Back Cast
I unrolled a foam sleeping pad borrowed from a spare bedroom that hadn’t been slept on in months. It didn’t fit perfectly and there was some temptation to trim some of the excess, but I decided against it, mostly because I didn’t want to run into the house and find a pair of scissors.
With the backseats of my vehicle folded down and the pad in place, it looked doable. Having read a number of stories about adventurous (read: younger) people traveling around the country for weeks at a time, sleeping in the backs of their vehicles and cooking meals on camping stoves sitting in the dirt, I figured we could do it for one night. Not a problem.
It was the last weekend in March and we’d caught a break in the weather – 70 degrees for the high, and 28 for the overnight low. My youngest kid, 12, didn’t have school on Monday, so we decided to use the window of freedom to hit the road.
We loaded sleeping bags, pillows, a cooler, spinning rods, fly rods, two tackle boxes, .22-caliber rifle and ammunition. While we didn’t have much of a plan, we weren’t running screaming into the night, either.
We were thinking of camping at Coal Mine Lake in Sheridan County and fishing for pike along the way. We brought the .22 because Jack was determined to shoot a cottontail rabbit, cook it over a campfire and make a winter hat out of the pelt when we got home.
Fair enough.
We pulled off and parked at what looked like the only turnout on the paved county road that ran arrow-straight through Lake Harriet and Arena Lake.
We cast spinning gear – red and white Dardevles, hooked to wire leaders – without so much as a bump. I imagined the pike in that cool, late March water, sluggishly hugging the bottom, waiting for things to warm up.
Soon we’re joined by two anglers who understood the recipe for early-season pike, bobbers and dead smelt fished on the bottom.
When we left, three pike swung heavy from a metal stringer attached to the side mirror of their pickup. The biggest fish was about 7 pounds.
About an hour north, we turned east off of ND Highway 14 down a gravel road in the direction of Coal Mine Lake.
In the next 5 miles, we saw two bald eagles perched in a lone cottonwood that was weeks away from leafing out, several pheasants, a handful of sharp-tailed grouse and three moose.
If we were keeping score, we’d decided, the moose scored highest, just because you don’t see them every day in North Dakota.
Sitting around the campfire later, eating cold store-bought chicken and recounting an unsuccessful (but not uneventful) cottontail hunt, we’d occasionally lean our heads back and look between cottonwood branches and through wood smoke for what was familiar – big dipper, little dipper, north star ….
When it was time to turn in, I flipped up the window and swung open the rear door to my Jeep and spread two sleeping bags on top of the foam pad.
In what little illumination the campfire and the vehicle’s overhead light offered, our sleeping space looked smaller, a lot smaller, really, than it did in the driveway at home.
Turns out, I hadn’t thought the whole sleeping-in-the-back-of-the-rig thing all the way through. That’s on me. I’ll take the blame for a horrible night’s sleep, but I won’t apologize for it.
If I’d have stopped and thought everything through over the years, it’s unlikely we’d have gotten off the couch.