Thirsty Thursday

On Thursdays I go to the Grey Rock for some beers with a handful of working soil scientists, but mostly retired soils scientists. We talk about hunting and fishing every week, without fail. Now I know all about beaver trapping and 'yote hunting and how to smoke a sucker and how to call a turkey. Sometimes we stray from the topic of hunting and fishing for a quick comment about the weather or a tale about an ancient knee replacement. Or ponder topics such as "Did Donny over at the Oscoda office retire yet? No, I heard he's got a few weeks left yet..." But those topics usually fizzle out quickly, followed by long silences that can only be broken by news of smelt abundance at the south side of Higgens or that gobbler that was so close, but never within shooting range.

Last week, however, was different. It was a warm and sunny Thursday. A recordbreakingly warm day for the first of April, if I recall correctly. No one wanted to set foot in the dark, smoky interior of the Grey Rock. So we started to call around, looking for a backyard or porch to host Thirsty Thursday. Marty, who retired just three months ago, was our first choice. He lives close to town and has a nice porch that would be the perfect setting to quench our thirst. But try as we might, Marty takes a nap during the day, and proved impossible to reach. We had to move on to Greg. Now, Greg is a recent soil retiree as well, but his porch had just been stained. Would this be an issue? Yes. But we could go as long as we kept off the porch and stuck to the lawnchairs. Now that he is retired, Greg has a lot of time on his hands. In addition to staining the deck, he has turned to cutting down trees, apparently for recreation. Using an intricate pulley system that all the retirees were extremely excited about, Greg had removed about half of the trees in his backyard. We talked about tree removal for a while, and than jumped over to the topic of the census, and then home heating.

I was starting to wonder how long a story about a rogue propane tank could go on, when the silence we had all been waiting for finally came. We let it linger sweetly for a few pensive moments, and then dove headfirst into 'who's been sucker fishing on the Black?'