Short Loins: "The Crick"

The crick is high out back.  That's how one properly pronounces the word "creek" around here, by the way.  If an otherwise upstanding and well-adjusted looking person pronounces it to rhyme with "sleek," beware.  They might be from Minnesota... or worse.  Yikes.

We've recently enjoyed a tantalizing respite from lingering winter gloom -- it even got above freezing a couple times.  The melt started.  The creek swelled and went muddy.  It's high and robust still, with that cold steel cast a stream will sometimes take from a distance when it's newly invigorated and ripping through.  Not yet out if it's banks, the big runoff was cut short by a dip back down below the freezing mark, and it crested well below flooding.  Last year it topped its banks and filled a couple acres of low forest almost overnight, but it appears we'll avoid that this year.  Unless, of course, April becomes a month-long deluge as it sometimes does.  We're back to grey sub-freezing temps and gentle flurries for the moment.  All the mud is refrozen, winter refusing to let go for just a bit longer.

It's just a small farm country creek back there, fed by one spring at the head and a couple feeder trickles between here and there.  Down here in the lower wooded stretches it's warm and meandering before it goes through town and dumps into the big lake.  It's wide enough in a couple outside bends that wood duck pairs and singles will sometimes spend the night in fall.  I can hear their sharp, raspy zeep zeep whistles at dusk, and occasionally catch a bit of that brilliant drake plumage in the binoculars when the leaves start to fall.  There are no trout -- no game fish at all barring the occasional wayward spring walleye who made a bad turn somewhere in his spawning run.

When the water returns to summer levels you can cross in the riffles without getting your calves wet.  You can also go down there and catch creek chubs till you tire of it on, well... basically anything small enough.  The males turn rosy orange and get little bumps on their heads while spawning.  When you're twelve you call those bumps "horns," and giggle.  Then they're horny fish, and that's resoundingly hilarious because it's true.

The one time the creek is absolutely full of writhing life is during the the spring sucker run.  They pack in the riffles and runs, splashing up nearly out of the water when you approach the bank too loudly.  One could mosey down there with a net, and fill buckets with suckers sometime around the start of May.  I haven't done that yet, and I probably won't any time soon.  Firstly, I'd have to check the regs to see if it's still legal to dip suckers.  Nextly, I'd have to want to eat smoked suckers.



A long time ago, when we were much more malleable, Roadkill and I rafted this very water (though in a section farther upstream) during the spring runoff.  "Rafted" is a generous term, in this instance.  The raft was a flimsy purple and yellow toy, hastily purchased months before from a beachfront shop in Tampa Bay through the generosity of my father.

We were both broke college kids, which led to one of the exchanges with Dad that I hold fondly nearest my heart to this day.

Standing on the beach in Tampa, "Dad... um, I need some more cash."

"What for?"

"A prank.  Something kinda... mildly not legal."

Eyeing Road and I with equal parts suspicion and amusement, "Will a hundred cover it?"

The remainder of that story will have to remain a mystery unless you get me drunk around a campfire someday, but I will say that it involved covering the gaudy raft in black garbage bags and duct tape to remain unnoticed under the cover of darkness, a nighttime aquatic assault on municipal infrastructure, and narrowly avoiding the sweep of a bow-mounted search light while paddling like hell just like in a prison break movie.



So we were feeling pretty invincible the day we decided to run this creek in the midst of a full spring tempest in that raft, little more than a beach toy.  Road spent his youth in a small town, kicking at the dirt and playing in the mud just as I had, but he'd not spent nearly as much time in canoes, kayaks and rafts as I.

Naturally, that meant he took the bow of the raft, and I manned the stern.  I would've suggested this set-up in any case as the more experience paddler generally takes the back seat to do the steering around strainers and not drowning everyone part, but I don't mean to imply that I didn't have a good idea what was going to happen.  Or that I "forgot" to mention it to Road before we got started.

We put in up near the county road, and were almost immediately swept away in the high water.  There were standing waves and holes and pillows just like the Ocoee and Nolichucky runs of my youth, and we had a time of it keeping our nearly shapeless raft out of trouble with plastic toy paddles, but seldom have I had more fun.

The highlight of the run featured Road's world-class cussing talent, repeatedly rendered in the highest volumes humanly possible every time we bashed against a midstream rock.  There was little protection for him, kneeling in the front of our tiny craft never intended for this sort of use -- a few mils of vinyl between the repeated high speed collisions of patella with Ordovician dolomite.  His howling epithets were drowned out only by my laughter, and that raft was sinking fast by our journey's end.

We soon exited river right, fully drenched and shivering, but we were young and laughing and alive.

Short Loins: Red Squirrels Can't Walk

It's true.

Or maybe it isn't, but it seems like it.  Even at their most languid pace (if there exists such a thing in the red squirrel world) they don't walk very often.  They bound.  Grey squirrels will walk, especially under the bird feeders where they have little reason to move more than a foot at a time, but their diminutive crimson cousins almost always leap from start to finish, the length of their leaps being the only variance used to regulate their speed, which is most often frantic.

I know this because since moving to the country I've become an expert squirrel watcher.  You heard me.  If squirrel watching were an Olympic event, I would've been on the podium in Sochi.  There were squirrels when I lived in the city, of course, but not in these numbers.  Or at least not able to be viewed as a single scurry in these numbers. (Yes, I just Googled the proper collective noun for a group of squirrels)  I now live where there are a baker's dozen mature shagbark hickories in the yard, more in the woods, and the squirrels are surprisingly numerous.

And there remain hundreds of unfallen nuts on the trees yet

 2012 was an off year for hickory nuts here, probably due to the spring drought which hit particularly hard in this part of the state.  There were a few laying about, but almost not enough to bother with.  Last fall, however, we had a bumper crop.  Falling hickory nuts pinged of the steel roof of the pole barn with enough frequency and volume to keep me awake at night, like an especially percussive drippy faucet.  Driving down the driveway sounded like popping bubble wrap.  I picked up forty gallons of nuts, and failed to make a dent in the overall crop.

These nuts have been featured on the plate so often and in so many ways this winter, that frankly, I'm running out of ideas short of the classic brownies.  I recently chopped some up in the food processor with a handful of kale, and sauteed that up with caramelized sweet onion and apple.  I still don't know what you'd call that concoction, but it was downright fantastic on a pork chop.  Whatever the cheffy name be.

And the squirrels came from everywhere.  On a warm day this fall and winter, precious few as they were, it was not uncommon to see more than a dozen squirrels out there harvesting -- one or more for every tree, cumulatively.  Where the plow had pushed snow partially across the yard under the hickory trees nearest the house, in preparation for yet another potential blizzard, a perfect sheet of ice formed over the dormant grass.  I especially enjoyed watching the squirrels dig and pry there, slipping and flopping over as they worked.  When one of them did gain a single edge on a nut frozen to the ground, they'd poke and pry, chew and fight, sometimes even chattering in frustration, until they got the nut free.  That perfect rink of ice was soon pocked full of squirrel diggings so that it resembled a miniature minefield.

I'm comforted by that.  Let them grow Carya-fat and content that they will fill my stew pot from the neighboring woods all the more, come fall.




Surely at this juncture you've noticed that we're trying something a bit different with the above.  No sweeping panoramas of the hunting and fishing world, no waxing pansophic on the wonders of the natural universe and pike slime.  The muse has been away for quite some time now -- I heard she's vacationing in Aruba.

That's all well and good for her, but in her absence and in order to try to establish some more consistent posting around here, I'm going to be trying out a bi-weekly (ish?) format of shorter posts concerning the changing flora and fauna around here as spring comes alive.  I shall endeavor to come up with an appropriately snazzy and droll title for these mini posts as a group, like "Weekly Wildlife Journal" or "The Nature Report" or "Shit I Saw in the Yard While Waiting for the Dog to Pee" so that you may differentiate them from my regular, more sporadic stories when you see them linked on Twitfacetube, or however you usually find yourself here.

Fear not, gentle reader.  My normal, over-palaverous and wandering ramblings will still be featured here, as often as they come to me.  As soon as she gets back from Aruba.  Better bring me a t-shirt too.

Thank you for guinea pigging with me, voluntarily or not.  

Notes From Twenty Below

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (California), I was a wee beardless freshman attending the Rose Bowl with the University of Wisconsin Marching Band.  For a time no less than my entire childhood, our beloved Badgers had been the laughing stock and cautionary tale of Big Ten football -- seasoned basement dwellers, perennial losers.  Then, through some fortuitous twist of fate, I arrived in Madison just as the Barry Alvarez era of football domination was really starting to pick up a head of steam.  There was a t-shirt in campus stores back then that read, "Wisconsin Football: Not Just A Great Band Anymore."

The football team hadn't been to a bowl game, had scarcely completed a winning fall campaign, since dirt was young.  Then my class of band-mates and I came along to ride the coattails of the football team to four consecutive bowl games.  Spectacularly foresighted family planning by our parents, I have to say.

We played a pep rally at Disneyland early one day leading up to the game, replete with cardinal and white cheerleaders suddenly vaulting toward the heavens, crimson Whack-A-Mole against the clear California sky from my vantage point buried in a tidal throng of revelers; and rousing choruses of On Wis, Badger, Bud -- jargon for the playing of "On Wisconsin," "If You Want to Be a Badger," and "You've Said it All" sequentially.

I remember the fans of our Bruin opponents in the upcoming game were in the habit of approaching and abruptly screaming a unison, "UCLA!" at any group of people wearing red.  As startling (and a little "on the nose" for my tastes, honestly) as this repeated staccato demonstration of fandom was, I didn't begrudge them their right to a few pre-game antics.  I rather enjoyed them in fact, being an unabashed and hopeless rah rah guy when it comes to Wisconsin sports myself.  I hear "On Wisconsin" (especially the Soft and Strong version) or Matt Lepay screaming his patented touchdown call out of the radio while driving home from a bird hunt in October, and I can still go immediately and downright verklempt -- a little gooey in the middle with my forearm hair standing on end.

Back at Disneyland, my ragtag dirty dozen or so took to quickly yelling four randomly selected letters back in strong reply to the UCLA fans, a sudden cacophony of Tourette-esque GSCA! and PJRD!, which often left the blue and gold fans to carry on satisfyingly befuddled.

As we stood in yet another interminable line for some ride, we struck up a conversation with a family of locals, the vociferous bellowing of random alphabet soup having been omitted.  When they inquired about the weather we'd left behind back home, one of the fellas casually replied, with that subtle touch of implied hometown bravado, that it had been "four below" when we left.

The coiffed and over-sparkly California soccer mom asked without pause, "Four below what?"

"Below zero."

"You can't live like that!"

Commence with the bulging eyes and dismayed expressions of  horror.  They always regard you with something between pity and amazement in that moment, and follow up with the landslide of clichés concerning how they miss having seasons living in California, but would never trade it for a life below zero.

But you can live a life below zero, futbol mama, and we certainly have this year.  I'm hard pressed to recall a winter in which I've woken up to a negative number on the thermometer so many days in a row.  Honestly, I don't think I have -- at least when I've been of an age to competently balance the state of the woodpile against the severity of the forecast.



Swirling vortices of sub-arctic air always present some challenges in winter, as well as few high points.

Plastic breaks in the cold.  Over the years, I've been through three red plastic knobs on the Mr. Heater I use ice fishing.  You only really need it when the mercury is doing the limbo under the zero degree mark, and that is the precise point at which that plastic knob will shatter from nothing more than a startling glance directed its way.

The new squirrel guard comes with a five round clip, and turns them into stew.

More recently I rigged a homemade squirrel guard below the back bird feeder using a Frisbee, a pair of tin snips and a few squirts of flat black spray paint.  There is no doubt that it was ugly as a mud fence, but it was also effective.  I lubed it up with lard from the kitchen, and had more than one belly laugh at the squirrels beating feet like little machine guns trying to get up and over.  Until the temps remained well below zero for a week or more, and one intrepid tree rat attacked it with such vigor that it shattered in a half dozen pieces on the ground.

When the temp does plummet, though, the song birds are plentiful and voracious at the feeders.  By the dozens, they arrive in fleets to peck away at seeds and bob for suet, devouring birdseed collectively by the pound.  I'm looking at a red-bellied woodpecker and a handful of juncos right now.  I've seen both the tufted titmice (mouses?) and white-throated sparrows quite a bit this winter, though I don't recall them on the feeders of my youth.  Maybe I was just too busy ramming around like a nitwit to notice them among the more common players back then.

I especially enjoy watching a couple pairs of resident mourning doves sunning themselves at the base of the spruces and assorted evergreens at the back of the yard.  Twenty below zero, and there they sit all puffed up against the cold, looking nothing short of content.

There's a winter ritual around these parts and all over the north.  It takes place when entering a domicile or other familiar setting.  A person enters, and stomps the snow off a couple times, then sometimes gives a full body shake meant to ward off the following cold like a retriever coming out of the water, and says to anyone or no one in particular, "Damn it, it's cold out there!"  The leading expletive and any other intensifiers will vary from "golly gosh darn" to the other, more revelatory and satisfying end of the spectrum depending on circumstance, but I frankly find the entire rite a bit jarring and crass for some reason.  I prefer to aspire to the more serene and accepting state of the mourning dove, and skip the whole clomp and bitch routine.  Nansen and Amundsen didn't whine about the cold, at least not in my mind, and so neither will I.

Purple finches flit about like animated Christmas ornaments. Juncos hop and pace, almost never leaving the
ground. Doves remain stoic. They appeal most to my hereditary Scandahoovian winter serenity.

When you want to do nothing else outside, when the appeal of the woodstove and written word against the deep arctic stillness are almost irresistible, that's the time you should be out there splitting firewood.  Hunks of hardwood at temperatures above freezing, when driven with the maul or ax, often absorb the blow with spongy indifference.  Upon closer inspection, the area along the cheeks of the buried blade will sometimes reveal drops of water and sap being forced out by the intrusion of steel.

Make your very same swing below zero, however, and that piece of wood will likely clatter apart easily.  The open cleft will reveal an intricate and beautiful tat-work of icy crystals, and the smell -- at least if you're me -- will remind you of working next to Dad in flannel and sweat.


This is the time of the year when many of my cyber-friend fly fishing specialists (some known to me, others who remain yet faceless in our digital interactions) sometimes take to the ice for a little fishing to ward off the cabin fever.  You can only tie so many flies and watch so many fly fishing short films, even when most of them nowadays are exceptionally beautiful and well done.

Their skills on the ice, familiarity with the gear and tactics, and attitudes toward ice fishing itself vary vastly, from savvy pro to shivering newbie.  For my part, I was staring down a hole long before I ever picked up a fly rod, and still consider myself an ice fisherman converting to the way of the fly, even though I tie and cast much more often than I huddle over a Vexilar these days.  So I read and watch as they venture forth, and I try not to judge.  But if I'm completely honest, I do have to admit to experiencing a delectable sliver of schadenfreude here and there.  It happens while witnessing guys I admire and look up to in the fly fishing world, guides and fishers from the pinnacle of our sport, stumble through a day on the ice.  It's easier to remember they're just outdoorsy guys like me, in few ways deserving of my sometimes misplaced veneration, when you can watch them sort through stumpy bluegills and fall on their asses.  It's all just fishing, anyway.


I can clock my evening walk this time of year with the rise of Orion over the red pine at the end of the driveway.  I like to go out again and look at the stars before bed too, like how the air seems clearer somehow, the stars impossibly close.  Recently Jupiter was bright and clear up there, crowding in as close as it ever gets to the moon from our egocentric vantage point, and we did have a nice showing of the northern lights a while back before the clouds rolled in and cut the festivities short.  Last night was particularly clear and bright, the moon two days short of full.  We'd had a fresh bolus of powder in the afternoon, and it glinted and shone like fields of gems in the moonlight, the bare hickory and maple shadows gently brushing over but failing to erase their glimmering.

I stood fighting off the shivers (I somehow always think I can manage without a coat for the scant five-minute jaunt before bed), and tried to conjure some transcendent thought about our insignificance in the universe, but nothing came so I just stared at the moon.  The Great Horned Owls continued their sonorous nightly chorus.  The dog at my side snuffled deeply into a deer track, her protracted snoot and face buried up to her ears.

Then the fox that lives down by the creek started in with her strident bawling screech, and I remembered once again, beatitude cannot be forced.