Good morning. How are you? Can I get you a warm out of the oven cinnamon roll?
Maybe a glass of fresh squeezed orange juice?
Just a coffee?
So how was Christmas for you? I hope it was peace filled.
My wife and daughters are braving the crowds to do some shopping today. I get to stay home. Yes!
Have you ever cooked a breakfast over a camp fire? or any fire? I highly recommend you try it some time. Probably sort of tough for us city dwellers I know. You could use a bbq but an actual wood fire would be the best. When I was a boy my Gram would take my sister and me to campgrounds by the Yellowstone river or sometimes the Stillwater river, and cook us breakfast over a campfire before we all went to school. Gram was a teacher. She had a theory about how food tasted better over a fire. I'm not so sure now that I'm older what it was that made those times so special, I kind of think it was because we were outside having fun before school eating eggs and toast beside a beautiful Montana river.
I'm going to smoke some salmon today. I'll use my Johnny's Seasoning Salt and Brown Sugar brine, air dry then smoke using alder chips in a Little Chief Smoker...method. It'll be good and maybe remind me a little bit of being down by the Yellowstone with Gram smelling something good.
The Yellowstone is a big river, beautiful and unforgiving. One of Gram's brothers drowned in that river while taking some cattle across. He fell off his horse and couldn't survive the current. Gram gave me a pair of homemade spurs from one of her brothers...I don't know if it was that one or not. It's interesting to think of her family being cowboys of the type who actually rode horses and watched over cattle. One of her brothers named Con, was a fence rider which meant he spent most days on a horse riding along a rancher's fence to make sure it was intact.
A guy I used to go skiing with drown on that river too. He was a good swimmer and athlete but he got caught in some deadfall (trees stuck in the river) during a raft trip and couldn't get out.
I was on a raft trip where we came close to disaster on the Yellowstone due to not respecting the river. The river can be deceiving when you raft it in late summer. Slow and boring with some very treacherous spots for the unaware. We had about 10 adults and 6 kids, three rafts and inner tubes on that float. I'd been down the river many times. The mistake we made (I think now) is that no one was really in charge. There was a large sweeping turn in the river where the current had undercut the bank to expose tree roots. The water picked up speed and pushed towards that bank as it rounded the corner. The way to avoid the trouble was to paddle hard to the left which took you into a straight channel of the river and avoided the under cut.
We didn't make the decision in time and ended up letting the current push us into the bank, roots and near disaster. By the grace of God we all made it out of there. After the excitement of people getting out of overturned rafts and away from the crushing water the river flattened out, narrowed, and became shallow and fairly fast again. We had beer and pop in a small raft with a long rope tied to it. Somehow that rope got wrapped around my leg and I had a raft pulling me downstream faster than I could walk or run, and making it almost impossible to swim because it was pulling me feet first with the current. I thought I was going to drown before I was able to get the rope untangled from my leg.
I grew up on that river and had a great deal of respect for it.
Beer and pop floating down a river reminds me of something I saw fishing for trout in Montana. One day I was driving home on a road on the upper Gallatin River. I was driving over a bridge and saw a red and white cooler floating down the river. I knew that there was another bridge not to far down the road where I could get out and maybe intercept that cooler. I did intercept it. The cooler was filled with beer and pop. I can only imagine some unlucky rafters had overturned and lost it somewhere upstream.
Another time I was fishing on the Yellowstone north of Livingston (up near the Paradise Valley). I'm all by myself just enjoying the day when I hear some noise/laughing from a raft coming around the bend. I'm standing there and a raft full of topless woman floats in front of me. I felt kind of embarassed standing there with my pole in my hand. I didn't want to stare or act like it wasn't an everyday thing for me so I just kept fishing.
Just two more fishing boating stories for this morning.
A friend of mine used to fish for huge salmon over on the Hoh river in Northwest Washington. That's a big river and you need to know what you are doing. They were in a driftboat and had been following guides who knew the river. The problem with that river is if you take the wrong turn you will end up in a dead end where the river forces you into a deadfall (there are huge trees that fall into the river). Anyway they took a dead end and got stuck on a deadfall. The drift boat overturned they lost everything, fishing poles, cameras. My friend said he probably would have drown if hadn't had neoprene waders on that give you additional buoyancy.
Finally a funny story I guess....
Same friend was over on the Hoh fishing out of another guy's drift boat. They were in a quiet big part of the river and getting sort of bored because no fish were biting. No one was around and one of them had some M-80's (don't ask me why) I'm just telling what he told me. M-80's are big firecrackers that have a fuse that will burn in water. One of them throws an M-80 into the water just for the heck of it I guess. About this time another boat comes into sight. You have to sort of imagine this picture, a nice quiet beautiful river...with these yahoo's in a driftboat knowing in a few seconds a big bang is going to happen...no one is around except them and the other boat now. They think they are going to look like the idiots they are...
Not so quick.
Their driftboat begins to close on the M-80. Just as the fuse finishes it's job the boat and the M-80 contact each other. They ended up blowing a six inch hole in the side of their own boat. No lie. I bet those guys in the other boat were mystified.
I'm going to go in the back and peel some potatoes give a holler if there's anything I can get you.
