A, um, (un) balanced life

So at any rate I was wandering around the other day on the edge of this wet meadow and there were two deer laying out there watching me.

On the edge of the meadow there was a woods and me being me I still got the bright ideas that I'd like to go in there and poke around for some stupid reason.

I made a similar mistake earlier this year taking pictures of some early flowers. I wandered in what looked to be a friendly woods. But just about every tree was down. You get to hopping around in a place like that chasing a bird or some other stupid creature and then you find yourself stuck, spending the better part of the afternoon trying to get out.

As summer progresses it only gets worse because the grass and other brush starts growing up and you can't really tell just how much stuff is down until you actually step foot into the place.

Well anyways my first step into this woods didn't go well because my shirt caught on a branch and the weight of my pack, which is just about 40 pounds nowadays without lunch, shifted and the camera I was carrying on top the weight of the pack shifted and over I went.

Kersplash.

The meadow was wetter than it looked. It had about 2 inches of water seeping up through the grass.

I blinked the mud out of my eye, twisted my head around to see if the camera was OK (it was) and then let out a pretty good string of language that is normally reserved for men at war or in divorce court.

My entire left side was soaked and those deer (remember those deer I told you about?) they stood up all straight and proper like and huffed at me and then got the hell out of there. Boing! Boing! Boing!

Meanwhile I worked the mud out of my ear and trudged on.

I found nothing special in the woods, in fact, it was just as bad as I expected and quite frankly, I didn't stay in there long at all. It was, in a word, boring.

Plus I was soaked. Correction. Half of me was soaked. One half of me was dry. The other half was, well, it was, shall we say, pasty.

But the day was young, so I trudged on and I saw a few cool things, like some ducks and a great blue heron and a rainbow and a neat little grove of aspens. I'm partial to aspens. They're diverse in many ways and even a little patch of them, particularly if a few are dead, will hold more birds than miles of lodgepole pine forest.

Eventually I dried out completely and then a thunderstorm rolled in but by then I was back at the truck.

Yes, I'm sick of rain.

But what can one do? Try, I suppose, to stay on your feet. That would be a very good start.

Have a good week.

Chris Peterson is the soggy editor of the Hungry Horse News.