Good Fishing...and Catching

There's been some serious fishing--and catching--going on in these parts lately! The late spring has kept the water temperature on the cool side, and that means that the fish are still in relatively shallow waters. These good looking lake trout were caught by the Olson Family, and they reported having an excellent time fishing. We heard that the bass are biting also. The mosquitoes are biting, too, and I'm told that means that the walleyes will be hungry. I haven't seen many of those since the week after the ice went out. Hopefully reports for those will start rolling in any day now.

Something else rolled in today instead....a big grey cloud of smoke. Greg and I first noticed it mid-morning, while we were out in a boat. This was my first boat ride of the season, and we went to check out the progress of the cabin-building on the lake. I smelled the smoke before I really noticed it. The wind was coming from the northwest, and the far western end of the lake was looking quite hazy. I asked Greg if he thought that maybe he was going to be called upon to go help fight a fire, but he didn't think so. He said that if this was a fire that was nearby and just starting, we would see a plume of smoke, not a blanket. He said that this was probably someone else's fire. Sure enough, when we got home, we learned that it was actually smoke that had blown down from fires in Manitoba and Ontario. We just happened to be in the path that the wind was blowing. It's been so wet this spring, it would have surprised us if the fire had been close to us.

What I found most interesting, though, was how the scent of that smoke in the wind immediately flooded me with memories of a year ago. I was changing beds in Tamarack cabin, and found myself thinking about doing that same task last year, and I could remember for whom I was getting the cabin ready: On Sunday night, it was for our friend Mark, evacuated from the end of the trail. On Tuesday night, it was another friend named Mark, and his son Nathan, coming up from Duluth to help us set up sprinkler heads. Other cabins were in stages of use for Forest Service personnel, the early waves of people working the fire before all of the staging area was in place. I could remember vivid details of the moments in those days. Maybe my memory isn't failing me as badly as I sometimes think it is! I know that the sense of smell is a powerful reminder, and today reinforced that for me.

As I was sitting this evening and knitting on my current sock project, we noticed how pretty the colors were in the sky. They just happened to coordinate with the colors in my yarn. This is another result of the smoke in the air--it often brings beautiful sunsets.