Acast powers the world's best podcast. Here's a show that we recommend. Candela is our adversary. There's a referendum this fall, and independence is on the ballot.
Sort of. I'm Danny Parity. And I'm Tim Quaring-Cesser. We're two Alberta journalists who've covered this province for years.
This summer, we drove around Alberta, talking to separatists. And the people who want to stay. Who are they? What do they actually want?
And what happens to the rest of us if they get it? Certainly, this isn't settled on October 21. This is separation anxiety. Wherever you get your podcasts.
Acast helps creators launch, grow, and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.com. On the Gulf River at the cabin. Indeed, we are.
And there goes a pontoon. A pontoon passing in front. Will they see us? Can we open?
Oh, they're not looking, so we won't wave. Not looking. No waving, even though it's a kind of thing. But fun, they're supposed to wave.
I know they are. Oh, well. Who goes first? The person on the dock or the shore?
An excellent question. We're up a shore a little bit at the fire pit, the fire ring. And this is kind of a special episode, isn't it? It is, Bjorn.
Or piece of it. Hung it up a bit. Bjorn's dead. What?
Hi, Earl. Oh, I apologize. I'm a Bjorn. I'm going to find a way back to come up in the summertime.
This will be our last edition from the Gulf River. At least the two of us. There may be some FUD reports. There may be.
We'll see. It's not totally out of question. We'll see. Right.
Bjorn is, he's heading somewhere else in a month or so. That's right. It's been the long dream of the Lloyd's Dead family to be able to travel a bit internationally. And FUD, as you well know, I have crossed a line of adulthood that many, oddly enough, many fear.
But I embrace with open arms. I'm retired from the workbook. Woof woof woof. Oh my goodness.
Can you literally, a couple of two days ago, three days ago? Yeah. I put in my last shift and turned in my computer, my iPad, and my Apple pencil, and my name tag, and their parking paddle, and said, I'd love to say it's been great. What I like to say now is here you can have your stuff back.
No, it's been. It was wonderful. It was a good run. I'm glad to be joining the ranks of the retired.
And now, ideally, international travelers. So I may have a few field reports. Yeah, I'm a bonus of where we're headed. But yeah, it would be difficult for me.
Let's say it would take several flights for me to rejoin FUD in Kevin Country. So we thought up here, one last time, let's throw together just sort of a reminiscences. Yeah. And how is this trip going type of?
Yeah, type of chatter. We can start right off by mentioning that, since it is the first weekend of June, that means it is the Donovan annual. That's Master's Classic. And we've seen plenty of boats going by.
Yeah. But with many of relatives and friends of yours waving at us. That's right. And waving hands, not middle fingers.
Yeah, they're glad to see us. They're going by. They're heading towards their favorite spots. And they are in it to win it.
It's all about catching that trophy bass. And I forget FUD. Help me out here. How do they measure the winner?
Well, it's. They go by the inch size of the fish and they estimate the weight there. And I think it's a total, like, how much total weight is of all the fish you caught. And I think there's also like the biggest fish.
I mean, I think you'd have to have, yeah, and obviously carp and well, what else gets that big in this? I don't know. I don't know. Rough fish or?
Rough fish. No rough fish allowed. Are allowed. But in the Bassmaster.
And they're looking for bass. Let's not get ourselves. Yeah. Yeah.
Ideally. It's a Bassmaster. Right. This is not.
Classic, right. We're not out there bringing up award-winning crappies. Oh, I bet they won't run back if they catch a big two pound black crappie. Well, I don't know.
I don't know if any of these guys are catching it to clean it, need it, or if it's just the sport of the catch and release and reporting. And there's a money pot that goes into it. There is. We were invited last night.
He texted me saying, I thought I saw your boat. Are you guys up here for the Bassmaster Classic? I said, well, we're up here. I've already caught three off the dock.
Yeah, fun is that. I mean, this is what a great way for me to call a swan song. On about 10 casts, FUD caught three bass, two probably 12-inch, one 15-inch. And it's crappie.
It's not good ourselves. Many trips up here. You've tried your crappie rod and you've been shooting for crappie. I did.
Univanted black worm with a big hook. Yeah, on a rod that actually says the crappie rod. Yeah. And I went with the vaunted Arbogast frog or the jitterbug frog.
I guess they're not arbogast. They're close competitors. And also the jitterbug mouse with a bright pink reeking gulp edition. And then a septus four and then the crickhopper and then the crickhopper hornet.
And I'm thinking, you're nailing bass right and left here. Top floaters kind of create a sensation as the sun's starting to go down. There was even some rain. Yeah.
The clouds came in. And in the grand tradition of gulp river fishing, Bjorn came up with nothing. An osprey caught a bass out in the middle of the street. Right, what's that?
And FUD caught three eaters. But of course, we're not here to eat fish. We're here to do as little as possible. I get ourselves.
It's a little lot of wood. Yes, it's a lot of wood. I stack a lot of wood. I hold.
Yeah. I say it's kind of heartfelt. You demolished a couple art pieces. A couple of chainsaw art pieces from my dad.
And what stayed really in front? Oh, they were hollowed out and punky with ants. Yeah, it was kind of a crucial. Two bears, one standing on both standing on hind legs, one.
What happened to its face? Oh, it was rotted out. Right. And these were just back behind the wood pile getting more and more rotten.
So I guess I could have called my dad. I'm sure. I'm going to be confident in my guess that my dad would say, oh sure. Yeah, get rid of it.
It's all, you know, it's ant eaten. You just go ahead and I can't imagine them. Boy, I don't know why you'd cut up an old rotted piece of that your dad carved. No, that was a piece of it.
Not very sensitive. My soul went up. But we're burning. Yes.
Not get ourselves. We're offering it to and we know all about, you know, we're not poo pooing. The DNR's burn situation, but we did check. We checked it was low and green on the state map and even set as we drove by the brainer area.
Moderated. Moderate to lower energy. So no worries. And we've got our big five gallon bucket full of water here.
Full of water. Yeah. We've even got an inflatable crocodile standing guard. That's right.
Do we come up with a name with a crocodile? I don't think so. You'll have to give it a moniker. But yeah, we also, why we're up here.
I told Officer Torgerson that it was going to be your last time up. Right. So he stopped by. We were joined.
Yeah, it was crazy. It was a picture of him for the one last time. Torgie. Good to have him here.
One of our intentions in the coming, well, I don't know how long it'll take me to work along with Don to get it. I think we're going to do a special compile all the Torgerson episodes. I look forward to that. I think where I'm going to be.
Fair enough. I'm just tuning in straight like a cereal. Yeah. Like it's running in episodes back to back to back stories together.
Maybe the occasional ad break. Yeah. Maybe the occasional mitz coffee ad or you know, throw your health to the wind by yourself in chunka. Or shoe plug.
It's up to you. Yeah. It's all for you. But no, just you know, they talk about how wet it was going to be here this weekend.
Let's not get ourselves a cool breeze coming in. We had a heater on last night in the cabin. Yeah. And it felt good.
I'm not going to lie. It was a we needed touch of warm up to him. It's kind of humid today. I went check the DNR about almost 10 years ago.
Did some clear cutting. Yeah. Well, I think it was the Minnesota power that owns it. Not the DNR.
I apologize. Oh, this land we're on. We're actually leasing from it. I don't know if I've explained it to everybody.
We actually signed a 30 year lease. Lease. Lease. Yes.
And but they hired a company to do some clear cutting and they got well, they did kind of a messy job. A lot of people complained about it. But that was like Bjorn said almost 10 years ago. Yeah.
Long time ago when we walked out there, we walked around. It's like, oh my God, it's like the surface of moon with antilles. Yeah. We came in and planted a bunch of five inch tall little pines and now they're all like 10, 12, 14 feet high.
Well, at one point, they were in very dire straits of like we could have crushed them death with our walking shoes. Yeah. Little time ceilings. I remember something like that from the old Daggett Lake cabin.
My dad at one point got an offer from Northern States power or whatever the power cooperative whatever it is Northern electric cooperative and they were offering, you know, come on down to our headquarters and brainer and you can get for 20 years. It's almost like one of those goofy lure deals you'd see in the back of one of those lure logs. Oh, yeah. We'll send you 500 lures that you'll never believe.
You wouldn't believe it because you'd open them and say, I can't use these. They're all melted together and the hooks are weird. But you know, when you're seven years old, that looks pretty good. That's cool.
More than you can get to that. Power cooperative is offering all kinds of people up in the Brainer Lake area a great deal on trees. $25. You're going to walk away with like 50 trees.
Wow. I'll give you maybe not 50. But there were a lot of trees and I remember it was raining cats and dogs. It was cold, clammy early June and we drove down there.
We got a box full of little sticks covered mud and we, I'll be darned if a dear old dad didn't plant every last one of them. Wow. Same deal, you know, like a couple of more of these interesting shrubs. It was like a purple plum and after 15 years ago in the cabin, they weren't any taller than like six feet.
It was a full shrub. I don't remember if there was edible food, fruits on those, but they were pretty. But yeah, a lot of scotch pine, a lot of Norway pine maybe. Okay.
I think a Norway pine or five, a couple of like red maples and a little tiny birch. I think the deer made short work of those. But it was kind of cool. I mean, it turned our giant back a lot, which looked kind of like a, and yes, folks, that was me slapping a bug.
It is June. Yeah. There are bugs. There are bugs.
That's a garlic, another cigar. But yeah, it looked like a, look like a wiffle ball field back there at the old resort, you know, it was like the cabin and then the road and then this back lot. And I was like, they never quite knew what to do with the back lot. I didn't play ground.
I digress. We planted them all. Some of them came up. Yeah.
Some of them, they worked real well. And then we've been there past trips over the years and it looks like a wooded lot. So it's still there. It's paid out as it were.
It's good. It's cool. We're hoping your dogwood will take down there on the gallbank. Yes.
And I mentioned that we called in an area conservation person to come by and give us some advice on how to keep our bank from eroding your bank. Yes. And a common practice for that is to bundle up small green stems of dogwoods. Yeah.
They are very hardy, I guess. Hardy and fast growing. Fast growing. Hard once established.
Almost impossible to kill. Yeah. That said, how do they look now? Well, I'm not taking a shot.
I'm not taking a shot. I don't know what I mean. Yeah. Some of them, I haven't looked closely.
I'm not going to be stuck into the bank last fall. I'm looking just dead. But I brought up a bundle this early spring when we put in the dock. And I just sort of planted them in the water like a bundle of cut flowers.
And they're still there. They're leafing out. They're doing okay. So that made a lot of it.
Also, I planted a few bushes. I can't remember what they're called. I went to a nursery around up here. A little parsnip.
Looking for dogwoods. But the one thing that was suggesting something else. So I got three of those and planted those. And at first I thought they were toast, but they've come back.
And what's happening? They do have a very impressive self-seated small birch growth. Going along the edge of the river. I think what is it?
But both the current and the action of the muskrats, right? Well, that's a good question. The fact that your bank is kind of receding, wearing away, kind of a glatter. Muskrats had a large part of it.
The muskrats nest under there, into the bank. Right. So they got to stay warm, Fod. Yeah.
The muskrats got to live too. All the earth's creatures. But there's plenty of bank that isn't good enough. You'll give them some good eat of it.
Oh, really? He did. Muskrats. It involves a fair amount of pulling all the fat and sinew and glands off of meat and then soaking it repeatedly.
But you know what? It's a wrap. Let's pass. Thanks, Yule, but maybe not this time.
Yeah, interesting. I guess they are, in fact. Emergency rations, if you're... Well, imagine they're better than possums.
I would like to think so. You know how we feel about possums if you ever listen to the shows. Oh, my God. Pass a few dead ones on the highway.
Yes, indeed. And a plethora of raccoons. Yeah, lots of raccoons. Wow.
Dead on the road, a couple of deer. That they be. Yep, four unfortunately. But yeah, what else on this trip so far?
Interesting at about six yesterday. Six, seven. To hear one of those big truck engine powered boats. Oh yeah, mud motors.
Yeah, kind of a blind boat. It's almost like for waterfowling and kind of thing. Yeah, I think it's designed to get in weedy areas because the prop is way behind. It's on a very long shaft and way like, gosh, I don't know, 15, not 15, but maybe 10 feet, 8 feet long behind the tran.
Right, yeah. I'm allowed. Very loud, yeah. Yeah, and he came downriver.
He was going upriver. He's going down, coming down. Coming down. And then we watched a couple of movie offerings around getting ready to hit the rack.
Sure enough, we heard that motor coming back. Oh yeah. It's like dude, it's like midnight. Where are you going?
I do you got any lights on that thing? I mean, especially on the go. Yeah. You know, just think you could head straight into the weed bath and forget out.
But must have known what he was doing. I wonder if he's a carber. Could be a lot of a lot of. Showing the lights.
Well after dark slowly moving downriver. Oh jangles, bow honks. There we go. Bow honk carp.
Yeah. I know you took a run at it. I did. I bought something to outfit an old bow and I stood on the end of my dock for a while and that's really not the way to do it.
You're shooting at a milk jug, right? Just for practice. Well, that was what was recommended to me from where I bought my rigging for the bow. Sure.
And they said, yeah, you just get a gallon milk jug and pop off. Pop off it. I'd still like to maybe do it. But like I said, if you're standing on your dock, you could be waiting there all day for one quick ten second.
There's one. Oh my god. Draw back. Miss.
I think I have a batch. All right. I'm not bad now. It's one of you.
Yeah. It's. But the idea seems kind of fun because it's like you're getting rid of an invasive species base base of the river. Right.
So it feels like sort of a legitimate hunting. I'll get rid of those. I'm doing some good work for the river ecosystem. Folks, you might be saying to yourself, well, those two jug heads are out there recording by the firing in the middle of a five alarm thunderstorm.
Those would be the howitzers at Ripley. Yeah, Ripley's not far away. Yep. We are listening.
I don't know if you can pick them up. But the report of, I'm going to guess one oh five howitzers. All this weekend. Right.
I'm guessing every week. Probably all week. I don't know. Very hot.
We took a walk down to see that cut. It was in the sun. It felt like it was about 80. Yeah.
I've probably not. But it felt like it. Like it was man to be standing out there in full suit. Oh, yeah.
Oh boy. I had a good friend who was a reservist and he talked about doing summer duty up at Ripley and having to stay sharp in days they called you. Oh. He said, you will never miss the days of suiting up and belly crawling through the tall grass up in Ripley.
Oh my god. 95 degree humidity. Wow. Wow.
Thanks to all those that do it. Right. I guess 59. So yeah.
Yeah, that's no longer part of it. No longer part of it. Never was really an option. FUD.
I think one of the paws from the bear just rolled up. Maybe that was the artistic trunk of it. Oh, yes. It's now punky and defunct.
It's supposed to be a bees nest and a bear trying to get at it. Right. Just rolled out of the fire. Maybe I'll get up.
Yes. Do a little touch. I won't touch that. Sorry.
I already did. That wasn't thunder. That was Bjorn hitting the recorder. No, well, we're high tech here.
We're wearing wireless mics. That's right. And we just thought it'd be easier and lucky you get to listen to this just prattle on and talk about it. We like prattling on and we've done 70-some episodes of issues.
That's right. That's right. Good thing I retired from. You got to take it easy on that bubbly water.
I know. I've had almost. What I often talked about is that we love to listen to old time radio shows and we've even started listening to a fellow podcasters long running show that we're quite into. Yeah, it's very good.
Can we even say the name? We're going to. Go ahead. Monsters Among Us.
Yep. I mean, it's a perfect thing around the fire. We're listening to people call in with their spooky encounters with unexplainable things. And I have to admit, at first I thought, oh, this is kind of cheesy.
Oh, wow, this is cool. Yeah. So we like it. It's well done.
But in a dis- That's not a plug. Yeah, it's not a plug. We're not being. We're not being.
We're not being. Right. Monsters Among Us might be fine. Good stuff.
Nice. Nice stuff. Good stuff. I'm great for a starry night around a campfire.
Yes. Sounds of... We can recommend. Bullfog.
Cabin Country. Monsters Among Us. Absolutely. But we did.
As we will actually do. We'll listen to some back, some old Cabin Country episodes. We listened to a couple. What were the ones we did our volume two spook rest?
Yes. Hamlet Lake haunting. Yes. Hamlet Lake haunting.
Car game going awry amongst. Yes. Hardworking. Right.
Right. Lumbermen. War of the Dogfish is our tip of the cap that was in Wells 1938 Classic War of the World. War of the World, yes.
And I know my dear sister said it one point. Yeah, I tried listening to it. Other than that, how do you like it? Well, it's not.
It's all right. It's not for everybody. But we love it. We have a lot of fun.
Yeah. It is definitely inspired by this locale. Yeah. Exactly.
It is fun to listen to it and it's because we have fun doing it. Although I can't get over it, especially if it's been a while since I've heard one of our recreated dramatizations of something that I think, gosh, I'm not nearly as talented as I thought I was when it comes to reforming these stories. Oh, don't sell yourself short, but that's all right. I'm my own worst critic.
I know it. We all are. It's like a dumb thing. But yeah, I just keep stocking the fire here, folks.
That's awesome. Yeah. We can hear it. I hope you can hear the breeze along the goal.
There's no thundering of 105 millimeter howitzer comes from the thundering of one of our Godox as we're thinking, oh, yeah, we haven't had dinner yet. That's all right. That's in the near future. Yeah, we've taken out the old reliable phone app Merlin to identify some bird calls.
We have. But we watched it at Osprey, you know, that got came in second in our final. Yeah, our best master. Yeah, I of course came up with lots of I should know my weeds better.
No raccoon tail, but plenty of that long skinny stuff that looks almost like big bluestem under the river hangs on to have the treble hooks and great crested flycatchers. Oh, yeah. Great. Great.
Great. Great. Great. Yeah.
I've never. I don't think I ever heard a great crested flycatcher. Of course, I'll run the chickadees out there and a bluejay who you said was mimicking. I think a hawk of some kind.
We're as up last week and I realized bluejay is mimic. That's cool. Yeah, they are mimicors. It's like, I think our catbirds also.
Oh, yeah. Catbirds and mockingbirds. We thought we saw a bald eagle, but I think they've been maybe they're vultures. I just couldn't see the white.
Well, the flite pattern was way too steady for a turkey vulture. Yeah, that's true. And I thought as it kind of banked over the bend down there by your cousin Doug Shack. I thought, man, I think I see a white tail that could have been a young bald eagle.
Could have been as they're called juvenile or a hawk. Right. Very big. We were on our let's check out the cut area.
Yeah, the pretty sure we saw a paragon fell. Yeah. Sure sounded like the call of a paragon. It was up pretty high and scanning around high speed dive.
At some point, I would imagine. So a lot of good stuff to see, a lot of fun things. Interest of this particular trip that is some of the minutiae Bjorn finds interesting. We sat around the fire for a while with nothing burning in it.
Again, listening to radio shows, listening to ambient music, listening to our own music, and our good friends at Red Flannel Trout. That's right. That's wonderful stuff. You haven't checked out Red Flannel Trout?
Yeah, check out Red Flannel Trout. Both off the cuff kind of comedic offerings and some really cool ambience as well. Yeah. But all these little tiny kind of brown, black, copper colored butter.
Right. They're just landing in the fire pit and sticking their proboscisies down into the ash. I think it must be some kind of mineral getting out of that ash. Yeah, I suppose.
I know a lot of times butterflies like salt, like various minerals. They know the carrots that land on the side of a clay hill and just like, oh, sure. Swallowing beaks full of clay. Wow.
I'm quite sure why they do that. I'm sure someone out there knows they could ask my own just the forester. Ah. I'll just help us out here.
Coming to leave the city got to get a shame. I think it was last weekend I was up with a family and the three ladies were in the cabin. I was out here by the fire and I had this moment of like, oh my God, yeah, Bjorn's not going to be coming up here for quite a while. It's just like a, so I was getting, well, I don't want to say we'd be a melancholy, but I did have the thought of it.
The nostalgia was starting to, right. It was dawning on me that, wow, this is, I mean, we've been doing this long before our podcast. We started in like 90, 91. Right.
Coming up here. And we started out for many years just making one annual trip in the fall. Yeah. Yeah.
And then it's finally dawned on us. What the heck can we do more than that? Absolutely. So we started doing three times or so a year.
Remember the early days doing the 90s, hot dogs. Yeah. Hormel, chili. Oh, yeah.
On buns. On buns. I've still hadn't been. You hadn't realized how much pain.
I don't know about that. Chili's just really rocking a gut load here. Yeah, you're gluten intolerant Einstein. So I'm going to stop with the buns and maybe read the label on the chili.
Right. And we had two dogs. Yeah. Gluten free.
Sons buns. Yeah. Turkey chili, no beans. No buns.
Yeah, no buns. And it's fun. Some fairly lean beef. Natural casing weiners.
Yeah, they were awfully good. They were good, but I have to say without beans and without gluten, I was left with white and uncomfortable. I got it. Yeah, interesting.
It wasn't fun. Curious. What happened? What in the wide, wide world of sports is going on with fjords.
With fjorn and Judd. Wait. I'm a fun. And this is fjord.
Yeah. Or fjord was rocking a gut load. Oh, man. Unfortunate.
But hey, you know what? The passage of time, right? These whole things happen. Yeah, we used to eat a lot of that and a lot of it would bring up bags of knock off Cheetos from some gas chain and candy.
We'd load up on candy. Right. I mean, we continue year by year to compare our diet to what it was like in our 20s and 30s. Turning into dattering old men for.
Right. I can't touch that. My blood sugar is too high. Care for another baby carrot?
Yes. Yes, I'll take one of those. Yeah. That's fine.
In fact, my dinner tonight. What are you probably going to dine on a little bit later here? Have a little bit of an roasted turkey slices left. Okay.
Narl's bird cheese and slices. And then some snack size cukes. I don't know if they're our medium. Big burpless.
Well, those are good. Those are good. Go back to an old red flannel trout song. That's right.
Big burpless. Miju. Big burpless. Oh, I want to know Christmas is my favorite.
No, they're good. I still have a pint of blackberries and so's off. You know, my carrots are good. Many of my friends from other lines of work.
I was like, God, him and the carrots again. There we go. Why is he turning a certain color? Orange.
I'd really rather not turn orange for so many reasons. Anyway, I love them. I just absolutely love them. And then popcorn.
Popcorn. Popcorn. Fud in. Yarn will be mowing on popcorn.
Possibly watching other police squad. Police squad are we also enjoyed an old Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple. Yes. From the mid 60s.
They're old gal. They look quite jeez struggling to keep the folks in their head. Right. They're quite entertaining.
Oh, they're great. I'm probably enjoying a salad with a packet of tuna. Does that sound like cabin food or what? Not really, but if you know what, it's a...
It's like a manish fare. But hey, you know, not manish. Speaking of manish, I'm going to go back to the invitation from my cousin dog to partake of their Bassmaster Classic. And I said, well, we may visit its Bjorn's last cabin trip up here before he moves in July and I said, we may stop by, but you know, as bad as I feel about not going and rubbing elbows with him and his buddies, I don't want to.
Well, you might be a participant. Well, I just might. You got a tracker. Right.
I'll come up and maybe both of you always on your own. Head. We'd be Ed. We'd be Ed.
Training through the pressure. Get up, big fisherman. Right. Yeah, he's a big fisherman.
Or Buck Fielding. Buck Fielding. Now that is an individual. Taylor Me.
Yes. The cinnamon. He'd love it as a classic. And Buck is...
A little bit competitive too. I think he'd be upset with himself. He would. He would.
Not only that, but both my cousin, Doug and Buck Fielding are both realtors. That is true. That is true. Talk realty.
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I thought I'm going to ask if you wouldn't mind if we don't take a short break because that about seven cans of water. Oh, alright.
Okay. We'll be back. I can't tell for you. Right after this.
Where is this? It's intermission time. Take it away. Get more out of life.
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