Monday, February 17, 2025
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Making lemons into lemonade

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When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. An old, trite bit of advice, but at the same time a bit of solid gold advice.
Put another way, when your usual way of life is taken away, make some new and equally good way of life part of your life.
For the second straight non-winter, I have had to improvise, have had to cobble together something different to continue making my life as enjoyable as it can be in the outdoors.
Last winter, as the days and weeks passed by with no appreciable snow, I had to adjust what I did, to forget about skiing what would have been a 21st American Birkebeiner ski race, to find a way to enjoy our outdoors without ski poles in my hands and skis attached to my feet.
I could have gone ice fishing, but for two reasons I did not. First, the ice on many lakes was not safe to be on for a good part of the ice fishing season. At my age I no longer spit in the face of danger, and when there is any element of bucking the odds of safety, I opt to play it safe.
Secondly, since cross-country skiing took over my winter life some 43 years ago, ice fishing has for the most part faded away from my itinerary. Skiing in 10 below temperatures at times — well — that seems highly appropriate to me, as long as I cover my face with Vaseline and let my whiskers grow long enough to keep my face warm no matter what.
Sitting out on a frozen lake, wind blowing at 20 per, no heated shack to bask in, often forlornly hoping for a flag to go up or a tiny bobber to jiggle from a bluegill hit down below somehow fell out of favor.
Last winter, in an effort to make the best out of a bad situation, I turned to the oldest exercise known to man, and no, that exercise was not that of chasing a fair maiden, my wife, around and around the house in an attempt to maintain some modicum of physical good shape.
I turned to walking. Brisk walking, at least brisk in my estimation of what a 17-minute average per mile result is, an average I regularly attained.
I started out by walking a mile to two miles about three days per week. That grew to include two to four miles at least five days a week, and finally, as the months turned from winter to spring, anywhere from three to six miles at least five days a week.
As I found out, many were the benefits of walking. For starters, it was good for my overall health and good in getting rid of about 15 pounds of excess weight I was carrying around.
Even better was the opportunity to walk and hike through much of the outdoors I would never have enjoyed had average snow blanketed the ground.
I walked unused snowmobile trails, deserted ski trails, little used town roads, two-track logging roads and sometimes, just at random, wherever I wanted to roam in the north Wisconsin woods I have been roaming for my entire life.
I got to see wild critters going about their daily business each time I walked through the woods of the Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest.
I saw where pileated woodpeckers had stabbed out large slivers and chunks of dead and decaying tree trunks as they found grubs to feast on.
I had my breath taken away, and my heart rate instantly raised about 50 beats a minute, each time a ruffed grouse blasted out of a low cover a scant few yards away from me.

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