It was Sunday, the second day of deer camp. My daughter and I sat quietly in the stand for the second morning in a row, eyes and ears straining for signs of life.
Continue reading “Moments to Remember”essay
I Don’t Want to Go Back
You don’t need to be told how horrendous 2020 was. We all lived through civil unrest, a hundred-year pandemic, a spiraling economy— all in an election year, no less. We complained, we laughed, we shared memes. We clung to anything to get us through, including a shared belief that 2021 could only be better.
Here we are, and I don’t feel any different.
Continue reading “I Don’t Want to Go Back”Look At Me, I’m A Fishing Genius
I love catching walleyes and I’m not alone in that. Lots and lots of videos online testify to that fact. A brief survey of YouTube titles will tell you that walleyes can be caught on Lake Erie, Mille Lacs, Lake of the Woods, Lake Winnipeg, and some place way up in Canada whose name I can’t remember but sounds like “We-must-go.”
Just those five lakes. Continue reading “Look At Me, I’m A Fishing Genius”
How My Alma Mater Prepared Me To Sleep On The Ground
Waking up somewhere cold and hard is not an occasional occurrence for me. Just a few weeks ago, I took my first solo trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area as the snow and ice receded from the landscape. Earlier this year, I slept a night on the ice of Lake Mille Lacs while I explored a lake that is still big and new to me. A couple months before that, I endured one late-October night (in a slightly leaky tent) while I tried my hand at netting whitefish in far northern Minnesota. I was fortunate enough to catch a modest number of fish each time, for which I was grateful, but everyone knows there are easier ways to bring food home for the table. So what makes me embrace physical exertion and discomfort doing these or any such things?
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The End of Their Era: When Our Outdoor Mentors Pass On
My dad’s friend Larry was a staple of my formative years, a regular presence in our hunting endeavors in the late 80s and early 90s. His light, contagious demeanor was always welcome, and I won’t soon forget how his jokes and wise cracks punctuated the many car rides, duck blinds, and nights in the camper, not to mention his deft incitement of near-inappropriate moments at home and in the narthex of the church. I can still hear his crazy, half-wheezed, unfettered laugh, and I know I always will.
He passed away last week, after a years-long tussle with cancer; this news was not unexpected, certainly, but its inevitability did not serve to mitigate its impact. His loss comes as yet another blow to constancy, a cold chipping away at my sense of youth and connection to the past. So it goes whenever a part of us seems gone forever and can only be kept alive in memory and stories. For me, it would be hard in this moment not to pause and remember the others that have gone on ahead. Continue reading “The End of Their Era: When Our Outdoor Mentors Pass On”
Beauty: Birch, Mozart, and Human Nature
On an early spring morning this year, I was attending a dress rehearsal for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem mass, one of his most recognizable and beloved works, and a perennial favorite (Ironically, Mozart left it unfinished when he died at the young age of 35, and much of the music wasn’t actually written by him). There I was, sitting in a church pew and watching the fast-passing altostratus clouds through a window high overhead, when the orchestra and choir started the Lacrimosa movement. I was utterly blindsided. The sight of cottony clouds streaking across the blue set to the soundtrack of a true master was profoundly and inexplicably moving. It was the kind of moment that makes a person gasp, and its abrupt arrival magnified its effects on me at least threefold. It was an unexpected moment of beauty that would change the whole week to come. Continue reading “Beauty: Birch, Mozart, and Human Nature”