keep those fishies rollin,
folks'll come a trollin, walleye...
(to be sung to the tune of Rawhide, and I have many more words where those came from, after all it was a long drive..)
Walleye. This is what Minnesota is all about. These are eight inch or so fingerlings, being released to grow, with unknown success, into adults into lakes that lack spawning habitat for these babies.
I drove over 300 miles today to pick up and stock 160 pounds of them, less than a thousand individual fish altogether, into a 600 acre lake. I don't do the math, I just deliver.
This is North Big Pine Lake, a dreadful lovely spot where I have stocked walleye recently. It looks so lonely now.
At Powder Ridge, a glacial moraine, they were making snow for skiing, snowboarding, etc. Don't know what that McMansion is doing in the foreground. I don't think the artificial snow will melt tonight.
And this is at Maine Prairie, near Powder Ridge, where apparently a bunch of settlers from Maine tried to settle until the railroad company decided to run the railroad through the town several miles south. The railroads decided everything in those days.
I also saw lots of disturbing rural sprawl; that is, formerly small towns like St. Cloud and Hutchinson now boast populations rivaling those of Twin Cities suburbs, and there are look-alike townhouses and factory homes and mega churches ("worship centers") in former farm fields. (Would God approve?) When will it stop? It was nice to see some country I haven't seen for a while, but I was getting plenty tired by the time I stocked the fish and drove back to the office. Hopefully, I'll spend the whole day in the office tomorrow, which means a blogging break once in a while...;)
4 comments:
The lake looks grey and cold.
41 degrees; the smaller ponds around here have a skim of ice over them, but this lake is big enough that it takes a while to cool down. November is the loneliest time on Minnesota lakes.
As soon as you said "mega churches" I had bad flashbacks to many other places I've lived--Oklahoma being the most populated with such buildings. :) Oh my.
Thanks for taking us on a little tour.
My husband grew up on Grand Lake, just down the road from Maine Prairie (okay, maybe 5-10 miles away).
When we go up to St. Cloud to visit his mom, he is continually marvelling at how the city has changed. It's sprawling all over the place. Growing up, Grand Lake was "the country." Now, it's close to being suburban St. Cloud.
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