The Lake Where You Live

Many people write about the outdoors. Some can make readers feel like we’re actually out there, on the lake, in the woods, wearing the boots or snowshoes. 

Far fewer also help us appreciate the why of going outside — what makes our experiences so transcendant, so essential. Dave Greschner is that kind of writer.

Greschner was sports and outdoors editor for the Rice Lake Chronotype for more than 40 years and now writes the online “Dave Greschner Outdoor Journal.” The first book of his best work, Soul of the Outdoors (Cornerstone Press), came out in December 2023. I discovered it just lately. 

Greschner no doubt did lots of hunting and fishing in his newspaper days, but that’s not what his book is about. Now and then he mentions taking a shotgun along on a hike during grouse season. He recounts one April afternoon of fishing on what turned out to be the absolute last day of (just barely) safe ice: “Nothing I would recommend. Nothing I would do again.” 

But in most of these short essays, reflections and journal entries he simply chronicles, with all his senses and his mind’s eye, what he observes. He spends a memorable morning on a marsh as great blue herons build nests of sticks in a rookery amid tall dead trees. 

“Sometimes the herons sit quite still, like old men with white hair in gray overcoats, watching and waiting. Then the herons preen, touch each other’s beaks, and, at times, turn their heads to watch a bald eagle cruise above the swamp.”

Not all observations are from far afield. There’s the welcoming home of two puppies. Watching cardinals and robins play in a birdbath. Hanging a feeder for hummingbirds. Learning to back a fifth-wheel camper.

The best entries go deeper than mere reporting. Greschner finds gratitude for gifts in September: “Painted leaves and faded tansies. Lingering butterflies and easy breezes. Red apples and blue asters, old shotguns and canoe paddles, wood smoke at the cabin and frost on the pumpkin…”

Solace on a hilltop overlooking a lake: “We all can’t walk the woods and shorelines, but we all can let nature take over our thoughts for a time, move the troubled horizon for a moment or more… Worries becalmed.”

Wonder at boyhood memories of puffy clouds floating by: “Where were the clouds going? How far and how fast? Would they circle the globe or dissipate over the neighbor’s hill? Would a cloud that looked like a bear above me take on that same form 10 or 100 miles away?

In a New Year’s entry that ends the book, he muses, “I often exist in fits of hurry, the only order in the day that of what needs attention next on my list… Nature, however, pays calm, instinctive attention to the daily small stuff. The birds and critters, and trees and rivers, paint the big picture slowly and steadily on the canvas of each year. I should too.”

My one disappointment with Soul of the Outdoors is that it’s only 138 pages. The good news: Greschner is working on another book. 

I’ll be at the St. Germain Fish and Wildlife Club meeting on Wednesday, May 21, 7 p.m., at the St. Germain Community Center, talking about natural shorelines and being a lake steward. I also invite you to attend my presentation at the Minocqua Public Library at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, May 22. 

Ted Rulseh, a writer, author and advocate for lake protection, lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. Visit him and his blog at https://thelakeguy.net.