Of trout, chubs, and shiners

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Jerry Johnson
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Rumor has it that I have never caught anything on a fly rod. Untrue. I have caught chubs, shiners, and once a turtle.

In a way the small brook, the pond, the river, and the sea are all the same to the fisherman. They are places for the imagination to play – a bass by every stump, a trout behind every stone, a marlin in the trough of every wave. We tie our hope to our line and send it out into the mystery water. Then we wait, boy and man alike, for the answer to the same question.
– from Giant Thoughts, an essay from the book Passing a Good Time by the outdoor writer Gene Hill (1928-97)

Of trout, chubs, and shiners

More than 40 cold water streams flow through North Country’s watersheds, gushing from the bases of the steep, rock-faced bluffs that characterize our landscape of crosshatched ravines and coolies, fed by steady and seemingly inexhaustible aquifers pooled deep within the layers upon layers of fractured limestone formations that are the bones of this part of the Earth. Most are called creeks, some are called runs, and a few earn the optimistic title of rivers, but all share similar characteristics: sheer banks, clear water, rock-strewn beds, surrounded by woodlands or pastures or hay fields, overhung by trees that have survived the assault of annual floods.

Individually and collectively they comprise a fascinating micro-ecosystem. Scorching months of summer or sub-zero weeks of winter, the fast flowing water of these streams seldom warms to more than 60 degrees or cools to less than 50 degrees Fahrenheit. This consistency makes them the natural habitat of relatively few species of fish – trout, chubs and shiners among them, but also small mouth bass, creek chubsuckers, and what appears to be a million darters – but is the perfect environment for hundreds of types of insects, amphibians, reptiles, birds, small mammals, and plentiful populations of raccoons and whitetail deer.

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Ready, aim, FIRE!

Posted on April 16, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

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The ancient Greek philosophers named earth, air, water, aether and fire as the foundation of all things in the world. I know the concept of those classic elements was dashed by modern science, but they still seem to hold true when I observe the cycle of life in the North Country. Fire, in particular, brings a burst of rejuvenation and energy each spring.

Ready, aim, FIRE!

Before this year’s garden can be planted the dead and brittle jungle of last year’s garden must be cleared away. There are gardeners who plunge into this task in the late fall, dutifully pulling up the withered tomato stalks, the tangles of squash vines, the stumps of broccoli and cauliflower plants, shredding it all and raking the rubble into compost piles to be covered with bushels of wet leaves. They till it all into the rich soil the day after the first hard freeze and then sow a winter cover crop of red clover as green manure, giving it a natural boost of nitrogen in preparation for the year ahead.

I am not one of those gardeners. After the last of the tomatoes are picked from our garden in September it is left untended until the following April. A wild growth of late weeds intertwines with the gnarled stubble of vegetable plants until this quarter acre plot looks like the gloomy, blackened, tangled forest of the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz movie. More than once I have thought of posting a crooked sign board: “I’d turn back if I were you!”

I have tried to discipline myself to be a more conscientious fall gardener, but because hunting seasons begin the first day of October in the North Country the chances of me changing my profligate ways are less than zero. Considerably less.

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Sub-sonic Coot

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

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Sub-sonic .22 Long Rifle loads are, in theory, more accurate than super-sonic high velocity loads because of some aerodynamic “disruptions” that affect the flight of the faster bullet as it decreases from super-sonic to sub-sonic speed during the course of its flight. I do not pretend to understand this; my expertise in physics ends with the practical knowledge that water always runs downhill.

Sub-sonic Coot

Rifle shooters, as a rule, want bullets to go fast. Really fast.

Not only the varmint shooters, who have good reason to want “flat shooting” rifles that propel tiny bullets at more than 4,000 foot-per-second muzzle velocities, but also the big game hunters who choose .300 magnum calibers over the more mundane .30-06 so they can boost the velocity of a 180-grain elk-slayer bullet in excess of 3,000 fps.

We old timers remember that the quest for ever-faster bullets is all the fault of Jack O’Connor, the rifleman’s writer who began singing the praises of higher velocity cartridges more than 75 years ago, especially his beloved Winchester .270 caliber bolt action rifles. For 20 years there was quite a war of words between the fast bullet boys who championed smaller caliber, higher velocity rounds and the big bullet boys who clung to the notion that larger bore rifles that fired more substantial chunks of lead at lower speeds were more lethal for big game.

The speed demons ultimately won. You won’t see anyone in the West, and very few hunters in the East, toting a .348 Winchester or a .35 Remington these days. Admittedly, the ancient .30-30 Winchester holds on as a woods rifle for whitetails, but that has more to do with the tradition and romance of the lever action rifle than ballistic superiority. You could argue, too, that the big bullet boys still have their advocates because I know of elk hunters who go afield with a .338 Winchester Magnum loaded with 225 grain bullets or a .375 H&H Magnum shooting 270 grain bullets.

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The vultures of spring

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Jerry Johnson
Turkey Vulture (Cathartes aura)

Turkey Vulture, photo by Michael “Mike” L. Baird http://bairdphotos.com, from http://www.spirit-animals.com/vulture/

The vulture’s redeeming feature is its graceful flight… If only we could lift away from Earth with that effortless freedom and look down from above upon the springtime beauty of this land.

The vultures of spring

Harbingers of spring, swallows return each March to San Juan Capistrano in California, robins to Ann Arbor in Michigan, sandhill cranes to the Platte River Valley in Nebraska, snow geese to the Arctic tundra of Canada’s Nunavut Territory, storm petrels to the rocky coasts of Maine, a dozen species of ducks to the Prairie Pothole Region of the Dakotas and Saskatchewan, and the mountain bluebirds to the Bitterroot Range in Idaho.

In the North Country we get buzzards. Turkey vultures.

We know spring is on its way when our resident pair of turkey vultures (Cathartes aura) appears, floating gracefully on the wind over the ravine on the south edge of our farm, roosting in a huge old oak tree, and spying out the landscape for winter-kill carrion and a likely ledge to lay and incubate their eggs this summer. There is probably some preternatural connection between my springtime musings on life and the arrival of this most grotesque and least appealing of the avian population but it is best if I do not think too deeply about it.

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Glazed

Posted on March 25, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

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Encased in ice the North Country was strikingly beautiful these two days, especially when lighted by the golden-red rays of evening sun as the weather front finally passed over. Illuminated by the full moon’s silver light the scene was something from a Russian novel or the poetic telling of a Norse saga.

Glazed

A foot of snow was predicted to fall on the farm at the end of March, a final temper tantrum of the god of winter that is not uncommon in the North Country. Long ago we learned to cope with the nastiness of March, watching the weather maps, forbearing to stow away wool sweaters, hats and mittens, and proactively stacking several days’ worth of firewood on the deck.

Yesterday’s sunny skies and 50-degree temperatures are not to be trusted. The dogs have not yet begun to shed their winter coats, and the wisdom of their bodies far surpasses the speculation of the Farmer’s Almanac.

In more temperate parts of the American Midwest it is said that “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb – or else it comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion.” In the North Country this transition month between winter and spring usually comes in like a raging lion and departs like a petulant lioness with sore feet, a bad toothache, and swollen hemorrhoids.

Every paradise has its dragons and monsters.

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A writer’s role

Posted on March 18, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

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One of the roles of a true writer is to bring all the gifts of their being to the task of creating art which though conscious of history and artistic tradition demands that you attend to how it feels to be alive NOW in this particular society and culture in all its messy complexity.
– from The Immortal Jukebox – A Blog about Music and Popular Culture, written and produced by Thom Hickey (b. 1955), British writer, contemporary music critic and historian, social and cultural pundit

A writer’s role

Eventually we figure out what we’re doing and why we do it.

During a 25-year “second career” teaching and supervising undergraduate college students, ages 18 to 22, in the dark arts and science of communication, journalism, and marketing, I was cast in the role of mentor many times, engaging in soul-searching conversations with young men and women who stood trembling at the doorway to a vast and confusing and seemingly chaotic world, wondering if their talents and intellect –and most of all their heart and spirit – would be enough to carry them through good times and bad, hardship and prosperity, love and heartbreak, joy and sadness, triumph and defeat, comedy and tragedy – all the adventures and misadventures that the drama of human life leads us through.

Most often they were seeking advice and assurance in their attempts to find an unequivocal answer to mankind’s universal question:

What is my purpose in life? What is the meaning of life? What am I supposed to do? What is it all about?

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Library support

Posted on March 9, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

library sign

Thanks to all the readers of the Old Coot who attended the February book signing for my latest book, Coot Stews, with proceeds going to Friends of the Decorah Public Library. Royalties check arrived yesterday, and today FDPL received a donation of $275. We are fortunate to have a great public library in our town, and to have a first class local book store: Dragonfly Books.

 

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Doo-doo diligence

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

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March is the month of pooh patrol. Doo-doo duty. Poop scoopin’. Crap collection. Dung drudgery. Shyte shoveling. Manure maintenance. Doo diligence. Call it what you will, it’s the labor of cleaning up all the piles of dog poop that have accumulated over the winter months.

Doo-doo diligence

Winter in the North Country can end suddenly in mid-March. The transition time is often eight to 12 hours.

On March 5 the high temperature for the day was 5 degrees, a 25-mile-per-hour northwest wind was howling, and five inches of snow fell on the farm in winter’s final petulant temper tantrum, her theatrical slamming of the door to announce her departure and her outrage that we had not shown her more courtesy and gratitude during her visit. The bitch.

On March 8 the thermometer on the deck went bipolar, swinging from frozen depression to a euphoric 65 degrees. The wind came around to the south and brought a warm, wet air mass up from the Gulf of Mexico to drench us with a few inches of rain. We can hope that winter is over.

But spring has not truly arrived. We are in the season we call squck, that month to six-weeks period of time when four or five inches of mud lies atop the still-frozen subsoil, turning the farm into a squishy quagmire that makes the sloshing-sucking “squck, squck, squck” sound with every step you take in knee-high rubber boots.

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Late winter doldrums

Posted on March 3, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

Winter doldrums

No animal, according to the rules of animal-etiquette, is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.
     – from The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), British writer

March is the month that shows people who don’t drink exactly how a hangover feels.
     – Garrison Keillor (b. 1942), American writer, humorist, storyteller, and radio personality

Late winter doldrums

Like political campaigns and dysentery, winter in the North Country can go on and on long after it has ceased to be enjoyable or even interesting. Beautiful as they were on the days they arrived, February’s snowfalls have thawed and refrozen so many times they have become a pavement of ice and hard-packed snow across our farm’s fields and woodlands, and the late winter storms of March have covered that slippery shelf with four or five inches of powdery snow, a combination that makes snowshoeing a high-risk adventure and every stroll down the driveway a potential path to the emergency room.

So I’ve been trapped inside the clubhouse for several days, becoming more grumpy and morose than usual as this last phase of winter hangs on, a house guest who can’t take the hint he’s overstayed his welcome and ought to leave while we’re still on speaking terms.

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Book signing angst

Posted on February 27, 2016 by Jerry Johnson

100_2063In the entire world there are only 19 writers of creative non-fiction whose primary income is royalties from sales of their books, and I am not one of them.

Book signing angst

Book signings tie me up in knots.

Not the event itself. Every one of my book signings has been pleasant and cheerful, a couple hours of uplifting and energized socializing with readers. (It’s doubtful that I am the source of that positive ambience because “pleasant” and “cheerful” are not the words most people would use to describe my character.)

Invariably, these book signings are enjoyable times. A writer friend who has done dozens of them once told me, “A book signing is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.” Not exactly true, and I do not insist that guests keep their clothes on at my book signings, but I get the gist of his statement.

I have done signings and readings in book stores, coffee shops, seminar classrooms, and college book shops, places that have a genial and tolerant clientele, so I have been well-received for the most part. I received a crank e-mail message before one that was a vague threat that an animal rights group would show up to protest against my “blood sports” writing (it turned out to be a gag). When one of my Over the Hill Gang cronies learned of this, he said a protest, with fisticuffs and arrests, could be the big break that boosts my writing fame and career. He predicted I would be invited to do book signings in sports bars all across the country. My own feeling is that my books, like handguns, should not be bandied about in bars.

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