Of the Boreal North.
Hey Folks its great to be back! Sportsmen’s Camp audiences are the greatest audiences on earth! As always when opening the camp we are very busy. We also have onerous responsibility of acclimating Baxter “The Wonder Dog” (TWD) to his new surroundings. Yeah right! He took to this place like a cop on a donut, like a priest on an altar boy, like George W. Bush on idiocy – well you get the idea. Its soooo nice to be in a land of sanity where people ask Americans – “Why haven’t you impeached that lying war criminal BASTARD?” I added the bastard part they are far too genteel to say that. The water system is finally up and running, the diesel is purring happily, the cabins are getting cleaned, the grass is growing, the shutters are taken down and stored, the shop is open, the gas tank is full, ice is nearly out of the ground under the cabins (but not the lodge) and the lodge is getting in order. The winter didn’t bring down any of the trees this year but it’s a typical spring. The day I arrived it was in the 80’s F and the next day when Janet arrived it snowed accumulating a dusting. In past years, when we have arrived this late in the spring all the poplars were leafed out and the birches were well on their way too – not so this year! Only selected poplars were leafing out and most everything else was skeletal. But there was a friendly committee of black flies welcoming me back. I haven’t gotten the docks put back in place yet – the weather has been too windy to set them and I had some problems locating the final leak in the water system.
The final elusive leak in the water system evaded me for 2 days. I walked the pipes looking for a wet spot but to no avail. I looked under cabin 5, 11 and 6 but to no avail! Finally yesterday I plugged off sections of the water system in a systematic fashion to localize the offending leak, after several hours I determined that it was in the system feeding cabin 11. Previously I had peered under the cottage several times and had spotted no wet areas – so I glumly informed Sled that we would probably be playing some “banjo music” (shovel work to the uninformed). The only place that I thought the leak would be is under the drive between cabins 6 and 11. It is plausible since the well sorted finely grained soil of this area could conceivably drain off the offending water without too much surficial evidence. It has also been a very dry spring here – the ground being as greedy for water as Dick Cheney for power and oil profits. But I resolved to physically crawl under the confines of cabin 11 before disinterring the water line. Revelation! The dried fallen leaves accumulated under the cottage were masking a small wet area by floating on the surface! I found it when my hands got wet as I crawled along the line. (You don’t have to hit me in the head with a sledge hammer more than 3 times!) No banjo music! Yippee! Break out the 50!
Janet, Baxter and me have been fishing once and we caught many bass too large to keep from their normal springtime haunts. But after much sturm und drang we did manage to secure four nice eating sized males for our first fish fry. Nothing better! Jacks Patented batter on freshly caught Firth Lake bass fillets with fries! Baxter (TWD) took to the whole fishing thing like an old pro, like Dick Cheney at a Burmese whorehouse entertaining W’s Saudi owners. He scrambled all over the boat hid and retrieved his bone, reveled in new scents brought to him on the northern breeze, sniffed the bass brought in by his staff of retainers, attempted to chew on the stringer, gas line, reel handles, fishing poles, life preservers, anchor rope, tie off ropes, tackle box handle, pliers, line clipper and so on. You get the idea he was a busy boy. Unlike our two previous masters – he is totally fearless – standing on the gunnels or forward cowling of the boat in windy wavy conditions! Janet was fretting about him falling in – but he didn’t. It was fun seeing it all through the eyes of a young pup. I could go on for hours but alas I have places to go people to see – we’ve got guests in camp and more coming.