Not so early a start, but we made it to Jimmy's Egg in time for huge breakfasts. Me: 3-egg veggie omelette, canteloupe, and thick-sliced raisin-cinammon toast. Ed: sausage, eggs over easy, hashbrowns, biscuits and gravy.
Loaded down with all that goodness, we went fishing. Storm clouds lurked, loomed and gathered, all on top of us and everywhere we wanted to go. I planned to take the Flint Hills Scenic Byway up from Wichita to Cottonwood Falls, so in order to easily route that on the map I told Google Maps to take us to Cassoday, a small town mid-way. And that's exactly what it did--it took us to "downtown Cassoday." A grocery store. I had to get off the highway to get to a grocery store. To get back on, the maps told me to follow a dirt road triangle for three or four minutes--incredibly stupid. I could have popped a U-turn and made it in 30 seconds.
No big deal, but I've learned my lesson about takine the time to choose the route correctly. In a bit we arrived at the Cottonwood Falls Courthouse, quite a cutie, and then went on to Chase State Fishing Lake.Lovely! I'd have fished there in a minute if I'd had a license or any bait. But the legal limits were shocking--the smallest Channel Cat you can keep was as long as any I've ever caught.
The loveliest thing about the lake is that it was nearly deserted--only one single camping RV--and gloriously quiet. We have got to get an RV!
On to the Tallgrass Prairie National Monument. We tried to take their little nature trail but it was boring. All the other trails were too long for the time we had remaining--we were still hoping to fish in Council Grove lake--so I asked Ed if he minded hiking up to the buffalo pasture in hopes of getting a glimpse of them. He was game, so off we went.
We walked on a gravel road across the prairie and up a hill. Wind at our back, hot but not overbearing, overcast skies, no problem, right? Yes, problem. Distances are deceiving out there--not so much as they were in Yellowstone, but bad enough. We walked a long way and still hadn't found a sign of buffalo. Also no birds or wildlife of any kind. At one point I heard a bird call in the grasses and headed cross-country to try to flush it out. I walked and walked and walked and the call never got closer--until it did! But he wouldn't flush! I finally gave up and wrote this note:
Never try to flush a bird in the weeds when the bird is upwind of you. Distances are deceiving to the ear.
I discovered tha tthe "tall" grass prairie that looked short was actually knee-high when you waded through it. Not so tall as our fields of Johnsongrass back home, but tall enough. Funny thing--on the way out, I never noticed the roundish spots of bare dirt spotted all over the place. Buffalo wallows!
After a short forever which turned out to be about a half mile, we reached the buffalo enclosure and went through the gate. It wasn't much farther until we saw a lone buffalo, way out in the grass to the right. So at least we saw some wildlife this trip.
Go on or go back? We'd already invested a good bit of walking in the endeavor--it seemed a shame to go back without seeing more. I had these mental images of a huge herd of buffalo thundering across the plains, right over the next ridge. But we were beginning to understand something about this grassy prairie, this place where trees were bushes and only found in the low land between ridges. The prairie goes on.
You walk and walk to get to the top of a ridge, and what do you see on the other side? More ridges. Higher than the one you're on, too--you just couldn't see them from back there. And the tops of the ridges frequently aren't. Aren't tops, I mean. They're gateways to more of the same of the same.
We set a stopping point at the (arbitrary) top of the ridge we were currently climbing, although there wasn't any vegetation visible that would distinguish the point of our turnaround. It turned out to be a good choice, because there, we saw the buffalo. A sweet little herd of some 30 adults and calves, grazing and resting way off at the limit of our vision. With binoculars, we could seem them only fuzzily. You could say we chose to remain at a "safe" distance or you could say we were just lazy. They couldn't catch our scent--or us theirs!--and so they were blessedly ignorant of our intrusion. Just hanging out doing their bisonly thing.
That was pretty much the end of the trip. We drove on the Council Grove reservoir. It would have been a nice place to camp and I could see likely spots for fishing off the bank, but the rain was coming on and there wasn't much point in getting out of the car. I proposed we go back and look at the farm buildings at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve. We had no sooner parked and got out of the car than thunder groaned its warning--three steps away and we could tell we were about to be drenched and our umbrellas reversed. We reversed our steps instead and cowered back into the car.
I'm not a sissy about rain. Last year we went to a botanical garden in a drizzle. But this one was hard, fast and nearly horizontal. The misery-inducing kind. It followed us back to Wichita, let up, came back, and nearly killed us as we tried to head out next day. When I'm going 40mph in a 70, with wipers on high and fingers white-knuckled over the steering wheel, it's not a good drive no matter how much I might enjoy driving.
We learned something from it all, and like most deep truths, it's obvious when it comes to mind. We're not city people. A day in San Antonio can be a hoot, and a walk through the Waikiki beach outdoor shopping mall is entertaining. But the trips that count--the trips that stick in our gut and make us hunger for more--are the outdoors ones.
For this trip, part of the problem was lack of execution of the plan--I let us linger in historic sites too long and that truncated our outdoors time. On Monday I lingered in bed too long. Wetland birds are best observed with a spotting scope, not binoculars. Animals and birds--and reptiles and insects--are seen when they feel like being seen, not when you go look for them. Any wildlife viewing trip is a crap shoot, but the more time you spend outside, the higher your odds of twenty-one. Remember Yellowstone and the seven o'clock wake-up-fox, running through the campground? The wood thrush calls at Land Between the Lakes? Every hike in the woods thrilled with them. The otherworldly beauty of Hermit Thrush song, at the Grand Canyon North Rim campground? The prairie dog town at the entrance to Wind Cave? We didn't go looking for these things, we just went. And there they were.
Lesson learned. Go where they are, and stay there. They'll come to you.
No comments:
Post a Comment