A Tenderloin Runs Through It

Diversification of Mastication

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 20:28:00 +0000

Despite its title playfully derived from The Book, this is not a food blog and I am not a food blogger. While I do occasionally stumble into mentioning that pickled pike or smoked grouse are friggin' awesome, food blogging has not been my intention from the outset. Look to the right there on the blog roll, and you'll find a small fraction of food bloggers I admire. They are light years ahead of me in their beautiful, concise, and and thoughtful prose (and photography) concerning all things cuisine. For the most part, I leave it to them to enlighten the world with their varying styles of food writing.

Venison loin au poivre, an updated classic

That being said, I've been hovering around a food related idea I believe important enough to brave a toe-dip into the deep waters of food blogging. This idea is not especially original or profound, but I think it's worth discussing. It is something I believe in completely.

If you peer into the cupboard of any cook worth his or her whisk you'll find a stack of cookbooks. Sometimes you'll find an entire library. They're sorted and enjoyed by ethicity, region, and method; by course, by season, by specific dish. Anyone who cooks will have a stash of literature and guidebooks on the topic, dog-eared and stuffed with markers. Mine also sport a nifty patina of stains and goop of unidentifiable makeup. While the internet now provides the ways and means of frying an egg to anyone who cares to Google, cookbooks still prevail in the matter for most of us. From classic American burgers on the grill, to salting Finnish whitefish in a hole in the ground, there are cookbooks written and collected for every technique and foodstuff under the sun.

If one were to then peek into the pantry of dedicated hunters and fishermen, most often there'd be a cache of cookbooks dedicated solely to the preparation of wild game. As in much of the rest of the culinary world there are cookbooks dedicated to the preparation of venison and salmon, ducks and geese, walleye and trout. While there are international options for cooking all of this game (obviously), and as many methods for cooking them as any other food, I find most of these books in the kitchens of my fellow outdoorsmen are filled with recipes that fall mostly to three general categories or combinations thereof.

Ignite the fires and crack a beer
Grind it up and stuff it into sausage
Any myriad of attempts to get around "gamey-ness"

Where the first category is concerned, I have no pause. As far as I know there is little more sublime than a well-grilled chunk of meat and a frosty one in hand. It would be inane and nearly treasonous to aver otherwise. And by "well-grilled" I do not mean well done, of course. If you enjoy your game meat well done I suspect you may be in need of intensive counseling and perhaps a vegan cookbook, but that's a matter of personal preference in the end and has no bearing here.

By "well-grilled" I mean to say cooked over fire with a bit of skill. Finesse, even. Delicacy, dare I say. Not, as we've all seen too many times, venison shellacked in a bucket of marinade and vaulcanized to the consistency of a steel belted radial.

I recall such a moment that found Frisbee and I standing in the yard at camp while dinner was being prepared by our elders during a summer party. With beer flowing freely among us all, one of the men in attendance exited the cabin and doused an already lit charcoal fire with enough lighter fluid to produce a satisfying fireball and an amusing jump back on his part. As we looked on, another fine gentleman then appeared, not a minute later, to unceremoniously flop a tray of venison steaks on the barely subsiding benzene inferno. We ate petroleum infused venison that night, and enjoyed ourselves in good company, but that was something less than the pinnacle of venison cookery done correctly.

Blackened sauger tacos

We'll leave sausage making to be addressed further on as it ties better into my rambling thesis here, and deal next with the volumes of recipes and articles dedicated to removing the "gamey" flavor from all sorts of fish and game.

On this topic I have only one thing to say (though I'm certain I can manage to stretch it into a few verbose paragraphs)-- I don't get it.

When properly dressed, stored, and cared for, venison tastes like venison. That's it. What's more (and this is quite shocking) woodcock tastes like woodcock and catfish tastes like catfish. Moose tastes like moose, goose tastes like goose, and bear tastes like bear (and a lot like beef to me). There are recipes and techniques that put the individual flavor profiles and consistencies of each of these meats to better use than others, certainly. And they should be employed or avoided as such, but I do not believe that we should attempt to dull the taste of any game meat. We should endeavor to accentuate it through wise choices that come from practice and following the instruction of those who know better.

I suspect most of the days-long milk baths and ice water soaks in all those old game cookbooks have more to do with less than desirable food handling practices than the intrinsic taste of the meat. And perhaps a national palate less attuned to natural food (you find a lot of these harried attempts to obliterate the flavors of game meat in happy housewife cookbooks from the 1950s and 60s when America was obsessed with TV dinners and Jello molds, and refrigeration for the masses was a relatively novel concept).

If all you want to eat is frozen pizza that tastes like nitrates and cafeteria floor that's fine, I guess, but attempting to claw the flavor from a hunk of protein gifted to you by an animal in order to better approximate processed food is folly. Learn to preserve and cook it with a bit of respect, learn to enjoy the taste, or get your candy ass to Arby's.

Pulled BBQ pheasant pizza

Charcuterie, the culinary art of making sausages and cold cooked meats, holds a strong and deep tradition in the preparation of game meats. It's something that I unfortunately find little time for in my kitchen, but remains important to most hunters. And while it does, charcuterie is often "farmed out" by the hunters I know. Most deer in this part of the world are field dressed by the hunter, and perhaps boned and packaged at home, but the "scrap meat" is then taken to a meat market to be processed into sausages, bratwurst, landjaegers, and any number of other delectable treats.

I have no problem with this, in theory. Sausage making is a time consuming affair, rife with possible pitfalls, and requires the purchase of fairly expensive equipment at the outset. Not only that, but in the particular case of our deer camp, the meat market we've chosen to have make our sausage produces all manner of meat treats I only wonder if I could duplicate or even approach on my own. It's difficult to consider making your own sausage when the place an hour down the road does it as well as anyone in the country.

Stunningly resplendent books like the recent smash hit Charcuterie (Ruhlman & Polcyn) may be changing that thinking in the minds of many hunters, myself included. In this luscious tome and during many associated interviews, the authors repeatedly intimate that in the process of sausage making and smoking, game meats will "play" just as well as farm raised beef or ham. In fact, that's where the entire practice started. People were preserving protein of any sort in just such a manner long before you could cram your SUV into a space at the grocery store to trade currency for meat. The cook acquired that protein with careful stalking and a well placed shot, and preserved it with salt, smoke, or some combination of the two. I believe this cookbook and many like it are bringing us full circle.

Let's return for a moment to the cookbook hoards of the hunting and non-hunting cooks above. While both are collections of instruction on cooking, the two are plainly disparate. While the shelves of the hunter and fisher are populated with those books dedicated to preparation of game and fish, the collection of the non-hunter is generally more diverse.

Here's the thing (and finally, a tad breathlessly, the point). There should be little difference between the two libraries in my opinion. Just as in charcuterie, game meats and wild-caught fish very often lend themselves to more mainstream cooking and cookbooks. With a few caveats.

Game meats do require more careful treatment than a fatty farm-raised duck or marbled beef from the store. Most of our game animals are Olympic level athletes in human terms, and live on a skinning knife's edge of caloric intake versus effort required to gain those calories their entire lives. As such, their meat is lean and mean. This immediately informs the wise game cook. With most cuts of game there are only two ways to go when it comes to temperature; low and slow or fast and hot. We can either braise or blaze. Slow cook that shoulder until it's nearly falling apart or flash that steak on and off the grill before things start heading dangerously into Michelin territory -- the tires, not the stars.

Deer liver dirty rice

And there are obvious seasoning differences. All that wailing and gnashing of teeth about soaking the flavor out of our game meats came from the fact that they do have a stronger taste, in general, than the protein normally found sitting on that gross blood diaper in the store. Seasonings have to be adjusted. Stronger herbs and sauces can come out to play, more smoke can be applied. It takes practice, but nearly any recipe from a mainstream cookbook can be adapted to similar game meat or fish.

Once the cook begins to consider the act of preparing food more in terms of ratios and techniques than measures and stopwatches, an entire world of game cookery can be conveniently pilfered from the world of cookbooks never intended to be addressed to venison or duck or bear by their authors.

There's a whole bountiful world of crossover out there, simply waiting for hunters and fishers to try, no longer constrained by recipes found only in fish and game cookbooks.

Green Tomatosplotion

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Sat, 04 Oct 2014 16:58:00 +0000

The fall canning season has been going fast and strong, and now I find myself in possession of a mountain of tomatoes that didn't quite make it before the oncoming freeze tonight.

I'm happy to can, pickle, fry, fire roast, and do just about anything else I can think of to get these lovelies gobbled down or put up for the winter. If you happen to have a favorite green tomato recipe, please comment below.

Pretty Fly for a Bait Guy

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Mon, 29 Sep 2014 19:02:00 +0000

I've fallen away from my roots in the last decade. Or perhaps I've evolved. I'm not entirely sure there's a difference. One thing is certain, I don't fish with conventional rod and reel nearly as much as I used to. I don't fish with anything nearly as much as I used to, period, but we'll cast that aside for the time being.

It's a natural progression, much written and talked about in fly fishing circles. Some of us, through boredom or the love of a challenge or the coveting of more sexy gear, eventually leave our spinning rods and baitcasters standing in a forlorn corner obelisk to chase fish and dreams with fly rods. It happened to me, and it had been quite a few years since I'd been in a good old fashioned bait shop, until recently.

Buddy on planer board watch. Como Lake.

At the farmers market one morning I spied a woman sporting earrings similar to, but not quite spinner blades. With Randi's birthday approaching, my mind leaped to fashioning earrings for her out of actual spinner blades, knowing she'd appreciate the outdoorsy bent. In a feat resembling a protracted archaeological dig, I managed to lay hands on my own crawler harnesses from the old catfishing days on Cherokee Marsh and Como Lake, when we used to troll the mud flats for channel cats just like you would for walleyes except with heavier gear (and to only moderate and sporadic success in our case).

There were plenty of blades in my old collection in many sizes and colors, but only a few matching pairs, and mostly beaten and nicked like cheap old diner spoons. One hatchet blade in bubble gum pink and black would've been perfect were it not for the lack of a matching partner and some unidentifiable crust of fish goo or worm innards. Not exactly the makings of jewelry for most, although I do know a couple catfishermen who, finding a woman willing to don earrings of such earthy patina, would begin the search for an engagement ring in earnest. Their wedding colors would be Realtree and Copenhagen, and I'd be there to tap the first half barrel in a plastic tub of ice.

I was about to order some shiny new blades from an online retailer of such things when a novel thought occurred to me... I should go to a bait shop. I live mere miles from the the biggest inland walleye lake in Wisconsin. I didn't need the latest in hyper-graphic paint jobs and blade design to fool fish, simply some clean and shiny jewelry fixin's. Surely a bait shop in walleye country would have a surplus of old blades in bulk. I was suddenly stunned I hadn't thought of that in the first place.

For the uninitiated: while both fly shops and bait shops exist to provide the tools necessary to chase fish using different methods, there exists an undeniable gulf of differences between the two. They are, in general, two massively different sides of the same coin.

Many modern fly shops may be described as stylish. They're appointed and polished. Sleek. If a bait shop is the hardware store, many fly shops are the equivalent of a wood grain Apple Store.

If there is a shop dog it will be a German Shorthaired Pointer or a setter, some pointing breed resting comfortably on a canvas and cedar chip bed from which he can preside comfortably over his fiefdom. There will be beautifully mounted trout on the walls, and always one huge walleye for some reason (or a whitefish out west). The shop rats will fall into a number of categories, including, but not limited to... the trimly bearded and tatted post-punk modern bug-flinger; replete with piercings, blocky hipster spectacles, and a snarky t-shirt (Fly fishing advice: free. Bait fishing advice: Don't) He drinks only craft beer and drives a Subaru or Xterra. The older gentleman in pressed khakis and spendy Filson flannel drinks scotch (or if he's progressive, bourbon, neat), and drives a Volvo. He prefers to fish dries upstream, but will occasionally deign to fishing nymphs when there's no hatch on, "to pass the time." If the shop also runs a guide service, there will be a twitchy muttering guide hidden somewhere in the corner so he doesn't bite the patrons, his shoulders copper and broad from a season of toil at the oars of a drift boat. He drinks whatever the hell anybody sets gingerly near him.

There will be mountains of flies, organized by style, size and color in those display cases with all the little cubicles -- high rise apartments for flies. Some will be "bought in" as they say, and some will be tied by the shop, the latter having been conceived during fever dreams in the cold off season. The latest trends in vests and boat bags and waders will adorn the walls, a full kit of which will approach the cost of a year of college tuition. The latest iteration of the revered Simms wading jacket alone goes, laughably, for over half a thousand dollars... for a raincoat. Maybe that logo on the chest makes one a better caster.

The best fly shops maintain all of this with an air of comfortable welcome and free coffee near the door. They're like walking into a nice guest cabin with a warming fire. The less desirable among them fall deeply into the trappings of effete xenophobia.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the bait shops most of us grew up with.

Where the modern fly shop may be polished, the bait shop most often appears more lived in. More real, bluntly. Most are as clean as they need be while remaining a bit scruffy, much like the resident shop dog which, incidentally, will be a good workaday Lab or some other amiable mutt of indeterminate lineage and bountiful good cheer.

There will be minnow tanks in back, gurgling and churning with life and that pervasive, if subtle and pleasant aroma of wriggling life, aerated fresh water, and ammonia. Some places let you scoop your own minnows while others leave you there peeking under the lid to watch the little guys dart and scatter willy-nilly every time you move, until you can be helped.

There will be dusty mounts of huge walleyes on the walls and always one trout for some reason. And often, a buck of a size not often seen in that county for the last century with the arrow that felled it resting lightly in its rack.

There will be plastic bins of jigs and hooks in every single size and color ever conceived in the universe, some of them not in popular use since Chubby Checker set the world to twisting. At the shop I used to frequent there was an eight foot wall of divided Plano boxes set as drawers and filled with ice jigs. Brimming with thousands of them, tangled in their little prisons so you had to shake one loose to buy it. Psychedelic pinks and oranges to muted natural tones, from minuscule one dot tear drops to monstrosities obviously constructed in pursuit of a kraken. From factory paint slopped on junk hardware to quality one-offs from somebody's basement decades ago -- and plenty of the converse. Well more jigs than I've seen assembled in one place before or since.

Some bait shops are stand-alone affairs, but most are tucked away in the basement of a hardware store or back of a gas station, almost as an afterthought. In the instance of the latter your customer service representative will vary from a freaked out high school girl pulled from behind the register and afraid to scoop the "icky little fishies"... to a bedraggled guy fresh from cutting some chain and on his way to hauling some sheetrock.

The stand alone bait shops almost always have the proprietor or the proprietor's spouse behind the counter. These are the best shops. They know where everything is and most of them care about keeping you as a customer. They will pass along the fishing report which can later be sussed into equal parts quality information, rumors, and mystical bullshit -- my undying favorite example of such bait shop wisdom being the time a guy behind the counter told us if we were quiet at night in our shacks, we could hear the crappies scraping the underside of the ice for bugs and follow them that way.

Bait shopkeepers are a consistently colorful bunch, and I've had the pleasure of knowing many. There was Gene with his perpetually filthy canvas work shirt and only the merest acquaintance with the waking world. When you could rouse him from his torpor his information was solid. And Red, the excitable fast talker, who, upon only our second meeting, began our conversation by regaling me with a story about the time he woke up in jail after a particularly sanguine bender.

Lastly, with much trepidation, we come to the Scary Lady.

I have no inkling of her given name as she is referred to in hushed tones, fittingly, only as the Scary Lady. Her ramshackle bait shop, attached to her rural home by a breezeway shuffled together out of warped plywood and prayers, holds a funhouse menagerie of anachronisms and dust bunnies. It's a big place, deep and long, a warren of aisles and cubby holes festooned with dusty bubble packs and thrice-painted peg boards sporting equal parts full and empty pegs.

One is not allowed to scoop minnows at the Scary Lady's. No, the dauntless fisherman must wait patiently near the tanks while the Scary Lady separates herself from the hapless stool that supports her impressive girth, and shuffles forward. The organic aroma of the tanks is soon overpowered by a more feral odor. The dreaded moment arrives when the fisherman must decide which eye to peer into, the northerly tracking one or the other, seemingly more interested in Illinois. It should be noted that all attempts at friendly conversation will be flatly ignored. Transactions take place only through a series of grunts and gesticulations from behind a stringy mat of frightening witch hair, followed by your purchase price appearing mercifully on the register. Cash only.

Her bait is fresh and lively or nobody would ever go back there again. Local lore says that during one oppressively hot and humid summer years ago, she appeared in a bathing suit and slipped into one of the bait tanks for a refreshing dip with the shiners. I hope, for the good of humanity, that is merely an exaggerated folk tale. On another occasion I know to be true, after I'd paid for my crappie minnows and she'd apparently forgotten in the following instant, she snarled a gravelly, "What is that... what is that," her voice growing louder as she pointed a crooked finger at the minnow bucket in my hand. Being the staid, fully grown man of the outdoors that I am, I followed her inquiry with the most practical course of action I could come up with -- I scrambled out the door with my bait. Some would even say I ran, but I prefer to think of it as relieving a poor old woman of her confusion.

You may think the Scary Lady and her exploits a figment of my imagination made up for the enjoyment of my readers, perhaps even an homage to Rancid Crabtree of McManus fame. I assure you, she is quite real and more frightening than I've managed to describe. Ask Brian. If we deem you worthy and brave, we may even take you to visit her sometime.

So it was thus armed that I ventured into a local stand-alone bait shop recently, in search of those spinner blades needed to make earrings. I found myself in an open and clean bait shop, one that I'd never seen before but knew through memory.

Plenty of earring blades in those dusty old bait shop boxes

The register was attended by the proprietor and her daughter while two ancient, sun-beaten men in seed caps talked about old guy stuff down the counter -- how much the recent rain would bring the river up, and the running concerns of a certain Janice and her useless bum of a husband.

When I related my search for blades as a fly tyer making jewelry, the owner and her daughter fairly jumped into action. The daughter is a fellow tyer who produces a locally famous walleye jig, and the mother quickly produced dusty box upon box of bulk spinner blades from the back. Both were helpful and cheerful in our conversations.

As I finished up my purchase, one of the old guys called over to the daughter, "Hey Brenda, you got a pair of scissors?"

"Yeah... why?"

"I'm gonna cut that goddamn muskrat off his face," pointing at my substantial beard. Laughs all around.

He continued, ambling over to me, "You ever meet the Fishin' Magician?"

"I haven't," I replied, growing slightly wary.

"Well, now you have, son," shaking my hand. That earned another laugh from me and eye-rolls from the captive audience who'd obviously been privy to his shtick a few times before.

You can get all the lustrous "latest and greatest" in any modern fly shop, but I'll venture to bet you'll never be treated to a good-natured threat of debeardment on your first arrival there. And I'm certain you can't get spinner blades... or sun-drenched earring selfies from a happy birthday girl.

Short Loins: Candlestick Maker

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Thu, 25 Sep 2014 02:22:00 +0000

If you've been reading here recently, you're aware of my current holy war against the invasive and detrimental common buckthorn and my odd disquietude concerning its mass murder at my own hands.

In restive moments I've continued my attempts to come up with ways to use the waylaid wood
constructively. While ideas that would consume all the trees I've killed yet elude me, I did come up with one yesterday that allowed me to use one more trunk and produce a comely fall arrangement.

Aside from a few moments in which I was convinced I was about to start the shop ablaze while drilling end-long into the sections of buckthorn with a huge spade bit, there's no real story here.

Some time with the chainsaw and drill press, a selection of archetypal autumn harvest from the
garden, and some persnickety arranging soon led to an attractive centerpiece for the dinner table featuring buckthorn votive candlesticks.

For those of you interested in cobbling together such a thing, it's really quite simple. All you need in the way of tools are a saw of some sort and a 1.5" spade drill bit. I'm currently in possession of a mountain of buckthorn and I do quite enjoy the asymmetrical orange heartwood, but a softer wood such as birch or basswood would be much easier to deal with. In which case, you could forego the drill press and simply use a large pair of channel locks or vice grips. Add some votive candles and a mess of autumnal goodies, and you're in business.

Genocidal Tendencies

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 19:35:00 +0000

There were two moments.

Late last winter I built a cold frame, a small wooden box with a second-hand window for a "roof" in which the hopeful northern gardener can start seeds before warm weather comes and continue to grow fresh greens after the frosts and early snows arrive. I filled it with annuals and greens to be enjoyed all summer long. And beets, because beets are awesome. Roasted beets, smoked beets, boiled beets, pickled beets, beets beets... I'm even coming around on smaller raw beets even though they sometimes make my mouth itch in what I can only assume is a mild but annoying allergic reaction.

Normally, a gardener would direct sow beets in the garden after the soil had been sufficiently warmed, and I did that as well, but I wanted to get a jump on some by starting them in a tray in the cold frame because, as we've learned, beets cannot come soon enough.

Beet and tomato salad

Beet seeds are teensy-weensy little buggers, and I, being of sound mind and hammy galoot mitts, went with the less than precise but ultimately easier method of broadcast planting the seeds, followed by a sprinkling of potting soil on top and a spritz of water. In no time I was greeted by a minuscule jungle of crimson and emerald seedlings needing to be properly thinned in order to grow big and strong and delicious in the garden after being transplanted.

It was then that I had my first moment of introspection. A real, honest-to-goodness emotional reaction. Keep in mind that I've finished off a wounded deer with a knife to the jugular after a less then perfect rifle shot (though, to be honest, the first time I was confronted with that same dilemma I had to defer to Roger when I quailed with blade in hand). I've stomped on a bunny to end its pain after I'd unknowingly maimed it with the lawn mower, punched a bat when he finally landed on the living room wall, and hammer-thwacked a face cord of nuisance chipmunks stuck in traps out in the shop. I'm no stranger to taking a life up close, just as none of us who pass time out in the wild world are.

Yet there I stood, Mr. Tough Guy, repulsed by the thought of yanking out the innocent little beet seedlings I'd doted over. So their brethren could grow large enough to be murdered in my mouth months later, no less. It was startling.

I said it was a moment, I didn't say it wasn't an odd one. I got over my rare and unexpected wanderings into tenderness, and thinned the beets. Transplanted them, direct sowed more alongside, and they are all currently in season and delectable.

The second moment dawned in one of those gestalt explosions that rip through your delicate little monkey brain on suddenly seeing a certain situation as a whole.

I was hoofing it down to the creek to do a little warbler watching in early May, the woods just coming alive with green and sun and little midges spinning up over the water. Migrating songbirds gather down there to feast on the hatching aquatic bugs, and in so doing, refill their energy stores for continued voyages northward or the upcoming mating season if they stick around here.

All different sorts of colorful and drab fliers arrive, many of whom we have the chance to see only briefly as they pass through to Canada – a thrill I am unashamed to admit that I've yet to outgrow. I'm especially partial to the kaleidoscopic clan of the warblers, with their bright plumage and hyper flitting about. There are so many different species that I'll never keep them all straight, but the annual rite of parking my butt and watching them gorge is always a pleasant refresher course in their names.

I am slightly ashamed to admit, however, that even with it staring me directly in my apparently blind face, I'd never noticed all the buckthorn. Not properly noticed, anyway. I'd seen it, but I hadn't looked at it. Somehow looked past it and around it without acknowledging it. I even mentioned it as a growing problem in a previous post without ever giving it much of a second thought.

Common buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) is an invasive species in North America, and a pretty harmful one at that. It's a tall shrub or small tree listed as "restricted" here in the state of Wisconsin, meaning it can "...cause or have the potential to cause significant environmental or economic harm or harm to human health..." (WDNR Invasives Rule - NR 40/terminology). And it is presenting a full frontal, brute force takeover right outside these windows.

As I stood there drenched in springtime rays and surrounded by this European invader, I came to the instant-if-belated realization that war had been declared without my consent or knowledge. In my blissful blunderings through the woods here, I had missed the call to action. On closer inspection, the invader was everywhere. And with that knowledge, I began to notice the springtime absences. No jack-in-the-pulpit, no trillium, no Dutchman's breeches. I can't be completely assured the presence of dense stands of buckthorn directly correlates to these absences (and many more), I've not done a controlled study, but I do know that it can't help. Buckthorn greens up earlier in spring than natives, produces dense shade, stays green longer in fall, and releases chemicals in the soil that retard the growth of plants nearby. In short, it chokes everything out.

It is not a climax tree. I don't know if, left unchecked, it would eventually create a completely homogeneous forest, but even an understory monoculture is hugely detrimental to everything from insects to deer to my beloved diminutive warblers.

And so, it has to go. A jihad has been declared.

I was suddenly outraged. Stupidly, angry at the buckthorn itself, but more with my blindness and inaction. There were none of the seedling thinning related questions of morality. In my mind, those trees were threatening me and my personal space, so I did what you do in that situation – I steeled myself for a fight. Plum topped off with righteous disgust, I wanted nothing more than to kill those trees as I sharpened the chainsaw. While seething blood lust may not be the most cordial reaction, nothing lends more instant drive and determination than getting oneself all snarled up in a good old fashioned snit.

Another tow strap load to one of the piles

I began cutting and poisoning in earnest. Great swaths of the evil invader buckthorn fell to chainsaw, brush cutter, and triclopyr. The last necessary as buckthorn is not a wilting violet. Unless it's poisoned directly after cutting, multiple shoots will appear from the stump with even more vigor. There were initial pangs of trepidation, applying poison so freely in the woods, but then I found purpose-made applicators that look exactly like those fat Bingo markers, and I was comfortably murdering trees and shrubs with blue-dyed poison in perfectly dabbed Bingo dots once again.

For a while, anyway. With some deeper internet research, I was reminded that clear cutting entire sections of the forest isn't the most healthy practice unless you're going to replant. A bit of moderation has to be applied lest a person slash the entire place wide open to buckets of sunshine and a new crop of invasives. Secondly, righteous anger can only fuel a person for so long. It's damn hot to be crawling around wrestling with a chainsaw in the thick stuff, and the mosquitoes have been atrocious this wet summer.

Most importantly, after having established multiple brush piles (one as big as a two-car garage), the old beet seedling questions began to creep back in.

What is our relationship to any given ecosystem? Are we stewards or simply inhabitants? In the hours of bending and cutting, skeeter swatting and sweat dripping, I've broken those questions down into three categorical answers that work for me.

One can simply remain inside and ignore whatever's happening out there. Most of America does – video games are fun, I'm told. Or one can inhabit the outdoors passively. Go for a nice leaf-peeping hike in the fall, pick some apples at the orchard with your sweety, and never venture off any beaten path. Lastly, a person might elect to jump in with both feet – explore, learn, eat off the land and with the seasons, and even sometimes attempt to actively manage it, keeping in mind that many of these attempts end in abject failure or full-on disaster. The presence of woods-choking buckthorn where it doesn't belong being the blatant example here.

We can all point to a dozen examples of the introduction of a non-native species, applied even with the best of human intentions, leading to the natural equivalent of act three in a Jerry Bruckheimer flick – shit is gonna blow up in your face.

The understory looks a mess when freshly cut, but it'll bounce back

The sheer numbers of trees I killed (and continue to kill) was what became the crux of my more careful thinking. From the standpoint of sheer biomass, never before have I slaughtered on such a grand scale without plans to heat a domicile. But they are only trees, I'm not killing puppies.

Which raised another question while slowly wrestling and tripping my way through the thickets. In the removal of invasive species, is sentience of said species morally relevant? Is the absence of it? Surely, killing trees at a staggering rate because social and scientific convention tells us they are "bad" is not equivalent to mass murder. Or one murder, for that matter. But by killing them en masse, I am removing from the land a great deal of some sort of "life force."

They aren't inherently evil, they're just standing there... tree-ing. I remain diligent but slightly ambivalent in my genocidal tendencies toward buckthorn. There is some kind of bass-ackwards comfort in knowing I'll never kill it all, even on this small scrap of land. And if I do get close to eliminating it all, there are plenty of other invaders here to contend with like honeysuckle and garlic mustard. Best keep that saw sharp.

Not all of the cut buckthorn will be going to waste. Some of it will be burned, and in a small token gesture to the spirits of the woods (at least on my end of the deal) Frisbee has picked up a load of it to be turned into pens, wine stoppers, and various doodads on his lathe at home.

One of the lesser-known upshot qualities of buckthorn is the beauty of it's grain and color when finished. While the sapwood remains pale, the heartwood varies from light umber to a deep, golden orange. And if you look closely at a well finished piece of buckthorn, you'll notice a very comely slight sheen or pearlescence seeming to glow from behind the coral orange grain. In woodworking circles this is known as chatoyance, which comes to us from French where it means "to shimmer like cats' eyes." (Le chat being the French word for "cat") That is one of most lovely English word origins I know. It's so visually perfect.

If you'd like to purchase pens or wine stoppers like those pictured below, turned from buckthorn cut here, you can contact Frisbee at paulm5150@yahoo.com. He's also turning implements in sumac at the moment. Call him Paul. While we do annually question his father's sanity as gun deer season approaches, his parents did not actually name him after a plastic flying disc.

Buckthorn wine stopper

Buckthorn pen

Sumac wine stopper

Fleet Farm Time Machine

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Tue, 19 Aug 2014 20:45:00 +0000

Suspended with feet drifting up for the surface in water as clear as the air, face down with one hand clamped on a piling grown slimy with feathery green algae. Frozen in breath-holding time above a clean cobble bottom – this is how I first fell in love.

It wasn't big, but it was ours

It seems nearly impossible now, but there was a time when a simple auto mechanic and a school teacher, merely by the location of their modest ranch home amid the ever-multiplying McMansions along one of the most picturesque and adored lakes in Wisconsin, could be afforded access to a small private beach denied to those nearby with much greater means. That is indeed how the world worked when I was young.

Records were kept on index cards in little wooden boxes at the public beach house back then, the gateway to all summer fun, much like Mom's box of cards for creating cherry cheesecake and Salisbury steak at home. In a rite of spring dripping with that rare satisfaction rendered when the “have-nots” triumph over the “haves,” local kids would troop into that little clapboard beach house, and announce our names a little too loudly in case there were any rich kids from Illinois within hearing distance. Surnames would be ticked off on the cards, and small fabric seasonal passes would be freely dispensed from a roll much like tickets at a raffle, square nylon patches little more than an inch square with the year embroidered in a circle around the perimeter. One for each member of the household and a few extras for guests. But ours came from the roll with the colored embroidery thread. We got red or blue or sometimes gold, depending on the year, while those from away got only black and only after they payed.

That little colored badge of honor was quickly sewn on the lower left thigh of your trunks to be displayed proudly for the gate attendants and life guards the rest of the splashing and frolicking summer, and more importantly, for the kids emerging from shiny foreign cars with air conditioning and upholstery who had to hot-foot it all the way across the sweltering blacktop to the far entrance of the public beach. The yuppie scum.

All socioeconomic injustices temporarily waylaid, we were free to cross the much shorter route to our gated private beach. Or, more often, to simply hop the fence and tear down to the water in unbridled youthful glee for a day of cannonballs and jacknives on top of each other. The gate attendants knew who we were anyway. They were our babysitters and waitresses in winter.

In our house we had to finish our chores before mounting bikes for the almost daily speed run down the huge hill to the water, and I submit that was cruel and unusual punishment. Dishes or vacuuming or the inexorable pain of cleaning a bathroom. Imagine the horror. But once our work was done we were set free to rocket our way to sunburned freedom. On that ride down “The Big Hill” I was stopped more than once by Mr. Hutchinson, the town cop, for passing cars on my single-minded mission to achieve soggy summer fun. The posted speed limit there was (and still is) a residentially staid 30mph, and I can happily recall glancing over to see the startled visages of drivers as I shot idiotically by on the double yellow line. I cringe to think of the stitches and dental work (or much worse) that would've been involved had I ever put that old Schwinn down as it began to shimmy and wobble in my haste to get to the beach.

As we grew into rowdy young men, burgeoning with hormones but still too young to drive, the true proof of manhood among us was the ability to ride our bikes back up that same hill at the end of the swimming day without once touching the handlebars. A feat I came very close to achieving many times, but never completed, I'm sorry to report. I can rest easy now, from the remove of adulthood, with the fact that I failed. I believe all claims of having achieved this monumental task were exaggerated or flatly untrue. I don't think it's possible for a kid to do, and you wouldn't either if you saw the hill or a topo map. Except for maybe in the case of Brian. He claims to have done it a generation before me, and I believe him. He's not normal.

Yet another rite into young manhood was the willingness to sleep “under the stars.” There came a time when even the flimsy comforts of a tent and foam pad were eschewed by all who wished to deem themselves men of the woods. We'd practice our young bushcraft skills, often giving up on the bow and drill fire in collective resignation that a one-match fire was almost as cool as a no-match fire and far more comforting than none at all. Having mutilated a couple flimsy perch or shiners with a fillet knife and fire, and maybe with some wild greens or berries, we'd enjoy our paltry repast. Things were sometimes bolstered with hot dogs or beans or Oreos from home, but young mountain men in the making have amazing powers of selective memory, and these treats we summarily erased from the public record.

We'd stretch out in the grass and gaze up at the stars, fully codified in the belief that we would one day be remembered among names like Boone, Lewis, and Clark. But here's the thing: Even on warm summer nights, even as a malleable, nearly indestructible pre-teen, you don't get a lot of sleep sprawled out right in the dirt. Not if you've evolved past that stage twenty-five millennia prior to trying it again, anyway.

So we'd be up early. Very early. In that light that isn't really even light yet -- the bottomless pre-dawn calm. A time of day known best to duck hunters, third-shifters, and young knuckleheads who think it's rad to dirtbag it right on the ground.

What was there to do at this hour? The same thing there was to do every day all summer long – make for the beach.

Lake Geneva is one of the largest kettle lakes in Wisconsin. A kettle lake, in quick and dirty lay terms, being a dent in the ground left by a retreating glacier and filled with water. It is spring fed, deep and cold, and almost heartrendingly clear. Like looking through a window into the earth. One of those lakes where you park the boat in twenty five feet of crystalline water to fish for spawning bluegills in fifteen feet of water, instead of anchoring in five to cast up into two. And sometimes, if you're paying close attention when you pull a thick spinning gill up out of those depths, you will notice a long, heavy pike or musky hovering deep down there in the wet void. A monster of the deep glaring back up through the window.

Standing in the fishing section of the local Fleet Farm (a mid-western hardware store chain) the other day, I spied the cardboard and plastic packets of Eagle Claw snelled hooks. The very same packs that inhabit every tackle shop, hardware store, and gas station peg board near water in the known universe, and seemingly have since the beginning of time. They have bronze finish bait holder hooks or little gold aberdeens snelled with an eight-inch leader and a loop on the running end. You know the ones. I know who buys them too – twelve-year-old boys who ride their bikes down The Big Hill to the beach before the sun comes up.

Seeing those snells hanging there, I was instantly transported back to that little beach in the last throes of night, the sun not yet coming up over the drumlins seven miles to the east across the flat, dark plane.

Armed with the loop of one of those snells over your little finger, you could slip into that cold spring water and swim out to the weed line at the very deepest reaches of the white and blue swimming pier. A few big breaths to prepare, and then a long dive down through the clear nothingness to the bottom in earliest slanting dawn.

Grab onto the pier and hover there. The shimmering mosaic of flat round skipping stones before you in the quickly gathering morning, nature's most perfect fresco. Let the twinkling golden hook fall from your hand and hang by its leader. Still yourself. Just be. If you are patient, if you become nothing in the water with your bowl cut hair standing on end and tickling, a curious sunfish will come up from the sashaying green and bite that bare hook, and you will be pinky fishing in paradise.

June Food Porn

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 00:39:00 +0000

I haven't been posting here lately mostly because I've not had the time or opportunity to wander the woods. That does not mean, however, that I've been shirking my duties in the kitchen. So here, in case you don't follow on other forms of social media, is a photodump of recent culinary travails.

Enjoy, but remain assured they were much more satisfying in person.

Short Loins: Chain Reaction

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Tue, 06 May 2014 19:33:00 +0000

Chicks dig scars. That's what we used to say while gushing blood back when we were young and dumb enough to bring about that condition fairly regularly -- and young and dumb enough to call women chicks. I said it the time my left ear was half torn off my head in a particularly nasty scrum and the time I was wobbling around like a sot, concussed and bleeding with a ruptured ear drum on the other side. That ear remains numb to this day, but the one that got yanked off around the top shows no ill effects other than a cool white scar around the crest when I pull my ear out taut.

Men love to talk about their scars. Spend some time around a campfire with pleasantly tired fly fishermen or upland hunters for a while. You'll see. My hide sports the average number of scars for a man my age who, in the course of his life has played the roughest sports with relish, grew up with a pocketknife at the ready, splattered molten roux on his forearms, and occasionally consumed sufficient quantities of alcohol to be rendered incapable of dealing with the force of gravity.

On my left pointer finger, right at the first knuckle, there's a minor crescent-shaped scar that transects about a third the circumference of the digit. It was earned through devious trickery and a jaw-dropping surprise that nobody saw coming. Allow me to elaborate.

Roadkill at Lake Wisconsin, near Okee. Circa 1995.

There was a time long ago when Easter weekend meant that Roadkill and I would make a day's ride on our mountain bikes from Madison to either Governor Dodge State Park or Devil's Lake Sate Park campgrounds for some quality time around the fire. Frisbee and Brian joined us a couple times too. For the maiden voyage Road and I auspiciously carried all our camping gear on our backs, much to the chagrin of our tender backsides. In subsequent years we wised up, and had my dad meet us at the campground fully provisioned.

On one such occasion Dad arrived, and I dug the hatchet out of his truck to split up some kindling and get dinner going. In doing so I was met with the standard half-mocking admonishments from the crew about taking care with a sharp and dangerous implement.

They need not have worried, we all knew the truth. My father had a great many wonderful qualities as a parent, friend, and outdoorsman. Found nowhere among his burgeoning skill set, however, was the ability to sharpen tools. The man simply could not do it. He'd never owned a sharp tool after its second use in his life. He was an outstanding mechanic, or so I'm told by people who understand such things better than I (one of my shortcomings being the steadfast, if unmanly, conviction that the internal combustion engine functions solely through some blend of gingersnaps and the prayers of virgins). But given a dull axe, grinding wheel, and enough time, he could fashion you only a perfectly adequate sand wedge. And that's alright. We all have our weak points, and if the inability to properly hone edged tools is our most glaring, we should count ourselves very lucky.

So I took to making kindling for the cooking fire, and with my first mighty hack using the very hatchet I'd known to be dull as a mud fence my entire life, sliced neatly through the slab of firewood and a good portion of my finger. I stood dumbfounded, reeling not at the sight of my filleted finger, but the fact that Pop had somehow managed to sharpen a tool to a razor's edge. I honestly could not believe it, and still think he'd taken it to a person more skilled in sharpening, though he steadfastly refused to admit that in all the grinning retellings over the years.

Last week it was time to sharpen chainsaws. One had grown dull from use in spring brush clearing, the other larger saw was (and is still) staring a big upcoming job in the face. I pulled down Dad's battered blue toolbox that houses the sundry little wrenches, files, and accouterments one acquires in the use and upkeep of chainsaws. I inherited this toolbox from him, and it functions just as much as a touchstone to something we used to do well together -- putting up firewood -- as it does a place to store tools.

All was going swimmingly in the sharpening of the saw until I needed the depth gauge to hit the tooth guides square and level. It wasn't in the upper tray of the toolbox where it should have resided, so I lifted that up, only to discover a dirty little secret that, when the realization of what I was beholding hit me, made me guffaw aloud.

When I used to come home from Madison, I would often sharpen things for Dad. Not out of some weak demonstration of feigned superiority -- it simply needed to get done. I knew he wasn't the best at it, he knew I was fairly proficient, and so it just sort of became a tacit tradition. Kitchen knives, axes, scissors, chainsaws... whatever needed undulling. I failed to consider it at the time, but in hindsight the chainsaws never needed much more than a light touch up, which is odd considering how often they were used in the procurement of winter heat and brush clearing -- chainsaws do go dull fairly quickly. And now I know why they always seemed to be in good shape.

In the bottom of that toolbox, hidden under the insert tray on top, was a stash of barely used chains. Apparently Dad had been using them for one season (or less), then retiring them instead of trying to sharpen them. This was a man I once witnessed calmly use a metal nail file to get his car restarted while double parked in Chicago Loop rush hour traffic, something I could not pull off with every Chilton guide ever made and divine intervention. (he tore up the console when he smelled that acrid electrical burning/melting smell, and jumped the neutral safety switch, I'd be taught later. Insert serious childhood veneration) But he'd given up on sharpening chainsaws, and decided to simply purchase a new chain when the one in current use got dull.

Now that may be seen by some as sidestepping a problem, but I (perhaps through the rose tinted glasses of sonhood) see it as a perfectly viable work-around. It's important to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and use whatever you can to get around those shortcomings.

I took a moment to smile and thank him, shaking my head, and got back to the business of sharpening. Thanks to his inability to do it well, I'm set for chainsaw chains for the next 20 years.

Motley Chanteuses and Nanokames

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 01:19:00 +0000

Spring is stuttering and stumbling in slowly, like a drunk after last call having some trouble getting the key in the front door. I've been there myself, but I always managed to get through the door, and so will spring.

The return of migratory bird species is among the first signs of the impending warm-up. I was greeted by my first rather frozen looking robin of the season a few days before St. Patrick's Day this year. The earliest ones always look a little indignant to me when the weather turns back to snow and cold -- as do the rest of us, I guess.

I look forward most to the brightly adorned, wee warblers that will soon make their way through. These are some of the most musically gifted songbirds we get around here, crooners every one. They flit and sing from understory to canopy and most everywhere in between, bright little harbingers of spring. For years I've intended to finally learn how to identify them each by their individual song, but here we sit on the cusp of yet another migratory warbler concert, and I remain wholly unable to distinguish between Yellow-throated, Chestnut-sided, and Blackburnian solely by their teeny chirps and whistles. Not to mention the near-countless others. Somehow I'm fully capable of digesting four straight hours of Game of Thrones in preparation for the upcoming season, but I can't get around to learning warbler songs. That pretty much exemplifies how priorities can sometimes run askew.

The Sandhill Cranes have returned as well, though they've remained hidden from view, betrayed only by their prehistoric clattering calls as they traverse the sky. Grackles and geese too, the vernal parade begins anew.

Even the birds who never parted for warmer climes are more active now. There are a couple of male cardinals, for instance, who now pose and posture in front of the single, demure female resident seemingly all day long. I believe the trio consists of a mated pair and an interloper. When the uninvited suitor arrives on the scene, the mated male will crouch forward on his branch and spread his wings low and wide to ward off the hopeful bachelor, looking for all the world like he's bowing in some imperial court. He chases the intruder off time and again, but the unwed male is relentless in his attempts to woo the female away. Like bar time again.

Nuthatches creep and hop improbably upside down on hardwood trunks. For such a small bird they certainly do carry on with those surprisingly strident yank yanks! Last year a pair nested right outside the dining room window in a natural cavity, where I witnessed for the first time their so-called "sweeping" behavior. According to my extensive research (I clicked on two Google results), Nuthatches will find a particularly stinky bug or other wisp of debris, hold it in their bill, and "sweep" their doorstep with it in order to mask their own scent from predators like squirrels and raccoons. I knew nothing of any of that until I watched it happen one evening last year, stuffing a Reuben into my gob.

Trickle inspection can be even more gratifying with a partner

I'm a longtime proponent of trickle gazing, and there have been plenty of opportunities for that in recent days. After the third coldest winter in local history, the snow pack is finally giving in to sun, and everything is a glorious, gooey mess on the ground. The standard gravel driveway glaciation has retreated in the form of perfectly delightful rills and tiny streams at all sides.

And while I playfully choose to employ the term "glaciation" to denote that the driveway was covered with receding sheets of ice, it's not without a purpose here. As I was enjoying the last of the ice retreat and cogitating on all things kettle and moraine one warm evening, I noticed a natural phenomenon, writ infinitesimal, coming to fruition directly from the pages of my Earth Science textbooks of yore. I'd venture it's exceedingly rare to happen upon a demonstration of fluvial glacial geoformation happening right before your eyes, but that is precisely what took place, albeit it on a minuscule scale.

Dundee Mountain, a moulin kame, from afar

Dundee Mountain, though perhaps a bit enthusiastically monikered, rests comfortably nestled in the Northern Kettle Moraine State Forest not far from here. More of a conical hill than a mountain, it's nothing more than a pile of glacial till. A kame, by name and definition.

A kame is a type of hill left behind by a glacier, put plainly. Sometimes they are irregularly shaped, but to my mind, the most iconic among them are the blatantly conical examples. Sand and gravel are deposited by a meltwater river in a depression on the top of a retreating glacier. With further regression of the glacier those materials are deposited in a pile on the ground surface. Boom. Kame.

In the case of our vastly smaller example, the depressions atop the driveway "glacier" in question were formed by dark spots under the ice (last year's plantain and lambsquaters, specifically) causing it to melt faster in those areas.

Snow melt runs across and down the driveway in this area, and often forms a surface better suited to hockey than driving, but that's the way it's gonna be until somebody regrades that entire section of driveway and yard. When the melt happens with enough vigor, the runoff carries with it some of the sand and gravel hurled up into the adjacent snowbanks by the plow.

And when the ice is finally all gone we're left with little piles of sand and gravel, formerly retained in their weedy depressions, deposited onto the surface of the driveway. When the vegetation that caused the depressions and holes in the first place rots away, we will be left with what, in fact, will be teensy-weensy little kames. Nano-kames perched atop the very Kettle Range that was formed in antiquity by a glacier which shares a name with our state. That's some heady Hakuna matata, circle of life shit if you think about it too much. Especially while standing in the driveway drinking a beer on a gorgeous late winter evening.

I've dubbed this miniature glacial formation The Bucket-head NanoKame Field after the bucket-head dog who kept stepping on them while I was trying to take the picture. They probably won't last through the April storms, but as long as they do remain I'll be reminded of the immensity and tiny detail of the natural world every time I walk by.

Short Loins: "The Crick"

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 18:30:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 21:00:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Thu, 13 Feb 2014 22:00:00 +0000

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.

He Ain't Heavy

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 22:27:00 +0000

Note: This post is darker and more graphic than most found on this blog, and is as much (or more) for my catharsis than for your reading enjoyment. Continue reading at your own discretion.

It has been a bleak winter for the families tied together by our deer camps up north. We've lost two of our elders in the camps -- grandpas and husbands -- to the cold winter winds. Solid men equally adept at fixing tractors as they were gibbering to grandbabies perched in their callused hands; they lived long productive decades, and raised gorgeous, loving families. I will not suffer so much as those families in the face of their great losses, but I can empathize. Death has put me in a qualified position to do so.

There is a certain conversation that happens when I run into a friend unseen by me for a decade or so now. I'm fairly adept at this particular catching-up confab, but that does little to ease its taking place.

We make our greetings, exchange in a little small talk, and it's then that I sometimes attempt to politely extricate myself from the encounter. Not to preserve my comfort, but theirs. I've had this dreadful conversation dozens of times before. If the exchange goes on long enough, though, they come to the subject of my family as anyone would in that casual updating mode, not knowing that they're stepping into a conversational bear trap.

They inquire about my parents. They ask about my brother Josh and my great love Erin. The fishermen sometimes ask of my exploits with longtime buddy and salmon trolling fiend, Kirk, on Lake Michigan; an ill-fated and desperate attempt to steer the conversation toward brighter shores. Time and again I'm forced to inform them, reticking the boxes on a worn list of despair, that all these folks are dead. Taken. Gone.

I'm the last man standing, though I've yet to figure out what I won.

The varying circumstances of their deaths no longer matter as much as the stark reality of their absences. That there were a few years there when I wondered if the seismic emotional pummeling would ever stop.

Sometimes these surprised friends from my past cry, sometimes they hug me right there in the frozen foods aisle (which is nice, I guess, but uncomfortable), but most often they simply stumble through a clumsy apology, and wander off looking slightly bewildered after their impromptu encounter with an emotional wood chipper. I always secretly hope they go home and hug their families.

I should go no further without making it known that throughout those three years of bottomless calamity, while everything was falling and broken, four men in particular remained unassailable and true for me. The steadfast and centered Frisbee of that solid up north deer camp stock, unmoving and patient. Spanky, a font of the greatest side-splitting rants ever witnessed in this hemisphere, always present with hilarity and that plain-spoken genuineness small town guys often have. The ferociously bright and deep Bender, smartest man I call friend, our long conversations wending and ranging over the spectrum of our combined interests for hours. And the indomitable, irrepressible, jarringly crass and sweet at once Roadkill -- so much the other half of me that we've occasionally been accused of speaking in (often gleefully profane) "Twin Talk."

We don't see each other as much as we once did, The Boys and I, separated by both geography and my post-traumatic predilection for running solo most of the time, but I know if I picked up the phone in need once again, any one of them and a host more, would run through a brick wall to help me. I'd return the favor without thought.

During the time in which my loved ones were tipping over one after the other, like metal plate targets at the range, my brother's passing was sort of lost on me. The way things went down, the order they happened in, I didn't have time to really acknowledge he was gone. When my dad died six months after my brother did, I'm fully confident that it was partly of a broken heart. I'd barely had time to think about Josh in the interim. There's no shame in that, it's simply the way things happened.

With the perspective of time, though, things have a changed a bit. The pain of all the losses dims with time, but his remains more clear to me at times because I was unable to give it proper treatment then.

Josh was just over a year younger than me, and we grew up in that classic brothers mode of bickering interspersed with laughter -- him following me around with my friends, begging to tag along; always the last in a train of bikes, struggling to keep up. We swam at the beach down the hill from home, and built jumps for our dirt bikes in the woods up the hill. And there were all-out wars. I've had a straight-back chair broken over my back (they don't explode satisfyingly like in a good Western) and a hatchet whiz right by me to come to a clattering halt in the woodpile. The boy did not mince about when it came time to throw down.

He looked up to me for almost everything growing up, starting from a very young age. When my parents and some ambiguous (to me) health professionals were fretting at his remaining speechless well past the age he should have, I knew better. He only spoke to me in the secret comfort of our darkened bedroom. Later he'd whisper to me in the half acre vinyl backseat of that olive drab Impala, and I'd make his wishes known to our parents up front. When he did finally begin to talk in public, it was with a painful, often debilitating stutter, but that did little to dampen his zest for talking... and talking... and talking. Josh was a singularly determined and unstoppable chatterbox from then on, prone to flights of fancy, and relentless to the point that he sometimes drove normally sane and serene people, family and relative strangers alike, to beg him to please, shut the hell up for two minutes!

As we grew through elementary and middle school, it became apparent that Josh was not progressing normally. The incessant yammering and inability to keep up with his peers in the classroom landed him in remedial classes, the offices of mental health professionals, and eventually, in the worst case, jail. Our paths could not have been more divergent. While I was being carted off to advanced courses and programs with my fellow nerds, he was mired and frustrated and acting out.

By the time we were in our late teens, he'd been diagnosed as bipolar, having OCD, and being mentally deficient or whatever the acceptable term of the day was. Not to mention a entire passel of other monikers. Learning disabled, special needs, retarded... whatever. The lay truth is that he was a naive 3rd-grader living in a behemoth 6'8" frame. Easily lost and confused, easily led astray by any who wished to do so, and easily provoked into violence when those two situations arose in unison. Or when some inelegant, about-to-be-mangled asshole made fun of his stuttering. I never blamed him for that one. I'd beaten them bloody for him until he was old enough to do it for himself. He was labeled a dropout, an offender, and a delinquent by the time I was in college, when all he really wanted was to ride his bike and have me visit.

He wrote me heartbreaking letters from jail and halfway houses and and mental hospitals, in his jagged childish scrawl, about how I was going to come home someday, and he was going to get a Corvette, and we were just going to drive and drive. I sat in 262 Witte Hall B, and wept for his simple beauty, his relentless hope over reason.

In the end, I couldn't save him. Nobody could. But we did one day, in a different way, long before then.

We were Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts together, Josh and I, and Dad was our Scoutmaster much of the time. Dad wasn't much for bloated organizations like the BSA, or for regulations and party lines, but he was for getting young boys out in the woods, and that's what he did. If you pack 8 boys in a van and head for the woods on your own, you're a creepy molester. Add uniforms and some paperwork, you're a Scoutmaster. Simple as that.

I was eleven, one of the oldest boys in our fledgling troop, and easily the most comfortable in the woods having been raised by my father, the winter we found ourselves camping and generally running around like little imps at a Scout camp in central Wisconsin. We'd been there before as a troop in summer, and knew the sprawling grounds well, from the lake well up into the woods that surrounded the camping area proper. After our mandated activities one morning, we were left free to scamper about the place until dinner was to be made. I have no recollection what those activities may have been, but I'll bet they involved canvas or leather at some point, and fire. And pocketknives. If you've ever been part of (or come in close contact with) a Boy Scout troop, you'll know that every one of them is fairly bristling with pocketknives. Big ones, little ones, sharp ones, dull ones; you could fashion and outfit an entire ark using solely the knives found in the pockets of any Boy Scout troop in America.

The snow was deep and dense that day-- outstanding for sledding -- as a few of us trundled off in search of a perfect sledding hill. Josh was smaller than the boys my age, and as usual, soon found himself bringing up the rear of our group as we trekked overland most of the afternoon, always searching for a sledding run to top the last.

We eventually found one to our liking in the form of a steep and icy footpath that cut straight through the woods down to a clearing near the river. It was slick and dangerous enough to be cool and a little hair-raising, but you didn't let on with that to your friends. We took it one at a time, narrow and fast as it was, and laughed as we wiped out in a pile of snow pants and stocking caps at the bottom.

Josh went last as he'd gotten there last, and was taking forever, as usual. I was getting impatient and ready to leave him behind yet again when he screamed my name. A sharp, frightened scream full of adrenaline and need. Not the prolonged, whiney... Looookisss, waaaait uuuup! I was accustomed to, no, it was immediately apparent, even hidden from view over the crest of the hill, that Josh was hurt. Another yelping and pained Lucas, Help! sent me hurdling uphill as fast as I could manage.

The first thing I saw was blood in the snow, and a lot of it. Splashes of bright crimson against the white. He was lying flat on his back, head uphill, his right leg essentially case skinned from just below the knee to his ankle, boot peeled off in the fray. There was a wad of "meat" balled up around his ankle like an old tube sock, its elastic long since given way. I wasn't sure if his foot was still attached, but when I asked him to wiggle his toes, I could see tendons and muscles trying to work behind his shin and in his foot. I froze for a moment, and we stared each other in the eye, both panting and scared. Then he did the strangest thing in that moment. He let out a resigned sigh, almost relaxed, and gave me the same comforted look he often did his entire life -- I'm in your hands now, big brother. I trust you. You got this.

And here's the thing. I did have it. If ever there was an eleven-year-old prepared for this, it was one who poured over his dad's wilderness survival and first aid manuals at bedtime just as often as he read Encyclopedia Brown mysteries and Jim Kjelgaard.

The blood seemed almost neon red in my amped-up state, and I was worried it was arterial, but there wasn't any real gushing or squirting, just seeping and dripping everywhere. My young mind took that to mean no tourniquet and potential loss of limb. We spun him around so his leg was above his heart uphill, and I had my buddy Jason apply heavy pressure to the inside of his thigh by kneeling into it right at the groin. I flopped his fake-feeling and plastic-y skin back up and over his lower leg, packed some clean snow in there, and tied it all back together with his boot laces. To this day, I don't know if that was the "right" move, but it seemed like it at the time. We piled our coats on him to keep him warm and maybe treat for shock a little. I told them to keep talking to him, and Jason not to lift his pressure no matter what.

Then I ran.

Like I never have before or since, I ran. Hard. Through the deep heavy snow until by teeth hurt and my hands shook uncontrollably. Until the tunnel vision and peripheral firework sparklies of oxygen deprivation set in. Until I vomited down my front, and still I didn't stop. I ran with the fear for my little brother's life at my back, a flat out sprint for love through rough up-and-down riverine gullies, mainlining adrenaline and hope.

I got to the campsite, and Dad drove to us to a phone to call 911. Honestly, it gets pretty blurry after that. I do remember the medics arrived in slacks and dress shoes, apparently fresh from a meeting. They couldn't get him up the hill once they had him stabilized, slipping and flailing on the icy slope. A walrus-mustached sheriff's deputy was there by then, standing next to me and exhorting them from the top of the hill (in language I'd only heard Dad use after he'd stepped on a Lego in the night) to get their goddamn heads out their asses, and bring that boy up.

Once again, my little troop of Scouts swung into action, and rigged Josh to his sled to be pulled up the slope with a rope by the cop and Dad while the medics slipped and fell all over trying to get back uphill to their rig to call for... I don't know. Boots, a crane... a clue?

As was later discovered, some Scout from one of those anonymous troops bristling with pocketknives had carved himself a stout and sharp, nice long spear, and then, meaning no harm of course, thoughtlessly cast it aside along that trail down to the water, where it froze solid to the ground, point uphill, waiting patiently for my brother to coming zipping right over the top of it kneeling in the front of a plastic sled.

I remember he had 300-some stitches and 38 staples to close up his initial surgery, figures that boggled my young mind then, and still do today. There were more surgeries after that, and a handful of skin grafts, but eventually he recovered fully, and had a cool story about the badass giant scar on his leg. He always painted me the hero in the retellings, looked at me with that same fawning, completely open trust. I shied away with a wince of the undeserving.

If this were a weepy episode of Grey's Anatomy, I'd have been there to hold his hand when he woke up from the initial surgery. But it was real life, and we never held hands anyway. I slept at least as long as he did in my own bed an hour or more by car from the hospital, and when I was taken back there, he simply said, "Thanks, brother."

Anytime, brother. Anytime.

I'm not much into cars, but if I ever do find myself in possession of the means and desire to own a classic American sports car, it'll be a 1967 Corvette in Rally Red, just for him -- just like he wanted when we were kids. And I'll just drive and drive.

Merry, Merry

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Tue, 24 Dec 2013 19:42:00 +0000

For my friends hailing from more temperate climes, a few pictures that you might enjoy a white Christmas from afar. For my hearty northern brothers and sisters, more of the same. Soldier on, and we'll make it till May.

For everyone, I wish you the best in whatever you have going over the holidays. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, all hail Skadi, goddess of winter -- whatever floats your boat, I hope it floats it high and dry.

All my best,

~Lucas

A Feather Touch

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Sun, 15 Dec 2013 22:41:00 +0000

This one is geared a bit more toward the ladies... or, if you're a fella who happens to enjoy sporting a feather or three in your hair, well then... go for it I guess, dude. I'm not judging. I'm probably going to alienate a female reader or seven here in a bit, spewing stereotypes and generalizations as I go. I don't need to lose anyone else in the first paragraph.

There are some universal truths in life -- what goes up must come down and the sun sets in the west. A flush beats a straight and the Bears still suck (put more generically: the sports team from my geographical area is superior to the sports team from your geographical area, always and in every way). We hold these things to be true everywhere we go.

If you're a tyer of colorful and flashy warmwater flies, another thing will occasionally happen to you that is as consistent as the seasons. You can see it coming almost every time. Open your boxes in front of a non-fishing woman or group of women. Almost without fail one of them will, in that particular timbre and frequency that is somehow simultaneously jarring and oh, so satisfying to the male ear, oooh and aaah and say, "These would make cool jewelry. You should make me some earrings!"

I'm not a social scientist, and I only have the anecdotal evidence that is my life, but apparently, when a member of the fairer sex encounters something small and colorful and sparkly, most of them can't help but lose their mind for a few seconds. It wouldn't be a stereotype if ... yeah, you get it. All emails regarding my perceived anti-feminist generalizations will be ignored in the order they are received.

The trout guys are notoriously out of luck here, by the way. Nobody other than the angler and trout gets excited over a box full of little brown creepy-crawlies, and few outside the fish has ever thought of a dobsonfly nymph as sexy or delicious. Google one up if you don't believe me.

No, it's us warmwater and big, bitey-fish chasers who tie the flash and sparkle that looks like it might be jewelry to some uninitiated female friends. The modern equivalent of that unboxing in front of the girls is, of course, the sharing of our pics on social media. Maybe I'm way off base in all this, or maybe I just tie really girly flies somehow, but if you looked at an archive of my Twitter, Instagram, and (fledgling, admittedly) Facebook tying pics, you'd find quite few requests for jewelry in the comments and replies.

I believe this was the most recent winner in the eliciting jewelry hints game

It was inevitable then, really. A while back, Randi asked me if I'd like to have a bunch of peacock feathers. I really would, as it turns out. That much herl will go a long way, staring a long winter of tying in the face.

I first brought up the subject of peacock jewelry being fashioned in trade for the feathers. It doesn't really matter who broached the subject, I was almost certain she'd be flatly thrilled at the prospect. Decades of occasionally opening fly boxes in front of females had already taught me that to be true. Aside from that, I'm always down for the challenge of trying to make something beautiful.

The irony of putting together feather jewelry as a fly tyer is not lost on me. Beginning in 2010, I believe, the whimsy of the behemoth fashion industry turned to feather hair extensions, and pretty much kicked the average tyer right square in the teeth. One article I read said that a buyer for a home shopping channel called a grower asking for a weekend run of 15,000 saddles, more than twice what the grower produced in a year. Such was the demand for rooster saddles.

Once the craze hit there were simply no grizzly feathers for most of us, and when you did find them, they were usually from a hair salon supplier and almost comically, astronomically overpriced. To this day they are very difficult to find -- many of us often tie with substitutes or choose different patterns altogether -- but at least you no longer get salt rubbed in the wound by seeing women with perfectly beautiful saddle feathers hanging uselessly in their hair every time you leave the house.

In any case, we committed fly tyers are a resilient bunch, always with an eye out for new and different materials we can use in our tying endeavors. Fly shops and online fly tying retailers are, of course, our main source of feathers and fur and little shiny baubles to stick on a hook. But the low hum in the background of our brains that is the sound of seeking new materials thrums a little louder in the art supply store, the hardware store and many other other places.

There are fly patterns out there that start with everything from flip-flops to seat belt webbing. Me, I tie one fly with "collie dubbing." The pooch has cool gray underfur on her rump that behaves much like Laser Dub and she was just lying there watching me tie one day when inspiration struck. It made sense then, and it still catches fish now. Best of all, she loves a good butt brushing. (I'm choosing to leave that softball perched right there on the tee.)

The craft store is a treasure trove of fly tying materials. Craft Fur, some feathers, Prismacolor markers, beads and beading wire, chenille-- that one stringy looking yarn that is basically polar chenille, only in a multitude more colors. Eyes in particular are everywhere at the craft store, and not just the doll eyes and stick-on googly eyes (but those do rattle nicely).

The eyes above are made from the "stamens" sold to construct artificial flowers. The bottom two flies below have eyes made from cheap stick-on rhinestones. Those rhinestones inspired the entire color scheme, as a matter of fact.

So, I'm in the craft store at least once a month, often more than that. They know me there. I've always had a fairly easy touch working my few charms on the mothers and aunts (and sometimes sisters) of the world, and the cute little frosty-permed craft store ladies are no different.

When one of them found me in the jewelry aisle, looking mildly perplexed, she approached to help. She knows I'm a fly tyer, but when I related that I'd roped myself into making some earrings and such, she patted my arm, and said, "Oh, hon. We get you fellas in here all the time. Here's what you need..."

Having a craft store grandma is pretty sweet. No snickerdoodles yet, but I'm holding out hope.

There was no more putting it off. I had to sit down and make some jewelry. It had been a long time since I sat at the bench (vise now pushed over to the side), and had no idea what I was doing. Often when I'm struggling to jazz up a well-known fly pattern or come up with one of my own, I start with color. I have no formal art training -- I vaguely know what a color wheel is, but wouldn't know what to do with one, so it mostly entails me rummaging through bags of feathers, holding stuff up together to see what it looks like.

That's exactly what I did here. I made a glorious mess of things, hauling out every bag of feathers that had cool patterning or that I thought might look good in the color scheme. I soon found myself adrift in pheasant skins, strung guinea fowl, soft hackle patches, and whatever else I could dig up. My side of the mountain... of feathers.

I felt a feather overload flop sweat coming on, so I put all but my favorites away, and began to mock up some layouts. While there were some struggles initially, and almost no sustained or consistent technique throughout, I did eventually manage to meld some stuff to some other stuff roughly approaching a state of bedazzlement.

Things I learned about making earrings and hair clip... things with peacock feathers:

All the little metal posts and rings and stuff you use to make earrings are called "earring findings." I had no idea.
You don't have to baby peacock eyes as much as I'd thought. They'll generally hold together as long as you don't completely destroy them tying them on. That said, some Super 77 spray adhesive would be nice next time.
I watched a lot of crafty women go through a lot of shenanigans to get their feathers attached to head pins on YouTube. Somebody needs to introduce them to fly tying bobbins -- multiple times faster and no hot glue oozing everywhere.
You can't "reef" on soft earring components with the thread like you can a hook. Somebody needs to introduce this fly tyer to a little finesse.
I own a number of bins of feathers that might be deemed "ridiculous" by some. Some of the packs of feathers have never been opened, and that makes me feel slightly like a greedy asshat.

Here's what I managed to cobble together in my initial efforts, warts and all.

A little good old fashioned cherry Kool-Aid dying to get the red there.

I'll never claim to be a crafty jewelry maker, and I don't know how they'd rate in the highly competitive world of peacock jewelry making. Or if that exists. But I do know another universal truth in the male world...

... on the occasions you manage to craft something that makes a beautiful woman smile as above, it's often best to stop babbling about it on your blog before you say something idiotic and ruin the whole thing.

Peace.

Comfort with Discomfort

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 18:40:00 +0000

It would be easy for the uninitiated reader of all the wonderful outdoorsy books and blogs out there to assume that all we do in the outdoors comes with ease and comfort. One can read entire shelves concerning life afield, and never encounter a mention of biting ticks and mud and soggy feet. In much of our literature there exists a dearth of reality, in which the protagonists always bag the game with ease and aplomb, and usually have some schmaltzy life-affirming quip to back up their legendary shooting.

Never having experienced the sport, a novice might wade into fly fishing, quite literally, without any consideration given to the fact that they might someday find themselves staring, rather startled and vexed, at an impromptu piece of feathery jewelry dangling painfully from an appendage they'd not intended to pierce.

It ain't always wine and roses out there. In fact, it rarely is. A lot of times, it's even gonna suck a little. If you do what we do outside, you're going to sunburn and shiver, bring home scrapes and bruises along with a full game pouch. Or end up with a fish thrashing on the other end of a crank bait buried in your leg. Them's the ropes, but it isn't often addressed in the glossy mags or erudite literature, and I think a touch of reality is in order.

Excursions for most of us common folk begin with throwing the gear and some food in the truck. Then we do what we do all day, and haul it all back out of the vehicle, slightly more muddy than it was when we left home. There are no dog handlers, no chefs, no maître d'. It's up to us to power through the slogging and sorting, the cold and wet and tired, bird cleaning and deer gutting by headlamp, because this is what we love to do. The vast majority of the time there are no panoramic vistas or transcendental moments. Those are the rare treasures we seek but seldom find, and they are that much more powerful in their rarity after countless hours sitting in the cold or stumbling around on slippery river rocks until we take an unplanned swim.

The following is taken from an email I was forced to send to my entire contacts list years ago, as referenced in one of my very early (and pretty amusing, if I do say so) posts here -- Falling Down

It was going to be a glorious morning.

Waders on, fly rod in hand, I made my way down a slick bank to enjoy a few casts before officially starting my day. It was then that I suddenly found myself flailing at nothing, enjoying a rather pleasant -- if unexpected -- weightlessness. Followed immediately by a free fall to a muddy, wet finish. I stuck the landing with my chin, and the Romanian judge gave it an 8.6 with a the full level of difficulty rating.

My phone is toast. The screen shattered somewhere between the second and third full twist in the pike position, with no way to retrieve the contacts. It also feels like I bruised my duodenum and sprained sixteen ribs, but that's not the point of this message. Please reply here with your contact info if you wish your number(s) to be in my phone. Or don't, if you're sick of me.

Of course replacements are currently backordered, so Verizon has kindly provided me with a lovely Bakelite rotary-dial eight-pound loaner to lug around in case the need to call in danger close air support should arise.

Have a nice day.

It was actually an abysmally useless early Windows phone for the sake of setting the record straight, but that isn't what we're driving at here. This is: Much of what we do outside leads to a lot of hanging around slightly bored, getting frozen solid or cooked like a brisket. Yes, there are those glorious moments of accomplishment, but there's also a lot of waiting around in the rain -- and trust me, there's a very fine line between the badass-ery of hunting in the freezing rain and simply sitting in a sopping duck blind like you were dropped there by a short bus.

I recently listened to Meat Eater's Steven Rinella among a panel of guests on a very popular podcast. In the course of their discussion about the physical demands of hunting, one of the guests (I can't recall which) summed it up by saying that sometimes you just have to become comfortable with discomfort. I'd never heard it put more succinctly, nor had I realized that was precisely what I and many other outdoorsy folks do without ever thinking about it.

Years ago I took my neighbor and friend in Madison ice fishing for his first time. He was a professor at the UW, southern by birth, and a hell of a good dude. An outdoorsy kid decades before, after years cooped in classrooms and meetings he was finding his way afield again in his free time, and I was frankly honored to take part. He mentioned that he'd like to try ice fishing, so when I knew the bite was on we bundled up, and hit The Triangle on Monona Bay right downtown.

It was a steely hard mid-winter morning with blustery winds, but I didn't own a shelter big enough for the two of us at the time, so we braved it on upturned buckets like everyone used to do. We caught a passel of fat bluegills before the whirring glow of the Vexilar, and I called it for the warmer climes of home just when I began to worry he was going to turn blue and topple off his bucket in one big frozen chunk.

Months after that, as we drank beer and told stories in my living room -- I think he often took great pleasure in escaping what he termed the "insufferable droning of academicians" with me -- he shared that one of the things he was most struck by from our day together on the ice was that I hadn't worn gloves while I fished. His wife corroborated this sentiment, stating that he'd repeatedly mentioned it and stared at her dumbfounded when he'd returned home.

Now, any jigger of panfish through the ice will attest that when the bite is hot, you can't really wear gloves and remain effective. They eventually get wet and useless or gooped up with fish slime and useless, and you can't really tie a knot or bait a tiny hook with them on anyway, so you end up tossing them aside to get your jig back in front of fish faces with as much alacrity as possible. And your hands get cold, but you deal with it.

I don't share this story through some need to express online machismo (fishing without gloves had never occurred to me as exceptionally "tough" or even "fucking crazy," to quote our shocked looking southern professor friend), but to demonstrate a reaching of comfort with discomfort. My hands get as cold as anybody's, but we ice fishermen know that putting gloves on in that moment isn't the right play. You just ride it out as long as you're on the school. First your hands sting, then they ache, then it goes away. As long as they turn pink and not blue or white, you're fine.

Pro Tip- Occasionally huffing and puffing on frozen hands, whacking them on your legs and cussing, or boinging around furiously with your hands thrust between your thighs like you just smacked your thumb with a hammer are all perfectly acceptable substitutions for gloves during short fishing breaks. But you don't do any of them in front of your male Arkansan neighbor. You sit somberly and give your best Intrepid Ice Guide thousand yard stare from behind the beard and mirrored shades. There is a manliness protocol when taking southern guests ice fishing.

When asked how I can stand to sit on a frozen lake or hunt in the rain for hours by my "city friends" I often equate this becoming comfortable with discomfort to being hungry in a meeting or sometime when you can't eat. You acknowledge it and move on. Toughen up, Buttercup. Or alternatively, if you're gonna run for the truck every time you spring a leak and spurt a little blood... or take a massive digger on snowshoes right in front of your buds Pike and Rum Runner moments after proclaiming your expertise to them on said appliances... maybe stamp collecting is a better option for you.

I'd love to try a hunt of ease and luxury someday. Maybe a proper English driven pheasant shoot with a scatter gun that costs more than my first car (which isn't really saying much -- almost every shotgun at Dick's costs more than my rust and powder blue Volare station wagon did). I'd make long passing shots with grace and humble wit, then retire to the library, all herringbone and tattersall, for scotch and talk of favorite dogs in front of a warming fire, the birds and guns left to be tended to by handlers and cooks.

But my hunt will almost assuredly never end that way. Instead, I track mud into the house, and drink PBR while starting dinner. Brian combs burrs out of Buddy and carps about city people. Or bird watchers. Or people who ride bikes ("goddamn hippies")... mostly anybody who isn't us. The man has issues and a rare talent for colorfully entertaining vehemence, but he knows his way around the woods better than almost anyone I know.

Just occasionally though, after all the discomfort, just when you've made your peace and accepted it, there does come that perfect fish or deer or bird. Or simply a moment of grace, a pittance of quiet understanding at the feet of the natural world. Perhaps a short escape into that perfect panorama.

Huginn's Aerie

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Thu, 31 Oct 2013 21:56:00 +0000

A wind storm came through about a week ago and left the place a wreck. The clean-up endeavors involved a vast array of tools from weed whip to chainsaw, and most everything in between. During the course of my chores I was reminded, once again, that there are plenty of usage and meaning voids in the English lexicon. I think we need a term for that particularly enraging inability to get lopping shears around the branch you want to cut due to the inability to see it through the other branches or the skewed angles at which one is often forced to attack the offending branch through the brush. "Lopper Rage" seems many degrees too banal and not nearly visceral enough for that moment of blinding white infuriation when you can't get the mother$*!#&^% blades... around this mother%$*$#(@ branch... !! Shwew. Sorry.

Minor clipping conniptions aside, I soon found myself wandering between a good amount of brush, piles haphazardly dotting the yard. I decided to drag it to one corner that abuts the woods in back, and just yards beyond, a steep drop off to the forest floor deep below. It had occurred to me in the past that this would be a nifty spot for a ground blind as it overlooks a rather open section of the forest often flooded by the creek when it overflows its banks in spring.

I hadn't gotten around to building the ground blind before now, in part, because I am not a bow hunter. Nor am I predisposed to be one, truthfully. For decades, autumn weekends have meant tromping along behind a good looking mutt or two, and swinging on startled birds as they claw and flap for altitude before the backdrop of standing corn or golden leaves. I've suffered more than a moment's pause thinking about trading all that to sit in a tree waiting for a deer to walk by. Still, with the weeknight opportunity staring me right in the back deck (I could see the blind as I sit here if I cut just two spruce trees down), that personal opinion is bound to change. I only wish the urge had truly struck in time for me to be ready to bow hunt now. That, of course, would involve the possession of both a bow and the ability to shoot it well, apart from a good many other things, none of which I see laying about here.

So I rearranged a few landscaping ties between a tree and couple well-driven re-bar stakes on the precipice of the the drop-off, and screwed down a scrap of plywood to give myself a fairly level platform on which to park a handy chair. If the whole works isn't actually cantilevered out over the abyss, it's close enough to feel like it sometimes.

All that was left was to drag in my recently trimmed brush, and have a good sit., which I did almost immediately.

Huginn's Aerie- with all the eye rolling, tongue in cheek pomposity I can muster

I've dubbed this new blind Huginn's Aerie partly because, if you're gonna pose as a faux-pretentious douche bag on the internet, as I sometimes find to be enjoyable here, you have to really swing for the fences to make it play. And, more to the point, if you've managed to pick up some Norse mythology from anyplace other than the Marvel movies, you may remember that Huginn (or Hugin) is one of the ravens that flies all over the world and brings news back to the big cheese, Odin. The name Huginn comes to us from the Old Norse "thought," and so I chose him for a namesake because that's what you do most of the time in any blind -- you sit and think.

Sometimes you ponder the actual hunting happening in front of you, but just as often the mind wanders wherever it pleases. In a few short evenings of sitting and cogitating, I've already seen a respectable array of passers-by including the resident pair of great horned owls (I'd guess Jacinda has flown the coop for greener patches of hardwood, but I know little of juvenile owl habits), the somewhat more secretive (but still a local denizen, I believe) sharp-shinned hawk, a red fox, a family of three lumbering raccoons, annoyingly screechy blue jays (of course), plenty of deer, and chippies and squirrels too numerous to count. The most comical and consistent visitor thus far is one spectacularly unafraid chipmunk in particular, who seems to quite enjoy gnawing hazlenuts right in the blind with me, well within kicking range were I so inclined. I'm probably the interloper, probably built the blind right on little dude's house, but he seems happy enough for the company and we get along in any case.

Almost all the green you can see in this view from The Aerie (except the
blind itself in the foreground) is invasive buckthorn,
about the only deciduous plant still green in the woods.

I got to thinking about buckthorn while taking in the sunset the other night. If you've ever left the gravel parking lot at the trail head anywhere in this part of the world, you've encountered buckthorn. You can't not have. It's as ubiquitous as it is detrimental to native plants.

One of the main "ploys" buckthorn uses to out-compete native species so effectively lies in its ability to green up first in spring and stay green longer than most other woodland plants in fall. With just such an extended growing season, it has little trouble sucking up more sun and nutrients, growing faster and longer, and choking out the less aggressive species around it.

Check it out. This nimrod is about to wade directly into a possibly derisive religious discussion right in the middle of his perfectly harmless little outdoor blog. Idiot...

I am and almost always have been more of a science-y guy when it comes to explaining the universe and everything in it. It's more comfortable for me, but due maybe to my upbringing, I do believe there is a higher power out there somewhere as well, humming along in the background. It, this higher power, is just very much more hands-off in my mind than it is in the minds of some of my more religious friends. It may be there, but we don't hang much. And I don't go in the for the big beardly guy sitting on a cloud either. If anything, I hope it's Morgan Freeman in an all white suit. That'd be pretty rad.

Nor was I ever much of a "be one with the forest" crystal-wearing spiritual New Age type, until one day when I thought about it through the prism of the periodic table. If you look at the most populous elements in the universe and the most common materials in us as people, it's the same stuff. Excepting helium which doesn't really do much for us at the temperatures we hang out in, you check off the list of stuff floating around out there... hydrogen, oxygen, (hi, we're predominately made of water), carbon... we are quite literally one with the forest, not to mention everything else that ever has been. It's all from the same box of Legos. Everything that is ever gonna be was puked out in a few seconds or so, and that's it. We're molecularly one with most everything... or at least the four percent of the universe that isn't dark matter. That's a different blog entirely.

So as I sat there, elementally at one with the roley-poley raccoons and brave little chipmunk, wondering how many gallons of Roundup I'd need to put a dent in the local buckthorn population (now is the time of year, after all), it occurred me that maybe it was "meant to be" in some grand plan. Maybe God or whoever is in charge has decided that buckthorn should take over this corner of the world, and that's just how it is. And that kind of thinking brought me to thinking, in a roundabout way, of the classic God of the gaps conundrum.

God of the gaps, simply stated, is the practice of inserting God into any situation that science cannot define or explain. It is taking the holes in our understanding of the world as proof of God's existence. I have no problem with that on the face of it, except that it leads, without fail, to one massive problem.

Think about when there was a lot more stuff we could not understand scientifically. Gravity, Newtonian physics, the motion of the stars and planets, self tanning lotion. Many of them were given to God of the gaps through the ages -- the universe revolved around the Earth because God said so. Fair enough.

Until we are able to put the observations to a thing, to formulate hypotheses, run ever-evolving experiments and prove scientifically why or how something happens or doesn't. When that happens to a phenomenon previously attributed to God of the gaps, that deity becomes, by definition, nothing more than an ever-receding shadow of the unknown. I don't like the thought of that. It's jarring to me. I much prefer the Morgan Freeman model, as a matter of fact.

This is what happens when you get some time in a new blind to hash things over. At least it is when I do. I'm old enough now that I can occasionally have upwards of five to seven complete thoughts before boobs pop in again, and put everything else back on hold. I'd be babbling about even more random topics here if it weren't for the one thing I'm most excited about in The Aerie.

There are deer here. Seemingly lots of them, to my frame of reference.

I'm used to deer hunting in the much larger, much thicker northwoods where deer have not been nearly as common as they are down here for quite a few years now. There are wolves and bears and inexorably long, cold springs up there that often lay waste to the deer herd. And there aren't thousands of acres of corn and soybeans for the deer to leisurely grow fat and abundant on up there, as there are down here.

I saw 5 deer the first evening I sat in Huginn's, and that was mere hours after I'd been in there stomping around, raising hell with the chainsaw and stinking the whole place up. I've gone entire rifle seasons up north without seeing that many deer. Hell, I think I've gone entire consecutive rifle seasons without seeing that many deer. Not that you'd ever convince me to hunt during gun season anywhere but The Camp as long as they'll have me, but it is rather exciting, even somewhat startling, to actually see deer every half hour or so while sitting on a stand. What a novel concept.

I may have to get into this bow hunting thing, after all. And quickly.

Buckthorn about to block the vitals. Imagine that. Call in the Roundup truck.

Techno Feely Ya

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 23:23:00 +0000

Old guys gripe -- probably always have, and probably always will. It's their prerogative. They've been around long enough to have seen some stuff and, at the same time, not give much thought to what other's think of their opinions. So they say what they think, sometimes with a good deal of artful snark. I can't wait until I've reached the magical age where experience and lack of social imperative meet to suddenly grant me the right to bitch about whatever I like.

I once heard one of the guys in camp cheer for a Clay Matthews sack emanating from radio as we sat around the table tossing cards and shooting the bull, and in the very same breath, murmur something derogatory about the man's chosen hairstyle. Mr Matthews had just blown up, in his manic way, what might've been a game-winning drive for the opposition, and my close friend of receding hairline and ready opinions was muttering something about goddamn hippies.

Now don't take me the wrong way, I love me my old guys, and I actually enjoy their griping most of the time. Often it's said with a little implied wink, a snappy jab to let it be known they aren't quite ready to be pushed out on the ice floe for the good of the tribe. And funny. Pour a couple PBR's into the old guys in camp, and they'll rip into fly fishermen, golf, sit-coms, hot dogs... whatever... with a gleeful abandon that often leaves any novice onlookers in presumably stunned silence before the head-shaking laughter erupts.

One of the favorite topics for old guys to rip (after politicians and people from Illinois, of course) is the use of technology. Kids these days and their... yadda yadda... I'm positive there existed, at least one time in all the timeless generations of history, a Neanderthal elder huddled around a fire outside modern day Prague, muttering under his breath about these soft kids and their fancy-pants woven flax sandals.

Little should be taken seriously after the boot begins its circuit

I remember once professing, with no small bit of self-important authority, that every bit of technology used in the field served only to remove the user one step further from the true and honest experience of being in the woods. It should be noted that I made this mildly idiotic proclamation while passing the boot at the Essen Haus in Madison, and therefore should be taken with the proverbial grain of brewer's yeast.

Of course technology aids us all in our every outdoor endeavor. If it didn't, if we were true Luddites, we'd be walking to the river and bashing fish on the head with a rock -- which, come to think of it, would be a helluva lot cheaper.

We all have our own line of demarcation as to what we consider "too much" technology in the field, usually connected closely with age, experience, and personal proclivity for the use of such devices. In fly fishing alone there exists the never-ending and sometimes heated debate between the pros and cons of using bamboo, fiberglass, or "modern" graphite and boron rods. All choices have their moments of beauty and usefulness to varying degrees, but the truth is, if you're using any of them, you ain't rock bashing. You've allowed technology to seep into your fishing. For shame!

I have a buddy and extremely accomplished fisherman who states emphatically that, "if it uses batteries, it's a toy." Implying that it's not a tool, and therefore has no place in the field. This repeated statement comes to the fore most often in discussions concerning the use of GPS because he's an old school proponent of map and compass. I tend to agree with him in this particular case, having been brought up with the topo and Silva myself, but I can't go so broad as to state emphatically that nothing which uses electricity belongs afield. I have used hand-held GPS units in the past, but only to mark hot spots on the ice, never in the woods.

The mind fairly boggles when considering lists of things brought to use through modern technology that avail themselves to the current outdoorsman and woman. It's absolutely everywhere. Forced to narrow a list of technological advancements that have most impacted me in my life afield to a very spare few, they would be these.

Synthetic Clothing. I've covered the use of modern clothing here to the point of beating a dead horse (with the aforementioned rock, of course). Gone are the white waffle cotton base layers and felt-lined Sorrels of yesteryear. We wear poly-pro next to our nethers now, and we are much more comfortable for it when it comes to working up a lather in the cold. Down sucks as an insulator when it gets wet, nylon fleece does not. And unless you work with the little yellow dude on the box of fish sticks, Gore-Tex or the like now goes on the outside in inclement weather, not PVC or rubber.
Fly tying materials. As you've seen here for a couple years now, I can't tie a single fly in my preferred style without immediately and constantly reaching for materials that flash and sparkle, that were extruded through some process unknown to me in a factory somewhere full of modern polymers and glitter.
Real Time Sonar -- so called "Flashers." I'm a Vexilar man, myself, but no matter the brand the modern ice man chooses, the flasher is most often his single most important, well-loved piece of gear. Tip-up fisherman can bear to go without, but I don't know a single serious jigger of panfish or game species that would now fish without a flasher. They're a clear and real window into what's happening below the ice. I should mention, for the sake of being thorough, that ice fishing cameras cross my personal line of acceptable technology in the field for the rather nebulous (even to me) reasons hinted at above.
Social Media. Here's a favorite gripe of the old timer, but for every time they mutter and kick at the dirt about the use of Facebook and YouTube contributing to the death of the true outdoorsman, I believe there is another instance in which some guy or girl out there is using them to learn how to fish or hunt. Some peoples' dads didn't or couldn't teach them how to huntfishforagecamp for whatever reason, and for those folks, the internet is an invaluable recourse, a nearly bottomless font of information at the fingertips.

There are still innumerable times when the old way is the better way, or more often, the more enjoyable way. Sometimes it's just cooler to go old school.

If I ever find the time to add bow hunting to my still-growing list of outdoor pursuits, it will include, at least at some point, chasing deer with a traditional bow. I'll probably start with a modern compound bow in a tree stand both because that will be the natural continuation of my rifle hunting and because that appears to be the easiest way to go; but at some point, I hope to find myself on the ground, face darkened with schmutz, stalking with longbow or recurve in hand.

For a recent evening meal, I chose to go old school with venison in cast iron on a matchless Swedish fire torch, simply for the joy of practicing a little backyard bushcraft from my teenage years. You can now actually find Swedish fire torches (also sometimes called Swedish candles) in stores, pre-cut into the signature wedges with a chainsaw from seasoned hardwood. They come cocooned and clean in plastic wrap for those less likely to have a hatchet or saw handy, which never fails to elicit a little mocking eye roll from yours truly. I understand not everyone wants to be out there grubbing it up, but getting dirt stains on your knees is half the fun for me.

For the purposes of remaining a tad less yuppie-fied than that, and to keep things feeling more retro, I went with a grubby little white pine stump I'd cut during spring clean-up, and left out in the rain and weather for half a year. If you're gonna practice a little roughing it, running out to Williams Sonoma simply won't do. A quick buzz with the chainsaw to square up the notched end left from felling, and a few well placed whacks with the hatchet to split the log into quarters, and we were under way.

I don't think we have to wander into profound firecraft excitations here, but I will note that when it's been raining for a few days, and you're found to be coaxing a fire without matches or a lighter (whether through choice or necessity) mature milkweed seeds make for great tinder in season. They remain dry encased in those odd rubbery pods, and catch a spark very well when properly floofed up.

Once you have your small fire going in the normal fashion, building the torch is simply a matter of smushing up the quarters of your log around it so it begins to take on the form of a reassembled chunk of wood. Kindling can then be crosshatched up in the open spaces to bring the fire to the log. Things will go much better for you here if everything you're working is as square and level as feasible from the start.

While the appeal of the store-bought Swedish fire torch is purely that it looks cool and burns well, it's true utilitarian roots lie in the fact that it is at once a great stable cooking surface and is also easily moved. Once you get to this point, you can pick up the quarters individually, and as long you don't dally, move your cooking fire wherever you'd like. The fire level is controlled by simply adjusting the proximity of the quarters to each other. There is always sweet spot, depending on the conditions and wood, that allows the torch to get enough air and still remain close enough to burn. That's the Goldilocks zone you want to find.

Then it's simply a matter of perching your pan on top, and getting to the business of making some grub. I'd cut and parboiled the sprouts and sweet potato in the house here. Seasoned them too. I'm not a damn heathen.

A splash of Oktoberfest for steam and sauce, some additional kindling if things are really damp. Perfectly acceptable steps when needed. Even though the fire burns from the inside out, as you can see here, as long as you don't flail about too much, things remain perfectly stable. No cheffy sauté flip thing here -- use your tongs to stir. Or a pocket knife, in this case.

I prefer my venison very rare. Still snort-wheezing, as it were. Under normal circumstances, I simply set it in the general proximity of a mild heat source for a few moments -- a 60-watt light bulb, say. In an extraordinary show of selflessness, however, I actually laid my marinated steaks in the pan quickly for the purposes of this post.

That dog'll hunt.

That wasn't exactly hanging unseasoned steaks on a forked stick over the fire, but neither was it making use of the latest and greatest technology in camp cookery. Which, by the way, would've made me just as happy to do.

You want to go all space-age with your hunting, fishing, foraging and cooking? I'm fine with that. You'd like to chuck homemade darts with an atlatl? Go nuts. I'm just pleased you're out there doing it. You may want to check local regs on bashing fish with rocks before you try that one.

Tracer Round Tutorial

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:39:00 +0000

I was struck by the muse in the bottle last night, sipping bourbon and staring at the vice, when the color of my Buffalo Trace in the glass inspired a new pattern. It's been a while since I did a fly tying tutorial, and I've never done one here on A Tenderloin, so here we go... Introducing, The Tracer Round.

"New pattern" being a relative term, of course, and a bit of a stretch in most cases -- including this one. Almost all flies in the modern era are revamped iterations of previous patterns. With very few exceptions (I'm looking at you and your Game Changer, Mr. Chocklett), most of us tie directly on the shoulders of, and in concert with, our contemporaries.

I do bristle a bit when one among us throws a different set of legs (head, wings, etc.) on a well-loved pattern, and calls it their own. But barring the occasional leap forward in creativity at the vise, that's how these things most often evolve. If you can't see the Wooly Buggers in a Sex Dungeon, you need your eyes checked.

Try that as a pick-up line at the bar sometime.

So we watch what the other guys are tying, and add our own twist to the mix. More presciently, some of the more observant and intuitive among us attempt the fill a void in our repertoire or more completely appease the "needs" of certain fishing conditions with a certain pattern. The latter is partly where I was coming from with the Tracer Round, alcohol-fueled inspiration aside.

If you've read here much at all, you know I'm a proponent of the big, meaty articulated streamers. They're fun to tie, fun to chuck, and they work. They've also left a hole in the spectrum of the flies I like to tie and fish. In my boxes you can -- concerning size and profile -- reach for either a #8 bugger or the like on the small end... or ginormous, honking articulated streamers of all manner on the big end. And there ain't much in between.

Hopefully a smaller and lighter articulated fly like the Tracer Round, downright dainty as it is compared to its steroidal streamer brethren, will help fill that void. To my mind, it can, um... trace (sorry) its lineage to a bunch of Hog Snare, some Voodoo Squatch, with a little Sex Dungeon and Peanut Envy thrown in. Not to mention a good dose of Kentucky firewater.

Enough with the yapping. Nobody cares. Let's tie.

The Hardware:
Gamakatsu B10s #2
35mm Fish Skull shank
Uni 8/0 - Light Cahill

The Software:
Marabou - cream, tan, burnt orange
Fire Fly - gold
Krystal Flash - root beer
Mallard Flank - "wood duck" gold
Dubbing - Awesome Possum, light yellow
Mini Speckled Centipede Legs (Orvis) - orange, tan
Craft Fur - cream, tan
Sculpin Wool - tan
Fish Skull Living Eyes - Earth

Tie in a sparse cream marabou tail the length of the shank. I'm pulling off the "waste" pieces near the base of the quill here, so as to not use an entire plume for something that's gonna be pretty buried. Just need a little color here.

Tie in a tan marabou plume by the tip, and make 2 wraps forward. Like a wet fly hackle. Secure.

Add a few strands each of gold Fire Fly and root beer Krystal Flash. Trim just longer than the tail.

Tie in a burnt orange marabou feather by the tip, and make 2 wraps forward. Like a wet fly hackle. Secure.

Tie in the gold mallard flank by the tip, and dub forward about half the shank length.

Palmer the mallard flank forward to the end of the dubbing and secure. Repeat with another, larger mallard flank and round of dubbing. Palmer forward to within about a hook-eye distance of the eye.

Center tie one each of the orange and tan centipede legs, folding over to secure so you end up with 4 legs per side. Trim just shorter than the tail.

Reverse tie 2 clumps of craft fur. Cream on the bottom, tan on top.

Fold back the craft fur (the body of a ball point pen works great here), and secure over the body of the fly.

Insert the open end of the articulated shank through the hook eye, and secure with your thread. Hit it with some cement.

Repeat the exact same steps on the shank, tying the same fly twice and leaving room for a head.

Center tie the sculpin wool on top and bottom, and fold back over the body to form the head. Secure.

Glue on some peepers. I went with the spares you get with the sculpin helmets here. I was thinking "light and small" this entire fly, but you can certainly go bigger with the eyes.

Sip bourbon and admire.

Stop Sucking

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Tue, 01 Oct 2013 01:19:00 +0000

Holding expertise does not always result in good teaching. We've all had the express displeasure of being taught by less than stellar educators. Not just in the classroom, but also in life, and for the purposes of this blog, in the field.

I've been told many times that I should've been or still should be a teacher. The numbers are probably skewed simply because I know a lot of teachers and everything looks like a nail to a hammer, but it happens fairly often that somebody says, only half mockingly, "Dude, you shoulda been a teacher." I disagree.

Even in the few areas in which I hold a modicum of expertise, my teaching style often leaves quite a bit to be desired. Holding the knowledge is not the same as being able to express it in an articulate and useful manner. I can easily recall more than one instance in which a session showing somebody how to tie a fly or make a roll cast devolved into near-silent charades, ever increasing in intensity until both of us were frustrated almost beyond caring. Monkey see, monkey don't. When I get flustered in a demo situation, my usually acceptable command of the language largely sublimates into the wind, and I'm reduced to mumbling idiocy.

Stop sucking, just do the shit like this! may have actually passed from internal mantra to verbal exhortation on occasion, though only with the buddies I know can take it while happily pointing out everything I stumble over.

Pro Tip: if you ever get the urge to teach your significant other to fly cast, just slam your head in the truck door a few times, and get it over with before you start. The only time I've bickered more intensely was the time we tried to put plastic film up on the windows together in an old apartment. That stuff that probably saves three nickles on the gas bill, but takes a year off your life due to the stress of putting it up together -- divorce lawyers should sell that stuff in bulk.

Zeke gives spinning a shot on my vice by lantern light

I will say that when it goes well, introducing somebody to a new skill can be very gratifying. A while back I was in New York for a fishing vacation with some friends from an internet forum. My buddy Zeke and I sat down at the vice for a lesson in spinning and stacking deer hair on the hook. I managed to remain coherent and somewhat informative, he didn't get frustrated, and all went swimmingly. As it ended up, a line of people formed at the table to take their turns at spinning hair, and I had to rush at the end to catch the evening bite out on the lake, grateful and humbled to have been looked to for a bit of instruction in something I am fairly practiced at.

It doesn't always go so smoothly. I once found myself watching late night baseball with an inebriated Argentinian college student in a dorm room in Portland, Oregon. You heard me. We'd returned from a long night on the town with a group of students, and I was none too sober myself. I don't recall now what happened to the rest of the group, but there we were, suddenly alone with the Mariners on the tube. Saturday night rock stars.

While I'm no baseball expert, I am a patriot and fan with a comprehensive understanding of the rules. Twenty-some years of fandom, however, did little in preparation to explain the simplest of baseball regulations to a wobbly South American struggling mightily to understand the game and remain upright on a bean bag chair. Our little vignette here opens with a foul ball down the third base line.

"So, nothing happens if the man hits the ball outside those white lines?" slurred our foreign friend.

"Not exactly. It counts as a strike unless he already has two strikes. If he has two strikes, then nothing happens. Then it's basically out of bounds and a do-over."

The catcher then immediately fielded a foul pop to end the inning. Slowly assuming the form and posture of a garden slug in the bean bag, "I thought you said nothing would happen?"

"Yeah... unless the defensive player catches it on the fly. Then it's an out."

"What's 'on the fly'?"

"... so... you play soccer?"

Which goes to show there comes a point in our understanding of any subject or activity wherein we are able to pass over the details to take in the entire picture. The little stuff becomes given that the big picture may play out.

Experts hold "conditionalized knowledge," meaning the knowledge they hold reflects context and situation, and they can retrieve it quickly without much additional effort in the corresponding instances. Novices, by definition, cannot be so lucky. They have to slog their way through seemingly important patterns and facets that may mean nothing in the big picture, but appear to hold the key to cracking the code at any moment.

We woodsmen look at the woods and see individual species. How they might be useful to us or relate to the species we're chasing, be they feather, fur, or fungus. We see systems and interconnectedness and where we'd build the lean-to if we had to spend an unplanned night. The novice can't see that.

On the other hand, if I look at a spreadsheet full of numbers or a malfunctioning carburetor, my brains starts to go all soft and tallowy. I hear the Benny Hill theme, and feel the need to go fishing.

No matter our level of teaching proficiency, it is our duty as outdoorsy folks of all stripes -- fishers and hunters, foragers and wanderers alike -- to teach. To get outsiders involved in our favorite activities. Not only to bring to them the same joy we feel out there, but to preserve our outdoor way of life.

I used to bristle at that thought. My personal manner of getting outside involves a lot of getting away from, well... everybody. That's not the right way or the wrong way, but often when I head out there, I'm hoping to pass my time without seeing another soul.

The thought of bringing others into it only to clutter up the joint once seemed so counter intuitive. Why would anyone ever want to see more chuckleheads clogging up the trout stream?

The answer has become obvious with age and accumulated knowledge. If we don't encourage others to partake, vast libraries of personal knowledge and experience will be lost forever. Not only that, but when there's nobody left to practice our lifestyle it will be deemed outdated and inconsequential, ancillary at best. It will wither on the vine.

The proliferation of technology as it pertains to our outdoor pursuits is a massive subject due an entire blog entry of its own here (and much more), but I will say that there are many examples of how it can be used for teaching and learning in the arena. For me, YouTube plays a very large role.

I watch a lot of fly tying demos. I have shelves full of fly tying books, and while they remain both useful and sometimes beautiful in their compositions, nothing beats seeing it happen right in front of your eyes, sometimes in high definition, with the ability to pause and rewind at will.

There are all sorts of fly tying teachers floating around out there in the YouTube ether. They range in style, quality, and teaching ability across a wide spectrum -- from Brian Wise, whose videos of chunkalicious streamers are played back on fast forward to thumping music for those of us who have existing knowledge of the materials and techniques used, to Davie McPhail. His very comfortable pace and euphonious brogue lend themselves to in-depth and relaxed, comprehensive instruction. If you ever zoned out to Bob Ross and The Joy of Painting on PBS back in the day, that's the neighborhood Mr. McPhail inhabits to me in the fly tying world, and his videos are as mesmerizing as they are instructive. A happy little pine tree lives right here...

This post is sort maundering out of control at this point, but I think what we're driving at here is that if you know how to do something, especially something outdoorsy where this blog lives, I think you should teach others how to do it. Don't mind the fumblings and stumblings if your teaching style is as abrupt and stilted as mine sometimes is. They'll be happy for the instruction.

Brian has been shooting woodcock since before I could dress myself. When I think of proficiency in an outdoor activity, I often think of him. The way he powders a bird, then thumbs another shell into that ultralight pump gun as an afterthought. I'm grateful for his years of instruction, and happy to report that the young buck here can now often hit the bird before he does when we swing on the same one. Sucks getting old, I'm told.

Of course, all the experience in the world, mountains of teaching and learning, can do little when the birds simply aren't there. Sometimes you just have to follow the old guy's lead when he says...

... Piss on it, dude. Let's go get a burger.

This is Nuts!

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:07:00 +0000

I dumped out my morning haul of hickory nuts today, and they just landed like that. I swear!

Zoning Out

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Thu, 19 Sep 2013 16:51:00 +0000

I played golf once in college, and that was about the third time I'd ever been on a course other than to float tiny "boats" down streams and generally stomp around in winter. I don't remember the circumstances that lead to me suddenly finding myself, squinting slightly dazed and out of place, on a driving range with my buddies Ace and Dean, but there I was giving it a shot.

I had an excellent teacher in the Aceman. He was a single-digit handicapper at the time with the long, flowing swing employed successfully only by those of athletic grace unknown to most of us. (An athletic prowess, by the way, that also allowed him to almost casually throw at extremely snappy velocities. I can easily recall that distinctive rocketing hssssss of an Ace-thrown baseball -- the hiss you only hear when a ball has been fired from a serious arm cannon. And the startling mitt POP! that would make people stop and look while we threw the ball around in the green space now occupied by the Kohl Center.)

There we stood on the recently rain-soaked range with a bucket of balls and a teacher whose very moniker had been earned through achieving a hole in one not once, but twice. Ace is a good friend, so with undying patience he instructed me from the ground up. Tips and pointers I don't remember about hips and elbows. How this should feel and that should look. Keep my hands here, pause there, and remember to breath.

I was headed for the PGA, and I hadn't even hit a ball yet. After absorbing all the instruction I could hold, I stepped up to the tee for my first colossal hack, and unceremoniously buried the face of the club deep in the mud about a foot behind the ball. A ball that remained frustratingly inert on the tee, completely unmoved by my ungainly thrashing. It was then that I further considered dedicating my free time to becoming a mediocre fly fisherman rather than an awful golfer.

Somewhere in the midst of our later 9-hole round a wholly unexpected thing happened. I'd hit a decent drive (one that didn't fly off on some oblique trajectory, actually landed in the fairway to the amazement of all), and under Ace's instruction, I lined up my iron shot. In that mystifying and elusive moment that happens only so rarely, I swung easily and made a fine shot. More importantly here, I felt it almost immediately on the strike.

It landed pin high, on the left edge where he had told me to aim, and followed the natural slope of the green down so near the cup even I could make the putt. I walked up, read the break correctly, and put it in the hole. The remainder of my round was an ongoing and unmitigated catastrophe the likes of which they should've written brooding Norse sagas about, but for the briefest of instances, I'd known what it felt like to be "in the zone" on a golf course.

I don't think we really know what "the zone" is. The fact that it may be different for everyone or may come in varying degrees of intensity for the same person make defining it even more difficult. For me it involves a full immersion in the activity at hand. Complete focus and control in that time span also play roles. And the infamous time distortion people mention. It felt like everything was happening in slow motion -- we hear and say that a lot when we talk about the zone.

It's a rare and beautiful thing to find oneself in the zone. Even rarer to suddenly blip into existence there right out of the gate.

I took a walk in the woods behind the house this past weekend, armed with my much-loved bolt action .22 and thoughts of fried squirrel. Hunting seasons had just opened that morning in Wisconsin, and I was primed and pumped to gather some protein. A shotgun is often a more logical choice for early season squirrels, often obscured from the shooter with all the green still up, but my first tree rat hunt of the year will be with that nimble little Savage rimfire until one of us is in the ground.

I grew up shooting that peep sight, and had a bit of a tough time adjusting to scoped rifles when it became clear I was going to get more shooting opportunities using them in the low light conditions when bucks often appear. I got comfortable enough eventually, but there still exists a smidge of hesitation and adjustment when I put my eye behind a scope that isn't there behind the Lyman.

It's to the point now, using that .22 with the peep on shots that test the limits of both gun and marksman, that it becomes nothing more than a matter of feel. Meat conserving head shots are paramount to me on small game such as squirrels. When Mr. Fluffy Tail appears before me at such a trying range that he is almost completely obscured by the front sight post and I lean the barrel against a tree for support, I hold on the center of his body, and give the slightest nudge with my cheek or left thumb as I take out the last bit of trigger creep. (I actually clench my teeth when I need to push left, making that little knot pop out on the corner of my jaw, and that does the trick). I settle there, and with the lightest, almost inadvertent addition of pressure to the trigger, when I'm in the zone, the lead is well on past my dinner's far ear before he even begins his tumble to the forest floor.

I gave up, and contented myself with stealing his dinner.

It doesn't always happen that way, but it did twice on Saturday morning. A welcome and surprisingly abrupt return to the sweet spot in a breeze barely hinting at the cold to come. Monday morning I missed a much closer squirrel twice with a scatter gun. Though, as if to present a convenient excuse for me which I'll gladly employ here, he was bounding along up in the thick green tops.

Comfort, and even a little time in the zone, did eventually come with the scoped rifles. I remember the first buck I shot when I used to hunt over by the rifle range years ago.

I had a tree stand parked on a thickly poppled knob overlooking a beaver pond and the game trail that encircled its perimeter, supported by an aspen roughly the diameter and tensile strength of overcooked rigatoni. It was a nice spot, but there was plenty of pucker factor in that little tree on windy days.

I'd grown comfortable enough with the scope by that point, but by some happenstance unknown to me, I found myself running through the process of the shot in my mind all through the season that year. Even on the drive up, I concentrated obsessively on sight picture, trigger pull, and follow through. While hunting, I ran the imagery through my mind on a near-constant loop like an athlete would do before a contest, as a way to remain alert on the stand.

Quit making me laugh, ya bastards. This is serious.

When that massive northwoods buck (OK, it was just a little forky) stepped into view, I was prepared. For the first time in my brief career as wielder of a scoped centerfire, there was no need for pause or adjustment. It was about the only time I've ever set the crosshairs immediately and precisely where I wanted them on an animal. One of the very few times I pulled smoothly and saw the impact happen through the scope, saw the insides explosively become the outsides on the other side of his rib cage as clearly as if it had happened five feet away. I guess sometimes you can pick the locks, and force your way into the zone. I don't know why I don't more often. I miss often enough that I certainly should.

That sweet spot of perfect execution is not limited to shooting, of course. I most often encounter it at the fly vice and sometimes in the kitchen or sitting here spewing forth these tales of outdoor triumph and failure.

The doing of repetitious small tasks often leads me there. Anything from spinning repeated gobs of deer hair on a hook to peeling a pile of spuds, the activity in question doesn't matter. If I'm in the right mindset I'll make it a game, imagining myself in a contest to become the fastest and cleanest tater peeler this side of the ol' Mississip. Soon I'm on autopilot, hands functioning with almost no thought given to their actions.

We used to talk quite a bit about that state of "rigorous autopilot" in drum & bugle corps (insert collective moan from the DSO fellas, I know. Bear with me, gentlemen). At that activity's highest levels, the search for perfection leads up a path that eventually comes to extremely small degrees of differentiation at the apex of a huge scale. Minutiae and exacting detail rule your every performing thought at those tiny spans of separation. Fractions of pitches and inches and seconds. After hundreds of hours of rehearsal on a single piece of music and movement, so much information concerning technique and execution has been wedged into the soul of the player that he or she cannnot hope to perform at an acceptable level outside that near-mystical level of precision autopilot. You just line up and twelve minutes later, panting hard and dripping sweat, they're screaming in the stands. Deep in the zone.

The place I often find the autopilot zone most fleeting and frustratingly elusory also happens to be one of my favorite pastimes -- fly fishing. More specifically, the glorious and terrible art of casting. Much like the golf swing, fly casting is all about rhythm, timing, and feel. And much like the golf swing, you can learn the basics in a short time, then spend decades working out the kinks to perfect it. It's all long flowing loops and the poetry of physics in motion until it isn't. Then it's tripping on line, strained epithets, and ugly coiled heaps on the water.

I have dipped a toe in the cryptic pool of flycasting zone on occasion, and a particular cast and fish stands out in the recalling of rare moments basking in that gentle glow.

A couple years ago I was invited to take part in a shakedown smallmouth trip on a Michigan river with my buddy Flockshot and his guide friend Aaron. Even though we caught fish numbering somewhere on the north side of sixty that day, Flock may remember this particular fish when he reads this. I'm not a whooping and hollering Fish On! type when I latch in to a big one. Instead I usually go silent in concentration, but at the moment of this particular bite in the zone, I startled myself and everyone else by sharply bellowing, "Holy shit!" loud enough to shatter the gentle sussurations of a pleasant trip down the river.

My float had begun spectacularly far outside the zone. Casting with a guide rod, on an unfamiliar river, standing at the bow of a raft I'd never been in, I was a towering beacon of suck. Flailing like a crack monkey. I couldn't see the solar system containing the zone with the Hubble Space Telescope. With time and a couple smallish fish, I slowly improved. Eventually, I got my wits about me and my act together, and began to fish like a moderately competent human being.

It was an odd day on the river, for me at least, in that we started with dink smallies, and the fish got progressively larger as we neared the end. Maybe Aaron used his double secret guide mojo or the power of the beard to home in on the proper fly selection and boat positioning as the day played out. Or maybe the fatties were too lazy to swim upstream to our launch. I'm not sure.

Somewhere around the midpoint of the float, I found myself approaching an event horizon of imminent zonage. Still in the bow as a guest, my cast had un-bungled itself into something resembling an effective fly presenting tool. I spied a perfect lie -- an underwater log, barely visible from behind polarized amber shades, jutting into the current with that slick of pillow water behind it that denotes a washed out hole. Overhanging brush provided both shade and cover for the hole, and a formidable defense against probing flies.

You forget to grin like an idiot when stumbling down out of the zone.

Everything slowed. I took a breath, a double-haul false cast, and laid a long, low cast perfectly just upstream of the log. A quick mend gave the streamer a moment's pause, and it disappeared into the deep. The instant my offering vanished from clear view I witnessed that slightly eerie signature apparition, that thing we're all chasing out there waving sticks around -- the torpedo flash and shadow of Darwin's own predator crushing the life out of a fly.

It was a great fish, though not my biggest of the day. Probably not even the biggest that hour. But it remains clear to mind (and heart) among countless other catches before and since because it happened when all things came together, when focus and motivation collided with loss of self consciousness at the zenith of control.

It happened in the zone.

A Tenderloin, Found

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Sun, 01 Sep 2013 21:42:00 +0000

I've written here before, a couple times I think, concerning how I often view the calendar year in terms of outdoor milestones. That first time the chill catches your breath one fall morning when you step out the door, the arrival of morels and ramps from some mystical land where they overwinter, the many openings days of fishing and hunting seasons -- they all hold special places as they roll by.

As I perused the freezer recently, seeking sustenance and taking stock of the available space I'm going to need come meat gathering time, I was confronted with yet another of those yearly moments in the life of an outdoorsman. And not one I enjoy -- the final pack of venison.

I don't watch a lot of hunting or fishing on TV, mostly because there are very few shows that depict the sorts of hunting and fishing I like to do, and certainly not on a level based in reality. But this time of year, I do find myself parked in front of the tube at the end of the day, watching some dude pass on bigger deer than I will ever see because they aren't up to his inflated television host standards.

It's a fine diversion, definitely gets the blood flowing for hunting, but it doesn't relate to my personal proclivities very well. I don't hunt over farm fields because there are none where we hunt, I can't score deer on the hoof mostly because I've never seen anything bigger than a rack the TV hosts would scoff at in the woods, and most of all, because the great majority of the time, I'd rather be following a dog with shotgun in hand.

And while we're at it, a slightly grumpy aside: Would a well shot and produced upland hunting show be too much to ask among the tsunami of Bubba and His Tree Stand deer hunting shows currently flooding the market? I realize birds like grouse and woodcock would be extremely difficult to shoot with cameras (try it with a 20 gauge), but other than that pesky detail you've got all the makings of great TV there. The guns and gear, the dogs, the fall woods -- throw some thoughtful Flip Pallot-esque narration over the top, get a slow pull on the campfire or a macro shot of some dew in the grass... boom. That show is never coming off my DVR. At the very least, we should give some serious consideration to banning all hunting hosts from recording their own theme song on an ill-tuned guitar in their basement. Think about it.

Anyway...

If it weren't for the deer camp life, that awesome crew of guys, and the treasured delicious meat, deer hunting would be somewhere in the middle of the pack as far as things I want to spend time in the woods doing. As it stands now, it remains at the pinnacle of my outdoor year because of those two factors -- the men I love to spend time with next to the glowing fire and the venison.

So, I can say without much of a wry grin that finding the last pack of venison in the freezer is an important moment in my year. It means that venison will not again grace my table until I spend time in a blind or stand. Until I wait patiently, shoot true, and spill some blood. Kinda.

I'm lucky enough to hunt with a group of men who have agreed by long tradition to split all the venison we gather evenly between us. As it happens, I finished last year's deer hunting endeavors, both during the normal gun season and using crop damage permits on a farm, without ever having fired a rifle shot. I had a deer in the scope once during gun season, but it was bald and I was without a doe permit. That was it. I sat and pondered, I shivered, I got up in the dark and shuffled around with sleep in my eyes, I listened and hoped on the stand; but I was never granted the opportunity. I believe most of us hunters would grudgingly agree that it should be that way sometimes.

Thankfully, my generous hunting partners had more luck, and I found my freezer full at the end of November.

None of that makes the final chunk of venison loin, wrapped in white butcher paper with a tiny rivulet of blood-gone-brown frozen on one end, any less special to me. If anything, it makes me thankful for the company I keep in deer camp. If it weren't for them, this would've been a winter conspicuously void of venison, a privation I do not wish to endure.

I try to have all the unprepared venison (that not made into breakfast sausage, bratwurst, etc.) out of the freezer and into my belly by early spring. It tastes better that way, and has been a habit for so long that it just seems "right" somehow now. The brats do taste better on the grill during summer though.

Finding a hidden venison tenderloin, the very namesake of this blog and its profile picture on Facebook, in the depths of the freezer near the end of August is a bit of a blessing in disguise. Even well cared for, properly cleaned and wrapped, it will not taste so outstanding as fresh venison. Nor will it even taste as good as it would've 6 months ago, whether that be a function of time in the freezer or my mindset that I should've eaten it in March. Probably a bit of both going on there, though it was certainly no longer in absolute pristine condition in this case.

Now, here's the part where the cook in me went just a bit off the rails, I think. Not that the results weren't completely delicious and satisfying, it's just that I could have chosen a better time and place (and a fresher hunk of Bambi) for the dish I decided to prepare.

One of the problems with having unlimited access to information at the tips of one's fingers throughout the year is that it can sometimes leave the more adventuresome cooks among us flailing about with grandiose plans of suspect origin.

I'd seen a picture of venison carpaccio somewhere in the vast cosmos of the internet back in early winter, and thought to myself... Oooo... I need that in my face, pronto. Then it was August and, never having put together the carpaccio, I spied a clump of edible yellow wood sorrel and the thought of it popped back to the fore of that enthusiastic, if slightly capricious, cooking corner of my brain.

Some confuse wood sorrel with clover thanks to those tri-lobal leaves

Which is sort of surprising because wood sorrel, with it's delightfully zingy sweet & sourness, is what most would consider a weed around here. It grows in the cracks of sidewalks and just about everywhere else. If you live anywhere around the same latitude I do and can see your yard from where you're reading this, and you aren't maniacal with the application of Weed-n-Feed, I will freely bet there's a bunch of wood sorrel in your field of vision. Why noticing it for the ten thousandth time suddenly led to a connection with a picture I'd seen more than half a year ago will have to remain a mystery, but there it is. I set about preparing a raw meat dish with venison frozen for 10 months. Great plan.

I gathered up some wood sorrel from the edges of the woods, paying particular attention to find some of the minuscule yellow flowers because I wanted them on the plate. Horseradish seemed like a good idea so I dug up a gob from the corner of the garden where they are currently staging for a world takeover. Last to join the party was a leftover beet from the garden I'd thrown in the smoker on a whim earlier in the week with some pork. That seemed like a good idea too, next to the chopped sage and rosemary I planned to roll my tenderloin in.

There's no real story in the cooking of the carpaccio... because there's almost no cooking carpaccio. I seared it very quickly in a hot cast iron pan, rolled it in the chopped herbs from pots on the deck, and wrapped it in plastic wrap to chill out in the freezer for a couple hours. Once thoroughly chilled it was ready to be sliced thinly and laid on the plate with the rest of the players. If you count grating the horseradish and mixing it up with some Greek yogurt as "cooking," I did that too.

Thumbprint, 2 o'clock. Keep yer meat hooks off the plate, numbskull.

Happily, for one of the very few times in my life, I managed to mostly avoid my standard, ham-fisted, subtle-as-a-jackhammer plating style. It only took a couple decades to learn that if I put about half as much on the plate as I think I need to, it ends up looking a lot less like Jackson Pollock did it while being assaulted by a gorilla. I even did the spoon drag thing with the horsey sauce because it felt right to be a little fancy pants here. A little technical knife work on the beet too, simply because that always makes me happy.

The verdict: The horseradish sauce was really quite good, and the smoked beet -- something I'd never even considered until I was walking by the running smoker with a fortuitous armful of beets from the garden -- may have been my favorite part. Although I will admit that the fun (if a little pretentious) knife work did mitigate some of that smoke flavor. Most of it was obviously on the outer reaches of the beet, where it was conveniently enjoyed by the chopper guy before the uniform little cubes from the center of the sphere ever made it to the plate.

The venison itself tasted like, well... it tasted like it'd been in a freezer for the better part of a year; sage, rosemary, and sear notwithstanding. It was still delicious, and every bit was gobbled up with alacrity and horseradish sauce, but my brain and mouth both knew full well that it will be so much more robust and alive come November when it will be that much fresher... more fresh... whatever. The capers and sorrel added what I thought was just about the perfect amount of zing and salt to the entire gathering.

Bringing us to the point and lesson that every cook worth his favorite knife learns well early on -- cook with the season and your food will be that much better, artfully plated or not. It remains only to wait for deer shooting season, and to smoke some more beets. Those things were amazing.

Gratuitous Food Porn

Giveaway Time

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Mon, 06 May 2013 17:35:00 +0000

UPDATE: Hearty congratulations to our winner, Dennis Eckrote! Thanks to all who entered!

That's right, folks. I've finally succumbed to allure of shameless social media self-promotion.

"Like" A Tenderloin Runs Through It on Facebook, and you will be entered to win a dozen of my best streamers, lovingly ham-fisted together in the doldrums of winter. If you've already liked the blog, simply comment on the Facebook giveaway post, and your name will be entered in the drawing.

On Friday 5/10 at noon (CDT), I will choose the winner using a random number generator (we don't need to discuss whether true randomness can be generated here, you nerds out there), at which point, one lucky winner will be the new owner of this bountiful bouquet of big beautiful streamers... and one popper.

If you don't use Facebook --and trust me, I commend you on that -- enter a comment below to throw your name in the hat.

Good luck to all who enter!

The Pull

noreply@blogger.com (Atenderloin) — Thu, 02 May 2013 23:04:00 +0000

There once was a boy who grew up in the woods. Not speaking literally. There was, of course, a bedroom he shared with his brother and a table he was made to set and clear before and after dinner. There was a roof to keep the rain off and a garden full of peas and tomatoes and corn.

But his heart was in the woods, walking with his dad and brother, and sometimes his dad's best friend. During those walks, the men often regaled the wide-eyed boys with the tales of their own fort building and campfired youth. How they'd vowed, as young teens one summer long gone, to spend the entire time away from school living off the land. And how hungry that proposition soon became. Stories of cooking squirrels on sticks and digging cattail roots for sustenance. Of Alaskan homesteading dreams and long soggy nights spent huddled over sad, sputtling little fires together. And the time a chipmunk shit in the butter. They only used language like that in the woods back then, a small step in the secret rite toward manhood.

The boy was enchanted. He vowed he would be a woodsman too. He would grow a beard, wear flannel shirts and chunky boots, and eat what he killed with his own bloodied hands.

They still rest there, the volumes updated.

A lover of books from the beginning, he was soon devouring everything he could lay hands on at the library concerning bushcraft, wilderness survival, and famous explorers. In elementary and middle school classrooms he stared out the window at a forested hillside, and dreamed of being out there practicing his novice-level skills. The doodles in his Trapper Keeper were of deadfalls and snares, and a solar still he once read about constructing with a parachute in an Air Force survival handbook. He slept with field guides to wildflowers, trees, and birds mixed in with the London, Tolkien, and Asimov on his little bedside table.

Even in high school this pull toward the woods did not wane. While there were girls and cars; music, sports, and hormones; he still spent plenty of time splashing around in creeks, hunting small game, building snares and knapping flint, and lying on the ground staring up at the cathedral of trees.

Then the boy moved to the big humming city to sit in other classrooms, and he forgot a lot of the things he'd learned in the woods. There were so many new things to learn there in the bustling, metropolitan hive that he couldn't hang onto all of his old life, try as he might.

In the beginning he learned how to navigate busy streets, keep pace with all those people, and make new friends. He learned about the wonders of keg parties and chasing women. Of live music and dead tired hangovers. Of a certain green-eyed beauty who laughed at his fumbling jokes and made him feel everything and nothing at once. She followed him into the wilds sometimes, listened and learned as he parroted what he'd been taught, but her heart was in it only for him, not for the woods.

Over the course of a couple decades in the city he learned a great many things. How to interview for jobs. How to work with people he detested and lose people he loved. How to get the good table. Where to get the best late night pizza and early morning doughnuts. That a suit and a shave sometimes get you further than cargo shorts and sandals. The best tailgating spots and how to snag a much-vaunted taxi after the game. That people absolutely lose their minds and manners while encapsulated safely in their cars. These things and many more.

There was still the pull to the woods and occasional weekend excursions there, but he was of the city, with a designated parking space at work and neighbors who looked down on him for being a gun owner, among other things. His wilding needs were met more often with the words and deeds of early American frontiersmen such as Meshach Browning and Simon Kenton, read to the ever-present din of traffic noise.

Now the boy is no longer a boy, but a man with gray in his beard and aching knees at bedtime if he doesn't do his stretches. And he is no longer a man of the city, having returned to the countryside of his youth. The trade-offs have been many concerning his move out of the metropolis. He still can't find truly great bread locally, and he stays in most nights as his skills in the kitchen far outpace all the fare offered by TGI Applebee's Sysco Garden in the nearest town.

Hello, old friends.

The difficulties associated with the move pale in comparison to its rewards. Many of those important things he forgot while jostling and pushing in town are slowly coming back to him. The swing of the splitting maul becomes more powerful and precise. The smell of bar and chain oil, mixed with freshly cut white pine battered over the long winter, stops him in his tracks, quite literally. The names of spring wildflowers and migrating warblers flitting about rush into his mind from the past unbidden, and with them the great joy of encountering old friends.

He stands around staring genially at stuff more than he probably should now. He misses that feta pizza in the city, with the spinach and caramelized onions, but he's getting closer to replicating it. He misses warm pre-dawn blueberry doughnuts from that slightly odd walk-up drive-through window in the garish neon light, but the pull of the woods is stronger.