The Lake Where You Live

If I took a picture of Birch Lake’s wooded shoreline with my phone and went to work on it with the fancy editing functions, I couldn’t do much to dial up the color, nor would I want to — there’s such a thing as too much.

Anyway that’s the scene on Friday, October 11, as I pilot the pontoon boat toward the Birch Lake Bar landing where the dealer will pick it up for winter storage and some repairs. It’s too windy to take a last Secchi disc water clarity reading, but the water’s pea-soup tint tells me it wouldn’t differ much from the 5.5 feet I recorded two weeks ago.

The wind is tolerably warm, which is odd because it blows straight out of the north, which I guess is where the cold front and rain predicted for Sunday will come from. It has been an unusually warm autumn, at least for the last half of September and the first third of October. 

I have one last 2024 fishing outing planned for tomorrow with a friend, but not on Birch Lake, and not on this boat. My 16-foot fishing craft will serve that purpose. I guess we’ll pursue walleyes on one of the lakes near here, likely minnow on jigs.

There’s usually a bit of melancholy to this autumn-ritual last pontoon ride. I’ve made the trip in each of the last eight or nine years (I can’t remember exactly) since we bought the boat. This time I end the season almost with a sense of relief.

The weather has been strange since all the way back in June. The boat starter has been balky since then; the battery required frequent charging; it wore down after every three or four outings, and I was never certain when out on the water if I would be able to restart and make it back to the pier (though I always did).

Other than during May and early June, the fishing was difficult. More often than not I was skunked with prejudice, even in places that for years I have considered sure fire. The lake has changed a lot. Panfish and perch numbers are up, walleyes and smallmouths are down, considerably.

So the boat will go back to the dealer to have its issues rectified, and to a fabric shop that will make a new cover for the boat’s sofa seat. And I’ll look forward to having once again a reliable boat come spring.

For now there’s that fall color to enjoy. The explosion of reds, oranges and yellows always looks best surrounding and reflected in water. I’ll observe it and walk beneath it while removing the pier for winter, a bit of compensation for a job that gets harder every year.

I steer a straight course of the Birch Lake landing, tie the boat off at the pier, and set off on foot along Sand Lake Road. Yellow leaves float down on the wind. The colors of October blaze around and above me as I make the two-mile trek back home.

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.