LEADING NORTHERN MICHIGAN OUTDOORSMAN GOES OUT WITH A BANG

By Mike Colin
The greatest outdoorsman I have ever known has died in a tragic underground explosion. I am of course talking about my Great Uncle Oslo. Uncle Oslo was a hunting and fishing maverick. He invented new ways to hunt and fish faster than the government could pass laws to ban them. Thanks to Uncle Oslo you can no longer hunt geese using lawn jarts or, use horse shoes to hunt chickadees. His electric chair for the snow shoe hair was once featured in “The Alternative Hunter Magazine.” He was also on 60 Minutes before he went to jail for helping his friend, Dr. Kevorkian.

The local police believe that Oslo was blown up by a still he kept hidden in an old bear cave. My aunt told me that in fact, Uncle Oslo was getting ready to go fishing and was busy making up some home made dynamite when the explosion occurred. My dad said Uncle Oslo would be alive today if he had only stuck to the old family recipe for making dynamite instead of downloading one off the internet.

There is some good to come out of the tragic death of my uncle. It seems that Uncle Oslo never told anyone as to whether he wanted his remains cremated or buried after he died. Well, since his body was instantly vaporized in the blast and then the ashes were buried when the bear cave caved in, one way or the other my uncle’s final wishes have been carried out.

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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.