Hey, I Just Got Here!; Grouse Hell

Sweetney foresees the end of blogging, or at least its fall from fashion. As she sees it, after peaking sometime early this year (surely because of the debut of FTR , heh heh), the phemonenon of blogging is losing steam, and may soon become the high-tech equivalent of a mullet. She may be on to something, as she seems far more immersed in the blogging world than I am.

No surprise, that the blogging bandwagon would go off a cliff just after I took my seat. I have a history of untimely beginnings. I started my IRA account in the summer of 99, which gave me a couple months to profit from the tech boom before losing massively. When I started work in publishing, the company president greeted my class of trainees with an announcement that the field was moving out of paper and ink and into the brave new world of computers. I think she meant that to be inspiring, but, fresh off a collegiate immersion in American Renaissance and Modernist literature, I felt profoundly cheated. Soon I went back to grad school, where I could indulge my bookworm tendencies.

Wherever this medium goes, I want to keep doing some kind of online, fish-oriented expression. I'll admit my sense of purpose sometimes falters between fishing reports. I'm still trying to hammer out a consistent blog identity. Hopefully I'll pull it together before it becomes a moot point.


Made another local hunt yesterday. I'm despairing of ever finding another game bird in southeast Michigan. In most years, migrating woodcock would be passing through now (or might already have moved further south), but the mild weather is keeping them up north. Yesterday, I worked the grousiest cover I've yet found around here, and turned up neither grouse nor signs of any. I know grouse can thrive in southern michigan--my dad and I used to move loads of them on a farm near Hastings, and occasionally a few in the woods outside our house--but they don't seem to reside within an hour of Ann Arbor. Am I missing some hotspot?

I drove home cursing this birdless, troutless place where I now live, but then I remembered what I have taken from my hunts. I've seen plants and trees I never thought existed in southern Michigan. I've stood at the edge of swamps half a mile wide, and seen strands of maples and oaks, fully fired in red and orange, stretching more than twice that long unbroken. I've walked from the edge of a busy road to places where the traffic sounds could barely compete with the wind in the pines. All less than one gallon of gas away.

A move to the north would be nice. For now, a shift in expectations might be enough to get by.

Oh, yesterday I also jumped a buck deer with a very large rack. Deer hunters, I'll be glad to disclose his location to whoever makes me the best cash offer. Submit bids in the Comments section.