Serving Two Masters

Yet another rainy day. Today it's really sheeting down too. Heavy rainfall is possible through Saturday. We had light rain on and off all of last week, and now that seems like a drought by comparison. I shouldn't complain much, considering the weather other parts of the country are having, but four or five days of sun would feel heavenly.

It would also bring closer the day when I can actually fish my local streams. The Huron is currently running more than four times the upper limit for safe wading (3290 cfs, as I write, opposed to 700). I want to go to Cloud Creek at least once this season, but I doubt it's been wadable at any point since the opener.

Maybe today's rain is especially depressing in contrast to the beautiful weather we enjoyed yesterday and the outing it inspired. By midafternoon the clouds were gone and the temperature went well into the 70s, this after predictions for clouds and low 60s. I absolutely had to get outdoors, and fishing was out, but it would be a fine night to scout out some duck hunting locales, so by 6:30 I was on the road to a nearby state park.

I couldn't have picked a better night to be in the woods. It was warm with only the lightest of winds, yet mosquitoes were sparse. Mayapples, wild geraniums, and anemones were in bloom, strewing patches of color across the dun carpeting of last year's leaves on the forest floor. In the dropping sun the trunks of trees facing a small lake glowed tangerine, then faded to a dull rose. A few sandhill cranes bugled and lone robins let out a few notes here and there, but otherwise it was very quiet.

The scouting went well. I found new approaches to one of the lakes I hunted last fall that will allow me to hunt it from different angles and in more wind directions. I hiked in to a pond I'd seen but not hunted last year and found it took fifteen minutes--I'm assuming that will translate to thirty in the dark. And at points, strangely enough, I found myself wishing that fall was here. Summer has barely begun!

Yet an instant later, while standing along the lake, it occurred to me that if I'd gotten an earlier start I could have brought my pontoon and drifted the edges of the lilly pads casting poppers for bass. At the very least I might have waded the shallows and perhaps located some bluegill beds. With duck season almost five months away, I suppose scouting isn't imperative.


Or I could have spent an hour scouting and an hour fishing.

Nothing complicates a simple pleasure like another one.