Close to home
I’m not much for travel, even in the outdoors. Though it’s the safest way of getting from point A to point B, I sweat profusely while aboard just about any airplane, regardless
of whether there’s fishing or hunting on the other side of the trip and often start dreading the flight back with three or four days to go in my vacation. While far more comfortable,
there are few trips I make in the car for hunting or fishing that are more than an hour away, unless there’s a farmhouse or a cabin that serves as a makeshift basecamp
at the end. A good deal of my adventures occur just minutes out my front door, and more than 90 percent of them within an hour’s drive. From growing up on the Sheyenne River, fishing bullheads in the city park just half a block from the gravel driveway of my parents’ house to later living on the north end of Valley City, dropping my small boat in off the pavement chunk launch at Chautauqua Park in search of smallmouth and walleyes, my time on the water started close to home, and I was lucky to have that close-by opportunity to form my love of fishing. After moving to Minnesota, I discovered dozens of grouse trails within 20 minutes of town for the fall and lakes loaded with crappies just minutes from
home for late-night ice fishing adventures. In the state’s southwest where I resided for almost a decade, nearly 40,000 acres of public land rolled out each fall and after the rush
of opening weekend, they felt like they were mine alone to hunt for the rest of the season.
