The next morning, Thursday, I ate breakfast and finished unpacking the truck before heading for MB Resort. Ken and Jeanie are very nice friends and we’ve done business with them a number of times, as I have alluded to above. We discussed the local news over coffee and I signed the rental papers for the boat, a fourteen-foot deep-V fishing boat. Ken helped me install the Honda motor and loaded some buckets of sand into the front of the boat as ballast to offset the weight of me (220 lbs.) and the Honda engine (114 lbs.), all concentrated at the back. (This would make the boat remain level rather than having its bow up in the air and I wouldn’t have to stretch to peer around it as I motored along.) He lent me a square-drive bit, a pair of tin snips, some self-tapping screws, and a piece of aluminum sheet to mouse-proof the hole in the wheel well.

I drove the boat back to my camp area while Ken drove my truck around by road. By the time he arrived I had the wheel well hole patched and had taken the square-drive screws out of the shed door. He looked around and suggested I could build a boat dock using balsam rubble as a base, using cedar log stringers floored with boards ripped from some of the big cedar logs that lay nearby. I nodded approvingly, as I had been thinking the same thing. He helped me lift the tarp to cover the roof by lifting it with sticks and walking it on. We tied it down with the cords already attached to it. After we visited a few minutes I drove him back to MB Resort in the boat then returned to resume my camp duties.

Damn! There were the tin snips in the shed and I had the square-drive bit in my pocket. I could have returned his tools right then. On second thought, I might still need the snips. The shed had some construction gaps that would be ever so inviting for the little woods critters thereabouts. Pieces of tin cans stapled in place would deter their destructive ways.  

I had lent a small freezer to Dale on the previous trip. I don’t know what his understanding of the arrangement was, but I had expected to find it stored in the shed. With the exception of a half dozen 1” x 3” by eight boards, the shed was empty. That freezer would be important to freeze plastic water jugs to put in the cooler to transport fish back to Virginia. Besides, the same trick could be used to provide cooling for the refrigerator in the trailer, as it wouldn’t cool on its own. The freezer ran on 120 volts a.c., so it needed to be powered by the generator or by batteries and an inverter, all of which I had, as well as a photovoltaic panel that might charge the batteries if I could keep sunshine on it long enough. On the previous trip I had used all these methods as convenient and necessary to accomplish the freezing task. I would be on the lookout for Dale.        

A vehicle pulled into the yard and stopped. It was Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. making a neighborly call. Or, perhaps they were checking to see if I really did have a camp at the end of the road. They were very nice and I enjoyed their company for a break. They seemed to sympathize with my mice stories. No, they hadn’t seen Dale lately. He didn’t seem to be in the area much any more. If they did see him they would ask him to come by. Neighborly stuff. They left and I went back to work on the shed and yard for a few minutes.

Another vehicle pulled into the yard. Darn! It was like Grand Central Station around here! It was Lawerence and Cindy F. and their teenage son and daughter Max and Madeleine, good friends from the trip before. I was happy to see them. They were doing a neighborly visit also. We visited a while and upon hearing my story of the water damage, Lawrence insisted that I borrow his ladder to check out the roof.  I followed them for the two miles back to their camp at the end of cartoon road. There I met their Black Labrador Retriever, Champ, who was soon my good friend. I’m sure Champ would be good friends with anyone who would throw the ball for him. 

I was given the grand tour of their very nice vacation house. It was obvious that they had been busy over the past five years. The house was laid out in the most practical manner. This was the type of cottage I would want if I had enough time to build and maintain such a place. Considering the amount of time I actually got to spend at the lake though, the trailer I had was much more practical. If a tree fell on the trailer or someone hauled it off, I’d miss it, but it wouldn’t be that big an economic loss.

Lawrence’s cottage was nice, though. One large open room ran the length of the house on the lake side, with picture windows, kitchen at one end, bathroom at the other. Individual doors opened along the back wall to three moderate sized bedrooms. In the big room were mounted fish and birds and pictures, each with its own interesting story. The house was powered by solar photovoltaic cells and until recently, a wind power generator. Seems the wind had been too strong this spring and had cracked the rock the tower was anchored to. It had also been a royal pain to maintain, requiring near constant tweaks to keep it running efficiently. He was selling it and buying another photovoltaic panel. Less muss, less fuss.

Lawrence scouted up some hinges and screws for my shed door and I loaded the ladder and headed back to the trailer. I took the tarp off and immediately checked out the roof. Other than deteriorated seam sealer and a bit of trash, it seemed to be in fair shape. I swept the trashy areas clean. It would definitely need some work, but I’d have to make an eighty-five mile trip to town for supplies first. That would have to be Monday. Meanwhile, I installed the hinges and took care of a few other tasks I’d been thinking about.

I set up my solar photovoltaic panel on the truck cap door and hooked up one of my three deep-cycle marine batteries. It could be charging while I pulled up small trees that had sprouted all over the yard and grown to as much as four or five feet high. Without some attention, they would be a forest very soon. I worked at that for a couple of hours, cleaning up about half the area. I would take care of the remaining area at another time. Right now I wanted to go fishing.

I stayed out on the lake for a couple of hours, with no luck. Darn east wind! I never do any good fishing when there is an east wind, no matter what part of the world I’m in, it seems. But I had a couple of experiences that made it well worth the trip out, fish or no fish.

In an isolated bay about a mile east I observed a black bear, perhaps two hundred and fifty pounds, grubbing in a field of sedge grass along the shore. I fished to within perhaps fifty yards of him. He stood up to better see me for a moment, then dropped down and continued feeding. I don’t know what he was finding to eat, but whatever it was had him very preoccupied. I continued fishing the area and he continued grubbing around in the grass for a while until I moved out of sight of him. What was interesting to me about this encounter was the peacefulness with which each of us regarded the other. He didn’t bother me and I didn’t bother him — not the usual man/bear encounter.

The other experience involved a rainbow — but not just any rainbow. The perspective one normally gets, at least, the perspective that I’ve always had, is that most rainbows appear to be perhaps one to three hundred yards wide and arch over perhaps ten or fifteen miles. I’ve even seen double and triple rainbows, some nearly perfect, others in partial view. Perhaps in the case at hand there was something special about the vast horizon in view. Perhaps rainbows on this lake are often spectacular, and I have certainly seen some beauties.

This rainbow had little or no arch to it. I could only see the lower end of it. In perspective it seemed to reach perhaps a couple of miles high from the horizon, but it was five miles wide. Can you imagine the end of a rainbow spread over a quarter of your vista? I’ve never before seen any rainbows that approached this spectacular sight. Where is the camera when you absolutely must have it? — back in the trailer, of course. Sigh. In a few moments the amazing sight disintegrated and left me sitting in the boat staring at the normal old humdrum wonder of a beautiful lake. I turned around and motored back to camp.

I leisurely ate my ham steak and beans dinner, lit a mosquito coil, and went to bed. It had been a day of piddling tasks and poor fishing luck, but one of incredible nature scenes, unbridled and beautiful. And I had the camp a little more under control — not a bad note to fall sleep on.

Saturday morning I was up reasonably early, perhaps 07:30. Breakfast of cereal with milk and honey, then out to pull trees again. I can’t imagine what I would have done if I hadn’t brought my leather gloves. They proved to be the most important tool I had. They worked wonders with the bushes and trees. I cleared another area before becoming bored.

I decided it was time to begin work on the dock. I looked out over the area where Dale had used heavy motorized equipment to pile balsam logs in the edge of the alders. It was a long way through the waterlogged bushes to open water that way. And the question was, when I got there would I find water deep enough to allow a boat to come and go? I had examined the area before while fishing the area and I didn’t think it would be deep enough, particularly if the water level ever fell any, which it was certainly likely to do. As Ken had suggested, it would be best to take the shortest route to navigable water. And I was sure there was a shorter route to navigable water well to the south of Dale’s pile of logs. What I could do was use some of them for fill for my own selected location. 

My choice of the site had resolved around a nearly hidden five to ten foot wide channel of relatively open water that led crookedly from near dry land westward through the alders out to the open lake. Perhaps fifty feet out, a wall of cattail growth formed the south edge of the channel. A series of alder clumps had grown up along its north edge. Material had solidified around the clumps and would offer relatively solid bedding for the abutments that I would need for my stringers to rest on. This would offer deeper water all along the south side of the dock — this was the best choice by far for a boat slip in the alder choked bay.  

I discovered that the balsam logs that had been cut five years ago were well on their way to rot. That fact impressed upon me the folly of using this type of wood in any substantial way in the structure of the dock. On the other hand, cedar trees that had been in the water for at least five years to my knowledge, were as solid as could be.

So a modification of my original ideas began to take shape. Cedar would be my material of choice. There was plenty of it around, both dead and alive. I would use the balsam fir and other trash cuttings to lay temporary platforms in the swamp water so I could walk on it like a scaffolding to set the cedar underpinnings of my series of bridges. I could use the alder clumps, with the growth trimmed off, as anchor points for cedar log abutments six feet long and one to two feet in diameter. I would lay them at a right angle to the direction of the channel and the dock. Some would have to be underpinned on their north end with short cedar logs to provide solid mates for the alder clumps.

As each next abutment of a span would be set, I would set a pair of stringers, cedar logs from eight to twelve inches in diameter and an appropriate length of from ten to fifteen feet long, on top of the abutments, and notch the facing surfaces so they would interlock for stability. With the chainsaw I would rip boards out of five-foot sections of big cedar logs and snug them into place across the stringer pair.

A wonderful plan! (There were just a couple of problems that I would discover once I began execution.) In the mean time, my stuttering start to actually working on the dock was interrupted by a vehicle pulling into the yard. It was Lawrence again, with a couple of new neighbors. After my introduction to Mr. and Mrs. Kevin K. I learned that they had come to help me work on cleaning up my camp. Lawrence, who was the official road-master for the community, had his gasoline operated trimmer with blade to make short work of the little trees like I’d been pulling up by the roots, and Kevin had his Husquevarna chainsaw to cut bigger stuff.

When Kevin saw my first efforts at building the dock, he immediately began retrieving and ripping in two the five-foot sections of the large balsam that I had dismembered and carried out of the driveway. It was balsam, but, hey, it was a gift. They were very thick and and flat on one side, round on the other. I could use them to get started with the boardwalk at least. By the time he and his wife called it quits, they had enough to cover about fifteen feet of the dock. It was a good start, and much appreciated. Cedar replacements of the flat variety could come later. Meanwhile, Lawrence had cleared the driveway of encroaching trees and brush.

After the neighbors visited a bit and left I worked a few hours carrying fill material and laying it in place, following it with abutments and stringers. About six o’clock I decided I’d had enough. I wanted fish for dinner and the best way to make that happen would be to go fishing. I selected a rod and reel and a small tackle box and trolled around the bay and to the south a few hundred yards before I connected with a nice pike. He fought very admirably, but in the end, he was not a match for modern technology and came to net. A five-pound beauty. Heck! I was hungry right then. I motored back near the cedar tree point at the side of our bay.

Darn! No fillet knife! I hadn’t gotten that far with my unpacking to put one in the boat. Normally, I like to stop some distance from the boat landing and clean my fish on a boat paddle spanning two seats in the boat. The remains of the filleting process can be dumped overboard with no damage to the ecology, as it will be eaten by turtles, minnows and other water life in short order. There is plenty of clean water to dip a boat rag into and wash everything down. And last, but not least, mosquitoes won’t ordinarily find you out there. You just package the clean filleted fish in plastic bags that you handily have available, wash your hands, motor to the dock and get out of the mosquitoes. Neat and clean.

This time I had to take the whole fish to the trailer to get the knife. I used one of the ripped balsam slabs as a table, and wiped pesky mosquitoes off my forehead with my arm as I worked. I put the offal in a five-gallon bucket and slammed the lid on, to later be dumped.  Half my prize I stored in a baggy in the cooler and rushed into the trailer. Whew! Mosquitoes love to nail you while you’re cleaning fish.

A can of baked beans heated in a sauce-pan while I mixed a batter of flour and crushed honey-nut cereal. I dipped the fillets in beaten egg, dropped them into the batter baggie, then into hot olive oil in the frying pan. They were soon golden brown and I sat down and ate it all! How much fresher fish could one get to eat? Delicious!   

Lawrence showed up a bit later with a plate of cooked walleye fillets. As full as I was, I still sampled his excellent offering and put the rest in the cooler for another meal. I followed him back to his place to visit a while. He started an outdoor bonfire to ward off the cool dampness of a spitting rain and soon his adjacent neighbors Robert and Jim and a couple of their relatives came over from their cabin a hundred yards away.

After introductions, Jim soon asked if I’d seen the silver fox yet? No, I hadn’t seen any foxes at all. Did he mean gray fox? In Virginia we have mostly red foxes and a few grays. No, this was a slightly smaller animal and was the true arctic silver fox. 

He began telling of this particular fox that would roam the area when Champ was not in camp. The fox would show up and frolic around. If you threw a ball he would retrieve it, drop it near you and wait expectantly for you to throw it again. The fox was also fond of carrying objects off into the woods.

Lawrence’s story offered proof of its thieving proclivities. One day he had found it convenient to use the outhouse. Prior to entering, he took off his yellow rain slicker and draped it over a nearby stump. He finished his business in the outhouse and came outside to re-don his slicker, but his hands retrieved only empty air. “What the …?” He looked around in time to see the slicker “disappearing into the bush.” He yelled and raced after it. The fox didn’t want to give it up, but Lawrence was hot on its tail and it let go and ran off.

This story was followed by others of the fox’s sometimes irritating, sometimes comical exploits, and a number of bear stories, mostly about the spate of sightings and incidents concerning two or three that were currently working the vicinity trying to get a free meal off the barbeque grills. It became quite evident that this group of people had little use for the antics of bears. In a word, bears were a nuisance destructive of property, and a possible danger, all of which put them in the fauna non-grata category.         

We visited into the night until rain drove us indoors. It was getting quite late so after a few minutes I braved the weather and headed back to the trailer with Lawrence’s promise of a meal of moose steak sometime next week neatly tucked in the back of my head.

When I stepped into the trailer, I was surprised to see the table very wet, with my voice recorder and Honda user manual taking the brunt of the little deluge that was still pouring in. I cleaned up the mess and dried off the manual. It’s amazing that the voice recorder wasn’t ruined, but apparently the water didn’t get to anything vital. It seemed to work as well as when new. One thing was sure, though. The roof had something more wrong with it than I had seen earlier in the day. I had to do something about it sooner rather than later. I set a pan on the table to catch the drip and went to bed.

The next morning was Sunday. After breakfast I took my “portable” generator out of its box. It’s a Coleman 1850 Pulse, which just means that it generates peak watts of 1850, with 1000 watts being the norm. It had been sitting in the trailer for five years without running. The oil level was fine, and there was no gasoline in it. That was a good sign. I hadn’t stupidly left gas in it to dry up and glue the interior parts to useless solidarity. I put in new gasoline, turned the ignition switch on, set the choke. The third time I pulled the starter rope it started and ran. I was amazed, as I had envisioned having to disassemble it and clean it completely to get it going. I let it run a few minutes to warm up, then drained the oil and replaced it with new 10-W-30. I started it again and charged batteries with it for an hour. Occasionally, some things just go right.

I was having such good results with the generator, I decided to test out the 15 watt (15 volts X 1 amp) solar panel for charging one of the trailer batteries. These two batteries are the ones that operate the 12-volt system of lights and previously operated the 12-volt mode of the refrigerator before it quit working. (I could charge one while the other was in use. Alternatively, I could connect them in parallel fashion and have double the number of amps in supply.) I raised the truck cap door to an angle and placed the panel on it at an appropriate angle (90^o) to the sun and connected the battery. I checked it an hour later with the meter and it had significantly gained charge. Excellent! It was going to work out. The only problem was that I’d have to reposition the truck every hour to keep the sun angle near correct. Bummer.    

I had just started to make a bologna sandwich for lunch when Mike and Nadina K. walked into the yard and said hello. They have a cabin on a point well to the northwest of where I was currently tying my boat. Mike said that he had come by one time during the winter and the padlock hasp on the trailer door was bent out of shape and the door was open. He had checked inside and seen nothing out of place as far as he knew. He bent the hasp back into operable condition and fastened the padlock.

We speculated as to what scenario could explain this strange event. His guess was that it was someone ice fishing on the lake or traveling through the countryside had simply wanted to get in out of the cold and take advantage of the propane stove. That sounded feasible, as nothing was missing but the propane. My thought was that it could have been a couple in the area that decided to use it for a love nest. What other reasons could possibly explain why someone would go to the trouble to break in but not take anything? Perhaps the mystery will never be solved.

Mike invited me to use their sauna sometime when they weren’t around (they were soon leaving for a couple of weeks). I thought it was a nice offer. I would certainly consider it. Very nice people. They soon left and I got back to my bologna sandwich.

As I was eating, for some reason it occurred to me that this was June 13, the anniversary of the time in Virginia when the big bear we later dubbed “Bobo” had reared up and peered into the front screen door of my house, waking me from a TV induced daze. Other than startling the bejeebers out of me, no harm was done and I took five minutes of movie footage of the bear searching around the house for food. The game warden I talked to about it said that early spring was a difficult time for bears. There was little in the way of natural food for them. The acorns of the fall had long been eaten by them and other animals and the berries had yet to mature. They tended to ramble and look for food anywhere they could find it. He suggested that I not leave any source of food out (such as bird feeders or dog food) and I probably wouldn’t have any more trouble from bears. He was right, but I wasn’t about to deny the birds their food, so I continued to have bear troubles. But that is another story.

I went back to work on the dock for a while, then looked up to see a storm building and heading my way. Of course, I still had the leak in the roof. I dropped everything and began battening down the hatches, which included rolling out the tarp and putting it over the roof. I now had the ladder to work with so it wasn’t that difficult for one person, but before it was tied down well enough, the storm caught me. I continued tying and adjusting the tarp as the deluge had its way with me. I got soaked, but the tarp did its job and it stayed dry inside the trailer.

  The bucket of fish innards was still sitting where I left it after that first fishing trip. So it was time to go fishing and take that with me. It was pretty ripe. That reminded me of bear bait and that reminded me that my food cooler was still sitting outside beside the trailer door. That fact had been nagging at me since I arrived. I immediately took the cooler inside, then collected the “yucky” bucket on my way out of the yard and disposed of its contents far from the trailer. 

The storm had dumped several inches of water in the boat and I had a lot of bailing to do. Mike K. motored over. He showed me the spinner and minnow rig he was using to successfully catch walleyes. Each time we go to Wild lake the walleyes have developed an appetite for a different lure. Apparently this was it for this year. He invited me to take advantage of the pail of minnows that would be stashed at his dock. He also invited me to use his boat. I would be able to put my motor on it and save my rental fee for the boat I was using. That was a nice offer, but a contract is a contract. I would stay with the rental boat.

I rigged up an old favorite lure and trolled out of the bay and around the shore to the north. A small pike hit it and fought like the devil was on his tail. When he came to the boat I attempted to bring him in without benefit of the net. The line broke and gone was the fish with my lure. Bummer!

I’m sure the fish was able to quickly dislodge the lure, as for many good reasons I make a practice of using pliers to bend the barbs down or break them off new lures. The barbs keep the hooks from being very easily backed out of flesh, be that fish flesh or human flesh. I often practice “catch and release,” where it is desirable to inflict as little damage to the fish as possible so it can live to fight another day. Barbs on the hooks tend to make this a much more difficult task.

They also tend to get tangled in the net and require painstaking work to disengage. That can be doubly exciting if a big fish is still attached to the hooks as well. Then over time, there is the very likely scenario where a sudden violent spasm from a fish jerks a hook into one’s finger. It is very nice not to have those barbs doing their job in that case.

Just on that note, I fished with a neighbor boy when I was a teenager. Things were going great until I wound up on the receiving end of one of his roundhouse casts with a big nine-hook lure he was using. The impact pinned my cap to my scalp. Try as we might, we could not back out the hooks, nor could we even rip them out by brute force. At his home, his mother used a razor blade to remove the cap, then to slice through my scalp at the barbs, hook by hook. I wasn’t that much worse for wear, but I shudder to think what it would have been like had I turned to look at him just as he triggered the episode. Ugh! I’ve had an aversion to using barbed hooks on lures ever since.

Oh, well, no pike filets for Sunday evening’s meal. But those walleye fillets Lawrence had given me would be pretty good re-heated with a can of baked beans. Yummm.

Monday morning I headed for town and found it full of little old ladies. Now, I have nothing against little old ladies. In fact, some of the dearest people I know fit that description. I was just so surprised that they were out in such numbers, on their own, shopping like they were preparing for the weekend. But it was mid-morning of the first day of a brand new week!

I had to proceed a bit more carefully, as they were, as a group, very conservative of horsepower. However, I caught on fairly quickly and soon learned to go with the flow. I was doing so in Walmart, after doing most of my shopping at the Canadian Tire Store, a sort of Walmart with an emphasis on car stuff. Most of the stuff I needed I had found there, except their little refrigerators carried a higher price than I wanted to pay — therefore, the trip to Walmart.

I selected a small refrigerator (3.2 cu. ft.) that I thought would be easy on batteries, and wrestled it onto my cart. The box had to rest on top so I had to peer around it as I steered among the little old ladies and headed for the cashiers. I did so with success for the first hundred yards, but alas, the odds caught up and I bumped a nice blue-haired grandma. She fell into her companion and I thought both would tumble. I managed to reach her quickly enough to keep her from falling. I offered a profusion of apologies. She was a good sport and started laughing so I don’t think she was bruised. I apologized again and left for the cashiers once more, telling her that I’d bet no one else in town could say they’d been run over by a refrigerator that day. I caught only a fleeting glimpse of her grin as I moved away, as I was watching VERY carefully for anyone who might be in my path.      

The town area has some interesting geographic features nearby. It sits on relatively flat ground, but off to the south and west are some rather astonishing elevations that appear to be largely of rock rising some two thousand feet, with flat, green tops. What is most unusual about these formations is the straight up angle of the strata of the rock. Most mountainous up-thrusts do so at an angle of somewhere around forty-five degrees.

There seems to be another distinguishing characteristic of these formations or of the geography nearby, which is the prevalence of purple amethyst quartz crystal in the area. The many rock shops that line the highways displaying their wares are a testament to the commercial value of tourists’ desire to own “a piece of the rock,” but I resisted the urge to check them out.

I had all the goodies I needed from town. On the outskirts I stopped at “Grandma’s Diner” and ate lunch. The place wasn’t impressive, but I think the best club sub sandwich I ever ate was manufactured there that day. (Turkey, ham, mao, lettuce, tomato, and bacon on a very fresh bun. Excellent. I can’t wait to get back.) It was about that time that I realized I had forgotten to do my laundry and drop off a bag of too-nasty-to-save-mouse-destroyed trash.

The last real evidence of civilization would be a smaller town about half way back to the lake. It sits atop a mesa overlooking a nice waterfall tourist attraction and park. I stopped at the Laundromat there and during the process of learning the ropes on coins and soaps, engaged in a discussion with the manager, who also sold amethyst. Another patron of the Laundromat as green as me in the ways of commercial laundry use, was curious about the process of finding gemstone quality in the vast arrays of crystals that changed hands in the area.

Between us we asked enough questions to find that the raw crystals have to be etched in acid to remove the mud and dirt and that only a very few were of gemstone quality. Most have embedded flaws that effectively take them from that category.

This other patron was a mine surveyor and prospector. So between the shop manager and me enough questions were asked to find that all three of us had experiences with gold mines that left us with less financial strength than we had enjoyed beforehand. This discussion prompted me to quote Mark Twain to the effect that a gold mine was a hole in the ground with liars around it. The group appeared to agree heartily with this assessment. And by the way, could the manager please dispose of a bag of trash for me? No problem. I soon bid them adieu and was on my way.

I met Mike and Nadina about a dozen miles from camp on their way back to town and we chatted a few minutes. He said that he had put a bucket of minnows in the water at the end of my incomplete dock. This would keep them cool and healthy. Again he offered to let me use his boat. I thanked him and said I’d consider it. We continued on our separate ways. 

I was tired when I arrived at the trailer — too tired to do any work. The sun was still up but I decided to eat a bowl of chili for dinner and go to bed. Tomorrow would be soon enough to get started with my tasks — or so I thought!

Be sure to watch for the third article of this series to be posted soon.