Two Peasants Waiting For Roast Duck...

"A peasant must stand a long time on a hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in."

The quote is a Chinese proverb I lifted from the beginning of Paul Theroux's "Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train Through China." An excellent book, so far.

The photograph was from two seasons ago, when we actually had a little water. But, as I recall, no roast duck flew into our mouths that morning. Bluebird day, you know... And of course virtually no roast duck flew into our mouths this past fall. Hell-scorched drought, you know... 

Hopefully things will change this fall, as I owe several people the gift of some fresh duck, promised to them prior to the disastrous (for me, anyway) 2011-12 waterfowl season.  We're off to a good start, but we'll see what tune I'm singing come November, and if I'll need waders where I'm standing...



The Deadly Southern Plains Cobra

Fearsome-looking beast, isn't he? Actually, it's a young eastern hognose snake trying desperately to intimidate the camera. He wandered up to the house in search of toads and got caught. Bad for him, as I like my toads, but lucky for him I like hognose snakes as well, so I played with him for a little while and sent him on his way.

The flattening out is a defensive posture. Hognoses are also known for "playing dead" by rolling over and not moving. Pretty little fart, isn't he? We usually see only the western hognoses around here, although we live in an area in which the two overlap. This is the first eastern I've stumbled across.

I am, I have to admit, something of a herpy. Not Herpes, (at least not that I know of...) but herpy, as in herpetology. I've been fascinated with lizards, snakes, turtles, frogs, toads, salamanders and other assorted reptiles and amphibians for as long as I can remember.

That fascination stems, I believe, from the fact that I belonged to perhaps the last generation of children (I was a Seventies kid) that spent the vast majority of its time outside, either playing with other kids or roaming the fields and woods. I never was much for sports and groups, so naturally I was a roamer. And boy, did I roam...

I roamed so much that, in addition to my budding hunting and fishing obsession, I had a veritable zoo in my backyard and bedroom. Tank after tank filled with fence lizards, collared lizards (or "Mountain Boomers" as we used to call them), racerunners, skinks, horned lizards (the ubiquitous "horny toad" of course, back before those little guys fell on hard times), tiger salamanders, leopard frogs, tree frogs, green frogs, bullfrogs, numerous species of toads, as well as turtles of all persuasions: three-toed and ornate box turtles, common snappers, softshells, red-ears, mud turtles, map turtles, I caught 'em all. And the snakes, man did I have the snakes. Speckled and prairie king snakes, bull snakes, black and great plains rat snakes, glossy snakes, scarlet snakes, several species of water snakes, rough green snakes, ribbon snakes, various flavors of garter snake, and - although my parents never knew of it because I knew better than to bring them home - the venomous snakes to be found around central Oklahoma, which consisted mainly of copperheads (an extremely beautiful and surprisingly easy snake to catch) and the ill-tempered little western pygmy rattlesnake.

Oh, I caught other stuff, too; baby cottontails, a menagerie of rodents from deer and white-footed mice (Hantavirus? What Hantavirus? Ignorance is bliss...) to moles and gophers, and I once brought home a great-horned owl that I kept in my bedroom for a week or so (but that's another story...) but it was the reptiles and amphibians that I really liked.

I never kept any of them for long, aside from one favorite bull snake that a fellow herpy caught on a collecting expedition to south Texas and brought back to me because his markings were a little different from the bullsnakes around here. I got that snake in high school, kept him all through college and my post-college years and he finally died soon after our first son was born.

But other than that, I was never into the keeping. I'd catch them, admire them for a few days and then let them go on their way. Fair's fair, right? It's a habit I've never fully grown out of, and even now I can't pass by a old log, a flat rock or a piece of old barn tin without stopping to see what's under it. I like to think it helps me stay young in spirit, if not flesh, and as a result I'm always bringing critters home for the boys to see.

Sometimes, however, the critters decide to come to you...

Random Flotsam and Jetsam...

 Holly, my first chessie. She was a rough, tough, mean old bitch, but I've never had a dog with more drive. 

Been too lazy to write lately, so random bits of neither here nor there will have to suffice until the time comes when lukewarm inspiration returns. So...

Retaining rights to our work is always important to freelancers, but we're increasingly being forced to either give those rights up through bullshit work-for-hire or all rights contracts or not work at all.
It's a cognitive struggle as well as a pain in the ass to try to decipher and decode the deliberately vague, obtuse, lawyer-written, multi-page documents that seem to be the rule these days. But I was perusing the submission guidelines on the Gray's website the other day and was pleasantly surprised to find it spelled out thusly...

We buy modified North American serial rights. These are, specifically:

The right to publish your article in one issue of Gray’s Sporting Journal.
The right to publish your article, if chosen, on our Web site for the duration of that issue’s stay on the newsstand.
The right to use brief quotes and/or images from the magazine in promotional programs related to Gray’s Sporting Journal.
All other rights for material printed in Gray’s remain with the author/creator.

No "in perpetuity" crap, no "work for hire", no "copyright remains with XXX", just a clear, straighforward explanation of what Gray's is buying from you. Of course, it might be a different story if Gray's had a more extensive online presence, but of course it doesn't, thankfully.

In contrast, I also recently looked up the submission guidelines for one of those new online-only wingshooting journals, and predictably, in addition to the payment being absolute shite, these chuckleheads were demanding all rights for the privilege of being screwed. Right... To paraphrase the priceless words of Tom Reed of Mouthful of Feathers, these guys can go take a flying leap off Giffy Butte.

Onward...

If you haven't yet seen the four-part Frontline special Money, Power and Wall Street, then do yourself a favor and go watch it online. It will bake your noodle. Torches and pitchforks optional, but recommended...

Always wanted to write a bestseller but didn't know how? Well, then, here's your bluprint. Pretty good review of the new James Hall book "Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the 20th Century's Biggest Bestsellers." My favorite quote from the review?

For some reason, it is often the very people who say they want to write novels who seem to have the least understanding of what other people want to read. So Hall has no doubt seen countless examples of would-be authors — including people determined to work in commercial genres — who simply don’t grasp the most elementary principles of storytelling. While “Hit Lit” may seem, to many readers, like the literary equivalent of instructions on how to boil water, the sad truth is that plenty of those who speak contemptuously of Dan Brown’s prose are writers who could not get a child interested in a fairy tale.

For the record, I freakin' hate Dan Brown. Absolutely talentless hack. So what does that say about me?

And on that note...

I'm not ashamed to say that I am a Stephen King fan. Call me a rube or a mass-market consumer if you must, but I've always thought King's earlier novels, novellas and short stories were good, entertaining reads, and I'm not sufficiently edjoocated enough to put on any literary airs to the contrary. Judge me harshly if you must... At any rate, Mr. King, who is filthy rich, recently published a fine populist rant over on the Daily Beast website.

As noted in several previous blogs here as well as here I'm a big fan of the early Shimano Bantam baitcasters. I can't claim that a Bantam was my first grown-up reel (that honor goes to - what else? - an Ambassadeur) but those old vintage Bantams always will be my favorites. I snap them up whenever I find them in pawn shops and junk stores. If you have one and want to know a little more about it, here's an excellent resource on the various first-generation Bantams on the oldreels.com website.

I love Moras, and I recently received and have been playing around with one of the new Swedish Fireknives which is a joint venture between Mora and LightMyFire. It's basically a plastic-handled Mora with a LightMyFire rod built into the handle. Really like it so far. Sharp, handy, light and cheap. I'll write more about it later...
  

How Do You Gift-Wrap A Bullfrog?

Growing up, bullfrogs were an integral part of my life. When I was young, I happily caught their tadpoles in the creeks and ponds around my house. When I was a bit older I discovered that when the bass weren’t cooperating, not only would a bullfrog willingly, even greedily stuff a Texas-rigged six-inch plastic worm into its gaping maw every single time, but that if I caught enough of them, a fried frog leg dinner was gustatory heaven.

In fact, bullfrogs may have helped me get married. One of the first dates I went on in college with my future wife was a failed bass fishing trip saved by a pond full of ravenous bullfrogs. I figured any sorority girl who thought catching bullfrogs fun was a girl worth keeping, and I guess she thought I was just enough of a weirdo to be mildly interesting.

But eventually, we moved away from my central Oklahoma hometown, with its abundant rainfall, great fishing and numerous lakes and ponds, to the high, arid plains of far northwest Oklahoma, where water, bass and bullfrogs were in much less abundance. I still fished as much as I could, and still do, but eventually bobwhite quail and bird dogs replaced largemouth bass and bullfrogs in the forefront of my consciousness.

That is, until yesterday, when my youngest son informed me that what he wanted for his birthday was… a bullfrog. I have no idea why, but it beats the hell out of a iPod in my book. And cheaper, too. The only problem was finding one.  

Now, bullfrogs aren’t rare around here by any stretch of the imagination, but public water where they can be caught is. The only real option open to me was a small state park pond where I take the kids perch fishing. I didn’t even know if the pond had any bullfrogs in it. I had never seen nor heard one there, but being the good father I am, I got the kids off the school early this morning, rigged up a weightless, six-inch Texas-rigged worm and headed for the park, a somewhat fetid, trash-strewn stretch of water inhabited primarily by potato chip bags, beer cans, discarded fishing line, and stunted perch.

A quick walk around the pond elicited no jumping bullfrogs, and a scan of the slimy vegetation ring revealed no tell-tale bullfrog head poking above the surface. I was about give up and go home when I heard that old familiar “jug-a-rum” sound from the shoreline. Apparently I had walked right by a particularly ballsy bullfrog who had refused to be flushed the first time around.

I quickly spotted the frog, snuck a little closer and made a cast…

I’d like to say that the frog was an educated frog, a wiley old veteran of countless capture attempts who had probably seen it all in his long life, and that it was gonna take a helluva lot more than a six-inch plastic worm dangled in front of his snout to fool him, and that I stood there for a couple hours throwing everything in the tackle box before finally enticing him on the very last cast before giving up.

Uh, no. He did exactly what his simple, predatory amphibian brain told him to do, and what every other bullfrog I’ve ever caught did: he turned, opened his mouth and stuffed that worm into it as quickly as he could.

So now I have fulfilled my youngest son’s birthday wish. Since this frog's a birthday present, and since there obviously aren’t enough of his friends to make me a meal (Besides, the question of “Daddy, where did Hoppy go?” would be a little awkward…) this particular frog will be looked at for a few days and then released back to the cesspool from whence he came, none the worse for wear.

But my question is: how do you gift-wrap a bullfrog?  

Ozzy Update and Big Basket 'O Perch

I just realized I never announced what we'd named the new little Love bugger. The family, after much debate, decided on "Ozzy." Not that the name Ozzy has any special meaning or significance, we just all agreed that he sort of looked like an Ozzy. So he became Ozzy. Such is life when you're a pup or a newborn child.

Ozzy's doing just fine. He's a very laid-back little dude in the house (aside from a little cat-chasing), but quite active and bold when running around outside. I liked his disposition from the beginning, and I'm liking it more and more as I get to know him better. I'm hoping that fondness will transfer smoothly to how he works out in the field. Hard to tell about such things at 12 weeks of age, but I think it will. So far we've gone on walks around the neighborhood and into the woods at the back of the property. I'll probably start introducing him to a few birds in the next couple weeks.

I haven't been out turkey hunting yet, to my everlasting shame. Just too much stuff getting in the way. Perhaps this weekend, but I have managed to sneak out for a couple quick trips to local waters for some fishing, and I have to say, flyrodding for panfish is quickly becoming one of my favorite things to do. I grew up a hard-core, metal-chunking, baitcaster-throwing bass fanatic, and I probably always will be, but there's a lot to be said for a warm spring day, a three-weight and a pond full of willing, feisty and delicious sunfish.

It's not technically demanding in terms of equipment or skill, it's great practice for those of us who are not particularly talented flycasters, it can be an absolutely deadly way to sack up a bunch of perch fillets, and it's a helluva lot of fun.

I may (or to be more truthful, probably) never get the chance to cast a fly to a bonefish, a permit, a tarpon, or any other flyfishing glamour species, because that takes a minimum level of real skill, of which I have none, and also because I will probably never be able to afford the opportunity.

But you take your Zen where and when you can find it, and this 'aint bad, you know?

On Being Flippant: A Cautionary Tale...

                                        
Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut with that last blog post...

Gov. Mary Fallin requested a federal disaster declaration Wednesday for Woodward County for damage caused in a tornado that killed at least six people and damaged or destroyed dozens of homes and businesses early Sunday. The designation would free up low-interest loans and grants for uninsured damage caused by the tornado.

“Last weekend's deadly tornadoes led to the tragic loss of six lives and destroyed or severely damaged many homes and businesses,” Fallin said. “Having spoken with many of the residents in Woodward who lost everything, I know how important it is to do everything in our power to quickly rebuild this community. This disaster declaration would be an important first step in helping residents and businesses get back on their feet.”

It hit late Saturday night after many people thought the main tornado danger was over. Six dead, at least 89 homes and 13 businesses completely destroyed and many others damaged. We rode it out in the saferoom, but it ended up passing north and west of us.

If you've never experienced a tornado, it's hard to adequately describe the sense of absolute powerlessness you have in the face of it. Witnessing a tornado from the chaser's position of observational detachment, that feeling of powerlessness manifests itself as an exhilarating sense of sheer awe and wonder at the sight of something so incredibly powerful and violent.

But witnessing a tornado from a position of acutely vested interest (in your home, your family, your life...), that sense of powerlessness isn't quite so exhilarating. Watching as a tornado comes your way and knowing there's not a damn thing you can do about it is about as perfect a metaphor for helplessness as my feeble mind can muster. And when it comes in the dead of night, it's that much worse.

For a good idea of how terrifying nighttime tornadoes are, watch this short video of stormchaser Marty Logan tracking the tornado as it comes into Woodward. Marty is a chaser for the CBS affiliate in Oklahoma City and a guy I've chased with a number of times. He's the one I was with the night of the infamous Greensburg, Kansas tornado.

But Marty is also a retired Woodward firefighter, and it was obviously hard trying to stay focused on his job as a twister was destroying a big chunk of his hometown. He did a helluva job that night, and is directly credited with saving lives with his on-air reporting, as lightning had knocked out many of the city's sirens. I know we were certainly hanging on his reports as we hovered near the saferoom door (You'll have to ignore the douchebag hawking cars at the beginning...)

High Risk...

Apparently, many of us here in Oklahoma (and farther north into Nebraska) will be swept off the face of the planet tomorrow, but some of us may get lucky enough to be swept off the face of the planet a little sooner if storms fire up this evening.

Here's the Day Two Outlook from the Storm Prediction Center in Ye Olde Home Town of Norman, Oklahoma...

And this little blurb from the AP...

The Storm Prediction Center says fierce storms are likely Saturday in a band running through the middle of the nation from Texas north to Minnesota. Forecasters at the center in Norman, Okla., said Friday the worst weather is expected between Oklahoma City and Salina, Kan., but other areas also could see severe storms with baseball-sized hail and winds of up to 70 mph.

The severe storms are expected to strike Saturday afternoon and evening, and the Storm Prediction Center says the outbreak could be a "high-end, life-threatening event."


The SPC doesn't issue high risk designations very often, and back when I was a fairly active chaser, this would be one of those days for which I'd clear the calendar. Now that I rarely chase storms, I'll probably still clear the calendar, but for matters relating to rod and/or gun rather than twisting funnels of death. Age and its resulting mellowness will do that to you, but I'll keep one eye on the sky and I'll have a camera in the truck. Just in case. Because springtime on the southern plains is an interesting time, indeed...

From a little essay I penned for the February 2007 issue of Oklahoma Today

If there's anything finer or more spirit renewing than a warm sun-drenched spring afternoon in Oklahoma, this admittedly parochial native hasn't yet experienced it. Winter's gray and dreary yoke has finally been thrown off, replaced with a dazzling palette of fresh color and light borne to us on a whispering southern breeze.

On such a day, it seems, the possibilities are limitless. On such a day, under a brilliantly clear azure sky, trouble seems a million miles away.

As most Oklahomans know, however, trouble may be forming, unseen, right over our heads.

When we see the tiny little multi-colored state map in the corner of the television screen or hear that disembodied computer voice on the radio we know the day, however beautiful, just got tarnished with the slightest tinge of anxiety.

There is perhaps no more apt metaphor for the wildly bipolar nature of our state's weather than the tornado watch. In essence, it tells us that on some of the most achingly beautiful, carefree days of the year, we are routinely expected to be on the lookout for weather that can and will rip and tear asunder virtually everything we hold dear, up to and including our very lives.

No wonder some people think living in Oklahoma should come with a warning label.

The official definition goes something along the lines of  "a tornado watch means that conditions are favorable in the next few hours for the development of tornadoes within the watch area."

But anyone who has spent more than a season in Oklahoma knows what that really means is "Don't worry; chances are absolutely nothing is going to happen today, unless, of course, it does."

Zen Buddhism as weather forecast.

Truth is, most Oklahomans are nonchalant about the issuance of a tornado watch because, statistically speaking, they can be. There's a world of difference between possible and probable, and  as we know through experience the majority of tornado watches don't produce tornadoes.

In reality, however, there's an element of whistling past the graveyard in such nonchalance, and only the truly moronic among us completely disregard the tornado watch., even when most of them fizzle into nothing. At the picnic, on the lake, at the game, wherever we are and whatever we're doing, there's always that little kernel of information that colors every decision on those certain days the air just feels different somehow, an oppressively palpable texture of frightening possibility.

This peculiar precognizance we experience does of course beg the question of whether Oklahomans, by reason of geography and experience, can just tell when bad weather is imminent.

Scientists will, of course, say no. If the collective brilliance of thousands of our brightest minds and most powerful supercomputers still can't fully explain and predict the incredibly complex and mysterious dynamics of tornado development, then there's no compelling reason to believe that John or Jane Doe Sooner can step outside, peer into the sky and say with any degree of authority that today's tornado watch is different, more menacing, somehow more real.

And in truth, they'd be right. I for one would rather put my faith in trained meteorologists, Doppler radar and sophisticated computer models than in Uncle Leroy's weather-predicting rheumatic joints.

But still, if there's one thing Oklahomans should be intrinsically tuned in to, it's the weather. Perhaps over the course of the last century we've developed some deeper, subconscious connection to the subtle atmospheric markers that initiate tornado development and the tornado watch is merely the empiric confirmation of that sixth sense. Or not. Who knows? Just remember to act calm and relaxed when the New Jersey relatives are here next spring and the season's first tornado watch is issued. We've got a reputation to maintain, you know. 

Because Everything Else Is Just Ice...

Why yes, in point of fact I do only chill my bourbon with hailstones formed at 65,000 feet deep within the swirling updraft of a tornadic, violently raging southern plains thunderstorm.

Doesn't everyone of appropriately good taste and sophistication?

In fact, I think that's my new career. I'm going to buy a refrigerated truck and follow the plains storm season from south to north collecting hail, which I will then clean, package and sell to the One Percent as an exclusive, high-end premium drink ice.

Beats the hell outta writing for a living. Literally and figuratively...

*And in case you're wondering, hailstone-chilled bourbon isn't bad. Not bad at all. I might be on to something here...

The Morel Of This Story Is...

...when you're on the cusp of your 41st year on this doomed rock, and you realize that you're no longer the young man you once were, and you decide you really need to get in shape before next fall because you're going to be chasing after not one, but two young dogs (thankfully the third is old, fat and slow these days...), and you hop on your bike for a long, wheezing ride that only reinforces the depressing reality of your age and sloth, and when you're a few too many miles from the house and are about to collapse and call 911 to give your fat ass a ride home, and you're discouraged that you've let yourself get into this sorry state after years of swearing that you wouldn't...

Make sure you keep your eyes peeled, as you're falling to the ground, for ephemeral spring treasures on the side of the trail.

And oh, yes. If you're really lucky, make sure you bring a bag...

Refried Mallard: The Ghosts of Hunting's Past.

An old post from a few years back, when I first started the blog and (I'm pretty sure )  Suburban Bushwacker and my wife were the only readers. The wife has since left me*, but I think SBW is still around...

*Ok, so that's not quite true. Sorry, honey. It was purely for comedic effect...


There are reminders all around us, if we care to look for them, of what the area now known as Oklahoma was like in the not-too-distant past: A small patch of native prairie stubbornly hanging on in an undeveloped lot, an isolated prairie dog town or maybe a few sage-covered sandhills that, when viewed just right, give the brief illusion of a vast geographical continuity free of powerlines, cell towers or pumpjacks.

Although now largely gone in any kind of ecologically viable sense, we still venerate their memory as talismanic symbols of the plains’ rich natural heritage, and in the context of that history there is no figure as potent as the bison.

Everyone, of course, knows the story: the unimaginably vast herds of bison, the equally unimaginable slaughter that followed, the slow climb back from the brink of extinction. Environmental historians continue to debate just how many bison there actually were immediately prior to white expansion into the plains, but what’s not in dispute is that bison were the linchpin of the entire plains ecosystem as well as the cultural and sustenance base for virtually all the plains tribes.

And when the bison disappeared, the very essence of pre-settlement Oklahoma disappeared with them. It was of course inevitable, given the pressures coming to bear from the inexorable westward march of expansion. Bison and the plains tribes that depended on them, as well as wolves, bears, elk and other historical plains species simply did not, could not fit into the post-settlement nexus, so they were methodically eliminated from it.

So the plains are a place populated by ghosts as much as they are by people. If you are lucky enough to find a remaining sliver of native grassland, walk it and remind yourself that wherever you step you are walking on ground already trodden by countless generations of bison and the people who hunted them.

Which brings us to this spearpoint.

There is a place near my home, a public hunting area perched on the high rolling plains of northwestern Oklahoma that has yielded archeological treasures which are priceless in their importance to our cultural heritage.

This particular Clovis point - which was fashioned from alabates flint quarried some 200 miles west of where it was discovered – was almost certainly thrust through a bison’s ribcage some 10,700 years ago and subsequently lost in the chaos of the hunt. And there it stayed through millenia, buried at the base of a bluff overlooking the river until a few years ago when an archeologist plucked it from its bed of fossilized bones.

But not before I snapped a picture of it.

Not far away from this site, on the same public hunting area, is another ancient hunt site where we know for certain that some 10,000 years ago an artistically inclined Paleoindian hunter of the Folsom culture felt compelled to draw a red lightning bolt on the skull of one of the bison his or her group had been hunting along the bluffs of the North Canadian river. No one knows exactly why. It is the oldest design-painted object yet found in North America.*

I think an older object has been found (back east, maybe?) since I first wrote this blog, but I may be wrong.

As a hunter, I like to think it was out of simple respect and admiration for such a noble animal. The last bison disappeared from the bluffs and grasslands along this river well over a century ago and all I am able to hunt are deer. But I will sometimes sit on this same bluff during bow season and marvel at the fact that on this spot I have a direct connection with 10,000 years of hunting history, from those ancient Clovis and Folsom cultures on through the numerous plains tribes who hunted this area until Europeans arrived.

And sometimes when I get depressed and discouraged over what hunting in America seems to have degenerated  into, I recall that Clovis point nestled among the bones, and it lifts me just a bit.