Making hay with #phenology

Before we had a family to raise, the Better Half and I used to spend a fair amount of time fly-fishing for trout. We drifted away from that while the kids were growing up, complicated to get baby sitters for dawn trips. Well, the kids are now well beyond baby sitter territory and the BH and I are trying to get back into the habit. Today we headed down to Hay Creek with a bunch of other Twin Cities Trout Unlimited members, plus some prospective ones, to check out our fly-casting styles and explore the creek. We had fun, saw some really pretty country again and one of us saw at least one trout holding downstream of a culvert under the gravel road. The birds in the bottom photo had built their nest under the eaves of the picnic shelter where we were rigging up.

getting ready for the casting clinic

Photo by J. Harrington

students and mentors casting into the wind

Photo by J. Harrington

bird parents worried about getting jostled by a fly rod

Photo by J. Harrington

While we were traveling, we noticed that ox-eye daisies are blooming along most roadsides. We also say, coming north through Washington County, some of the local farmers have their first hay cut and drying. We'll check out some of the streams closer to home and probably get Wisconsin licenses to improve the ratio of time spent traveling to fishing. Summer is starting to settle in rather nicely.

A Sister on the Tracks

By Donald Hall

Between pond and sheepbarn, by maples and watery birches,

Rebecca paces a double line of rust

in a sandy trench, striding on black

creosoted eight-by-eights.

                                       In nineteen-forty-three,

wartrains skidded tanks,

airframes, dynamos, searchlights, and troops

to Montreal. She counted cars

from the stopped hayrack at the endless crossing:

ninety-nine, one hundred; and her grandfather Ben’s

voice shaking with rage and oratory told

how the mighty Boston and Maine

kept the Statehouse in its pocket.

                                                   Today Rebecca walks

a line that vanishes, in solitude

bypassed by wars and commerce. She remembers the story

of the bunting’d day her great-great-great-

grandmother watched the first train roll and smoke

from Potter Place to Gale

with fireworks, cider, and speeches. Then the long rail

drove west, buzzing and humming; the hive of rolling stock

extended a thousand-car’d perspective

from Ohio to Oregon, where men who left stone farms

rode rails toward gold.

                                  On this blue day she walks

under a high jet’s glint of swooped aluminum pulling

its feathery contrail westward. She sees ahead

how the jet dies into junk, and highway wastes

like railroad. Beside her the old creation retires,

hayrack sunk like a rowboat

under its fields of hay. She closes her eyes

to glimpse the vertical track that rises

from the underworld of graves,

soul’s ascension connecting dead to unborn, rails

that hum with a hymn of continual vanishing

where tracks cross.

                            For she opens her eyes to read

on a solitary gravestone next to the rails

the familiar names of Ruth and Matthew Bott, born

in a Norfolk parish, who ventured

the immigrant’s passionate Exodus westward to labor

on their own land. Here love builds

its mortal house, where today’s wind carries

a double scent of heaven and cut hay.

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