Pet Talk with Vicki Davis

You can’t take a picture of how good music sounds. You need to listen to it. It’s about letting the sounds inside your head. Not being forced to hear, but allowed to listen.

You can’t get the birch bark smell from a crisp photo, or the warmth that the flames send forth. You have to go build the fire, and sit by it. Breathe it, tend it, and follow the lofted sparks until the night sky just turn’s them into stars.

Sitting by the campfire revives and reignites the camping experience. It makes your eyes slam shut to somehow stop the wood smoke. Kinda the sweet and sour sauce of an open fire. But if we’re lucky we keep doin it year after year.

Nobody likes the mosquitoes or rain. But snug in your tent and the rain drops or thunderstorms put you into your life’s story. Having a kid grow up with out a flashlight or a belly full of smores is not good for your child. It’s not good for the child in me.

Burning some pine, or cones and the fire spits and snaps at you. Birch bark is pure aroma therapy. Ash with its orange coals just makes me drowsy. Oh, and to sit in the downwind side of a split cedar campfire, first place tie to walking into a fresh cinnamon roll bakery.

Let a kid poke at some birch logs until the coals go blue -orange and then send them for the marshmallows. They roast-em over the family rocks. Burned black rocks from some lake shore you go back to year after year. You hauled some; maybe your kids bring some new ones.

What campfire is not trying to consume one hotdog? It’s just cooked to perfection with the long heat bursting slash and black hash marks. Umm. But then the fire gremlins reach up and the tube steak falls off your sharpened stick, and into the ash. Gimme another one from the cooler, and this time I’ll be more careful.

Anything that goes thunk or splashes at night. Especially if it’s close to the campsite. That is what “sound” means. Sounds come from the dark. The next time you hear the story told it goes…. Well, we were sittin' by the fire; we all heard this sound…

No matter how hard I try. I zip into the tent. I zip the tent door shut. But somehow at least one mosquito is now on the winged prowl for my flesh. You would figure with all those other campers in my tent, one other person would get up and hunt the blood thirsty bugger down. Somehow this always becomes a dad job.

Waking up to 360 degrees of light. Your dome tent is splashed with morning sun. It must be ten am. You check your watch and its 530 in the morning. How can it be that bright that early? But early means coffee. That depends on me finding my other sock. Somehow that crawled around the inside of the tent during the night.

Coffee will bring almost anybody out of a tent. Even if they do not drink the very elixir camping is brewed from they know breakfast is not far off and nobody I camp with misses a meal.

All good things must end and camping trips do, but slowly for me. I go home and put tents away after they hung out for a week in my pole shed. I hang firewood smoked shirts where I get a whiff of wood smoke until someone tosses it to the washer. The camp stove gets a good degreaser on a sunny afternoon. I relish and ration the chores. Packs get an insider outsider to evict the sticks and pine needles.

Then when its all reset. I hope I'm going campin' again real soon.


The trout whisperer

Karl "Trout Whisperer" Seckinger is a respected JustNorth author and outdoor adventurer. His guide service, DuNord Guide Service, and the trout waters that he fishes in the Superior National Forest, are some of the most tightly guarded secrets among Trout enthusiasts in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Contact Karl at 218 - 525 - 0442 or write to him at:

DuNord Guide Service - 6999 Culbertson Road, Two Harbors, Minnesota 55616