EZ Huffs and Heads home
Saturday, November 30Ð
Dazzling cloudless sun at our backs did nothing to soften the freezing air shaving our faces. Hard winds had roared through the trees all night around the cabin and had relented little for our walk to an old logging dam site, a mile or so north along a minimum maintenance road then west through trees. It is a hike I'd taken twice before and I was confident we could locate the twenty-foot-high ridge and not miss it as on the first attempt twenty-four years earlier.
Two pickup trucks were parked at the road entrance--one at a new metal hunting shack with two tiny six-inch wide vertical windows along one side like battlements. The other truck was uninhabited and suggested that a bow hunter, or one with black powder, must be staked out somewhere up ahead. Chuck decided against taking Susie even though she was wearing a red quilted jacket and left her sitting watching as we followed our shadows--one with earflaps and one pointy head inside a sweatshirt hood -- and EZ into the wind.
The road was hard frozen and smooth easy walking, though for the first few hundred yards littered with jumbo egg sized and shaped rounded stones. Over the twenty-plus years since first exploring the road it has been upgraded by landowners from a rutted grassy two-wheel track into a deeply rutted dirt track, valleys and peaks softly rounded by ATVs and pickup trucks smoothing the frozen clay. Easily passable, though not with any speed.
The first deer stand was constructed of two-by-fours with a discarded door on its side and cardboard walls on the other three sides, ten feet off the ground. Under it a cardboard box spilled old clothing out of one side and a man's white dress shirt was caught and blew taps and surrender from a snag of low tag alderbrush.
Wide and long mud holes in the road were frozen solid and dusted with fine traction grit. Meandering out of a cattail slough water still ran open through icy shelves and through a culvert and into the woods out of sight. Minnows darted and seaweed swayed in inches deep water. EZ sniffed impassively and thankfully had no impulse to get herself wet.
Further along we came to a side trail leading to another hunting shack barely visible through low scrubby trees. Another white object swung from a barricade pole; a brassiere of mammoth capacity, with curvy rebar rods and a four-inch wide closure in back with a row of five hooky clasps dextrous guys know how to unclasp using magic in split seconds.
OLGA brand, conjuring Soviet images of matronly dames, and 40DDD also printed on the information flap does little to arouse lustful imaginings of what is held up inside those white lacy cups and away from disastrous thick waistline. Deer hunters have fantasies too.
EZ huffs and heads home.
The road rises an
eighth mile ahead and I promise we'll not go further than it. Then tell Chuck
I meant the second rise, when it appeared further ahead. A trail showed on
the left and we veered onto it for a few hundred yards then saw the earthen
berm through the trees and the river pooled on either side with thick skating
rinks of smooth blue-gray ice. The river flowed unhindered through a break
in the dike; no other indication that this had
been a logging dam remained. But it's been almost a hundred years since it
operated. The rapids descended in height about twelve inches from the upper
to lower pool. Icy ledges. Sunny water sparkled and spoke. A cheery spot to
end the hike.