NINETEEN SEVENTY

If you ever get invited to a seventies party, cut and run. No. Run. To hell with the cut part.

In an earlier post I described the recipe for pure trouble. This was a seventies party devised by members of the same tribe as before. Given some and taken others. I'll describe the scene back then, in the seventies.

It's 1973:

That's Joe Cool in the top pic. One Nine Seven Zero youth defined. Laid back. Big, big ass matching bottoms. Perfect hair with stylish accoutrements. Joe is peaking on the latest mix of cocaine and whatever form of heat was handed to him last. He's feeling right and tops and chicks have been on him all night. All of the other dudes, gay and straight, are staring.

The atmosphere and the mirrorball are making him look all the better at the party and soon, as shown in the second pic, he decides to show off some moves. He's got plenty of hot ones, this Joe; for sure. For sure. He can point. He can sweat. He does IT ALL!

At just the right moment on the tune the best flamingo in the party joins him. The looks in the crowd tell her that he's got all the other boys beat and she matches him, hip for hip. They move, they groove and swing and duck. The dance crowd goes crazy and everyone joins in.

Later, more guests arrive with groovy brownies and more cocaine and food and Joe, with the aid of this new girl, digs in. Everyone parties and dances, chills and spills and dances some more...

In the morning, after that wild party Joe wakes up with a hangover and realizes that something has happened.

He realizes that it's nineteen eighty five. Saturday morning in June? What the hell? Are those my kids? What's with the short hair! OH MY GOD! They're not being DRAFTED are they?! Does the army really pin their jeans at the bottom like that! Son! What are in all of those pockets?! To his dismay, his mouth tastes like the haispray he uses and DAMN!... with the BeeGees still pound, pound, pounding in his brain, feels as though he's being nuetered with rubber bands!

Poor Cool Joe decides to go back to bed to try and sleep it off.

The real Joe in the pic went home early, before he tripped on those gorgeous trousers.

Clink the glasses

A legendary New Years locale. There's no power or running water. Hence, no one puking on your shoes or spilling your beer.

Stupe and the original renegade pacing part of the cabin fleet; a 1973 Polaris TX.

The Polaris with original owner.

The fishing was slow on new years eve. We thought for sure we'd get some action with a low front and some snow coming in. I thought the sunken island would hold some fish but no one wanted to paddle out that far fearing the east wind would pick up.

The DA swatting dogs off of a new set of skate skiis.

Isn't that just delicious?

We hung this for some light...

...didn't need it. Burning the deadfalls and an old dock made of spruce.

The DA recovering with Rudy, a springer puppy with a good life ahead of him.

Hope yours is good, too

Happy New Year.

Tribute

Recipe for pure, pure trouble;

Marry a finn.

Mix in some swede blood.

Add sister and sister in law with similar attributes.

DON'T STIR!!

Let combination meld for undetermined amount of time.

Ingredients will seethe and compliment, plan and undermine.

Add wigs, stretch hummer limo.

With an extreme amount of appreciation to the aforementioned, lovingly blend in time and care.

And Rock-n-Roll.

Happy Thirtieth Birthday to the DA!

Backlash Four, Three Rivers

Late June and the boat calleth. Since theres so much damn water here to see, an exploratory daytrip nearby made sense. Bragging about faraway destinations lacks soul if you don't know your own backyard, so Stupe and I made the Little Isabella, Isabella, Snake route.

Set up in the boat at the L Isabella landing.

L Isabella, first portage.

Stupe noticed the cow, but again demonstrates that upland birds are her pot o' gold.

Last portage on the L. Isabella. Stupe makes the blaze and assures me no suprises await. Like bear cubs.

When my brother first moved to spring creek country, we fished the pastures. Once, when moving to and from a run, we passed a cow. He remarked, "You have to wonder, that cow could be thinking nothing or, 'I'm gonna eat this guy'". You never can tell. Same with moose. The animal will almost always move off. When chin deep in the BWCA, always keep in mind the long slog out if a fiesty moose decides your boat would be better off with a hole punched in the bottom of it.

Aforeseen bull where, at top right, L Isabella runs into Isabella proper. Stupe and I had some cheese and crackers and a cold one and watched the moose mow the river bottom. Hungry fella.

Isabella rapids number one, this one was runnable but we portaged.

Isabella flowing, at right, into Bald Eagle Lake. Twenty pound Northern Pike like to attach themselves to your stringer of walleyes in this water. The pic is taken at the end of the seventh of ten portages on the trip and the second longest at 141 rods. This is a prime spot to pitch hell and whatnot on a nine weight and have a real shot at landing a big Pike. But it ain't free. The last portage is the longest at 198 rods, which is the trail from the parking lot to the Snake River which leads to Bald Eagle. Hope you have a light boat.

Backlash three, Bwca sawbill two

PREFACE:

According to NOAA;
Fifteen below zero at 10:30 pm, Nov 30 2007.

Give thanks, 'coasties and southerners. You get open water.

I'll post some stuff you wish you had done from my summer now that the weather is good for working on the honey-do list, unless you want to see and hear about me taping sheetrock.

90 degrees. The walleyes are off. Beer available. Lake is warm.

S-Rod, this year's sponsored mexican, introduced us to a form of relaxation he calls "diapering".

After watching us float like dying whales or kicking the lake to a froth, the Don himself decides to demonstrate the proper prerequisites for total denial of gravity. With a leap he was afloat, and witnessing his instant gratification, all of us followed. We wished for the knowledge sooner.

Given ideal water temps and atmospheric conditions, bliss is near.

Taken from the campsite.
Some classic summer fishing. The crew members are floating around to see what might happen. This is how tourists smash fish records to bits. Feet up, dangling lines, and then something pulls the canoe to the bottom of the lake. You can be as hardcore as a twenty ton piece of granite about anything. If you don't lay back and watch how the water hits the boat every now and then, you'll wish you had.

The poles sticking out of the bow and stern have yellow deer hair and rubber legs attached to them, just in case.

A pre-diaper shot of the Don. After viewing the picture shortly afterwards, we decided that total serenity or absolute stupidity gives a man enough courage to dive the way he does. Out of ten, the water entrance was a solid eight.

Shortly after landing at the campsite. Very shortly. Very, very shortly. We recognized some challenges. Yes, rookie campers, animals learn by and from you. After chasing this little fella off of the plates for two days, we trapped his ass and hung him from a tree in a large plastic bottle. There he witnessed the goings on for awhile. Then he was released unharmed. He was seen no more.

Backlash two, bwca sawbill

A meal in late June in camp. I chose Sawbill Lake this year for its darkness, thinking that the hex's would be there. They were. Portages are customary on our annual trips but we decided to stay on Sawbill. Hence, the football and chairs got the nod on this one and I'll be damned if I know how my brother in law squeaked that sink drain in between the thwarts.

Backlash one

Another adage; it is said that, where I sit by a nice pine fire, there are four seasons. Almost Winter, Winter, After Winter, and Road Construction. An educated guess in it's origins might involve a real inventive sport to blame for the coining and word of mouth with the snowbird gang and barflies to name a few. Like many, it is a twisted tale.

A disagreement:

During Almost Winter, the leaves go psychedelic. You can explore previous posts. There you'll find good times, folks. Good times.

The After Winter period revels in waiting for the Big Thaw.

The mouth of the home water. The river is pouring over the frost line, six feet up from lake level. When the line backs to the first rapids, game on for the first river steelhead. The Pond is at the left in back and early this year served as catalyst for The Thaw as well as major and minor tackle preparations.

Very exciting this After Winter is. For afterwards, one gets all dirty with fish.

Winter. At it's birth, forty degrees is a three layer consideration. Near it's death, t-shirts at thirty-five and sunny. Shorts and crocs for the adolescents.

In between; Sixty below windchills or a frozen lake so quiet you can hear a pin drop in six fresh inches on the far shore.

More to come. It just got born.

Road Construction equals summer. Here, the main thread gets wider and straighter to accomodate the tourists. Along with winter, it's aptly named. Frost heaves up on rock and clay with passion and lust. They feast on road the whole while.

Spanning three or four months of real summer-type weather, Road Construction seems a short, memorable season.

Getting off on the scenery, waiting for the deer.

I was pondering the vintage 1972 Polaris at this stage of the game and how it will pack me and a load of essentials onto a trout lake covered with another fifteen inches of ice for another winter.

Richard scouted this clear cut and in the middle of the first week, staked a blind and sat down here. He spent the first twenty five minutes of his season watching for deer and the end of the twenty sixth killing an eleven point. You watch and listen to the old dogs in all styles of life. If you don't, you're effectively turning tail on the crystal ball.

There's gunsmoke still coming out of T-mos' 94.

A quarter mile in.

Timber wolves. The night after Richard shot his deer, they followed the trail into the blind, tore up the spot where the deer was hit, tracked the run, ate the gutpile, followed the drag, and fucked up the ground where the deer left terra and entered truckbed. In an order few or none have been privy to. The spot is near epicenter of the densest population of wolves in this country. I did think about that when going back in for a field dressed deer. Sans rifle.

Still another cutover picture. There's the truck. Halfway there. The son of a bitch didn't look this big. Thank God for snow. I should have stripped those layers. I'd have chopped those antlers by now. I wish there was a little bit more snow. Fuck those four wheelers. This is fun. I'm having a brewski when I get back.

Every time I make a cut, there's a plan. Hollandaise here, bleu cheese butter there.

And a perfect one for mucking straight.

A pic for a fellow whose love of meat goes right to his email address...

Cut and Wrapped

I was thinking of holding out for a buck until a fat doe trotted out this Saturday. A fat doe equals a hundred and forty, dressed.
A big set of antlers or a really heavy deer makes for good bragging rights and rightly so. I'll pass for the fishing and the bird hunting that takes up the time to scope trophy racks. The freezer is (very freshly) full of chops and steaks and roasts and a big pile of quality grind ready to be made into any tasty thing.

Common anomalies

When an aspen tree grows up with any variation of climbing vine wrapped around it, here's what happens:

These are some of my collection in various stages of finishing.

I'll get around to making a groovy flytie table and maybe even take a crack at a chair when I find just the right specimens. Until and after then, they'll be another reason to exit indoors, mosey the "wilderness" and miss another blue ribbon edition of "Puking with the Stars".

A finished unit.

The more wraps the rarer, this is probably a one in a thousand find. Richard fashioned this walking stick. Now in retirement, he gets to think about important things more often, like wrapping romex around young popples in an attempt to create a real eye opener.

He's got a garage full and told me to turn my blog into a cheap garage sale. Comment on latest post if interested. You'll improve a SD pheasant trip for an honest Finlander if you do.

Another opener

Regular firearms deer season this time.

A sunrise, a sunset, and another sunrise later, I had a deer walk behind me and a forked buck tooling along with a six pointer pass right in front of me. They were in a hurry. For fun, I gave an estrus bleat (horny doe in a can) twice and it stopped the six-point long enough to flick an ear, hop the brush just behind the pine in the photo, and disappear downhill. I have no time for nicking running deer in heavy brush. Even less time for dragging it the mile it ran afterwards. Fack that.

Scorewise I'm ahead. Three deer through as opposed to none. No heavy weather. All the nifty shit that happens when your pieholer is shut and your ears and eyes aren't (super-duper especially when watching those addictive nighttime soaps like gheys anatomy),

and leaving the bullet riddled shore for some cabin hunting solitude.

The red carpet.

You walk on it. You clean it.

Checking off the list

Have you ever had Zup's venison sticks?

Partial whitetail deer preseason to do list:

Sharpen knife. (will it split a hen hackle fiber? How about in the air after you drop it?)
Buy license. (MN regular firearm zone one area 127 with antlerless bonus tag)
Check plat book. (It was county land the last time I checked, but best act responsibly)
Make sure T-mos is cool with me using his model 94. (T-mos is always cool, but best act responsibly)
If so, make targets for sighting it. (For a clean shot. At a deer.)
Get mega road trip style plastic bottle. (Whitetails disdain human urine as much as humans do. Well, real humans anyway)
Scope the aspen cutover and set blind. (At the risk of it getting stolen, this is to make sure I don't look up at daybreak and see orange in a tree stand anywhere. Also to naturalize the thing; Blind meet popple, popple meet blind)
Load a book onto the ipod (I watched a cow moose and her calf have dinner and bed down for the night from my tree stand three years ago. Then the sun set. Five hours turned into fifteen minutes, to my suprise.
I suck at sitting still. I'll plug in when the cutover goes quiet. The DA tells me the book she wants me to hear is a scary one, so I should be able to listen comfortably with a high-powered rifle in my lap and not get frightened, out there in the woods alone)
Dig the whole thing. (Only two weeks out of fifty-two for gun season. Six days if you dirt collar like me.)

American Woodcock

Back from a winterizing stint at the cabin with Richard. Pull the dock and Bunky the pontoon boat out of the lake, et cetera. And other generalities, like Richard exacting revenge on the cribbage board.

The American Woodcock is a migratory bird. Like ducks and geese, they travel in groups, landing in favored areas overnight or for a few days. Unlike ducks or geese, they are remarkably difficult to see after they do and must know it. A common technique used by reseachers for capturing live woodcock for banding involves a good pointing dog and a net. The dog points and the bird is netted on the ground. I've been told that the bird usually flushes before the person with the net can find it.

Richard counting primary feathers. It is difficult to dead-on determine the age and sex of a woodcock. Counting from the tip of the wing, the twelfth to fifteenth primary feathers give good indications of a birds' age and sex. Take notes on tip banding and mottling symmetrics.

Post test reward!

The recipe for Woodcock Ramake:

Breast filets of woodcock are carefully cradled in onion or green pepper the way julie cuts them. Wrap in a half of strip of bacon. Fresh ground pepper, maybe seasoned salt. Everyone knows the grill works best, but the oven works too. Use medium to low cooking temps to keep the bacon from flaring.

This photo shows ramake made with woodcock and grouse. If this doesn't look good to eat, an air freshener will help with the greasy, humid mcdonalds aura in your car or house. If still no go, peta is always looking for people to strap bombs to.

Richard's yellow lab, Rowdy, shows that the old dogs know what the game is about.

If that were a rattlesnake...

If I were fifteen feet away from a bird sitting in a relatively sparse pine in full daylight and the bird is abount an inch or two shorter than a grown rooster, I always believed I'd be able to spot it in a second. Stupe knew it was there, kept her trap shut and was looking at me real funny. I stared at the bird on the branch for five minutes. Put on your watch and look at something for five minutes. Then I got closer and closer until I could see that it's neck was bent at two forty-five degree angles and the tail was skewed way off to it's right side. It looked exactly like an eight inch chunk of branch. I looked at a ruffed grouse ten feet from me for minutes nonstop and I believed that it was not a grouse. By then, Stupe was bailing nervous circles and getting stoned on scent and then the bird gave a flinch. I've never given too much of a care for disintigration so I put one over the tree and we watched where it went.

Stupe takes another one out of the popples.

The home water takes a bath.

The same waterfall as shown in an earlier post. Rowdier. I took the previous picture from where the foam line is. I'ts rained here for two weeks steady with a day or two of what you might call letup and wouldn't call indian summer.

Thanks to some camp experience with real northwest coast steelheaders, the knee length rubber boots, dry firewood and chemical logs have been stowed just in case the water around here unblows before the season ends.

New structure

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Brule, ah. Brule. So subject to adversity. And raining like hell again as I write.

Five words for a rainy month in Minnesota

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Giggity.

The nature of things

Silent... (no story, DA very effective)

and beautiful. (no story, hard frosts ineffective)

Another pic and The Reason Why

A bronze banded ruffed grouse tail.

This ruffed grouses' tail displays one of the rarer color phases. The picture may not strike the viewer in the face with a hard left. However, it affords me to show the appreciative another thing on this earth that is pretty.

It also shows the log which it had chosen for it's drumming site. Crusty grouse hunters will see the proof. The drumming log is a spot where a male ruffed grouse flaps it's wings to attract mates. No bathrooms in crowded airports, just a nice secluded stand of aspen trees.

Stupe and I had just taken one (that's granola for "kill") and as I was gutting it (that's sportsman for "taking care of wild game") this bird drummed.

Stupe makes three long loops around where I heard the drumming and halfway through the fourth, zones to the center of said loops, points, and flushes the bird and after I get a precious wingshot, makes a good retrieve. Wingshots are always precious. Like Big Fish takes on a dry, the moments deform part of your brain and you can easily recall every single one.

My pop put guns in our hands when we were real young. By the time I was twelve and my younger brother ten, we learned just what a .357 magnum could do to a person who was on the safe end of the barrel and what it did to a sprite can that wasn't. Around that time there were shotguns too, and "don't you ever fuck around with these, either". But he still entrusted us to them, took us for long walks and car rides and showed us what the ruffeds were all about. Still I wonder why we never wore helmets through this.

This led to that and I met the DA. DA the dog person, who's dad, Richard, raised and trained gun dogs for years. On a fine September Saturday afternoon he asked me how my bird hunting has been. I told him I had killed four so far that season. He invited me to go with him the next morning and guaranteed I'd see twenty birds. I saw twenty two and was barely keen enough to notice which scenes his dog acted in. Will you spell s-o-l-d for me, people? Shortly after the Da and I had two dogs of our own. She conveyed the idea of dog ownership. I held my ground of little resistance. One of them turned out to be just about the best out of the box bird dog a Labrador can be. Richard sees this and says to me,

"You better hunt that dog because you'll never have one that good again in your life".

So we hunt, the season is short. And only Kings hunt birds and fish salmon.

Gigity.

The summer side of life.

Finnish marigolds.

By late July they looked like this. They got a transplant in September to a small patch of dirt near the house (for heat) in September and I took this pic this morning. Blossoms through two frosts. Year after year, they keep on rocking and rolling after the hardwood trees around here drop leaves and after the potatos and squash and beans issue their statements.

Children talk, and rivers and trees. People (never on tv) talk from time to time. These flowers are rather articulated, so I thought I'd blog'm.

Salmon in the home water

Since the weather was tops today for fishing the brand of salmon that come into the rivers near here, I went. It doesn't take long to reach the home water. And with a bit of hiking I get to look at this:

Here's the upstream boundary for all fish that move up this river. Right after I took the pic a dark king took a very nice attempt at the falls. Figures.

But this also suprised me. The local fish polititians, with bulldoggish prompting by the local sportsman groups cut funding altogether for the pacific salmon stocking in the area. The pool you're looking at hosted state record kings and thousands of fish year after year. It seems that the more native species like brook trout, steelhead and lake trout are getting into the money around here. This suits me just fine.

I took the seven weight out and landed some of the pinks that will be there this time of year and turned one king. I spotted a few old rusty-tails cruising around but after awhile found myself thinking how much cooler this river would be if the steelhead ran it like the salmon do now.

Or even better, did then.