Responding to an on-line opinion page invitation about the hypocrisy that hunters sometimes face, I decided to outline my own progression of the controversial activity of hunting, beginning in my Iowa boyhood. Little did Guy Reynolds know that his son, Steven, and his Fox terrier, Bridget, would become a rat killing duo on Des Moines Street, at the Burlington-Northern railroad tracks clear past Dean Avenue, on Des Moines' Eastside. When I was about eleven years old, I hunted Norway rats that frequented the railroad tracks by the thousands near my east Des Moines neighborhood. In the shadow of towering grain elevators, my Fox terrier, ‘Bridget,’ and I valiantly tried to reduce their population every Saturday morning whenever possible. I routed them out from under giant sheets of wire-reinforced cardboard boxcar liners lying about in the grass, as one after another, Bridget snapped their backs and shook them until they didn’t move. Despite their apparent suffering, no ...
I've planted more than a hundred thousand trees since 1974, the earliest ones by hand with help by a friend from Iowa. Some lived, some died. The fact that my help couldn't avoid hitting a rock with his planting bar, no matter what direction he turned, or how much he swore, may have had something to do with it. "C'mon really, Jeff?" A portion of 1974 White Spruce plantation planted by hand along Mikinaak Creek. Since then, many more have reproduced a thousand fold. It's good to see them in their multitudes; one over-topping another through their depth and width. The tallest prevail. These White Spruce and Hybrid Cottonwood, planted in 1981, in half-mile long rows on the west side of Mikinaak Creek, were the first trees ever planted using tractor and tree planter, echoing the contours of the farm lane and existing woodlots near the farmstead, that in turn echoed the contours of Mikinaak Creek set in motion my unconventiona...