The final weeks of December and the first of January are a time to reflect on the year passed. So I will not bother with that. I will bother with looking forward to another calendar year in the Arrowhead of Minnesota.
To fishing trout in cold lakes under the two-foot ice, stocked rainbows or naturally-reproducing lake trout, who can be found up and down the water column beneath the hole, down 60 feet during high pressure days, up to an inch just under the ice where they feed on the new year’s first invertebrates escaping through the hole in warm, foggy, low pressure days.
Fishing steelhead in the spring at the mouths of the streams, then upstream as the big adults go up to spawn, with fly rods and big, bushy, colorful flies that I tie myself. To the roar of the Flute Reed behind the outhouse behind the cabin in late April at mid-spring melt. Will the new beaver dam hold? Or will it go the way of the one from five years ago, and the one from 40 years ago, and be blown out, and just be a relic bulwark from World War I.
To the spring with the first rhubarb shoots, and will we have asparagus this year? The buds of the tamaracks are open and it is a rocket’s yellow-green glare. When the pear and apple and lilac bloom on a green backdrop.
To swimming in Trout Lake, me stumbling on the rocks out ten yards to the great eight-ton boulder that I crouch on in ten foot of water and Peppy swims out easily and heavy, and Foxy swims out toward a loon on the water and eventually gives up, and Daphne swims out with extreme coaxing, where I crouch in the water on the boulder and hold her tight and ruffle her fur to clean it (we don’t often bathe). And she escapes me and swims back to shore and rolls in the balsam and spruce and cedar duff. Will we get sick, or come up lame this year?
Into the season of deer, and partridge, and ducks and geese. Of the beaver again, and the wolf. When there is a purpose for going into the woods, and intention. I know it, the game knows it, and if you don’t understand, I can show you that the pups know it too.
All this potential depends – like so much depending on the red wheelbarrow – upon my keeping my mind and body together, and making it through another day, for 365 days more.
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