Our great MN weather has taken a turn toward the cool side. At least for this mild winter it seems cold at around -10° the last couple mornings, with a nasty wind, as icing on the cake. Still nothing to what most winters are, but some of us are happy for the break. The lack of snow makes me even happier than the warm temperatures. So far we have only had a few inches, I plowed a little bit one time and now the ground is mostly bare. But we have March coming up, which is historically the snowiest month of the winter for us, so we might get a pile yet.
Today as I was going about some work in the shop, I was having some ‘flashbacks’ to days of my childhood and the small farm in southern OH that I grew up on, at least for the most part that is where we lived in my young years. It is a fact, that our young years have a decided affect upon our lives. I am not sure how other people look at these things, but for me, I loved living on a dirt road with very few neighbors and lots of room for a young fellow to roam, without getting into too much trouble. I took to country life like a young duck takes to water. It just came natural, as if instinct told me that my place was outside of cities and villages and near the woods, fields and streams.
Since becoming an adult, I have lived in some fairly large cities for short periods of times, but I was never ‘at home’ in a city or even living in apartments or houses in small towns. I wanted a place as far from neighbors as I could get. Not that I have an un-neighborly attitude toward people, a lot of my desire to live apart comes with some of my ‘hobbies’. Things that make a lot of noise and is bound to disturb some neighbors. Mainly that is with the boom of some of my black-powder rifles or modern deer rifles. I have been a fan of target shooting ever since I was old enough to shoot a BB-gun. I like living in a place that I can shoot when I want to without disturbing a lot of people.
On the little farm where I grew up we were very lucky to have plenty of woods where I went as often as I could escape my mother and just loitered with a single shot .22 or a shotgun. Not that I was always really hunting for game, but that was as good an excuse as any to hang out in the woods. We had a small stream that ran through our farm. On the maps it was called Little Raccoon Creek. A few miles down stream they dammed the stream up and build a reservoir that formed a fair sized lake, for that region. I was in my early teens when they made this lake and remember when they stocked it with fish. They did not allow fishing for 2 years after it was stocked, I tell you that was a long 2 years for a want-to-be fisherman. When you are young, two years is ‘forever’! But it was not against the law to fish in the stream. Most of the year there were not many fish in the stream, but in the spring the suckers would run up the creek to spawn. We made “hay” then!
We had an uncle who like to “gig” for suckers. In MN we would call it “spearing”, but there they used a frog gig to spear the suckers at night. I remember we would take old carbide miner lights as lamps. Then we would wade in shallow water where it would be rippling and there is where we could see the fish as they swam upstream in the shallow water. We carried burlap feed sacks to put our catch in, at times we would get 2 or three sacks of those suckers in a night. I have no ideal if it was ‘legal’ or not, I think it was, but am not certain.
One night I especially remember. We had worked our way upstream and got a few fish, but not very many. It was a cold night in April and I recall that night very well because I got desperate enough to get some fish that I took the chance of standing of a slippery rock over about 3 feet of water. Stream water in April is cold! I found out when my feet slipped out from under me and I went into the water body first. Of course it did me no harm other than a cold dunking and a pleasant memory.
From that night we flash-forward about 20 years. By then we were living in MN at the junction of the Shell and Crow Wing rivers near the village of Huntersville, MN. It was another April and I was in a canoe doing some spring fishing up the Crow Wing river maybe a half mile from our house. The ice was still on the lakes, but the river had been open for a few weeks and I just could not resist ‘casting a line’ with some crappie minnows and a bobber. I had tied my canoe off on a tree that had fallen into the river. The worst part is that I had been having some back problems and did one of those “dumb” things we sometimes do to avoid pain. I had an old lawn chair that I set up in the canoe to sit in while I fished. If you are familiar with canoes you can guess how that was going to turn out. But I had spent a lot of time in a canoe and had never tipped one in all my travels, so I was over-confident you might say.
I had just got comfortable and was ready to bait my hook, so I reached down to pull my minnow bucket up out of the water to get a minnow. I never got it out of the water. As I leaned over in that old style lawn chair it slipped on the bottom of the canoe and before I even knew what happened I had a ‘rude awakening’ in ice cold water.
There was a strong current in the spot I was at and as soon as my head came up out of the river I saw my lawn chair floating downstream. I wonder now why I bothered with it, but I swam out and retrieved the chair before I attempted to get out of that ice water. I suppose I did not want to have to chase the chair down with the canoe and then have to paddle against a very strong current to get back upstream to the house. Not that the chair was of any value, I hate too see “junk” cluttering up a wilderness river and that is what would happen if I just let the thing go.
The funny part to me was that I had a hat on and sun glasses when I went under the water, when I came up from the dunking my hate and sunglasses were still perfectly in place, albeit very wet. I am glad there was no one around with a video camera to film the fool in a lawn chair, in a canoe soon after the ice had left the river. Being fairly young and healthy at the time, and used to the cold, it did not bother me as far as the cold was concerned. The only thing that would have bothered me would have been if there was an eye witness to the event, there was no one around.
There is no moral to these stories, unless you don’t like taking a dip in ice cold water, then I would advise you to stay off slippery rocks and don’t even think of sitting in a canoe with a lawn chair!
What makes one think of such crazy things on a cold winter day?
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