By the time I was a teenager, I had already caught the fishing bug and it was where most of thoughts went. Over the winter I would ice fish some but much of my time would be spent organizing my fishing tackle or studying maps, looking for new spots to try. I was obsessed.
Early in the season when I was 14, I drove a 14-foot boat with a 15-horsepower motor from our family cabin on the west arm of Lake of the Woods to Ash Rapids Camp to introduce myself and offer up my services for guiding.
The owner of the camp at the time, Roger Clinton, was friendly to me but I’m sure he wasn’t really eager to send a geeky-looking, hundred-pound kid with glasses to take his guests out fishing. Instead, he told me I could start off doing work around the camp. It was my first job so I did what he told me to do, with the end goal being that I was going to be a guide someday.
Throughout the spring, I worked on the weekends doing all kinds of jobs around the camp.
At some point in early June, it was time to cut the grass. I had done plenty of grass cutting and weed-eating so I was somewhat excited because it was a job I liked.
Around our family cabin, we had a decent amount of poison ivy, which my Grandpa always pointed out whenever we passed by. I knew what it looked like and was careful never to touch it. I did well to only get a little sample of it on my ankle once or twice up to that point because around Northwest Ontario it’s not hard to find.
After I cut the grass with the lawn mower at Ash Rapids, there was still some work to do with the weed eater. As I went along, I noticed that there was poison ivy mixed in with the grass I was cutting and just tried to be careful not to hit it with the machine or touch it. Evidently, I did a bad job because by Monday afternoon when I was back at school, I started having an outbreak on my neck and arms, where I got hit with shrapnel from the weed eater. I can’t remember how long I had a rash on my neck for but I do remember it kind of put a damper on my plans for the prom.
After that, it seemed like I would get poison ivy at least a couple times each summer somewhere on my wrists or ankles. A bottle of calamine lotion was mandatory equipment at our house.
For many years, I’ve been diligent about staying away from poison ivy. I know what it looks like and generally, where you’re going to find it. Fast forward to now and I can’t even tell you the last time I had it but that all changed this past week.
I was planting a few trees around my yard and I guess I plucked one right out of a patch of poison ivy because I got the worst outbreak of it on my arm that I have ever seen. A spot nearly the size of a fist has been a nightmare this past week. From there I must have brushed my torso before I washed up because there are probably ten smaller little spots of it on my body.
While it hasn’t really stopped me from doing what I want to do, it’s a brutal little plant to mess with. The rash looks nasty and it is so itchy.
I’m going on a week of fighting with it and it’s starting to get a little bit better but it’s still a big inconvenience. Where I dug up the tree, it was in an area that I knew had poison ivy in the summer but the plants seemed to have disappeared. I figured maybe they had given up for the winter. I was wrong. You can still get poison ivy in the fall!
Later in that summer when I started going out to Ash Rapids, I did finally get to do my first guide trip. Another guide didn’t show up one morning and they needed someone to take a couple of guys fishing. I think Roger trusted that I knew where to fish and he sent me off, much to the displeasure of the guests I imagine. I’m sure he probably made some kind of deal with them that if they didn’t catch any fish, they weren’t paying. I took them to the best spots that I knew and we had a good day.
