Ozymandias

Okay , I will confess that my use of  my next favorite poem Shelley’s OZYMANDIAS in the wisdom of hindsight may be a bit over-the-top. In the wake of George Bush II the seconds ill advised and ineptly run assault on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in search of weapons of destruction that did not exist, well the facts were wrong and the advice was worse. I thought at the time he would go down in history as one of our worst presidents by far. Needless to say given what we have in the White House at the present makes Bush look a whole lot better. And added to that when he left the office he refused in good conscience to turn around and say one single word against Obama who followed him. I would say on that alone he was and is an honorable former president

You have a bad toothache and its a few days before you can see the dentist. It hurts and you find your tongue unconsciously reaching for the spot and it hurts even more. Mrs. T dropped me off at the barbershop in Rochester and after finishing my business and still awaiting her return,  I headed around the corner for something to do.  Thus,  I found myself in the Goodwill store  picking up a few books at a super bargain price.  There was the classic The Call of the Wild by Jack London read long ago as a teenager. Then I found The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. Having recently read her new novel Flight Behavior I wanted more.  The State of Denial by Bob Woodward was next to be dropped in the basket.  Yes it was the later that caused the pain. I knew it would be painful to read yet  I still took it home.  After reading the book I decided that  it was Woodward  who was in a State Of Denial about his two earlier sycophantic books about the Bush II administration. He appeared to be trying to make up for previous blunders.  It was  sort of a  novelistic, gossipy, fly on the wall type of documentary reporting.  The book also  contained a lot of trivia (did we really need to know Bush and Cheney liked to trade fart jokes at important meetings) , yet it also brought forth  an  overpowering indictment of the arrogance and incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney,What a tragic farce it all was…..

The book was published praised and condemned in 2006. I had already intuited much of what was going on and being covered up in Iraq before this book came out.  In one of the few “political” posts I ever put on Troutbirder I came up with the following post.  Rather than discuss this poorly written book and its ultimate truths about the Iraq war, I’ll simply repeat what I wrote then…….

It is said that the great English poet Shelley was

visiting the British Museum in London when he

and his wife Mary (the author of Frankenstein)

came upon a relic of Ramses II. Stolen from

Egypt it remains in the museum today. This allegedly
inspired him to write Ozymandis. One of my
all-time favorite poems:

"I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them,

on the sand,Half sunk,

a shattered visage lies,

whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer

of cold command.

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,Which yet survive,

stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them,

and the heart that fed,

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains.Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck,

boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I think this spare poem will stand well in the future quite well for our autocrat loving and cowardly president who will reside alone in the trash can of failed  American presidents 

As the stars fall

His name is dog. We don’t know why people haven’t named him yet. But we do know he lived in a big city in an alleyway with his pack. That is with his mother and siblings. Actually, he’s just a puppy and His mom and siblings have been taken away by the dog catchers. So this puppy is barely scraping an existence in the alleyway. He wanders about sniffing the ground for scraps of something to eat. He is alone, frightened, exhausted and meeting mean people who either ignore him or hurt him. It's a great story and here's why.
     At the beginning of a very sad introduction the book seems a little too slow till a young girl named Mia discovers Dog shivering and hiding in cardboard box. After petting the puppy gently Mia
 tells her father that Dog is injured and very sick and they have to help him. After much ado her father agrees.
     Of course, this must be a love story but remembering the author writes mysteries one never knows where he might take us in writing a book about a dog.

·        I read on to see  where the story went. It happens that cruel people abandon dogs in the countryside.  Unable to fend for themselves unless they are in a pack, dogs can only be saved by humans. We inherited such a dog when a farm family took her in on Easter Sunday and named her Lily. Later when that family was unable to care for Lily because of serious illness in their own family. Mrs. T and I in a sense  inherited a rescue dog and it was love at first sight. For certain, I was going to love this book because the story at the beginning seemed all too familiar. The first few chapters then seemed more like like déjà vu. It didn't stay that way though. Time passed and the little girl grew up and so did Kai his new human name, became a really big boy perhaps even a

  German Shepherd cross. There were Many adventures good times and much love. Mia had previously lost her mother due to cancer and so the new pack was Mia Kais Alpha master and dad. There were many adventures and much love. Kai explained all this in the way only a dog would think can understand. You see it all from the dog's point of view and that view turned darker and darker. Mia disappears and Kai doesn't understand why and he searches and searches just like he did at the beginning of the story for his mother and siblings's.

·        cancer. As the plot thickens our hero dog ends up starving under impossible circumstances. Thus like any good detective story we are drawn to the finish where the final truth will be revealed. Perhaps the  If you are a dog lover as millions are this story is for people of all ages. It is required reading. I highly recommend this book. It is indeed a remarkable and wonderful story

                                                                                                                                    

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@Barrie Summy

Scenes From The Arizona Desert where my grandchildren live.

Birthday present July sixteenth

I was born on July sixteenth 1941.  We are family.The banner was given to me in celebration of my 79th ninth birthday by my five grandchildren. They are a diverse group ranging in age from twins who are three up to a freshman in college. There are two girls and  three boys. Two are black adopted from Ethiopia and Rwanda. Three are white, born in Arizona and North Dakota

.
 The ones in school are all great kids and honors students and the Apple of Troutbirder's eye.
The banner says "in this home we believe" and that is true whether they are staying in grandpa's house or at their home in Arizona.
  The youngest boy in this picture name is Leo he will be driving two years so I called my son and daughter-in-law in Arizona to ask them what they have taught dealing with the police should he be pulled over for some minor violation. This the day of course that I watched a man murdered by the police in Minneapolis what a thing  a parent or grandparent have to do..........

Big Fish Little Fish

When I started this nature blog lo those many years ago and with a name like trout birder I vowed to keep the focus away from pictures of dead fish, fisherman's hyperbole  and concentrate on beautiful birds and flowers. So I did mostly. BUT today with tons of snow falling and my snow
blower not starting and in a mood of nostalgia I give you.........

A rare "midget" brook trout caught deep in the Montana wilderness.

Colorado grandson shows off his first ever "brookie" (much bigger than Grandpa's. )

Rookie river fisherman takes a near record smallmouth from the Mighty Mississippi....

TB goes Crappie fishin......

Northern Northern!

Ted off the dock on Lake Vermillion...

Yup. That's a biggie son....

In Retrospect

In the years that have past, since our Steel River trip, many things have changed. Some have stayed the same. My brother Greg has passed on due to cancer but then, we had young families, mortgages, careers to tend to and other responsibilities. We were not as cautious then. We knew of death but didn't believe it applied to us. We were a long ways from help and there were no cell phones. Today age and health issues would definitely preclude me from dragging a one hundred pound canoe up a cliff….   Still, important lessons were learned about perseverance, self-reliance and teamwork. Today my love of nature and wilderness remains. With vertigo and other balance issues at age 79 I don't go fishing and canoeing anymore.  Sigurd Olson and Aldo Leopold still speak to me thru their writings. Should I never again be able to find my way back to those wild places, like the BWCAW, Canadian rivers or the backcountry of Yellowstone, I will continue to rest well knowing they are still there.

The Steel River country has changed a lot in recent years as well. Several major wild fires charred parts of it. Perhaps, as a consequence, bad floods have occurred there. The floods have created huge logs jams, especially in the lower reaches of the river. This all has created the necessity for much longer and more difficult portages.

Although more people are taking this route now the difficulties of travel beyond low or too high water have increased. There are new routes into the area, as it is possible now to just do the river part of the loop and skip the lake section. This means, above all avoiding the Diablo portage up the mountainside. .

My brother Greg unloading the canoe at Santoy Lake, getting ready to head home.

For us timing was everything. We were among the earliest but not the first to make the journey so we had decent information. The river level was just right. We were lucky.

Now, new threats have appeared there as well as in Minnesota.. Copper, nickel and gold mining are being surveyed. There are people today working to preserve this wilderness. I wish them success.

Later, I took my two sons often canoeing on our local creeks, pristine St. Croix River and the BWCAW (Boundary Water Canoe Area Wilderness). There was also camping/flyfishing trips to southwestern Montana. Those were the days my friends…..:)

Adventure in the Canadian Wilderness (Part V)

Rainbow Falls

We had a beautiful and  easy paddles the next couple of days.  The fishing was great, lots of wildlife and fantastic scenery.  Serenity  is a rare commodity for many of us.  We had found it in the Canadian wilderness. Mostly just by gliding along, not a care in the world.  We did not see a single person the entire trip.  

Steel River

The river was bigger now and running smooth and strong as by mid-afternoon we approached our moment of truth. Its name was Rainbow Falls.  More a cascade than a falls, it had about a 80 foot drop, we could hear a low rumble as we rounded a bend for our approach.

While the map we were given had its blank spots and inaccuracies, the falls was clearly marked, as well as the portage. We had to run a "ferry" to approach the portage but fortunately there were no mishaps. To the non-initiated a "ferry" is what you do when something dangerous is downstream from you and its necessary to cross a river to a safe landing on the other side. If you go straight across the river, the current may drag you downstream and sweep you over the falls. The trick is to angle your canoe about 45 degrees upstream and then paddle like crazy. The result is to cross the stream without going downstream any further. As I’m writing this post it obviously  worked! 

This is the view from a rock overlooking the falls.

The portage itself was steep in spots but relatively easy going downhill. We stood below looking back at the falls. The power and roar of tons of water rushing over the precipice almost shook the mind. If you are swept over a cascade like this you dead for sure as you bounce off all the boulders on the way down.

We found a nice pool below the second set of rapids and called it a day.  By this time we were not even concerned about catching our supper. The dehydrated food wasn't bad. We boiled our water and added Kool Aid for drinking. We hadn't gone hungry yet.

The walleye fishing had been good throughout the trip and we usually fished from shore during our breaks and when camped for the night. The walleye had come as a big surprise to us, in the Steel River.... THEY WERE BLUE. 

In Minnesota walleye come with yellow or white bellies. We were not aware that a rare blue bellied type existed. The next morning we entered the lower section of the river as the current slowed , the bottom and banks became sandy and the landscape had a boggy look to it.

We paddled on leisurely until we came to the outlet delta into our old friend Santoy lake. There we camped near a sandy beach knowing tomorrow we would cross the lake and return to civilization. The next morning found us up early and after breakfast we headed south into a dense cold fog.

My brother Greg leading the way across Santoy Lake and end of the loop.

Knowing it was a long paddle we followed the western shoreline not trusting our navigation abilities in the fog. There was somewhat of a headwind with whitecaps but we were well conditioned to hard paddling by this time. We arrived back at the Santoy landing landing about 10 a.m. and had a long drive ahead of us to return to the Twin Cities. Arriving back in "Civilization" the two survivors (especially Troutbirder) look rather bedraggled....

It had been a great adventure. I hope you enjoyed coming along.....:)

Next:   Our Steel River Adventure in Retrospect.

Adventure Into the Canadian Wilderness Part IV

 Into the Steel River

Duluth packs and gear stowed and ready to go.

 On the morning of our fourth day in the canoe, we had an easy two hour paddle, completing our long paddle  up Steel Lake, to the first of several portages leading into Aster Lake. Aster Lake formed the apogee of our long circular route. We initially found the river to be smooth sailing . From that point we would turn south and begin thankfully to run the Steel River. We initially found the river to be smooth sailing with only a few minor rapids. If the water had been higher, with sweepers and log jams, it would have been dangerous or have required many more slogging portages. Lower and with rocks and boulders to be avoided, the river would have been too "technical," i.e. crashes into hidden boulders and wading and dragging the canoe would have been the order of the day. As Goldilocks once said it was just right and so was the steel River

Upper Steel River

It was a big relief to be able to follow the strong current thru easy chutes and minor rapids. We had little paddling to do other than some steering and avoiding the occasional rock.

An easy rapids

 At one of the first rapids, where we could see straight ahead to the very end, a duck appeared. I wasn’t into birding then, so I’m not sure what kind it was, possibly some kind of merganser. He would be at the head of the rapids and then dive underwater. His reappearance several hundred yards downstream amazed us at first. This little guy seemed to be leading the way as he repeated this performance several times. The idea was, if this little duck could make it ... so could we!

We sailed thru without a scratch. The scenery was stunning with rocky bluffs and the forest for a backdrop.We liked to set up camp by mid-afternoon as that gave us time to catch our supper and relax around a campfire.

About that time, we found a flat area about twenty feet above the rocky shoreline. It was covered with moss and lichens and looked especially soft and comfortable. This proved to be a big mistake. In our tent, that night, we found ourselves being bitten by a mysterious insect we couldn’t see. "No-seeums" they are called. No-see-um ... yep, you sure can feel-um even if you can't see-um! Apparently we had disturbed their home in the moss. Our only alternative was to spend the night out of harms way, our heads buried in our sleeping bags. Not good as it was too warm and stuffy.

The next morning we began our second day on the Steel River confident we could handle any more challenges. At the crack of dawn it was foggy as usual. The rapids we did encounter would best be described as Class II technical. We checked them out carefully, decided our route and with only the occasional "eddy turn," had no difficulty negotiating them. In those few cases, where we were uncertain as to advisability of running the rapids, we chose to portage. The thought of wet sleeping bags and clothes was not appealing.  And yes we did some fishing along the way. 

Troutbirder eyeing a walleyed pike for supper.....

To be continued...............