The Camp Road

Note:  Some of you have seen this before.  Those of you close to me may recognize the date, and my reasons for recycling it, slightly edited, today.

He turns the wheel, and the truck noses tentatively onto the camp road.  Its tires won’t feel the monotonous, numbing vibration of pavement at highway speed for days.  He’s made this drive many times before.  It is an exercise in familiarity.

Through the decades-old red pines the sun sets, bruising the darkening sky deep shades of indigo and orange, a sight he rarely regards in the city.  He slows to take it in, reminding himself that looking is not the same as seeing.  Though he cannot abide the primitive structure and repetitive nature of old country tunes in his real life down below, up here he allows the simplicity of the music to wash out through the speakers and envelop him.  As happens so often, the proper soundtrack is necessary to get deep into the groove of this place at this moment. 

There are no majestic outdoor magazine cover shots to greet him on the road. No massive buck in the prime of his rutting glory, no black bear sow sending her cubs up one of the pines.  Still, he knows they are not far.  He shot his first buck not four hundred yards from here.  He was so excited that he almost didn’t believe when it fell, it’s antlers growing grotesquely in his mind as he raced back to the camp to bask in the glory that would be bestowed upon him by the men that he loved.  So he takes comfort in the fact that they are in fact there, somewhere.  He smiles as he realizes, once again, that seeing is not the same as looking either.

The lake now appears on his right, a simple kettle filled with cold, clean water.  He thinks that he should try to fish it sometime, but knows he might never get to it.  Some half remembered tale about perch the size of your forearm seeps like smoke under the door from the back of his mind, but he can’t remember if the story was even about this lake.  They all run together after a while.  A circular pattern suddenly describes itself on that door in his mind, branding itself there like an Ouroboros -- the snake eating it's own tail.   Tie some classic wet flies from the partridge he shot here last weekend, roll out some long, elegant casts to the sunfish cloistered in that enticing bed of lily pads, fry those fish and enjoy over some beers with the boys, then have one of those boys guide him to another shimmering Popple thicket full of grouse to harvest more feathers.  Repeat.  A perfect circle.  The thought dissolves as the final beam of setting sun breaks him from his reverie.  His casts are only long and elegant in his dreams.

He glances over to the passenger seat, and she is there.  Shining like she used to before the surgeries and pain so smugly robbed her of that infectious, gleaming smile.  He’s known the memory of her was coming since he pulled onto the highway over four hours ago.  It is part of the reason he makes this long drive.  He tries to remember the music of her laugh one more time, but he still can’t.  He wonders why, but is not sad.

He is nearly to the camp now.  He is no longer thinking, merely remembering.  His mind is awash in short vignettes from years past on this road– digging out of a snow bank with an ice fishing skimmer… ambling alongside his hunting buddy’s long strides with no particular destination in mind… rattling the frame of his old truck off every rock and rut with another tale of the perfect hookset or most imperfect shot… stopping to collect himself so they wouldn’t see his suffering…suddenly noticing that he no longer suffers every time down this road.  Yes, a fine road indeed.

He draws to a slow halt in the yard, the warm inviting glow of the kitchen spilling into the night, illuminating cords of split and stacked oak.  The sweet, acrid smell of wood smoke permeates the cab of the truck.  He sits quietly.   When he does open the door, he is brusquely greeted by a cold, hard late autumn wind.  He is immediately reminded of a story his father enjoyed telling.  His father had once witnessed a shirtless Oregon man, standing defiantly in the chill spray of breaking winter surf.  His father had asked the man why he was enduring the torturous cold while the icy spindrift had cut at his own face.  The man replied, with a devilish gleam in his eye, “Because it is real.”

This is real, he thinks.  This is what I was built for.  He gathers his travel gear from the rear of the truck, and feels his familiar way through the darkness to the door.  He opens the door, is greeted by the sound of a familiar story being told around the single homemade table, and is grateful for the camp road that got him here.

For Erin.

JuJu, Rhinoceros, Apophenia

"Good Luck.  Be Safe!"

I've had those two short sentences said or written to me maybe a dozen times this week.  Deer camp is coming, and those are the prevailing sentiments.  Good luck getting a deer, but more than that, please come back home with all your parts attached and in working order.

Relative safety is achieved without too much trouble.  I hunt in an area without a lot of other hunters, I'm using a better safety harness in my tree stand this year, and I trust the men I hunt with implicitly.  Most of the fatalities associated with hunting occur when hunters fall out of their tree stands, or suffer some sort of heart problem anyway.  Either when Bullwinkle walks out in front of them or when they are attempting to drag a  deer out of the woods.  Shooting accidents do happen, but they are much less common than a chunk of bacon getting snagged up in a ventricle.  I have been much more frightened for my personal safety driving down the interstate than I ever have doing any type of hunting.

Luck is an entirely different matter.  We don't even know what it really is or if it exists.  In our struggle to define it, we assign random values, willy-nilly, to random occurrences until such time as we can link a certain outcome with a certain occurrence.  It's all very slipshod, but that doesn't prevent us from spending massive amounts of mental energy on it.  I'm sure it varies from person to person, but I think most of us have our own little rituals or talismans that we secretly believe help achieve a given goal.

I have a little pewter rhinoceros on my key chain.  It must be moved to the zipper of my hunting coat at the start of the gun deer season or I will surely go the entire year without so much as catching a glimpse of a deer.  I shot my first buck two days after I'd clipped that little guy to my coat, and now I have greatly diminished confidence if I do happen to forget him on my key ring back in camp.  God forbid I ever lose him.  I'd have to quit deer hunting.

There is a shirt that I prefer to wear under my vest while wading in summer.  I'm not going to go as far as calling it a must-have lucky shirt, but I certainly prefer to wear it.  If fits me well, wicks away moisture, and matches the trim on my favorite Fishpond vest, if nothing else.  It's important to look good on the stream -- never know when you might run into a mermaid.  If it doesn't bring actual luck, it definitely brings ease and comfort, two qualities in high demand when my notoriously sketchy fly casting starts to go sideways on me once again.

Just like mise en place in the kitchen, I think our little superstitious ticks help bring order to a world that can quickly ramp up to a Category 5 shitstorm if we enter into it ill prepared or disorganized.  Having everything in its place, including little trinkets, not only boosts confidence, but helps us to be more productive and level headed when it's time to rock-n-roll.

Apophenia is defined as perceiving connections in unrelated phenomena.  Or seeing meaningful patterns where none exist   This is where hunters and fishermen truly shine.  We see connections everywhere that may or may not be related.  Ask any fisherman why the fish are biting better (or not as well) today, and you'll get almost as many opinions as there are fish in the sea.  Everything from barometric pressure to sun spots, water temperature to wind direction, moon phase to static electricity -- all have them, and many more, have been thrust to the forefront as the cause of victory or defeat on any day in question.  I have literally stood slack-jawed in front of some of this armchair science, while at the same time, having absolutely no way to refute it.

Of course there are professionals, guides and commercial fishermen, tournament anglers and avid locals, who seem to have an uncanny ability to read their home water.  They've been fishing the same water for years, and have gained a sixth sense for how the lake "feels" today.  I realize this happens all the time.  The accumulation of vast amounts of data stored in an experts mind can result in pronouncements and catches that seem to border on the mystical.  But that's all it is, trial and error refined by experience.  The "10,000 Hour Rule" espoused by Malcolm Gladwell fits well here -- true expertise in any field comes from performing any task for roughly 10,000 hours.  I'm gonna need some aspirin and my tennis elbow arm band thingy after that much casting. 

It was once a common belief that Northern Pike lost their teeth in winter because they became more difficult to catch, and therefore, must have stopped eating until spring when their slightly frightening chompers would reappear for another summer of terrorizing perch.  We now know this to be patently false, but it was asserted as truth for decades.

Hunters are the same way.  We stand around tailgates and campfires trying make sense of what we have seen.  Deer trails go cold, birds seemingly disappear, coyotes stop responding, and we are forced, by our nature, to attempt to make sense of it all.  They stopped feeding, or it got too cold, or too hot.  Whatever.  We grasp at any shred of evidence, and stomp it to gelatinous goo until it oozes down into the cracks of our reasoning like mortar.  Not that it's an entirely bad practice.  Often, we do stumble on a bit of key information by simply hashing stuff out with each other.  Brainstorming over pickled eggs and beer can produce results other than the gaseous emission kind. 

To any of you fellow deer hunters who may stumble upon this before heading out into the fields and woods this weekend I say, good luck and be safe!  And don't forget your lucky socks.

Camp Food

Deer camp is looming.  Of course, to my mind, that means thinking about the food.

There are a gajillion things to get in order during the next week.  I have to take care of everything from stopping my mail to getting an oil change.  I have to pay some bills and remember to set the thermostat down as a far as I dare.  Guns and blaze orange, boots and hats, it all has to make it in the truck.

And the cooler, of course.  There is no shortage of food at camp.  In years past I've brought everything from smoked grouse breasts to canned fish.

Northern Wisconsin being Scandinavian country, there is always a preponderance of pickled goods around the table at camp.  I've pickled pike myself.  Frisbee and I experimented for a few seasons, and finally settled on a pickled egg recipe fit for royalty.  If royalty like pickled eggs, I guess.  They are a bit of an acquired taste, but are also damn near the perfect food with a cold beer.  Frisbee has taken over the job of pickling the eggs in recent years, and continues to do a bang-up job.

There will be pickled herring, pickled wild onions, and a vast array of pickled vegetables to accompany the bloody mary fest on Tuesday morning of deer season.  As everyone knows, the guns get put away on that morning, as we rejoice in the world famous tradition of Bloody Mary Tuesday.  Alright, maybe it isn't world famous quite yet, but it is the day I look forward to the most of all.

If you've been reading this blog at all, you know I love to hunt and fish.  Deer season is no different.  It's a chance to escape into the woods, and be quiet for a while.  But after three days, most of us are ready for a respite from shivering in a tree or on the ground.  And the people come from miles around on Bloody Mary Tuesday, quite literally.

Yard full of trucks means it's Bloody Mary Tuesday

If memory serves, we had 22 guys mashed into a tiny camp last year on BMT.  I adore it.  We eat, and drink, and tell the stories all day.  There is something almost magical about sitting around that table on that day.  Not to oversell it, it is merely a bunch of dudes of varying levels of sobriety, talking trash and telling jokes, but I can never get enough of it.  There's a chance that I might miss it this year because of this pesky career thing ruining my life, and it's killing me already, but as Dad used to say, "You wanna eat, you gotta work."

I learned to love head cheese around the table on BMT.  A peasant food since the middle ages, head cheese is not actually cheese.  It's a terrine made from the head of a calf or pig.  In lay terms, you take a head, remove the brain and eyes, boil the rest down, and pack it into loaf form.  The natural gelatin rendered from the head congeals when cooled, surrounding the delicious meaty bits, and forming a solid mass.  Then you slice it up and fall to, bloody mary in your other hand.  It takes a bit of courage the first time, but once that sweet seasoned meat jelly melts in your mouth, you're sold for life.  Meat lover's pizza is a misnomer.  real meat lovers know that head cheese is where it's at.

We're short of woodcock breasts this year, or there would be woodcock pate' again.  Woodcock has that livery taste that lends itself extremely well to the making of this outstanding cracker topper.  And it's a snap to make.  Fry up some timberdoodle breasts with shallots and garlic, and toss them in the processor.  Bash that up with some capers and a few other key ingredients not to be divulges on the open interwebs, and there you are, smiling again.

Pasties are a favorite of the northwoods, of course.  This pastry case filled with meat and root vegetables made it's way to this country from Cornwall, England with the Cornish miners who immigrated here with their mining skills and their recipes.  They worked both in the copper mines of the U.P. and the lead mines around Mineral Point, WI, so the pasty is popular throughout the state.  While the pasty has Protected Geographical Indication in Europe, meaning that the recipe and even the shape of the pasty are protected, they can vary more here in Wisconsin.  It's the perfect camp food as it's easy to warm up, and very satisfying after a long day in the cold.  It's a pouch of meat and potatoes, after all.  Very nearly impossible to mess up.

In our deer camp the meals are delineated by tradition.  I already know what I'll be having for dinner all of next weekend.  It adds to the anticipation factor when you know whats coming.  I haven't had that lasagna or that stew since last year, and I'm looking forward to how the leftovers of each will taste.

Of course deer, camp isn't the only camp of the year.  There are fishing camps and bird hunting camps as well.  While some of these do take place in remote cabins, they've also taken place in campgrounds, decrepit seedy motels, and illegal campsites on public land.  Those signs that say "No Camping" are merely a suggestion most of the time, as long as you don't get caught.  The tastes and foods of these camps vary as much as the hunters and fisherman who populate them, but I've come to discover there is often a discernible pattern.  That being, the stronger the taste or smell, the more popular it is.  Think about an annoyed wife or girlfriend, face scrunched up in utter disgust, stating emphatically, "You are never eating that again in this house!"  You're on the right track.

Kipper snacks stink up the joint nicely, but taste like heaven.  People will fawn and tumble over smoked salmon.  Others sing the praises of smoked Cheddar and Gouda.  Finding a guy who won't devour an entire chicken form my smoker can be a challenge.  Yet, suddenly and without explanation, these same, seemingly sane people, will consistently turn their noses up at smoked herring packed in oil.  They might even be repelled on horror.  I don't get it.  Kippers are another perfect food for the field.  They pack well in the vest when you're on the move.  All smoke and salt and oil, there is hardly a better snack on the tailgate with a beer after a long day of walking.

Stinky cheeses are another favorite.  In this part of Wisconsin, that means Limburger. There's no getting around it, a three month old Linburger smells like farts and feet.  The bacterium used to ferment Limburger is the one of the same bugs that compels us to shower regularly and wear deodorant.  But it is so creamy and delicious.  At our old fishing trailer on the Mississippi River, Limburger was a staple.  Spread on a chunk of pumpernickel, and downed with a slice of sharp radish, we could barely keep it in stock.  You didn't want to be within three counties of that trailer the following morning, but that is just part of the fun for most of us adult boys.

I'll admit, there is one camp food I cannot do.  My nemesis is the antiquated and venerable Blind Robin.  I don't know the origin of the recipe or the colorful name, but I do know that salt in those quantities is unnatural no matter how much cold beer you have on hand.  Extremely heavily salted herring fillets, Blind Robins have fallen out of favor in recent years, and for good reasons, I say.  Good riddance, with apologies to my friends Brian and Dick.

I'm on my way up to camp today to get ready for the upcoming deer season.  I'm looking forward to seeing the fellas, I can't wait to check my deer stand and possibly hunt up a few grouse, and I can't wait for all the yummy smoked, pickled, and salted snacky food.

And maybe one or two of these...