You can make friends anywhere I suppose. It’s just harder for me to make friends at the dentist office or during a tax audit. Census workers always knock during dinner, politicians wave from parades, and I’m not the best dressed at the local grocery store. I once over heard a lady whisper to her kids to stay away from that scruffy dressed man. I looked around for the guy, until it donned on me, she meant me.
So I was in the super natural forest again this past week resting at one of my favorite portages catching my breath looking just as scraggly as ever when along comes a complete stranger with, as it turns out, his wife and their golden retriever all under the same upside down canoe. The couple carried everything except the dog, pretty smart dog I figured.
They plopped everything down next to me while the dog sat panting his portage breath all over my face. I pet his ears, told him what good dog he was. He licked my beard, and then I think he got a whiff of my cigar breath so he decided to go get a drink out of the lake.
As it turns out, we were all headed in the same direction, out. I hadn’t seen them fishing or camping during my brief weekend visit, but just like old friends right then and there we went over every paddle stroke, theirs and mine.
There big news was they saw a calf moose first, then mother moose showed up but they didn’t have a camera and that was two days ago. Fishing was fishing; they had pitched jigs in the shallows after dinner, caught enough to eat. We exchanged a tin foil fish recipe verbally that his wife was pretty proud of. I lent the Mr. one of my cigars; he lit it and said I really traveled well; the Mrs. dug in a pack for snickers, the dog got a milk bone.
We’d been to tusk, east, stairway portage just to mention a few, and never together, but you’d think so after we described similar hikes or beaver dams. We thought the lake trout in little kek had the orangest colored fillets in the entire BWCA and the massive toppled tree on the west shore was great to tie off on to fish. I used jigs hand lining with power baits, they used slip bobbers with leeches, years apart, dead tree just as dead for all us. And we laughed at the lake trout’s expense at how both techniques worked.
We agreed it’s not a swanky club on west forty fourth in lower Manhattan or the odd shaped café in the empire state building that held folks like us bound. It is the boundary in these waters, water, and all it lacks that keeps us coming in here and as a newly formed trio we were pretty happy about that. I said I think the lakes had lots of traffic this season but they had to be the friendliest I’d happened upon all summer. The Mrs. said with a new shirt she thought I might clean up pretty good. I choked on my cigar smoke, asked where she bought her groceries, told them the short tale, and with that one, we all laughed.
They never asked me my name and I never inquired or got there’s, and that was fine, well except for Dalton the dog. They corrected Dalton once to lie down or sit down and Dalton did. Dalton was one well behaved dog as far as I could tell. Dogs are a lot like there owners don’t you think? So to Dalton’s owners, wherever they are, and anybody else that waves in the woodlands, you’re on my friends IN the forest list the trout whisperer
