Spending time outdoors means spending time with bugs. Some are irritating, like flies and gnats. Many want your blood, like ticks and mosquitoes. Others are entertaining, like water striders, dragon flies, red ants and beetles. And some are best avoided, like hornets, fire ants, wasps and yellow jackets. Spiders seemed to fit in all four groups.
I have always enjoyed watching bugs, even the painful ones. A hornet started building a nest over the door at the bus garage in Pike County one spring and we watched it as it added a few layers, laid some eggs and then made the nest bigger with the help of her offspring. We got rid of it when it was about the size of a baseball – somebody finally got stung.
When I was young there was a big red ant bed in the ditch in front of my house. Every summer they were there, and I helped around the house by swatting flies, then took them out to my “pet” ants. I could sit at the nest and watch them as they carried my fly offering into the hole, and they never stung me. I often had them crawling over my bare feet and legs but for some reason they never bit me.
I always enjoyed watching them move grain by grain of sand to make their home bigger. That made me really realize what “Busy and an ant” meant. It also made me realize how strong they were, often toting things bigger then they were. And it was surprising how they would work together at times to move a object too big for one to handle.
Wasps often played an important part of fishing trips. We would kill the adults and put the nest into a paper bag. At the fishing hole the little larvae in the nest holes were great bait. We learned fast that you better keep the nest cool between trips or you would have a paper bag full of very mad adult wasps the next time you went fishing.
I remember getting stung a few times getting the nests, but usually we were able to spray the nest at night and kill all the adults, then get the nest. I have heard people also dug up yellow jacket nests and used the larvae for bait, but I never knew about that while growing up.
Watching dragon flies around water was always fascinating to me. I always wished I could fly like the darting glimmers of color that would buzz around catching mosquitoes then light on waterside plants. It was years before I learned what the dragon flies were doing when they would fly over the water and touch the surface. I thought they were getting a drink, I never realized it was the female laying her eggs.
I also wanted to be able to scoot along on the surface of the water like water striders could do. We always called them water “spiders” because of the way they looked. They could skate along with no effort, never sinking into the water. And water bugs or water boatmen were the same, running circles around me as I fished in a boat or while wading. I could not figure how they could stay on top like that.
Spiders always horrified me but I could not help watching them. The big yellow and black garden spiders that spun huge webs late in the summer were scary to me, but their webs, glistening with dew in the early morning, were beautiful.
One of my worst experiences with a spider happened when I was running trotlines at Clark’s Hill. I went into a willow tree to get the end of the line, and I felt something on my ear. When the light was flashed on it, whatever it was went down into my ear. I could feel it scrabbling around on my ear drum and it made me want to scream!
Back at the camp the bug would not come out. My mom finally poured some baby oil into my ear, and a small brown spider popped out. It had taken refuge from the light in the nearest dark hole it could find – my ear! I hope that never happens again.
Wasp often scared me at night when I got to close to a nest in a bush while tying lines for catfish. I found out they would not fly at night in the dark, and I was safe as long as I turned off the light and backed away pretty fast.
Now it a great time to watch bugs. Just don’t give them too much of your blood.

Starting a fire is an art as well as a skill. Camping and fishing trips of my youth always required a fire, and we learned how to quickly build one – most of the time. From small cooking fires to roaring bonfires near the water, giving us light to fish by, we planned location, size and amount of wood carefully.

On camping trips, we always dug a small fire pit and ringed it with flat stones where we could keep food warm. A forked stick stuck in the ground on either side with a straight stick across them over the fire allowed us to hang a pot from our mess kit. And the pit was big enough to allow a fire on one side but an area to rake coals to use the frying pan.

I loved the breakfasts we cooked. Bacon, burned black in some areas but still rubbery almost-raw in others, scrambled eggs with ash in them, toast burned to a perfect black and coffee with half milk and lots of sugar in the cup, still seems the best breakfast ever.

Dinners were a full meal in a foil pouch. A big hamburger patty was placed on a square of tin foil, then sliced onions and potatoes placed on top. Cut up carrots with a big hunk of butter topped it off. When the tinfoil was folded tightly over the top, it could be placed on coals to cook. We ate it straight from the pouch, no plate needed.

The butter was supposed to stay in the pouch, but no matter how carefully we made it, some always leaked out, and it was not unusual to stick a hole in the foil at some point. But the meal was always delicious, even if the meat was charred on the bottom and the carrots and potatoes still crunchy.

It seemed to rain on almost all our camping trips, so we made sure we had a dry place to keep wood. But all too often the pit would fill with water, making it a little hard to get a fire going. So, we had a plan
“B,” another flat place to build a fire on drier ground.

We always wanted to start our fire with flint and steel or by rubbing two sticks together, but never could. So, we carried matches. To keep them dry, we dipped the heads of the “strike anywhere” stick matches in wax. That worked well.

It seemed wrong to carry paper to start the fire, so we gathered tiny twigs and dry pine straw, leaves and grass. We learned to pyramid it with bigger sticks on top and kindling in the middle to quickly get it started. Then we would put bigger wood on top.

Since our wood cutting tools were small hatchets, we learned to put long limbs on the fire, one end burning and one end outside the fire. As it burned, we simply moved unburned areas into the fire. We called it a “Lazy Man” fire.

My most memorial fire was one at Clarks Hill one summer while I was in college. Mom and I put a trotline across a cove and then beached the boat on a small sandy area near it. We built a small fire, mostly for its glow and enchantment since it was not cold, and put our rods out on forked sticks, hoping for a catfish bite.

We sat there for about four hours. I do not remember catching any fish, but our talk will always be with me. I think that was the first time mom really talked to me as an adult. It took my dad a few more years, not until after I started working.

That night I grew up some. Our talk made me realize it was time.

Fires can have some interesting effects.

The flooding rain Good Friday caused a lot of problems and delayed those that like to plant their gardens. Folklore around here says Good Friday is the time to plant tomatoes, peppers, squash and other cold sensitive plants. We seldom have freezes after that date.

Growing up we depended on our huge garden to feed us year-round. We never bought anything we could grow. As a kid, I hated all the work but loved eating the results of it.

Potatoes, turnips, radishes and cabbage was planted early in the spring. Daddy always spread the tiny turnip and radish seeds, not trusting us kids to do it right. But we spent hours cutting up seed potatoes, carefully leaving an eye on each piece, to plant. And the cabbage plants were transferred from small containers to rows in the garden.

I enjoyed watching the potato plants break the surface and a few weeks later scratching around the base of them for new potatoes. Those golf ball size nuggets were carefully removed and cooked. Later, when the plants started dying, daddy would use a turning plow to expose the mature potatoes and we would gather them. Many were eaten fresh but bushels were spread on the concrete floor of an old barn where they stayed cool and lasted well into the next winter.

String beans, butter beans, butter peas, black eyed peas, corn and okra rows followed the tomatoes and peppers put out on Good Friday. Dropping seeds for them in the prepared furrows daddy had made was tedious and I wanted to just drop handfuls and get it over with, but I knew that even if I got the seeds covered before he noticed, sprouting plants in a few days would give my laziness away.

For weeks an almost daily job was carefully pulling weeds from the rows of plants we wanted. I learned a lot about identifying good plants from unwanted weeds. It was hot, dirty, boring, tiring work but had to be done.

When string beans were ready, we picked them by the bushel and spent hours at night stripping the “string” from them and snapping them into short sections. Some too mature ones had developed beans, and those were shelled out to be cooked with the snaps. I still buy “shelly beans” with the beans in them when I can find them, they remind me of real ones from home.

The beans were carefully put into jars and canned in our pressure cooker, about a dozen jars at a time.
Our pantry had well over 100 jars of them by the end of summer, at least two jars to eat a week until the next year when fresh ones were available.

Butter beans and butter peas also meant hours at night in front of the TV, shelling them into pans and filling big pots. Mom would spend hours in the kitchen the next day blanching them to freeze. We had a big chest freezer and it would be full by the end of the summer.

Nothing is better than fresh corn-on-the-cob, pulled just a few minutes before boiling, slathering with butter, and eating. Daddy planted short rows a few days apart to extend the time we had it, but there was a huge patch down in the corner of the field.

That patch was watched carefully for the perfect day and at daylight we would be pulling ears and filling the truck bed. Under the shade of a pecan tree we would shuck and silk the ears and take buckets of them inside where mom or one of us kids used a board with a perfect groove to slide the ear over a blade the cut and creamed it.

That cut corn was carefully processed and put into containers to freeze. While mom worked inside doing the cut corn, we had a fish cooker with a huge pot of water boiling under the carport. Ears of corn were dumped into it and blanched, then taken inside to an ice water bath to cool. Each ear was then carefully rolled in tinfoil and frozen. In the middle of winter those ears were almost as good as the fresh ones of summer.

All that work was worth it for the excellent eating all year long.

When I bought my house in Pike County in 1981, I wanted a garden. I cut all the trees in the back yard, clearing about a quarter acre. After buying a tiller I got it ready and planted a smaller version of daddy’s big garden.

I’ll never forget him coming to visit and looking at it, and saying it looked like good dirt. It was, and I was encouraged when my efforts started producing small plants. But I had a problem. The whole area around me drains right through my back yard. Just as the plants started growing a heavy rain flooded it, drowning most of my garden.

I tried a smaller plot on the high side of the area the next year. It did not flood, but just as the butter peas started getting ready a dry spell killed the plants. My well did not produce enough water to keep them alive.

I now have a tiny 20 by 20 foot area where I plant peppers and tomatoes. I set up a pipe from my shower drain to a buried 40 gallon drum with a sump pump in it. Every time we shower the water is pumped to the small garden, keeping it well watered.

Fresh tomatoes are fantastic and I have them during the summer, but I still miss all the other good eating from a big garden.

Years ago when I was a teenager, the movie “Endless Summer” impressed me . It was about searching for the perfect surfing wave, following summer around the globe, visiting beaches everywhere. Growing up, my endless summers were quite different, and I would not swap memories of them for any beach full of perfect waves.

My endless summers started with the last day of school. I attended a small elementary school consisting of grades 1 – 8 and a total of about 215 students. We all knew each other and the last day of school was full of songs like “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers with dirty looks.” I am surprised the teachers let us get away with it back then.

As we left school my mind was full of plans for camping, fishing , building tree houses, picking blackberries and plums and many other activities. It seemed we had endless days ahead to do all the things we wanted to do before school started again.

One of our first activities was a big camp out. We would gather camping equipment ranging from lawn chairs to mess kits with the same care British explorers planned trips to Africa. And we probably carried more stuff than they did! Fortunately, we usually did not go much over a couple of hundred yards from the house on these excursions, so return trips home for additional supplies were not bad.

We always had a great supper the first night of camping consisting of a full meal in a foil pouch. It had a big hamburger patty topped by sliced potatoes, carrots and onions and butter. This was placed on fire coals to slowly cook to that perfect state of burned black meat and still crunchy potatoes. Nothing ever tasted better!

If you have never slept on a lawn chair, you have missed one of the most miserable nights of your life. There is no way to get comfortable on one of those things. I have no idea why we kept trying. The ground, even when covered with rocks, was much more comfortable!

Our “pup” tents were so named because they were probably suitable for a few puppies, not kids. But we loved them, anyway. So what if they leaked, let bugs in, were hard to put up and take down and were heavy to tote. Maybe that is why we kept trying lawn chairs!

Picking blackberries was always anticipated with much more fun than the actual picking. We would watch the blackberry vines as they bloomed and the berries slowly started turning red. We knew exactly where the best vines grew, and loved dewberries because they were so much bigger and filled the containers faster.

Momma made a blackberry cobbler with the first picking of berries, and we ate as many as went into the container. One summer we got real industrious and decided to sell the berries we picked. Back then, 25 cents a quart was a good price and we sold several gallons that summer. I would not pick them for sale at 100 times that price now!

Fishing ranged from tying and fishing home-made “flies” in the local branch, catching small bream and other fish, to bicycle trips to local farm ponds. We did not have a boat back then but an old pair of tennis shoes and jeans allowed us to wade around the edge, casting for bass and bream. And wading kept us cool while in the water and on the ride home.

Another cooing activity was damming up the branch to make a swimming and fishing hole. We worked many hours filling croker sacks with sand and dragging cross ties to the dam site. Our dams often created a great pool of water that lasted until the next hard rain washed out the dam. If we had been made to work that hard around the house we would have been furious.

Summers end too quickly now. It seems school starts months sooner that it did back then, and I know it seems even worse to kids returning to classes. I hope everyone can enjoy the time left and make some memories for the future.

I have two bluebird nests in my back yard, and two at the land I own. Bluebirds have been busy building nests in all four of them the past few weeks and I think the females will lay eggs soon. I have enjoyed watching the pairs of birds working back and forth constantly this spring.

It is amazing how bright blue the male bird is this time of year. It brightens up to attract a mate in early spring and will keep the deep blue color for a few weeks, gradually fading to a lighter color as the summer progresses.

I have also enjoyed watching the Canada geese on my two small ponds. I build nesting platforms from them, making a small raft for them to nest on. A female is hard on the nest, not leaving very much at all, on one of the ponds, a good sign she has started laying eggs. A pair on the other pond have not started laying eggs yet.

About a month ago nine geese moved onto the bigger pond. They would fight and honk at each other constantly, trying to establish dominance. Finally one pair ran the others off and claimed that pond as their own nesting site. One lone goose went to the upper pond and stayed there, and the other six left for parts unknown.

That single goose stayed around by itself for a few weeks and now it has gone. As soon as it left, a new pair moved in. I hope both pairs are able to raise some young this year.

Pay attention to the birds around you this spring. They are entertaining as well as educational.

For years, Georgia fishing and hunting licenses expired on April 1 each year. Now, they expire on the day you bought them a year later if you buy an annual license. That confuses many folks and they forget to check and renew them on time, risking a fine.

April Fools Day always reminds me to check my license since I had to buy one by then for many years. I did this year, it expires in 2216. I got my lifetime Senior License a few years ago but forget that and check anyway. I just wish I could be fishing 197 years from now when it expires, and I would have to renew it.

I never minded paying for hunting and fishing licenses. The fees are used to improve those activities in a variety of ways, from hiring new game wardens to funding hatcheries that produce all our hybrids and most of our trout.

My only worry about the fees is that they will not be used as intended. As I understand the process, the license fees go into the general fund and then legislators have to approve it being spent at intended. It would be too easy for them to spend that money in other ways.

I would not be happy if they voted to use the money for something like highway improvement. Not only would that be double taxation, hunters and fishermen already pay the gas tax for that, it would go against the way the money was intended to be spent.

I feel the same way about outdoor recreation that has nothing to do with hunting and fishing. Funding a nature trail on public land is nice, but do not use money hunters and fishermen paid to improve their sports. Use money from a fee or pass for using the area if not hunting or fishing.

Hunters and fishermen fund our sports nationally, too. The Dingle-Johnson Act places a ten percent excise tax on all fishing equipment. You pay it when you buy hooks or reels, or anything else related. Hunters pay the Pitman-Robinson excise tax for the same reason.

Funds are collected by the federal government and most of it is sent back to the states as block grants. The amount each state gets is based on a formula that includes number of hunting and fishing licenses issued by that state. It also requires that the receiving state spend all their state hunting and fishing license fees on those activities.

States are required to spend this money on hunting and fishing, but all outdoorsmen benefit. Most state hunting areas are open to bird watchers, hikers and others that do not hunt but get to enjoy lands hunters and fishermen purchased and conserved.

Check you fishing and hunting license!

I have always loved camping. From “camping out” in lawn chairs and sleeping bags in our back yard a few feet from the house to trips to Clarks Hill with the family setting up a big Army Surplus tent, I enjoyed my time outside.

When I started bass fishing, I camped in tents at lakes the night before a tournament. Then I bought a cargo van in 1977 and fixed it up with a bed and used it. Two more vans took me to the lake many times, each one converted a little better for my needs, until last March.

My old back finally convinced me I wanted to be able to stand up to get dressed, so I got a slide in pickup camper. It takes a little more work loading and setting up at the lake, but it is a lot more comfortable once that is done.

Last weekend I camped in it at Lakepoint
State Park on Lake Eufaula for five nights for the Potato Creek Bassmasters tournament there. When making reservations, I went to their web page to make sure there was no tornado damage. It hit the airport about five miles from the campground, destroying hangers and planes, but did not damage the park.

Modern “campers” amaze me. On the website comments about the campground proved people do not want to camp to enjoy the outdoors. I am not sure why they even go. They could stay home and do the same thing they do in the campground.

The oddest comment was about alligators. There are big signs in the campground warning “Alligators Present, Swim at Own Risk” and there are usually several in the water late in the afternoon.

One person complained in their comment that there were alligators at the campground but the park ranger did nothing about them. I’m not sure what they were supposed to do, the lake is full of them and they are wild animals, moving wherever they want in their natural environment.

Another person complained there were puddles in the campground after it rained. Duh. I guess those folks wanted a nice huge paved area like a Walmart parking lot, sloped so the water runs to drains. Get rid of all the trees and dirt so nothing natural, like a puddle, is possible.

Over the weekend the sites filled, many with families with children. I think this past week was spring break there. All the kids brought their toys, riding scooters, playing basketball and having faces buried in electronic gadgets. The same thing the probably do at home.

One of the first things many of the folks did was put out their TV satellite antennae and set up their big screen Tv. If you are going to sit inside and watch TV, why pay for a campsite? I like being away from TV and all the other day to day distractions at home. It is nice to hear no news for several days for me.

At their age I would have been fishing every minute I could. That is one thing I loved about camping at the lake, all that water so close by and I just knew it was full of fish.

I still love camping, sitting by the picnic table first thing in the morning drinking coffee, then going fishing. After coming in, grilling and sitting outside is a big part of it, enjoying the peace and quiet of the great outdoors. But sometimes that is destroyed by all the noise of camper air conditioners, TVs blaring, and other non-natural sounds.