Fall is in the air.  For the first time in months I was happy to fish in the sun in the Sportsman Club tournament a week ago last Sunday.  It got hot later, but at daylight it was a bit cool on the water fishing in the shade.

    A sure sign its fall is the preparation for the annual three club tournament at Lake Martin. We look forward to this tournament we hold the second weekend of October each year.  We usually catch a lot of bass, mostly pound size spots, but it is a lot of fun getting lots of bites.

    Last year 24 of the 29 fishermen had limits both days, two more had a limit one day and four keepers on the other day, and no one weighed in less than five keepers. And many of those fish were caught on topwater baits including the 3.74-pound spot I caught on Saturday.  That one gave me a thrill!

    Members of the Spalding County Sportsman Club also get ready for our Club Classic, held the first weekend in October.  To qualify to fish it, members must fish at least eight of the 12 tournaments during the year or finish in the top eight in the club for the year.

Some of the entry fees from monthly club tournaments are reserved for payout at the Classic. The top five get a check as well as the big fish winner.  There is a good bit of money paid out, much more than in regular tournaments.

The Potato Creek Bassmasters also has a Club Classic with similar rules and pay-out. It is held the last weekend in March.  It is much anticipated, too, and adds to the special spring feelings.

    Last week I smelled burning leaves for the first time this year.  I love that smell. Often when fishing on a very cold day a whiff of burning leaves can seem to warm you up a little. 

It takes me back to raking pecan leaves in the yard, piling them in the ditch and burning them. My favorite part was going back out there when there were just embers left, usually a cool late afternoon, and scratching around for missed pecans.

They usually seemed to be roasted just right. I think since they settled to the bottom of the pile against the ground, most of the heat went up and did not burn them.

We roasted pecans in the oven most of the year, too. Daddy also ordered 50-pound bags of peanuts every year and the bag was always available to get a pan out and put in the oven. Most nights the family sat around the den watching TV after dinner eating roasted nuts or a bowl of ice cream before bed.

Now the whine of leaf blowers replaces the rhythmic scraping of a rake and disturbs the peace. Blowers may be a lot faster, but I hate fishing on a nice peaceful morning only to hear someone crank up a leaf blower and make a lot of noise for hours on end. On a lake with lots of houses it is a constant sound all day.

I heard a DJ on the radio today say there was a sure sign fall is here.  The dollar stores are putting out Valentine stuff.  Seriously, Christmas stuff is already showing up in some area stores a month before Halloween.  Seems a big early to me.

Are we in too big a hurry nowadays?  We can’t wait to a holiday in a couple of months to the point of missing the excitement of the ones coming up. And it seems the same for hunters and fishermen. Bass boats scream around the lake, trying to find that perfect spot. Hunters can’t sit still in deer stands, they have to ride their four wheelers in the woods scaring the deer for everyone else.

My favorite season is a toss up between spring and fall. I love the warming weather in spring, the new growth of plants and animals and the fantastic fishing. Planting gardens is always a great anticipation of coming delicious vegetables.

But fall starts hunting seasons and great fishing again.  And the bounty of the garden is ending but still producing delicious fresh meals, with digging potatoes one of my favorites.  And fall crops of broccoli, cabbage and other cool weather veggies are another anticipation.

One of the best things about fall, the opposite of spring, is the disappearance of bugs.  Cooler nights seem to lessen them and the first frost makes most mosquitos, ticks, flies and other irritating bugs disappear.

Many people travel to the mountains to see the colorful leaves each year. I much prefer seeing them from a deer stand. Mountain and valley vistas are nice but sitting in a tree on a ridge over a creek valley is even better to me, since the anticipation of seeing a deer is there.

Deer camp the first week of November is something we look forward to every year, too. Every club has different camps, but all involve fires, good food, great companionship and an escape from the reality of modern life.  It takes most of us back to simpler times when the world was not quite so crazy.

Roughing it at deer camp can also make me appreciate the conveniences of modern life. Going four or five days without a hot shower is not something I enjoy, but fortunately, my camp is close enough to drive home every other day for a shower.

Cooking on an open fire is fun – a couple of times.  But having to do it every day makes me appreciate the ease of cooking a variety of things an open fire just can not produce.  Biscuits, pies and cakes are some of the things you really need an oven to cook!

Enjoy fall – winter will be here soon enough.

 Spending as much time outdoors as I have is bound to present some unusual encounters.  Nature has many wonders and they always fascinated me.  While growing up and most of my life I have had many books to identify plants and animals in the wild. Now I have apps on my phone to do it.

    On a church group camping trip when I was about eight years old, two events stand out in my mind.  We camped at an old mill pond and could not wait for the weekend of fishing, swimming, cooking on fires and trying to stay awake all night.

    The first afternoon I went off by myself, fishing along the small branch below the dam.  I noticed something in the shallows and when I got close, I got nervous, I had never seen anything like it.  It looked like a big, thick 16-inch-long mottled brow slimy looking lizard with a red frill around its neck.  For a minute I was afraid it was a baby “Godzilla,” growing like the one I had seen in the original movie grow from a leg that was blown off the adult.

    Being a kid, I killed it with a stick and took it back to camp. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.  When I got home I looked it up and found that it was an “Eastern Hellbender” salamander, the biggest salamander in the US. North Georgia is the extreme southern end of its range so to find on in middle Georgia was very unusual.

    Ironically enough, in the early 1970s my favorite lure was a Hellbender, an early crankbait. Linda caught an eight-pound bass at Clarks Hill trolling one in 1971.  The lure looked nothing like the real thing, though.

    Back at the camp on the mill pond, someone killed a big fat water snake.  That night around the fire I got out my trusty pocketknife and split it open. It has 17 eggs in it, mama was developing more water snakes.  Someone threw it on the fire against the advice of the adults with us and we all learned how terrible burning snake smells.

    Freshwater mussels always interested me. Their shells litter the banks in most of our lakes. Birds and otters will eat them. I have found piles of them under boat docks on a float where an otter went to dinner regularly. 

    I love all kinds of seafood including oysters, clams and mussels, so I just had to try a freshwater mussel. I found a live one at Clarks Hill that was as big as my fist, so I took it up to the kitchens and steamed it in the oven.

    I might as well have scooped up a handful of the mud it was in and put it in my mouth.  That’s what it tasted like!

    I have never been shy about trying different kinds of food and have always said “I will eat anything that doesn’t eat me first.”  That has produced some interesting experiences traveling with Linda all over the world.

    While on a nature hike in the Amazon Rain Forest in Brazil with a survival training Captain in the Brazil Army, he showed us many typed of food provided by nature. 

    He showed us how to tease a tarantula spider out of its hole, saying they tasted good roasted and the fire burned oft the hairs that would tickle your mouth. He then cut a vine up high then cut the bottom, grabbing it quickly. It was full of water, several of us had a swallow of the pure water in the jungle before it all ran out.

    He also cut a palm branch with a small nut looking growth on it and said it was a palm nut, similar to a coconut.  He told us the meat of the nut was good food but inside was often a source of protein, a palm nut grub.  When he split the nut, sure enough there was a grub inside. It reminded me of the grub worms we dig up here.

    He asked if anyone would eat it. After a few seconds of quiet, I said I would. When I put in in my mouth and bit down, it popped. It did taste like coconut!

    About half of us on that cruise ship flew back to Miami from Manus, Brazil on a chartered 777.  When Linda and I were bordered first and put in the two first class front seats, others looked at us and asked how we got those seats.

    I told them it was because I had eaten the grub!

I got a deer this year on the second day of archery season!

Unfortunately, it was with my Chevy Express van on the way to fish Lake Oconee. It was the second one I have hit with my 2008 van, but just the third one I have ever hit.

    In 1971, the first fall Linda and I were married, we left Clarks Hill Sunday night headed back to Athens after spending the weekend with my parents at the lake. For some reason I was driving daddy’s truck, I seem to remember we needed to haul something back to our mobile home.

    On a back road near Washington, Ga, with nothing, not even a farm house within a few miles, a deer was standing on the left side of the road. I slowed to look at it, seeing deer was still not an everyday, or every night, thing. Suddenly the doe ran right in front of the truck. I hit it and it went under the bumper and I felt the tires bump over her.

I stopped and turned the headlights on the deer flopping about 20 feet from the road. I went over to her; the truck had broken her back and she was trying to crawl off using her front legs.

Since I had no gun but did not want her to suffer, I got the tire iron out of the truck and hit her in the head to kill her.

Wanting to do the right thing, I stopped in Washington, Georgia when I saw a police car sitting by the road to report what happened. The cop did not seem friendly and started questioning me about leaving the scene of an accident!

At the time I had shoulder length hair and if I remember correctly, was wearing “hippy” clothes, a tie died tee shirt and paisley pants.  After some discussion the cop told me to go on my way.

The next time I drove that road during daylight I saw there was a fence running along the left side where she was standing, but nothing on the right. I guess she chose to run across the road rather than jump the fence. Not a good choice.

The second deer was just four or five years ago, with my van while pulling my boat to West Point.  A deer standing on the right shoulder suddenly jumped right in front of me. I had slowed a lot and when it hit the right corner of the bumper, it knocked her back off the road.

I stopped in Woodbury where there was enough light to see and found no damage, just some hair on the bumper. Guess the glancing blow was not too bad.

Sunday I left home at 3:45 AM and saw several deer between here and Monticello.  About halfway between Monticello and Eatonton two yearlings were standing on the right side of the road. I slowed as soon as I saw them, knowing little ones will often run to mama on the other side of the road.

Before I slowed enough, I was still going about 45, a deer came out of nowhere on my left.  I never got a good look at it, it was just something suddenly there and a big wham and bump.  I slowed and kept a watch on my temperature and oil gauges, fearing damage.

When I got to Eatonton where I had some light, I got out and pulled off both running light assemblies that were just hanging by the light wires. The had been bumping in the wind a lot. Since there seemed to be no bad damage and nothing was leaking, I drove on to the ramp.

Linda has not been so lucky. A couple of years ago a deer ran out on Sixth Street Extension and hit her Avalon on the right side. She was going very slowly, but it still did $4000.00 in damage!  The next year in the same place a deer ran out and she hit it with her left front bumper corner. It came up, hitting the corner of the windshield and shattering it, damaged the roof and then part of the trunk.  

The insurance company totaled out her car there was so much damage!

Be careful out there, get a deer with a bow not a vehicle!

 By this time every December growing up my hunts got more specific. All fall I had kept my eyes open for pretty cedar trees that were the right size and shape, marking their location in my mental GPS. Back then it actually worked and would hold many locations.

    But around the first of December I got serious, searching for the perfect tree. It had to be as perfect shape as a wild tree could be, and as tall as possible without being more than seven feet tall, about as high as I could reach.

    I hunted a lot on an old farm about a mile from my house. The fields were mostly overgrown with broom straw and weeds but the field edges of briar, brush and small trees gave rabbits and quail perfect places to hide. The old fields still provided a variety of food for them.

    Cedar trees grew in the field edges and in the old fields, too. Since they could get sun from all angles out in the field, they were conical shaped and full all the way around.  Trees near the woods usually had a gap on the side that did not get full sun so the ones in the open were the best.

    About a week before Christmas Day I would direct daddy to the best tree I had found.  He drove our old Chevy pickup pretty much anywhere although it did not have four-wheel drive. Since the best tree was usually in the open, it was not hard to drive to it.

    Daddy “let” me lay on the ground and saw the tree down, using a lumber saw. It’s fine teeth made the cutting slow and took a while but for a preteen or teenager, it was not too bad. I tried to get a nice smooth even cut for the tree stand we would make with 2x4s.

    We would also cut some limbs from other cedar trees that were not candidates for “The” tree, even for the future. Those limbs were used by mama to decorate the mantel where our stocking were hung, and a center piece for the table.

    Getting the tree in to the house and set up was not hard with several folks to help. Within minutes the house would smell of cedar, a wonderful smell that would be reinforced by mantel and table decorations that would last until the day after Christmas.

    We didn’t have a lot of money back then and most of our tree decorations, as well as house decorations, were homemade. I brought in sweetgum tree balls and small pinecones from the few trees that produced them. I still do not know what kind of pine tree produced those two-inch-long cones but they were rare.

    We would spray the pinecones and sweetgum balls with silver or gold paint and sprinkle glitter on them.   They were hung from the tree with short pieces of colorful yarn. We would also cut strips of colorful construction paper and make chains out of loops of it for the tree.

We did have bought lights, big bulb strings that were very colorful. The strangest “lights” for the tree were ancient small pans that clipped to the tree and had a spike for  a small candle.  We were not allowed to light the candles except for a few minutes each night while mama and daddy watched carefully.

There were some very old ball decorations that had been in the family for years and we were very careful handling them. They were beautiful, some shaped like angels, some like Santa and some like bells and balls, and all very colorful.

Store bought tinsel was made from metal, I think it was strands of tinfoil, and mama would not let us kids touch it. She hung each stand carefully, placing it just right. After Christmas she would remove it just as carefully and put it back on the cardboard backing and into a pack for next year. I felt like we were rich the year mama said throw the tree out with the tinsel on it, we would buy more next year!

Undecorating the tree was a sad time and I did not help much, I wanted to get out in the woods with my new boxes of .22 bullets and .410 shells!!

We didn’t deck the halls with boughs of holly, but we did use holly in many decorations. In the drab December outdoor colors of browns and grays, bright green holly, and duller but green cedar, green briar and even mistletoe stands out, and we collected all four for festive decorations.  

    In pictures holly always has clusters of pretty red berries everywhere. Not so much in wild holly.  If there were a few scattered red berries on a limb it was carefully cut and taken home.  Mama used the holly for mantle and table decorations, along with cedar limbs.

    One decoration always took center place on the mantle. It was an old kerosene lamp with a bulbous lower chamber for the fuel, a wide flat wick and a tall glass chimney.  We filled the fuel chamber with small colorful balls and mama put a collar of green cedar or holly around its base, arranging it so it set off the lamp.

    We had several of those old lamps and the others were kept with kerosene in them for the times the electricity went out.  Along with a few candles, they gave enough light to get by.

When I was 12 we moved into mama’s dream house, a split level brick home that had three bedrooms upstairs and a den and egg room in the lower level.  The egg room had a big walk-in cooler and an area where we “candled” the eggs.  It got a lot of use since we had 11,000 laying hens.

The house was an orangish brick, not red.  The year we moved in mama bought plastic candle sticks for each front window, eight total, and put orange bulbs in each one. Those candle sticks had five bulbs each and set off the house just right at night.

    Getting mistletoe was always my job and I loved going into the woods, finding a big clump high up in an oak tree and shooting it down with my .22.  I tried to use as few bullets as possible, hoping to clip the main branch of the mistletoe with two to three shots.

    For as long as I can remember we had a big gold bell with a music box inside. The clapper for the bell was actually a pull cord and when pulled down it slowly retracted, playing a short clip of “Jingle Bells.”  Mistletoe was put in the bow above the bell and it hung over the door going to our downstairs level den.

    That doorway got a lot of traffic and my little brother loved to pull the string and make the bell play. So much so I usually hated to hear it within a few days. I think he liked to do it to bug me.

    I could stop the irritation for a few days by unclipping the music box from the bell and hiding it. He would whine to my parents, but I think they got sick of hearing it, too, so they would not really force me to get it back out for a few days.

    An old home place a few miles from our house provided “smilax” which I learned later in life is green briar.  We would go get several long vines of it and mama used it to outline our front door. The door was covered with shiny red and green paper and a wreath was placed in the center for a pretty entryway.

    Greenbriar stays green all winter, so it is an important food for deer in the lean months as well as being pretty.  I learned to hunt patches of it in late December for deer looking for something good to eat in the mostly barren woods.

    Food was amazing.  We never made gingerbread houses, but gingerbread cookies along with Martha Washington balls, snowballs, chocolate chip and many other kinds of cookies were set out on the table to nibble on as we decorated and all during the holidays.

    The holidays meant many big meals with family.  Mama and daddy had several brothers and sisters living near us, and we had to go to every one of their houses, and they all came to our house for meals, too.  There were often a dozen adults and twenty cousins running around on a day we had meals together.

    The table was loaded with turkey and dressing, ham, fried chicken, mac and cheese, string bean casserole, squash casserole, scalloped potatoes,  devil eggs, potato salad, string beans, turnip greens with roots, rutabaga, rice, corn bread, rolls and other staples.

    There were always several kinds of jello salad, from simple orange and shredded carrots to my favorite with cherries, pecans, pineapple and cherry jello.  The desserts ranged from ambrosia made with fresh oranges, coconut and marshmallows to every kind of cake and pie imaginable.

    Most days started and ended with hunting, either quail with several uncles and cousins if daddy or one of the uncles wanted to get the dogs out to me going alone after squirrels and rabbits.  Many mornings were quail hunting with the adults, then after a big meal, me hunting alone, since the adults were too full to move.

    Presents were exchanged with all cousins and family members.  One that I got every year from an aunt and uncle that lived in South Georgia was a window envelope with a dollar bill inside!  That may not seem like much now, but it was a lot of money to a kid that spent hours collecting empty coke bottles along the road for a penny each!

    I have great Christmas memories and I hope you are making new ones this year.

   Searching for good food is a fun activity anytime I travel, and fried scallops top my list. I enjoy cooking at home but fried seafood like scallops and shrimp are not something I cook well, so I eat them whenever I go out.

    In Thomasville last week I had only one night without a set schedule and had found George and Louie’s Seafood with fried scallops on the menu. Linda had eaten there and said it was good, so we planned to go Thursday night.

    At our welcome get-together at Kevin’s Gun Room, several asked our Chamber of Commerce host about dinner. She said Jonah’s Fish and Grits was famous and only a block away. Ron Brooks asked if they had scallops – he knows me well and I think he asked for me – and she said yes, so a group of us went there.

    When our group of eight arrived at 7:30 they were busy but pulled some tables together and seated us almost immediately. The menu listed scallops, but only as an appetizer or with pasta. I asked the waitress if they would fry me a batch of them for dinner and she said “no.”

    I have made that request at dozens of places all over Alabama and Georgia, and every single one of them said yes. Sometimes it was a couple dollars more than the fried shrimp dinner on the menu but I did not mind.

    In their defense, Joanah’s closes at 8:00 – we did not realize that so our party of eight was right at closing time. I ordered fried shrimp and they were ok, a little over done, but maybe partly not as good as they would have been due to my disappointment.

    Ron got the seafood linguine and the scallops in it were tiny, so maybe it was for the best, although the menu said the scallop appetizer was “sea scallops,” which are the big ones.

    Lesson learned, I should have gone to George and Louie’s!

    Friday night we had our auction meeting and dinner at Q-Café. I wondered what the meal would be like but the outdoor pictures on the walls reassured me, and the owner was great. He even bought a painting at our auction to hang on his wall and bought one of our auction guns.

They are usually open for breakfast and dinner only but they catered our meal and it was great. It was buffet style and they kept cooking till everyone was full. The blackened shrimp were delicious and the fried chicken fingers were cooked just right and piping hot, too.

    I filled up on pastry cups with either chicken salad or pimento cheese, too. Those bite size pastries were seasoned just right. And the cold veggie platter provided my greens I want at every dinner. A couple of our members went back the next morning for breakfast and said it was fantastic.

    Our Awards banquet Saturday night was at Plaza Restaurant and Oyster bar, and we had three choices, fried shrimp, prime rib or Greek chicken.  You can guess what I ordered, and the shrimp, although there was only one waitress serving the 30 of us, were hot and not over cooked. So I did get one really good fried shrimp dinner.

    Our lunches were provided by JB Crumbs. Sandwich platters were varied and good. If you are planning a conference, or just a personal trip, there are plenty of great places to visit, help you and provide food for your group in Thomasville.

    As soon as I got home I went to Jimmy’s Steak and Seafood in Jackson for my fried scallop dinner.  This small place in a strip mall has as good fried scallops and shrimp as I have had anywhere. Fishtales here in Griffin is just as good, but Jimmy’s is open every night but Monday!

    When I got home Sunday, still thinking about seafood, one of the first emails I opened was from Taste of Home magazine. I get their recipes in about four categories every day and the first one I saw was for shrimp and grits, so I had to cook it.

The cheese grits were cooked in the cock pot so it was easy and didn’t burn, and the sauteed shrimp and sausage with bell peppers and garlic topped it just right. I had it twice last week.

At Kevin’s Gun Room for our greeting get together we had a cheese tray with different things made locally in Thomasville. The different kinds of preserves went well with the locally made cheese.

Kevins started in Tallahassee, Florida and is a big pawn shop featuring everything you would expect. Kevin did well and opened his place in Thomasville as his showcase and personal get-away. When you walk in the front door you are greeted by a full-size brown bear mount and there are mounts all around the main room.

Upstairs in the remodeled mill right downtown is the amazing part. From the polar bear rug on the floor to the red stag mounts brought from Germany, the room shouts “rich man cave!”  Kevin has spent a lifetime hunting and collecting outdoor equipment.

The walls of four rooms upstairs are lined with guns for sale. The first one I looked at, a beautiful side by side 28 gauge, had a price tag of $49,999.00! I had to back away carefully. Most of the guns were not as expensive, I saw a lever action .410 for only $5000.00. But one gun in his catalog lists for $149,999.00.

You can get a good idea of the items for sale at Kevin’s in his catalog at https://kevinsguns.com/

Kevin’s GunsTallahassee, FL (850) 386-5544 Mon-Fri 9am to 6:30pm EST Sat 9am to 6pm EST Sun 11am to 5pm EST [email protected]

Maybe you want to order one for Christmas! I am honored to get to tour his facility and see what someone dedicated to their passion and willing to work to make the American Dream come true, can do.