Be prepared, time doesn’t wait for anyone
“Autumn this year is gonna break my heart, leaves start falling and the feeling starts.”
— Steve Forbert
I remember fondly the olden times when I was a kid leaving the house on my bike for a day of fishing along the creek.
My younger brother and I would stick the cork handles of our fishing poles in between the metal bars behind our bike seats to have two free hands to steer with.
We’d have our olive-green fishing bags from the Coast-to-Coast store slung over our shoulders and big grins on our faces the farther we got from the house.
We would bring several items with us inside those snap-pocketed bags.
The staples included an old potato chip dip container filled with garden dirt and night crawlers we’d picked from our yard with a flashlight and a coffee can on the last rainy night. The plastic lid of the dip container had air holes poked in it with a dinner fork.
We also had a package of number six hooks with barbs to help hold those worms on the hook and a round, plastic box with a rotating lid that you could turn to move the opening.
The box held an assortment of lead fishing weights we always called “sinkers” that would help us bring our baits closer to the brook trout fanning their tails along the bottom of the creek.
We also carried plastic bobbers for floating our line down through branch-choked places tough to cast into, and a pocketknife. Our fishing bags had a handy section of measuring tape stenciled across one side to help us make sure our fish were at least 7 inches, the legal minimum size limit.
Standard dress for us in those days was tennis shoes, regular, dark socks, corduroy pants in colors we hated – like burgundy, dark green or brown – T-shirts and our “Princeton” haircuts, which were basically crew cuts with bangs.
We’d often wear dark blue or black hoodies as a jacket.
Inside one of the pockets, we usually carried a can of cheap, gas-station off-brand pop that our parents bought in cases – in flavors like lemon-lime, root beer or black cherry – and in the other pocket, typically a peanut butter and jelly sandwich we’d made before leaving the house and then tucked inside the flaps of a plastic sandwich bag.
We might also have a baggie filled with potato chips or sticks.
I knew that whether the fish were biting, or we got rained on or it was too hot or cold outside, that sandwich, chips and pop lunch was going to be fabulous.
That’s because everything tastes better out in the woods. I don’t know why that is exactly, but it seems to just be one of those prima facia things – it’s a given.
Of course, there are exceptions.
I recall a backyard camping outing when we cooked a frozen pizza on a charcoal grill.
The crust was burned. Most of the toppings still had frozen places and the best parts, in terms of readiness, were about room temperature.
To top it off, the pizza broke in half on the grate of the grill. The pizza cookout was disastrous. We never attempted it again.
Back in those days, G.I. Joe was a big deal for kids.
I was in Cub Scouts, and I had a knapsack and a mess kit – like a soldier. The mess kit had opposing metal dishes that were held together with a couple of strips of metal that you could fold out into a frying pan handle with the help of a threaded bolt and a wingnut.
I remember grilling a nice slab of ham in that pan, as well as a brook trout lunch along a streambank – which remains a classic in my memory of firsts.
Some of my favorite things to cook outside are hot dogs or bratwursts either on the grill or with sticks poked through them held over a fire. It’s even better if a pot of baked beans is included.
As kids, some of our attempts to grill hot dogs, especially in the beginning, resulted in one big bite into a cold hot dog and the next chomp into meat that burned the inside of our mouths.
But we were left to cook our own and to learn from that. It was a great experience.
I love all kinds of food cooked on a grill, from tuna and chicken to hamburgers and roasted vegetables. But my absolute favorite is steak.
Steak isn’t something we ever packed on our kid trips to the woods or in our day lunches, but some of my favorite meals – from Texas roadhouses to California steakhouses – have been steak cooked over an open flame, combined with a salted and buttered baked potato and green vegetables.
About the only thing that can rival it for me is salmon cooked in any manner.
But out there in the woods, grilled or not, food is incredible, even if it’s only a handful of peanuts or trail mix.
Then there’s all the wild offerings like blackberries, blueberries, raspberries and thimbleberries that just explode flavor inside your mouth.
There are also places – especially around old homesteads or vanished communities -where you can find various types of scrumptious apples growing together in orchards.
Some of the apples are green and sweet or green and sour, while others are deep red, only blushed pink or somewhere in between, with tastes and sweetness just as variable.
As kids, once apples were on the trees, it wasn’t uncommon for somebody to carry a saltshaker with them in their pocket in case we came upon some sour green apples.
The salt would cut the sour of the bites going down, but more than a couple green apples and your stomach might hurt.
Autumn would of course be the best time to get out to taste apples.
Probably because of the old homestead orchards dotting the countryside, fall apples go together in my mind with dried brown and yellow grasses, rusted barbed wire and rotting wooden fenceposts.
To this you could add crows in the skies, cawing, the warm smell of autumn’s gentle dwindling and diminishing and leaves floating atop the waters of the creek, while brook trout spawn in the ice-cold depths below.
At this late time in the season, the days become very precious to me. I know it won’t be long before the snow flies and I’ve got to make the best of this time to get out to places I won’t be able to reach readily in the wintertime.
It’s kind of a farewell bidding, a last chance to see and experience things before everything gets locked up in a months-long freeze.
If I stop long enough to think about all the things I had hoped to do and didn’t over the summertime, it often adds a dash of urgency to my plans for the autumn.
As in any year, it typically holds true that I don’t get to some of the things I’d planned, but I did other cool things that weren’t on my list of things to do.
My biggest regret from spring and summer was that I never did see a black-throated blue warbler this year. That’s one summer bird that I never want to miss seeing.
I know I heard one while I was driving through the woods out my car window. But I was in a hurry to get to someplace else and didn’t take the time to stop, likely thinking that there would be other black-throated blues on other days.
I find that is a common mindset for me, that there will be plenty of other times to do this or see that person or talk with this other person or go here or there – but there may not be.
This is a lesson life has taught me over and over, but I still have not learned it.
Life’s changes are constant and can be quite abrupt, rushing friends or family members into another world, seasonally moving birds out of our region or limiting our experiences through health or other consequences.
Even if you wear a watch or constantly stare at the clock, time doesn’t wait for anyone at all – not me, not any black-throated blue warbler either.
I just ate a handful of salted peanuts, and they were damned good. I wasn’t even outside when I ate them.
I’m headed outside now to take a walk along the river. I want to soak up the autumntime while I still can.
Maybe I’ll find some apples to taste or at least some barbed wire or a rotted fence post. Regardless, I’ll let the wind take its best shot at blowing through me while I haunt those riverbanks like a ghost.
Here today, gone tomorrow.
Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.