By Dick Herfindahl, Tribune columnist

Here it is almost Christmas and for some their present arrived early in the form of an extended pheasant season. Now families that hunt are able to seek out the bird up until the end of the year. This will give the avid outdoorsmen something else to do while awaiting the magical time when the lakes are covered with ice thick enough to venture out on.

We have to keep in mind that venturing out onto thin ice is dangerous. The term, &uot;walking on thin ice&uot; had to come from somewhere and I suspect that the person that first phrased that statement might have had first-hand experience.

I have written in the past about when I was growing up and would walk the &uot;crick&uot; and slough from Bancroft Bay to Goose Lake. We learned quickly that walking close to vegetation such as bull rushes and cattails would usually result in a wet foot. This is something to be aware of if you are pheasant hunting in a marsh or slough.

Thin ice was never something that I was particularly fond of. It would always get the adrenaline pumping when walking on a lake and the ice would crack, even if the ice were a safe thickness.

Spending a wintry Saturday on the prowl in the old slough always had a unique feeling. It was as if you were one against nature. With all the outdoors books I had read it was a good time to let the imagination run wild. You could be anyone you wanted for an afternoon. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon was one of my heroes. I watched his show on TV and would always try to go and see any movie that had the fur traders, settlers of the north woods and of course Indians. I don’t know why but there was something about those movies that always felt right. John Wayne did a few of those movies about the Northwest Territories and there have been movies in later years like Jeremiah Johnson that were also good. Maybe I was just fascinated by the simple living and rough times where people had to overcome a lot of hardships with little or no outside resources. I guess a lot of this is just looking back on what our forefathers had to overcome. Of course the movies glorify things and sometimes made things seem more exciting than they really were. This is what appealed to my imagination while growing up. I am sure that pretending to be another character when we were playing made us feel like we were someone special. We would always want to be the hero that could draw a quick gun or shoot the gun out of the bad guy’s hand. We all wanted to be Roy Rogers or Gene Autry when we played cowboys; I mean who ever wanted to be Gabby Hayes?

An imagination is a resource every one of us has if we choose tap into it. In today’s world with all the technology we have too many things are done for us or are readily available to us and we don’t have to go that extra step to be a little creative.

As I think back to the days we actually had the run of the neighborhood and could go just about anywhere we wanted to, I get a good feeling about those times and actually feel grateful for having grown up at that time. In a way it almost seems like the &uot;good old days&uot; were only yesterday.

Today more and more of our land is being taken away by development and even public land comes with more and more rules. This fall I wrote about the people heading to the north shore for the colors at Gooseberry Falls. They had to ride shuttle buses just to see nature at its prettiest. I see something wrong with that picture. We have thousands of acres of land for habitat and in some instances we put asphalt trails through the land to make things more convenient for ourselves. I do think we often have a tendency for overkill.

With Christmas just a few days away a lot of us would like to see a little snow sticking to the ground. I know that a light snow always makes it seem a little more like Christmas. A fresh snowfall can seem a lot friendlier at Christmas than it does in January or February. I guess I always look forward to there being at least some snow on the ground at Christmas time. I often wonder what happened to the winters when we would get snow in early November and it wouldn’t leave until March. I don’t really miss the shoveling part of it but I know there are a lot of snowmobilers out there that would like to revisit a few of those past winters.

Until next time have a very Merry Christmas and enjoy the holidays.

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