.  Anything from spinning repeated gobs of deer hair on a hook to peeling a pile of spuds, the activity in question doesn't matter.  If I'm in the right mindset I'll make it a game, imagining myself in a contest to become the fastest and cleanest tater peeler this side of the ol' Mississip.  Soon I'm on autopilot, hands functioning with almost no thought given to their actions.

We used to talk quite a bit about that state of "rigorous autopilot" in drum & bugle corps (insert collective moan from the DSO fellas, I know.  Bear with me, gentlemen).  At that activity's highest levels, the search for perfection leads up a path that eventually comes to extremely small degrees of differentiation at the apex of a huge scale.  Minutiae and exacting detail rule your every performing thought at those tiny spans of separation.  Fractions of pitches and inches and seconds.   After hundreds of hours of rehearsal on a single piece of music and movement, so much information concerning technique and execution has been wedged into the soul of the player that he or she cannnot hope to perform at an acceptable level outside that near-mystical level of precision autopilot.  You just line up and twelve minutes later, panting hard and dripping sweat, they're screaming in the stands.  Deep in the zone.

The place I often find the autopilot zone most fleeting and frustratingly elusory also happens to be one of my favorite pastimes -- fly fishing.  More specifically, the glorious and terrible art of casting.  Much like the golf swing, fly casting is all about rhythm, timing, and feel.  And much like the golf swing, you can learn the basics in a short time, then spend decades working out the kinks to perfect it.  It's all long flowing loops and the poetry of physics in motion until it isn't.  Then it's tripping on line, strained epithets, and ugly coiled heaps on the water.



I have dipped a toe in the cryptic pool of flycasting zone on occasion, and a particular cast and fish stands out in the recalling of rare moments basking in that gentle glow.

A couple years ago I was invited to take part in a shakedown smallmouth trip on a Michigan river with my buddy Flockshot and his guide friend Aaron.  Even though we caught fish numbering somewhere on the north side of sixty that day, Flock may remember this particular fish when he reads this.  I'm not a whooping and hollering Fish On! type when I latch in to a big one.  Instead I usually go silent in concentration, but at the moment of this particular bite in the zone, I startled myself and everyone else by sharply bellowing, "Holy shit!" loud enough to shatter the gentle sussurations of a pleasant trip down the river.

My float had begun spectacularly far outside the zone.  Casting with a guide rod, on an unfamiliar river, standing at the bow of a raft I'd never been in, I was a towering beacon of suck.  Flailing like a crack monkey.  I couldn't see the solar system containing the zone with the Hubble Space Telescope.  With time and a couple smallish fish, I slowly improved.  Eventually, I got my wits about me and my act together, and began to fish like a moderately competent human being.

It was an odd day on the river, for me at least, in that we started with dink smallies, and the fish got progressively larger as we neared the end.  Maybe Aaron used his double secret guide mojo or the power of the beard to home in on the proper fly selection and boat positioning as the day played out.  Or maybe the fatties were too lazy to swim upstream to our launch.  I'm not sure.

Somewhere around the midpoint of the float, I found myself approaching an event horizon of imminent zonage.  Still in the bow as a guest, my cast had un-bungled itself into something resembling an effective fly presenting tool.  I spied a perfect lie -- an underwater log, barely visible from behind polarized amber shades, jutting into the current with that slick of pillow water behind it that denotes a washed out hole.  Overhanging brush provided both shade and cover for the hole, and a formidable defense against probing flies.

You forget to grin like an idiot when stumbling down out of the zone. 

Everything slowed.  I took a breath, a double-haul false cast, and laid a long, low cast perfectly just upstream of the log.  A quick mend gave the streamer a moment's pause, and it disappeared into the deep.  The instant my offering vanished from clear view I witnessed that slightly eerie signature apparition, that thing we're all chasing out there waving sticks around -- the torpedo flash and shadow of Darwin's own predator crushing the life out of a fly.

It was a great fish, though not my biggest of the day.  Probably not even the biggest that hour.  But it remains clear to mind (and heart) among countless other catches before and since because it happened when all things came together, when focus and motivation collided with loss of self consciousness at the zenith of control.

It happened in the zone.    

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...

  

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.