HOW TO HUNT THE MIGHTY SNOWMAN

By Tim Colin

Hunting snowmen in Michigan is a highly regulated sport.  For one thing you can only hunt them after Christmas because desecrating a snowman is a felony during the holidays.  I guess it upsets little kids a lot just like cleaning a fish upsets a lot of people.  Well, to those non-fishermen and snowman hugging little monsters I say “Bah Humbug!”  Snowman hunting season should be extended year around in Michigan.
After all, many Northern Michiganders depend on snowman meat to sustain them through those cold winter months when bugs and worms are hard to dig up.

Anyways, snowman hunting starts on January 1st and ends on March 16th.    No one hunts on March 17th because we are all at the local pub crawl for St Patrick’s Day of course.

In the state of Michigan it is only legal to hunt snowmen with old fashioned lawn jarts.  Of course disabled persons can hunt snowmen with a crossbow if they   get the proper permit from the DNR (Department of Nationalized Resources).  Of course we all have to pay $700 for a permit to hunt snowmen.  At least we all have to pay that amount unless you have access to a Kodak copying machine.  They make the best copies you know.

With my license plastered on my back and three blue lawn jarts in my hands I started out into the nearest subdivision looking for a nice big snowman to bag this season.  It was not long before I came upon two of them.  They were just sitting there all still and such.   At first I thought that they saw me because they both froze and did not move an inch.   But after several minutes of observing them  just standing there stiff as a board  I figured they were in some sort of snowman trance like they were trying to communicate with some higher plain of existence or something.  I of course figured while they were busy contemplating their existence on a higher plain or something I would end their need to waste time existing on my plain by shoving a lawn jart through their heart.   I of course proceeded to do just that and the snow creatures became my future barbeques.

 Now some people say that snowmen are kind of a fatty meat to eat.  I myself find that after frying them up in olive oil and barbeque sauce that snowmen are kind of watery.   In fact unless I add some mushrooms the snowmen have to be drank like water and have no real flavor at all except for of course the barbeque sauce and the olive oil.

Most people wonder why in the world would you want to eat such a bland meat?  Of course according to the Michigan Surgeon General’s office Snowmen are very heart healthy with zero fats, zero cholesterol, zero carbs, zero sodium and of course zero calories.

According to the Michigan Surgeon General “Eating snowman meat is like drinking water.  The worst it can do to you is to cause you  to urinate more often than normal.





   

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Back when we were young, my brother’s and I used to love a summer picnic. We had squash blossoms, road kill burger surprise and yard salad. Yard salad was made up of dandelion greens, wild onions, twigs, weeds and, grasses we found in the yard. We used to mix ketchup, mustard, salad dressing, vinegar and, orange tang together to make a dressing to put over our yard salad. Dad also used the dressing as a cure for his hangovers. Overall, the food was pretty good.

After a filling meal, we would often have to burn off some energy by playing summertime games. We sometimes would play horseshoe. This got to be kind of boring since we only had one shoe. We found the shoe when we went down the road to investigate a nearby summer music camp. The camp had horses for the kids to ride and evidently a horse left one shoe behind. It was “finder’s keeper’s loser’s weepers” so; we kept the shoe to play horseshoe.

Horseshoe was not our favorite pastime and, it was not the game we played the most. My family enjoyed a good game of lawn jarts just about every time we had a picnic. I remember us kids were really excited when dad found a set and a half of lawn jarts while we were foraging at the local land fill. Rich kids would go with their families each week to the K-mart store to shop. My family went to the local landfill every Sunday after the tourists dumped off their garbage and went home. We would just sort of look around for stuff. We would find household items like dishes and broken clocks. We would also find things like tools, cloths and when we were lucky, we would find toys. The land fill did take some getting used too. It looked like a big mess but, it smelled just like grandma’s kitchen. This smell put us at ease. When it started to get dark, dad would tell us to get a move on. He said that the bears would be there soon. There are of course no bears in Michigan. People always mistake Big Foots for bears.

Lawn jarts was such a great game that even mom and dad would play. We kids would play each other for Petoskey stones. Mom and dad would play for shots. Whenever one of them scored a point, the other one would have to drink a jelly shooter as a penalty. These shooters were like Jell-O shooters only we couldn't’t afford Jell-O. However, the relatives gave us lots of homemade jelly at Christmas time.

How do you play lawn jarts? Well, lawn jarts are like short spears with a long point on one end and a weight up near the point. The other end of the jart had a handle on it and just a little ways past the handle were plastic fins like the fins on a regular indoor dart. You would divide into two teams and each team had a plastic yellow ring that would be laid out several yards from each other. Each plastic ring was about two feet across and the way to score points was to stand at one ring and fling the jarts toward the other ring. Each time your jart stuck in the ground within the opposite ring, you would score a point. The first team to score 20 points or, the first team to have a parent fall to the ground and go to sleep, lost.

Because dad started downing penalty jelly shooters long before the game started, everyone wanted mom on their team. His team very seldom got to 20 points. We all piled on top of him to wake him up but, all he did was snore. If the next day were a work day he would always call in sick.

Lawn jarts, like the ones we had as kids are just about impossible to find now. I guess there was some sort of safety recall. It seems some people might have had accidents with the points of the lawn jarts. Instead of throwing the jarts at the yellow rings, people would accidentally toss the rings at the people standing near the yellow rings. We had our share of close calls, accidents, trips to the emergency room and near death experiences but, no one ever had an eye put out. I did get stabbed in the kidney and my brother Mike was stabbed in the foot. My brother Ted had one stuck in his head for a week before he finally had the gumption to pull it out. These were just minor injuries that bandages and duct tape took care of. Overall, lawn jarts was great summer fun. If I ever have kids, lawn jarts will be the first toy I find them at the land fill.

FROG LEGS DELIGHT

By Mike Collin
Recently, I and my older brother Tim went out to get some bull frog legs for dinner. We haven’t had to eat frog legs since we were kids but, Michigan is in some tough times right now. It’s like our dad is in charge of the entire economy and just like when we were kids, everyone is starving.

Don’t get me wrong. Just because poor people eat frog legs does not mean they don’t taste good. In fact, they are excellent. They really do taste like chicken. There just is not a lot of meat on each leg. It’s like eating buffalo wings. You need a mess of frog legs to get a meal.

My brother picked me up from under the bridge where I am currently living and we went to our secret frog leg pond way back in the woods. We parked near the “Exploit Chemicals” chemical dumping site at Quagmire Lake. There we found an old two track road that we walked down until we got to the old frog pond about a mile from Quagmire Lake. There were lots of bullfrogs and my brother and I each got six frogs which amounts to twelve legs for each of us. They were feisty little fighters. We caught each one with a homemade butterfly net then stuck them in a burlap sack.

We started back but took a wrong turn and got lost. Finally, we ended up on the other side of Quagmire Lake. We went up to the trail that went around the lake figuring that the trail would lead us out to the road. When we got to the lake shore we noticed that there were nothing but dead animals all around the shoreline and dead fish floating all over. There were deer and foxes and rabbits and birds all over.

My brother Tim started to panic. He insisted there must be some monster in the lake that is so horrible that it is scarring everything to death. Neither of us wanted to stand around there so we got going down the path until we could see the road and the chemical dump. We noticed that there was a line of trucks at the dump waiting to poor their stuff down a drain in the parking lot. As they poured some green and orange stuff into the drain it immediately came out the end of a pipe and fell like a waterfall into the lake. Tim said they were trying to dye the color of the lake so that they could better see the monster that was scarring all the wildlife to death. The trucks had a lot of foreign writing on them. There were trucks with writing in Italian, Chinese, Spanish, German, Dutch, Portuguese and a couple of trucks with writing neither of us could recognize. We figured they must be from Canada.

Just as we were getting up to the road a DNR (Department of Natural Resources Officer) stepped out of the bushes and asked us “what do you have in the bag?” We told him we had some frogs and opened the bag to show him. The officer then asked us if we had fishing licenses. Tim and I pulled our bill folds out and showed him our licensees. The officer then counted the frogs in our bag and said we had too many. He said we could only have five frogs each in your possession. He then said we were in violation of the law. He then wrote us out a citation for $100 each. He then said if he caught us poaching animals again we were going to be in big trouble.

I asked the officer if he was there to investigate all the dead animals around the lake and if the chemicals being poured into the lake by the trucks might be the problem. He said the chemical company called him and said there were two scruffy guys out poaching frogs in the woods. He also said the chemical company was licensed to dump chemicals from foreign countries in the lake and that the company was a good partner with the DNR. We then received our citations and the DNR officer confiscated our frogs. He then dumped all twelve of the frogs into Quagmire Lake. Within a few seconds the frogs were all floating motionless on top of the lake.

Well, this was not such a good frogging trip. Now I’ve got to pick up a thousand cans and bottles to get enough deposit money to pay my $100.00 fine. My brother still wants to go and pick up crayfish (crawdads) next week but, I think I’m going to cancel.

FISHING FOR THE MICHIGAN PIRANHA

By Mike Collin
Back when I was a kid, my dad would take me to his secret fishing hole and there he would teach me how to fish for piranha. He said he was the only one who knew about the spot. It seems that when he was a kid he stole his uncle’s pet piranhas and released them in a small lake way out in the woods. Over time, the piranhas took over the lake and were the only fish left. He told me these piranhas were an especially aggressive variety that were used to living in really cold water. My dad said that the piranha would eat ducks, geese, rabbits, deer or, any animal that happened to wander into the water.

I’ve been feeling like eating fish lately so, yesterday I rode my bike to my dad’s favorite piranha fishing spot in Western Lower Michigan. I had to ride my bike because my eyesight is still a bit blurry. I still have a bit of nerve damage from the accident. It seems that my brother Tim had a muscle spasm the last time we were playing lawn jarts. Well, the jart ended up being stuck in the middle of my forehead. I wanted to leave it stuck in because it made me look tough and it really impressed the ladies. You should have seen the looks I got at the bar. No one had a body piecing like the big orange spear I had in the middle of my head. After a couple of days I was getting really dizzy so I went to the doctor and she removed it. She told me the only reason I survived was that my skull was thinker than what most people have. I guess that‘s something to brag about.

Well, anyway, after going down an old two track lumber trail I got to lake I found out my can of worms was full of dead, smelly night crawlers. Luckily, there was a pile of rotten leaves nearby and it was not long before I had a couple dozen leaf worms. Before I picked up the leaf worms I had tossed the rotten night crawlers out into the lake to help chum for fish.

Unfortunately, no fish showed up and then I remembered how my dad taught me to fish for piranha. So, I took off my shoes and socks and waded out into the water until I was standing knee deep. It was a quiet morning so there were no waves. This made it easy for me t look around to observe any fish. I then began wiggling my toes in the water. I still did not see any fish coming. I then stated raising fist one foot up and then the other, each time wiggling my toes like little hairy caterpillars. Suddenly several dozen piranha came rushing in at my feet and began biting at my toes. I quickly ran back to the shore. Even though I was up on the shore I had three large piranhas holding onto my feet with their teeth. I was very pleased. I hadn’t been there five minutes and I already had a good start on a fish fry. I caught seven more fish on my fishing pole before my worms ran out. It was fine since I had enough fish to clean that day for a fish fry dinner for myself and my new girlfriend.

I did not end up bleeding too much after piranha fishing that day. I remember getting bit really bad by piranhas when I was a kid but, this time I only had a few chunks of meat bit out of my feet and shins. I also won’t have to cut my toe nails for a while. The piranhas, by the way, were delicious.