Cafeoutdoors.com: Swan Lake-Fountain Grove memories...

Every year about this time I get nostalgic for what can only be called the Old Days... now more than 40 seasons in the rearview mirror...

I am constantly grateful to have grown up there within five miles of Fountain Grove and 15 of Swan Lake during the Sixties and Seventies. A time and place where the continual adaptation of wild birds and the influence of mankind combined to produce a phenomenon the likes of which we won't see again, until this Earth passes away and a new one takes its place. It was a unique slice of time...

That 120-200,000 bird Canada goose population in the Grand River basin in those years was admittedly TOO many geese in too small an area... but MAN... the memories those days produced... I can still see em in my mind's eye!

Guys shooting geese from Tree blinds along the west border road of Swan Lake... gave em an extra 10 yards of "reach" LMAO except the birds they hit fell into the timber who knows where?? ... blinds and pits every 60 yards on Linscott's and Thornsberry's and others... being able to park and watch guys decoy and kill geese (after we had already killed ours!) marveling at the 1000 decoy "black hole" spread on Tiemeyer's hill, and hearing the barrages of buckshot being fired at geese 300 yards high LMAO (now and then, a luckless old goose would catch one of those buckshot in the wingbone or breast and fall... and THEN the race was ON from every pit on the place... first to the bird got it... TOTALLY FORKED UP but fun to watch from a distance!)

The Hunny House... Honkers, Inc., the observation tower at the federal headquarters... and the crip pen... being able to shoot from E.L. Reed's pits across from the State Headquarters for $5 a gun!!! (and killling geese from there, don't think you couldn't!) ... watching the mail every late summer for "Reservation" or "sorry" postcards from the Conservation Dept... meaning you either got a blind that year or didn't... not that it mattered, we had goose and duck hunting galore.. but in those days, hunting Swan Lake or the Grove was something special...

Bugs German and Jack Friesner, always cheerful and helpful behind the window at the state HQ... road blocks where the man asked "how many" you got... wondering how long the season would last THIS year (remember the nine day season?? or was it 11?)... killing a limit of geese and ducks before being at school at 8:30... playing hooky from school in the waterblinds or K pits at the Grove.. and NOBODY reporting us! HAHAHAH Finding whole boxes and lots of loose indivdiual shells under the benches of the blinds at the Grove... sometimes a duck or goose call... sometimes a bottle of hootch or a nice thermos!

Hell... we rode BIKES down to the Grove for teal hunting, and dove shoots... and rode em back in the dark, ducks over the handlebars... imagine kids today doing that...

Skipping senior year basketball so I could hunt every single day of the season that year... killed 109 Canada geese that season... best move I ever made... wouldn't trade that season for ANYTHING... Being present to see the old man knock down geese over decoys with his Bear recurve bow and flu-flu arrows -- yep, flying, and on two different hunts! -- and then the time I finally killed one on the ground at John Lee Boyles' blind with my Ben Pearson cheapass bow and a Bear broadhead!

The One Shot Goose Hunts, where we would only take one shell each... you miss, you go home without a goose... seeing the waves on waves of geese and mallards flying out over McKenzie's or the Lee Brothers' farm south of Meadville... and on north over town.. to feeding fields way up north.

Hunting with the "old men" in overalls (who were then about MY present age!!!!) like Jordan Coates, Kenny, John Lee and Robert Boyles, and Ray Martens and Buck Duncan... and the Old Man... and them passing the quart bottle of Old Grand-Dad after the geese were all down and the guns were cased... the THRILL of feeling part of the tribe when they'd pass me the bottle and say, "Here Scotty... you have a nip, too.." And then how they'd look at each other and wink and laugh as the rotgut made me gag and my eyeballs water LMFAO!

To this day... Every time I smell bourbon whiskey, I am back there at those goose pits... the same goes for the smell of glazed donuts in a brown paper sack... and the earthy rich smell of gumbo bottomland mud... and the smell of a "pre-steel-shot" shotgun shell that's been fired... the smell of burnt gunpowder... each of these scents instantly carry me back to those golden memories in goose pits and duck blinds in the Swan Lake-Fountain Grove areas ... what a way to grow up! What a place to grow up!

There are a million other memories and images that I could list... but let these suffice for now... one of these days, I'm gonna put together that feature article, "Swan Lake Memories" with input from all you guys and my own recollections... It needs to be done, because as I said at the top... Such Will Not Exist Again... and slowly the men who lived it are marching into the fog of Oblivion... so the story needs telling.

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