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The holler of spring

As I wait for spring, delayed again by yesterday’s 9-inch snowfall added to the already too-tall snowbanks, I close my eyes and see wild daffodils, bluebirds, a rushing creek, and little goats. Kids, you know.

Those images keep coming back, of my first spring this year, in the hills and hollers of northern Tennessee. On this second day of April, I drift back to a week in late February, 900 miles to the south, just across the Kentucky border. There’s no snow. It isn’t a dream.

Maple and hickory buds are swelling in soft hues of crimson and olive, feather brushing the tree-lined ridges as the transformation from stark to soft begins. From my nephew’s deck overlooking the valley of his goat ranch, I watch a bluebird pick at last fall’s crabapples. A meadowlark sings in the pasture. Remy, the old bird dog, stretches out in the morning sun, letting springtime warmth massage his tired bones.

In the valley is a narrow blacktop lane—move over and stop when meeting someone—that twists and climbs for two miles back to the main highway. Deep gullies drop away from both sides, to forests where beech trees hold their creamy leaves from last fall. Faded tobacco barns recall their past in clearings backed up against steep hills.

The sun has climbed over the tree line. From this log house, halfway up a hill of pasture and woodland, a vista stretches out in front of me of pastured goats, sheds and barns old and new, two creeks, and a few farmsteads further down the holler and up the next hill. Green branches of red cedar and wild bamboo bow over the creeks, while flocks of turkey vultures circle above.

There’s a small cemetery just up the hill from where the creek passes under a thick cement slab along the dirt driveway. The cemetery, its footprint no larger than a garage, is fenced off from seven docile, hairy Highland steers and cows. The Charlie Cothron Cemetery, with half a dozen crumbling head stones, is one of many family graveyards in Macon County.

My cemetery reverie is pierced by a juvenile bleat. The goats are kidding, I kid you not. I’ve picked out the tan 8-pounder I want to bring back to Wisconsin. Its long ears complement its long nose, with rectangular pupils cutting through marbled blue eyes. Just too cute. But then I watch the buck kid and his sister doe nursed by their protective mother, and I know the little guy needs to stay in Tennessee.

So I take photos of the kids, of the great blue heron in the creek, of the bluebirds, and of the yellow daffodils, which will run their course here before any dare show their petals in Wisconsin.

Oh, back to Wisconsin. I open my eyes, and it’s still white outside the window on the first Sunday in April. On the positive side, I’ll have two springs, the first in February in Tennessee, and then in northern Wisconsin, someday before May Day. I hope.

(Dave Greschner’s “Up North” column appears in the Friday print editions of the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and the Ashland Daily Press, and on the Ashland newspaper’s website, normally a day or two ahead of the Friday newspaper.)

Did you bring beer?

Whew! I got that out of the way. Yup, ice fishing is out of my system for another winter. Or maybe not.

I’ve been going ice fishing once a year for some years now, just to know it hasn’t changed. I normally don’t catch fish, I get bored and cold, and when I’m convinced I won’t catch fish is when I wonder why anyone thinks cold beer on a cold lake in a cold wind tastes good.

Ice fishing is not in my blood, even if lutefisk is. My parents fished in the summer only, because in our family “no such thing as safe ice” was taken way too seriously. Even when ice skating on the flooded rink in our front yard I had to tie a rope from my belly to the cottonwood tree.

But on a mild morning last week I texted my brother-in-law about something we’d been threatening since Christmas. “How about today for ice fishing?” I asked. A cold front was moving in by mid-afternoon, so we made fast plans to meet at the lake by 11 a.m. Maybe we’d catch fish before catching cold.

I stopped for waxies and teardrops—oh, you thought I’m not well-versed in ice fishing—drove to the landing and rode in bro-in-law’s Jeep to a spot hugging the west shoreline, out of the breeze. Bro’s gas-powered auger started whining and churning, thank heavens, because I really didn’t have a good plan for puncturing 18 inches of ice other than a garage sale special manual auger with a dull blade.

(When I go ice fishing alone I walk rapidly across the lake as if I know where I’m going. In reality, I have no idea, knowing only that I’m scanning for a hole already drilled but recently abandoned, a hole with only a skim of ice on it. The drawback being that I don’t catch fish in the same place someone else didn’t catch fish.)

I was fishing within 10 minutes. But by 30 minutes I was slouching on my obligatory 5-gallon pail, gazing across the ice, sometimes at the sky, fighting boredom by counting ice shacks and thinking profound thoughts. My profoundness was interrupted by my partner’s “Did you bring beer?” No.

Then suddenly, a nibble, though in my state of negative chill I figured a cruising northern pike had bumped my waxie. But then the bobber moved enough to get my hand’s attention to yank into a tiny bluegill. I threw it back down the hole. A minute later I either caught it again or its twin.

Then came more serious bites, and more serious fish starting beaming up the shaft to daylight. I tossed them on the ice next to me like I always do (or don’t). I was getting quite a collection of fryer bluegills when it all ended during a tangled line interruption and a cold-front eruption riding an emboldened wind.

Snow devils raced and chased across the flat whiteness. Clouds ran away, and so did the fish. But there were enough bluegills for supper, with a matching contribution from my bro-in-law. So you know, I might just go ice fishing again. Seems I got it into my system, not out of my system.

(Blogger’s note: Yes, I know this Outdoor Journal blog has taken a lengthy hiatus—18 months to be exact, after a 15-month run from the blog beginning in May 2020 to its pause in September 2021. As Jackson Browne wrote in his “These Days” song, “Don’t confront me with my failures, I’m aware of them.” But here’s the deal: About the time I paused I was taking on another newspaper column weekly commitment, which includes a photo with each piece. Then I got serious about a book, which has been accepted by Cornerstone Press at UW-Stevens Point, with publication scheduled later this year. The book is a collection of nature essays and outdoor stories. I hope to keep this blog up, more like once a month than the ambitious once-a-week routine it began with. This would also be a good time to note that my Up North column appears in the Friday print editions of the Eau Claire Leader-Telegram and Ashland Daily Press, and on the Ashland newspaper’s website, normally a day or two ahead of the Friday newspaper. A condensed version of the outdoor column also appears in every Wednesday edition of the Rice Lake Chronotype.)

Tailing the butterflies

I curbed my fascination with monarch butterflies when the swallowtails showed up. I was standing in a hayfield, the August morning’s harvest of firewood stacked in the trailer. I took my camera and walked into the blooming red clover.

There were half a dozen or more monarchs within my camera range. This was good news, or good views, for several years ago I stood in this same spot and was lucky to see a monarch or two. Are they recovering with our awareness of how much a milkweed plant means to a monarch butterfly? Or was I witnessing the early signs of migration, when monarchs gather in groups and roost by the hundreds in trees.

I’ve seen the roosting once, as a child, in the giant cottonwood tree of our farmyard. There were hundred of monarchs on the trunk and the lower branches on an afternoon in September. I’ve never forgotten the sight, and have not seen it since. But I keep looking.

As impressive is the monarch with wings in varying shades of orange, and white and yellow spots on the black borders, my eye was suddenly captured by an even larger butterfly. The giant and tiger swallowtails (giant swallowtail in photo above) were also probing the red clover, extending their proboscis tubes into the purple sweetness.

At 6 inches, the wingspan of a swallowtail is at least 2 inches wider than a monarch. It also has those tails protruding from the rear wings, which the monarch doesn’t have. And, with yellow and deep brown wings with dots of orange and blue here and there, an argument could be made that the swallowtail is as colorful as the monarch.

But there is one big difference in the two species. The monarchs we see now are the last of two or three generations to hatch in these parts this summer. Monarchs summering on their breeding range will only live a month, give or take a week. That is, except for the last generation we now see in August. These monarchs will live up to 9 months, and they are the ones that will make the incredible flight of nearly 2,000 miles to the forests of central Mexico, where they hibernate.

Unlike birds, overwintering monarchs in Mexico will not return to our northland. They will start out in February, lay eggs in the southern states and then die. Young monarchs will pick up the chase northward.

But the swallowtail will not fly south. Like monarchs, the swallowtails’ life expectancy in our summer midst is short—about a month. This will continue until the last eggs are laid and the swallowtails’ larvae caterpillars emerge. Before frost, those caterpillars will turn into pupas on several types of plants and also tree twigs.

Tiny butterflies overwinter inside the pupa, or chrysalis, with butterflies emerging when the weather warms in spring. It can be a long wait for a monthlong life as a fluttering butterfly.

So I stand in the field of clover, the monarchs and butterflies all about me. In a few weeks, some will fly thousands of miles, others will lay eggs and give up their lives. Now, I am fascinated with swallowtails, too.

Summer settles in

So it’s June already. Not quite summer solstice time, but feeling plenty like summer just the same. Kids are off the hook from school, and now are hooking up worms. Bigger kids—that would be adults—are thinking of playing hooky, though the weedy garden and peeling paint say otherwise, not to mention the lawn.

Where did spring go, along with its hoped-for early camping, perhaps pitching a tent before mosquitos are itching to bite? But the tent stayed stored away, holding the scents of summers past, each past season remembered as more simple the further I think back. And with more time to fish and camp.

And so now comes another chance, for the bluegills are biting as ferns spread among the blooming wild geraniums. Rain clouds drift away, and the sky is as blue as the leaves are green. One color against the another, complementing each other.

It’s the month of the longest days, light arriving by 5 a.m., sunsets edging up against 9 p.m. The Milky Way snakes northward through the sky when it’s finally dark. The orb weaver spider spins its tale in the dew of a warm sunrise as herons take off on fishing trips, and deer and raccoons sneak home from a night out.

There are strawberries for your sweet tooth and wild roses for your sweetheart. It’s time to hear the slate-gray catbird singing some other bird’s song in the low bushes. And then I stumble upon a fawn, its brown eyes as big as its white spots as if its amazed by its new world as summer settles in.

Her paths are peace

“Walk with nature, her paths are peace.”

The narrow footpath snaked between the trees, bushes and emerging ferns. On the way to the main lake the trail followed the shoreline of a shallow bay, about 10 big steps from the stagnant water, strewn with trees that had gone down and now served as sunbathing platforms for turtles.

It was a quiet afternoon in May. Quiet save for the melodies of birds, most notably the notes of the rose-breasted grosbeaks. It was so tranquil, so peaceful, that the words, “Walk with nature, her paths are peace,” kept easing through my mind.

The words graced a framed poster I had many years ago, a gift from my parents who must have seen the budding naturalist in me as I progressed from my teens to young manhood. I assumed at the time the words came from a Bible passage.

The verse was overlaid on a scene of a welcoming trail winding between large trees, with the splintered sun shooting a ray onto the path. I wish I could see that poster again, but somewhere in half a dozen moves through college and early job days, it was lost.

I tried to find if the exact verse existed, but my Biblical search only came as close as Proverbs 3:17: “Her ways are pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” The “her,” however, in this instance refers to wisdom, not nature.

There is wisdom in nature, so perhaps the poster creator took liberty with the verse. It doesn’t matter, for my search took me down intriguing paths, one that led to naturalist John Muir’s words, “In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks.”

Muir also wrote, “Nature’s peace will flow into you as the sunshine flows into trees.”

My search also found Henry David Thoreau, who penned, “An early morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.”

On this afternoon, on this pathway to my fishing spot, nature was teeming but peaceful. Turtles lazed in the sun. I heard frogs. The newly-arrived songbirds’ melodies rippled through the air. The honking of two geese reverberated across the lake and then was swallowed by the calm water surface, which shared the blue hue of the sky. A great blue heron stalked fish nearby, and I could hear its wings when it lifted off.

I sat in awe on the shoreline, thinking nature doesn’t make a sound that is not peaceful, nor a path that is not peace. I thought about having never found that exact verse, but having found many times what it told me.

No overlooking spring

As I walk along a trail this morning I am surrounded by spring—the birds, buds, flowers, blossoms, and even the fresh smell of the season. I’m reminded that there’s something new emerging or migrating my way every day. When will the first trillium show? When will the chesnut-sided warbler land in front of me?

I am engrossed in spring, always on the verge of uncontrolled exhilaration and anticipation. But it wasn’t always that way. When I was a boy, spring was something that happened while I was riding bike or playing ball. When I wasn’t pedaling I was bouncing rubber balls off the house foundation or milkhouse while the countryside all around me was showing an amazing rebirth that I largely ignored.

Oh, sure, I took notes of frogs and tadpole eggs in the creek, and the cottonwood tree’s profuse shedding of white catkins. But I paid little attention to the arrival of songbirds, wildflowers popping through the leaf litter, the buds of lilacs and blossoms of wild plums, or the winter constellation Orion the Hunter slipping out of sight behind the glow of a spring evening’s twilight.

All these years later, I’m looking over what I overlooked in those early years. Spring. With the knowledge of the years and yet with the wonder of a child, I’m amazed every day now at what’s happening around me. And there’s plenty yet to learn. What bird is that? What bush is producing those stunning white, fragrant blossoms? (I’m quite sure the photo accompanying this blog is of pin cherry blossoms from along my path today.)

One morning this spring without fanfare the ospreys returned. One silently inspected its high nesting perch, while its mate was no doubt fishing in the nearby lake, which was freed of ice just over a month ago. The pair have come all the way from Central America to make our neighborhood their summer home again.

And now, as I walk along, there is the wood duck coming and going from its tree cavity on the edge of the marsh. A ruffed grouse is drumming, red-winged blackbirds are working the cattails, crimson buds are decorating red maples, and tiny green leaves are dotting sugar maples, just as an oriole with its breathtaking color alights on a branch.

I take it all in. I watch and listen as a child.

The way of May Day

The spring wildflowers of my childhood were all spring beauties or May flowers. It would be many years later that I learned there actually was a flower called spring beauty, but that May flowers weren’t the name of a particular flower, rather a general term for any wildflower blooming in May.

My childhood days included picking the spring flowers for May baskets. I’m sure I picked spring beauties along with others I would come to identify, such as hepatica and bloodroot. Now, memories fill me when I see the emerging whites and pinks of flower petals in the greening woodlands and along trails.

It’s May Day today. When I was a kid the May Day tradition was encouraged by teachers with an activity project. I rushed home from school in the late afternoon, disappeared in the woods for a time and returned with wildflowers in a small paper basket made in school. I proudly presented them to my mother, who gushed over their beauty and my thoughtfulness. (Many times my dad had already picked flowers, and mom would have two bouquets.)

Then, at the urging of my mother, I picked another handful and arranged them in a small basket my mother supplied. She thought it would be nice to take them to the elderly woman across the road. I happily obliged, for there was a prize for my surprise delivery.

I handed my offering to the neighbor woman. In return, there were cookies and, more importantly, a scooter that was once their children’s waiting for me to ride. She told me, as she had many times, where the scooter was behind the thick white door of an old shed.

With one foot on the scooter and the other kicking up dust and momentum, I passed their barn on my way to a creek that slipped beneath the driveway. There, I lingered a bit to look for frogs. Then I returned the scooter to the shed, where it would be tucked safely away in the darkness until maybe another ride that summer, or surely next May Day.

The years went by, and our elderly farm neighbors passed the farm along to their son’s family and moved to town. I moved, too, and many May Days I wasn’t home to bring wildflowers—always “nice ones”—to my mom. But at some point during the spring I would. The tradition continued in one form or another. Until last year.

My mother is gone now. But I remember. I hope anyone with a mother or grandmother, or a friend, thinks about showing the kindness of a May basket today. Or any day in May would be fine.

Rainy Day Frog

I really don’t need to know how much it rains. I am not a farmer, gardener or dam gate keeper. So this matter of placing a rain gauge in the perfect spot and then checking it after each rain is borne of my background; my dad was a farmer.

It just seems like something I should carry on, like searching for agates and butternuts. And, since I’m now known to have a rain gauge which I check and empty faithfully, I get asked often, “How much we get?”

Earlier this spring after a fairly steady overnight rain, I held the glass gauge at eye level to read 2 inches. Exactly 2 inches. And then it hit me. I really do need to know simply because I really do want to know. And I want to know because no one else is going to give me the exact measurement of how much it rained in my yard, or even on my end of town.

But rain gauges are work beyond the checking and emptying. One must be a gauge of temperatures, too, for on spring nights and again in autumn when the mercury is dipping toward the freezing mark, the gauge must come indoors, lest a quick shower is followed by clearing skies and freezing temps.

I’ve been caught several times, usually in the fall. The water in the gauge freezes, the glass breaks, and there’s a trip to the store for a $1.88 new glass cylinder. The new cylinder is shiny and clean, and the numbers easy to read. However, it comes with a cheap tin holder to tack to the deck railing or post, or an equally cheap plastic wedge to shove in the ground, at which point the wedge promptly breaks.

I toss the holders away, for we have a heavy, bluish-green metal frog who is all too happy to hold the cylinder and be called Rainy Day Frog. Rainy Day stands upright 6 inches on his front legs so his front feet and mouth touch the ground when the rod, which is attached under his wide gaping mouth, is poked into the lawn.

The frog always makes me smile with its eyes bulging and its legs rising and bent to form a diamond shape. And Rainy Day appears to be smiling back at me, probably because he always knows before I do how much it rained.

To the creek

May I go to the creek as a child again? I’ll put my shoes and socks on this rock.

I hope I can.

But where to put these worries and fears? Will the gurgling creek waters carry away the troubles?

And the tears?

Perhaps so, with help from the frogs and my memories. Of carefree evenings by the water.

Buds on the trees.

Of following a creek that only flowed in the spring. Cool water on my toes, frog eggs in a jar.

Birds with red wings.

A killdeer ran scolding through the pasture. A tractor groaned through its plowing chore in the field.

Was I ever happier?

I’d jump to the large flat rock in the small pond. Frogs leaped for cover. I stared at water spiders.

I’d stay too long.

Mom shouted for supper. I’d catch one more frog. Let it go and know I’d hear it in the night.

Through the fog.

May I go to the creek as a child again? I’ll put my worries and fears on this rock. Then I’ll close my eyes and listen.

I think I can.

Chatter on the pond

“Frogs.” My wife looked at the pond to our right, the pond hugging the narrow dirt road splitting the woods. “Do you hear them?”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to admit my lesser hearing. Not when it comes to nature.

“Do you hear the frogs? Don’t you hear them?” she asked again.

I rolled down the truck window. I could hear something. I shut the truck off, and immediately the drone of the engine was replaced with the chattering and clattering chorus of the pond. “Yeh,” I said, “I hear them.”

It was the first Sunday in April. Easter Sunday. With the temperature nudging 80˚, we went for a ride. Where the blacktop ended and the choice was three dirt roads that snaked away through the woods, we took the left option. I had taken it before, on spring fishing outings.

For the next mile, the road slightly dipped and climbed, and twisted a bit, with the lake only a narrow strip of woods away. Cabins were nestled among the trees. Well, not quite nestled in early April for there were no leaves to nestle them.

There were a handful of ponds on either side the dirt lane. After hearing the frogs, we sat for a long time, and the chorus grew louder. The frogs grew braver.

“Why can’t we see them?” my wife asked. And no more had she posed the question when the dimples of mouths and eyes started breaking the water surface.

There were bulging eyes everywhere. As I tried to photograph the frogs—what little of them there was to photograph—some frogs would shoot forward as if to chase a nearby frog. It seemed there was more going on here than just singing for joy in the choir on a summery April afternoon.

My wife shot a short video, the sweeping picture of the pond accompanied with the sound, its decibels climbing the longer we sat quiet on the road. It wasn’t a peeping sound. It was a constant clicking noise with no rhythm and yet a constant beat. So it was not the spring peepers’ shrill whistles, but rather the wood frogs’ sharp and raspy clack and perhaps the tree frogs’ fast-repeating calls of quank. Though not an expert in herpetology, I’d put my money on the wood frog.

It was one of those first days of real spring when you could have sat on a log next to the pond, closed your eyes, and let your ears soak up the rebirth of a season.