The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 195: Hunting the Anthropocene

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

Steven Rinella talks with Rick Smith, Danny Morrison, Sean Weaver, Ryan Callaghan, Seth Morris, and Janis Putelis. Topics discussed: Steve's favorite thing to talk about: swiping right for love; how Danny blew off two of his toes while goose hunting; South Dakota's historic flooding and underwater highways; how fish eggs can survive in bird shit; Cal’s voyeuristic tendency to watch salamanders make love; Matt Rinella's "Trespassers Welcome" sign; shooting ducks over wasted tofu; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Download the Hunt app from the iTunes or Google Play Store. Know where you stand with OnX. I'll tell you what I think Rick lies about. What? Now that we're recording. Rick, Rick here says that when we kind of like pitch them, sell them

to female listeners, that it doesn't work. No, I think it does work. I think that he maybe doesn't seal the deal. No, it works on our end. It doesn't work on his end.

Yeah, you guys are doing everything you can. I just have a real hard time believing it. That we could say here on this show, like, here's this guy, Rick, nice guy. Drone enthusiast.

Drone pilot. And then say that he's open to all comers. All female... No, no, that's not the right word. He's open to any... He's open to... I'm pretty sure about... About five minutes before we started this whole podcast thing. That's not what he meant.

I think I said, let's not talk about that. No, I know you didn't. No, no. I know. No, but you said it in a way where like, I was like, Rick, we're going to talk about it. You're like, okay, I'm cool. He said that he knew that we would. Yeah, I knew you would.

He was just saying that. So nothing trickles in? No, I get some, I don't know. I get a few Instagram messages. And then how do you vet them? I mean, there's not a lot of vetting. Maybe I respond. Mostly don't respond.

Are you on any dating applications right now? Yep. Rick Smith. mostly don't respond are you on any uh dating um applications right now yep rick smith yeah but i mean how many like 10 10 how many how many i don't like i mean how many rick smith could be running around a lot oh dude there's probably like a dozen bozeman richard smith really pretty common name pretty yeah so people can't go find... You know what probably is happening now that I think about it? I just get lost in the... I think there's so many Rick Smiths that we plug you, say you're a nice enough guy,

and the women all come to find you, but they wind up marrying other Ricks. Ricks, they wind up marrying other Rick Smiths. That's probably what happens. Well, eventually all those Rick Smiths will be married up yeah pretty soon they'll be like god there's gotta be there's gotta be a single rick smith out there somewhere and they'll find you yeah seth likes this line of inquiry as much as steve does which is saying a lot because this is steve's favorite thing oh you know because here's the thing man here's the thing i've been married a long time so when i got married there was no when i was like single and dating there were no uh applications it was analog yeah dating apps yeah you had to go like talk to talk to you

had to go down to the bar yeah so you couldn you couldn't just sit there and be flicking through people. So I'm interested and I'm very interested in people who are having this experience that I was never able to live. Yeah. I mean, I think it's not as cracked up as people that are in committed relationships that look back and be like, oh, I wish there was a digital dating app when I was dating. I think it's not that helpful.

Creates laziness. Yeah, it's just a weird... It's hard to tell from a picture how people are, whether you're attracted to them or not. So you end up going... What what there's a lot about a person that doesn't come through on a photo that is instantly like you're aware of it when you meet the person in like a real setting yeah you know I don't know that this conversation is gonna be

interesting to our listeners but I'm sure I really do not agree. I could tell pretty much everything I need to know. Because I look at what they're doing. No, but it's all curated. False advertising, man. No, because I look into their eyes. And I can tell whether they like it.

I told you, you can drive my Tinder. You can set my profile. You can do the whole thing. If. I told you. You can drive my Tinder. You can send my profile. You can do the whole thing. If I was on there. Well, you can be. Well, no. I mean, let's just say. I mean, for me.

Heaven forbid. Let's just say factors in life led me to have to go beyond there. I would look at the pictures. And I'd be like, oh, this person's fishing. And I'm like, oh, you you know i'm attracted to him but what then that was the only picture of them fishing no because then i would i would i would look and i'd be like i can tell they really like to fish they seem like a nice person that's that's very possible you'd be like by god that gal's got split shot underneath her lip. She keeps her wax worms in her lip.

Yeah. And I'd know. And I'd click. I'd swipe. Yeah. What do you do when you want them? You swipe right? Left?

You don't even know. Yeah. Oh. I mean. I'm done talking about it. Yeah. Aren't you guests tonight? Did you guys meet your wives normal? Yeah. I mean. I'm done talking about it. Yeah. Aren't you guests tonight? Did you guys meet your wives normal?

Yeah. I kind of regret that I didn't have any of those dating apps right away. But you were around. They were part of your generation. No. How old are you? Like, I'm 28. Yeah.

Dude. For sure. Rich twice as old as you. Yeah. No. I already knew her like when I was, I knew her when I was 19 I met her. But you still weren't participating in the Tinder?

No, and right after we started dating, Tinder came out. I'm not going to lie, I was a little tempted to just make one to check it out. You met your wife at 19. Doing what? Being in college. Is she from the farm and ranch world no no and you met her in college yep stuck with her yep how long you been married four years now is it going good oh yeah

it's great has she threatened uh she got mad at you and acted like she doesn't want to be married anymore she gets dated from 19 to 24 i guess that seems like a reasonable amount of time yeah okay okay sorry about your name danny morrison married four years yes sir and sean you bet sean weaver just married just married married into the farm and ranch community married into the farm and ranch community four months ago dream dream weaver creative yes sir is that your company yep that's right travel around doing video stuff did you marry um did you marry her just because uh of the land yep no no i. No. I always say that I'm the guy

that everybody hates because he played way above his pay grade. Meaning like if I knew you and hung out with you I would I would

Oh she's way too hot for me. That's all there is to it. I'd be like oh he'd probably you know then I'd meet your wife and I'd think that there was a mistake.

Yeah. Definitely. Still think there is. Like she should have think that there was a mistake. Yeah, definitely. Still think there is. She should have swiped left. Yeah, whatever. Whatever. Tell everybody where you guys live. I live in Volga, South Dakota, which is by Brookings, South Dakota.

And I live in Britton, South Dakota. And you guys met in college in a real trashy rental house. Yeah, I like some of the stories you're talking about that you... Good South Dakota story. You live with two muskrat trappers. Can we talk about this? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Live with two muskrat trappers. One was a big weed smoker. Yep. And one didn't like to smoke weed but they like to trap muskrats together yep yep yeah it's interesting that's a team it's a good premise of a little film and they didn't just like casually trap muskrats it was like all day every day oh yeah you said they stacked them up oh yeah they had like five deep freezers going with muskrats did they get you said they got about 800 yeah that winter i think yeah and

that was during that little mini muskrat boom that was a few years ago yeah when prices shot up yeah uh my buddy was telling me like what are you saying they were getting like eight or nine my buddy was saying like muskrats out of horror con marsh he was getting like 18 for big big rats i'd believe it it. It was crazy. I mean, our one roommate went and bought a brand new mud boat with a fancy surface drive motor and all that off muskrat money. Really set him up. Oh, yeah.

No, he bought it to go get more muskrats or he bought it? Well, he bought it with muskrat money and used it to go get more muskrats. Can we talk about what later happened to him? How he became paranoid well or no i mean yeah okay a little bit that he thought but it brought up the question we brought up here before just leave the foundation of the paranoia well it's just it brings up this interesting thing uh do people that smoke a lot of weed like i think that smoking a lot of weed made you paranoid like it made you think the government was doing stuff to you or whatever yeah there's aliens hanging around whatever it's all the things that weed smokers like to do with their time. Yep.

But my brother one day brought up, he's like, no, I just think that there's the same kind of guy that likes to think about aliens and likes to think the government's out to get them, likes to smoke weed. It could be true to that. He could have gone both ways on that deal. Hard to know. It's like the chicken and the egg. A lot of people, I think, like all of the above. Yeah, he's like, no, I like to think about aliens. I like to think that the government's out to get me. And I like to smoke weed.

But I wonder if it causes it. Smoking a lot of weed makes you like aliens. I think there's probably a level of weed you can smoke to actually get real paranoid oh absolutely yeah right it's like or to get it to become an alien enthusiast oh yeah maybe you were just an alien enthusiast and then you smoked a lot of weed and became a professional yeah someone will probably send in because we didn't have the correction you know i've been talking like i got to throw in a quick correction. A listener sent in a study that proves that gluten intolerance is not, in fact, a partisan ailment. I'd always thought it was the thing that strikes people on the left,

which made me always think it was a weird sickness. Like, how many sicknesses are... All the snowflakes just... Well, maybe they're just more vocal about it. Yeah, but in fact, gluten intolerance can, in fact, does, in fact, strike both sides, left and right. Because it's a real thing. They actually did a study on this? Yeah, they asked people, like, you know, whatever.

Asked them about their politics and asked if they had gluten intolerance. It turns out that right-wing people can get gluten intolerance. I just think they keep quiet about it. Because they don't want to admit that they have some sort of, you know. Because it's viewed as a partisan condition. Oh, when I hear it i'm like oh right oh disappointed about hillary clinton are you like i just know i just know but like like oh i'm gluten intolerant i'm like oh yeah i don't know a place like italy which

they're all about their wheat and they have like a whole gluten-free deal because people really are gluten intolerant well i'm pointing out i don't want to dwell on it i'm just pointing out the place where i was wrong and i just wanted to clarify the connect correction yeah uh now i want to move on to you blowing your two toes off with a shotgun right yep tell us about that yeah so uh me and a few buddies were out hunting geese in a wheat field and uh and we were uh in a layout blind uh kind of a deal and wait you were in your own or you were all in no we're not all we're playing that game where you try to see how many people can get in a layout

with their shotgun okay so layout blind with a shotgun. Okay, so layout blind is a coffin. Think of like a coffin. Yeah, with doors. With doors. Right? And the doors open basically like your chest from the tip of your head

to the in between your toes is bisected and you erupt from this coffin in like a semi-laying position to try to shoot birds. And there's a little bit of backrest that gives you a little bit of pitch because

if you have powerful abs and you're used to doing sit-ups, it's no problem, but if you have unpowerful abs, you can just be stuck. You can just be stuck. I've be stuck i've seen that yeah they sell springboards where you pull a lever no my grandpa got one yep loves it it's an old man when he comes up because he used to always be way behind be like dang it daniel we gotta we gotta get a

new blind i wish i made one that's spring and i see one i'm like oh i'll order that for him so yeah you did a great job but we should probably set the stage a little bit where explain the situation where you use a layout line whichever you guys want so yeah you're out scouting for geese you see them in a wheat field eating you're gonna go out there put some field decoys out and then lay it out layers a lack of cover yeah yeah which means you cannot hide right well sometimes you use it when there is cover like on a fence line or something like that or in like a kochia patch that's pretty effective too but uh let's say you're out on

the wheat field and there's nothing to hide in in this scenario there wasn't we took the straw up gathered up kind of fill in they've got this little straps on the side and you just elastic strap. Yeah. You make it look like maybe you're like a little hill. Your blinds are full. You're trying to have a gradual slow, like a gradual. Yeah.

You don't want a hard anything. So you might brush in the edges and stuff anyway. So, uh, and then you, you, you, the birds come in and they get real close.

Their feet come out. And you guys get all excited. I know what you guys call them. They're boots. They got the boots down. Or to the boot bags. And then you go, get them,

take them, shoot them. Kill them, whatever. And everybody pops up. Grandpa throws a spring on his thing. Is that like a push button? How does that work? It's like a lever you yank.

And a spring shoots you up. So now you don't even need to have, now you don't need to be able to do any sit-ups at all and you can still hunt goose up. Does it need to be calibrated? I'm really worried about him. Did grandpa end up on his heels a couple of times? Daniel, wind that thing down a little bit.

It's coming a little hot. So there you are. You're on your layout blind. You blow your toes off. Well, let's not. We're jumping ahead here. So group of geese coming in with a few buddies. And it's probably like 20 strong.

And you know, I'm just getting amped up. This is my first year in South Dakota. I was like, oh, yeah, man. Never really hunted geese much. Brought up where? Louisiana. Where? Shreveport, northwest corner.

Uh-huh. Yeah. Anyway, geese are coming. So you rest. Did you do a lot of hunting and fishing down there? Yeah. A lot. You grew up with it.

Yep. A lot with my grandpa and my dad. Your grandpa's still down there, isn't he? Oklahoma's where he lives. And he lived there at the time. Did you guys go down south to catch crayfish much? No, but I did work for a crawfish catering company. We boiled up crawfish and brought a trailer out.

They have specific catering companies for crawfish. See, that's not even kind of the same thing. No, it's not. But we received bags and they cut up your arms when you handle them and all this stuff but you guys uh hunt ducks down there oh yeah all the time did you fish gar a little bit with a ski rope did you fish redfish and whatnot a little bit not much because it was like six hours away so none of the coastal activities someone no not really did you guys get fish catfish oh yeah flatheads channels blues squirrels a lot of jug lining

uh squirrels absolutely rabbits still do rabbits yeah with dogs still hunt rabbit that's what i want to do man hey there you are you blow your toes off all right so laying there geese are coming in so the way I shot a Louisiana at fresh Louisiana all still pretty southern accented freaking out over the geese coming in because I wasn't used to hunting Canada geese anyway so the way the gun lays there's a bar in front like in between probably about your knees and then there's the feet in front like in between probably about at your knees and then there's the feet in front of the bar and so I had the shotgun

you mean your feet yeah the feet being yours the feet being mine yeah and uh so you like rest your shotgun on there

and as the geese are coming I slip the safety off early yeah it's getting ready yeah I'm getting excited they're about 20 yards away and then uh I'll take them gun goes off as i start coming up and then i just boom boom shoot two all excited hold on a minute i don't know the gun goes off in the blind

so i thought in my head i okay you just don't i didn't know what's going on i was so excited about the the geese because blacking out blacking out still do it sometimes especially with archery that's just it's tough for me anyway so these uh so anyway so i come up and then i shoot two geese and i'm like something feels weird you know there's so heat and pressure. I want to dwell on this a minute. You're so excited that your gun goes off in your layout. It's not in the blind.

Like the guns in the blind. Well, okay. So you deliver it. So you deliver. The barrel's out of the blind. I lift the back end of the gun, so I can vision this as the barrel. Lift the back end.

Gun goes off, boom. Pivots on the bar. So the tip of the barrel goes down towards your feet. When I say in the blind, I mean not aiming it out at the geese. Right. And you were just,

well, I still got two left. I didn't. still got two rounds left kept going adrenaline at what point did you realize that your toes were gone well i uh thank you seth so yeah i feel so that night i'm getting undressed for bed so i'm feeling a little pressure a little heat and i'm like dude something's wrong so i look at my buddies and i then i realized what happened stand up freak out start running around on it and i was like dude i don't i remember saying like i don't i think i just like kind of grazed him like i think we can keep hunting because i was so excited to shoot geese

oh my buddy's like no dude you're you're you're there's a hole in your foot so uh did you get any geese of the two shots you shot yeah i believe i doubled no and my friends say i did oh they did but more probably out of sympathy than anything else yeah whatever that's a great story what kind of boots that that is my question what i had tennis shoes because it was August early. That doesn't help. My buddies always said if you would have had steel-toed boots, man, you'd be just fine. Steel-toed boots. I don't think you would.

The thing with a crimpton. You're out there with sneakers? Yeah. This was very noticeable if it's sneakers. Oh, yeah. Like bottom blown out. Did you save that sneaker? No. Should should have let's see the so and so you only lost two does your wife want it on the table yeah does your wife like this foot she likes that foot oh my god you got a good hunk of the look at that thing no but what's so how

here we gotta explain that how does the big one and the third one yeah we'll get a good shot of this yeah folks who are interested that is interesting and uh of course you can follow you can find it on instagram let me get let me just so no damage to the big toe well yeah we got to make sure the biggest toe in the group. And thank God there wasn't any. Get your phone out of my way, man. I can send you the surgical pictures, too. Please. If you can spread those apart, I can get Steve's head in between the gaps.

I mean, oh, no. Healed up pretty nice. Not bad. Were you married at the time? I was not. How does it feel to be married? I like how they're slowly hooking back in toward each other. Lobster foot. It's like a little claw there. Yeah, so you got the middle ones.

A lot of nicknames. Three toes, eight toes. You ever get an athlete's foot on that foot? No, not really. It's a disease. Just on the other one. Yeah, because the toes are tight together. I mean, it speaks very much to how close the foot was to the barrel right because how can

it those other toes aren't scratched at all no and were they at the time picture and it being other toes i didn't know you punched the middle out of there yeah yeah i would have thought you'd whittle the way at the edge i didn't know you just blast the middle out of there. Well, that's probably best. I would have thought you'd whittle the way at the edge. I didn't know you just blast the middle out of your toes. Yeah, this is missing your two front teeth of toes. Yeah, but he'd probably walk real goofy if he was missing the edge toes.

Yeah, you'd probably walk in a straight line still. Yeah, I'm just fine. So at what point did the pain start? Man, about five minutes in, it started pounding. You could feel every heartbeat on your foot. And where was all that toe pulp? There wasn't much. Vaporized.

Yeah, it vaporized pretty much. No, it didn't vaporize. Out there on a steel pellet somewhere. Dude, it was a hole. Did you look around? No, I didn't look around. I was freaking out. If I took your two toes, and a generous cut, because that's a generous cut,

like it dug down in there. I took those two toes up and I put them in a blender and ground them up and flung them around. There'd damn sure be hunks of foot around this room. Yeah, you're probably right. So what happened to the toes? I don't know. Sprayed all over the wheat somewhere.

Didn't it look? I still have the blind that I used. And you can see the shot going in where it went in the boot bag and then coming out the other end. Is that right? Yeah. Any bloodstains? No bloodstains. Whose hunting spot was this?

It was mine. Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, that makes it better. Found the spot. Did you tell the landowner what happened? No. Do you still hunt that spot?

No, i haven't i don't i don't like to go back in that area i was thinking yeah yeah i was thinking so it wasn't dan's spot that could have added to the hysteria right because you're new and excited to hunting geese and if it's your spot that i got invited to and i just blew my toes off i'd be like oh my god i'm never gonna get invited again oh that would go through my mind for sure man yeah we were going you're like well yeah i don't care if you it's my spot i blow my toes off i want i blow all my other toes we went with a guy that day who like had never gone before. Don't think he's ever gone since.

Imagine that. Trauma. Reducing the competition. So in a couple minutes, it starts to throb and aching. Yep. And at first, I like that you said it felt like pressure.

Yeah. Just pressure and heat. Heat and pressure. Yeah. So then my buddy goes and grabs our hunting van but you still hopping around in your sneaker i did right away and then they were like you need to calm down lay down pick it up and you took the sneaker off when did you take the sneaker off sneaker came off at

the hospital yeah that's good why is that because i wanted to do x-rays no no i don't know why didn't i take it off yeah what prevent is scared too it's good to leave that stuff on yeah did you go into shock yeah oh yeah yeah wow really yeah wow did uh i remember my uh so my buddy just ripping out there we had like this hunting van hunting van called it philly i don't know why we called it Philly, but... Like it was a little Philly. Yeah. It was a brown van.

Anyway, rolled out there. Actually, funny story about this van. One time we were pretty tired heading out hunting. Almost like falling asleep tired. College tired. Out drinking. Night before. Not too late. Or you were drunk when you blew your toes off no no absolutely not anyway we were uh out in the van one morning uh-huh and you know that scene

from tommy boy when the hood flies up well that happened to us everybody's about half asleep i don't know the scene oh so they're driving and the hood of the of their is it a van or what they have it was a car but you can just call it your van and this is what happened so you're driving through the dark and uh the wind catches the hood and it just slaps up against the windshield i bet it cars and that's happened. Yeah. Yeah. Scared the crap out of me. That's real scary.

But that was a side note. So, yeah, I remember my buddy Tommy ripping out there to grab me. And that's about all I remember because I went into shock after that. Wow. Until we got to the hospital. So did your hunting buddies, were they, did they help you in any way yeah they put me in the van because at that point i was just laying on the ground wow were you uh crying and moaning or what i was moaning i wouldn't say crying do you like the moan you're doing oh no like uh rick you do it no is it like and remember you're a young man from treveport

give us some moan rick let me set the scene for you a moan for two you were born you're born in louisiana you used to work for a crawfish caterer you had a roommate who's two muskrat trapper roommates. One smokes weed, one don't. And you are so excited to hunt geese. You're very excited. You blow your toes off. Now here comes... Shock sets in. Now moan how he would do it. No, I can't do it.

I'm picturing he's going, uh... Uh... Yeah, I think that's about right. Yeah, that's pretty good. A little more twang. A little more audible. A little more southern twang.

So they run you down, and the cops probably get involved because you can't shoot yourself. Game warden did. Really? That's who showed up. Just asked me how it happened. All right. Hunting accident. Had to report it. Whatever. Oh to report it whatever oh no please had to record it yeah no i thought

anytime like a any kind of something like that happens there's police involved no i guess but he but a game warden is what do you do when he showed up he just questioned me make sure make sure you had a plug in your gun yeah checking for wings on my geese yeah and then he said son uh how many geese did you get was he was the game warden sympathetic or or what oh yeah he like felt horrible he's interviewing me sorry was the game warden sympathetic yeah he felt horrible that he was even like talking to me about it right away because he knew there was no monkey business right probably happened to like 7 a.m and this was 9 a.m by the time he was there already morning hunt yeah yeah did you feel like you did something irreversible like that you weren't gonna walk oh man i was so worried oh really yeah i'm sure freaking worried

about what not being able to walk i didn't know the severity in my head. I didn't know how severe it was. Could you tell what was going on down there, or was it just kind of pulpy, weird? Nah, you could just see a straight hole through the shoe. How many years ago? Must be 10. Oh.

Hole through the shoe. Yeah. And yeah, you didn't want to check it out. There wasn't much blood, though, which I thought was weird. Oh, that is weird and then uh do they sedate you when you get there no they freaking called my parents to make sure that i they're like you guys are allergic to a kid yeah no you do now no they called my parents to make sure I wasn't like allergic to morphine or whatever

and I was just like give me the morphine right now you know and I did an x-ray without morphine and that was extremely painful took the sock off and everything without morphine yeah just because they wanted that x-ray right away just a flesh wound yeah

did they entertain the idea of, or was it just like flat out like, they're gone, you just don't have them anymore. No, no. They're going to make a fake one or anything. Not at all. So what's interesting is that top weird looking part is actually skin from my toes.

I didn't get a good look at the top. I'll show it to you later. I had the bottom view. Yeah, I can show it to you later. I can look at Cal's photo. Sure. The skin, they got that skin. Yeah, they got show it to you later. I can look at Cal's photo. Sure. The skin they got. They got that skin.

Yeah. They got that skin on the top. They grafted it on there. Where'd they pull it from? My middle toe and the, what'd be the, like the pointer finger toe. Oh, the index toe. They borrowed some skin from the neighboring toe. Yeah.

They put it over the wound but what had happened was the one that this toe that index toe was just hanging there by a thread oh so they cut that off right away the other toe on impact the bone had blown out of that toe so there's no bone in it but they were trying to save it the doctor comes in one day and he's like probably two days into surgeries and stuff he's like man you don't want that thing hanging on stuff and yeah you know catching on corners he's like might as well just cut it off we can use it to graft and you were like sure doc yeah well i was like well what if i keep the toe in a jar you mean i was thinking a jar like a necklace for sure you know formaldehyde or whatever and he was like oh no no no mind you

this is why i'm while i'm on morphine still and whatever he's like oh no no tons of paperwork you don't want to do that and for some reason probably one of my biggest regrets to this day is not having that toe in my possession. Oh, yeah, man. I'd have it. It's part of me. It's just hazardous waste. Yeah, I'd have it like a call lanyard

where you put your bands, duck bands and whatnot. Just be a dried up foot in there. Yeah, I'd have my toe on it. I would have took it out and tried to catch a walleye with it. Isn't there some drink that you can order with a toe?

It's like a bar. There's a bar where people lose their toes to frostbite. It's like a... I don't know. What? Really? It happens a lot. People lose toes to... No, it's like one bar.

Like you show up to lose a toe? No, it's like a... I don't know to lose a toe no it's like it's a i don't know it's at the end of the i did around or ever mcnerdo station ever space camp like a little yep it's a i don't know what it is it doesn't sound like you do no this is never gonna even if they do and if we do lure them in you're not gonna going to hold onto him like this, Rick. See, this is when we need Yanni. Yanni's not here. He can Google. Yeah, I forgot.

Yeah, Yanni's still on assignment. So then I imagine, yeah, there was like some physical therapy and stuff, right? Yeah, it was painful. And actually, what's funny is when I met my wife, I would never take my socks off because I was so embarrassed about it right away. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Here we go. Even though a lot of people knew. Can I chime in with some information about my that's fine rick sour toe cocktail dawson city it's a tradition oh there you go the an actual human toe that has been dehydrated and preserved in salt use the garnish or direct drink of your choice. How much that runafilla? It's the Sour Tail cocktail. How much is the cost? So they have a human toe.

Just one or multiple? Dawson, Yukon Territory. And they'll let you have the pleasure of having a drink with the toe in it. That bar has to file a lot of paperwork. It was a... Well, there's been multiple

tows that have been used, but the first one belonged to a miner and rum runner named Louie. We had a frostbitten appendage in the 20s. It was preserved in alcohol. Then 50 years later, 1973,

brought it down to the bar, the Sourdoughoon and they put it started putting in drinks sour sourdough cocktail so just yeah no you were i was on something you missed out on a legacy you were dead on and he verified himself there uh you start dating your wife then yeah wouldn't take the socks off did you did you know that you were oh really so like she didn't know so there you are it's your wedding buddies know you know so you didn't tell her about it no no and then it comes to be your wedding night and there you are in one stop there you are standing there with one sock no uh yeah she's like why don't you get comfortable okay so then she sees it then she'll just come over here

foot's cold no then she sees it and bless her heart she thought it was a deformity and then she got worried that if we had kids one day that they would also have it then she asked me about it and you had to be like well i can't guarantee you that they're not right so back up back up that's why you got to tell the truth up front you hide it from her that sucks a metaphor you start dating her you hide it from her then all of a sudden she sees it whatever however that happens she she like gets a look at it and there's that little crazy crab claw and you don't go like oh yeah i shot it off with a shotgun you just be like yep it's my foot that's the way it is i just didn't talk about it she like saw it when i i don't know when i was putting shoes on or something i don't know

and she wasn't like good god she didn't say anything for a little while then she brought it up that's a good woman yeah yeah she's a good woman i like that i i mean because you have to say like through the act of reproduction yes our children are not likely to have this not exactly but i cannot guarantee you that our children will not have this if they grow up to be goose hunters then there is a possibility man if they black out when 20 geese are locked up. Black out to start shooting random directions. Shooting doubles and toes. Well, that's a good argument for keeping your gunpoint in a safe direction. And for not taking your safety off early in the layup line.

I'm real strict about it now. Man, we were duck hunting this morning. Man, I can't tell you how many times i throw the safety well yeah but you're also in like a safe position yeah sitting there no i'm saying that like i do it though yeah it's hard not to i don't throw it if i'm using a shotgun with a with a tang safe on it yeah you know like a thumb safe i'll just usually throw it when i go to shoulder the gun yeah but with a trigger guard safety right i click it ahead of time it's really hard not to but in a layout line i would advise everyone not to yeah for sure got two doubles with three shells

yeah yeah two doubles double on geese double on toes um and then how long did it take to heal all up uh i was hunting again like two weeks good for you my buddy big shout out to my bud tom novak he uh he was always helping me carrying decoys out taking me hunting because you were a little limpy oh yeah doctor got all uh mad at me for hunting all the time. And actually, my mom came and stayed with me for a while when I was first healing. Did your mom came out and stayed with you because you shot your toes off? Yeah. Just for a couple weeks.

What'd she think about the whole situation? When I was going through physical therapy and stuff. Oh, was that serious? Yeah. Yeah. Did it feel funny walking around yeah oh you can't lose a toe without doing physical yeah it was come on well in part really part of the foot you're not a flip-flop man now are you absolutely not yeah my buddy though i can tell

by looking at your foot on my 21st birthday my buddy made me one of those flip-flop sandals and puttied two fake toes you guys hang out with the good good crew of guys that's awesome physical therapy yeah yeah do you still have those shoes with the hole in it i don't they probably threw them away at the hospital because they're like a biohazard. Yeah. Thanks for sharing. I can't think of anything

more to ask you about. Do you miss them now? Are you glad it happened or not glad it happened? I don't know. It's kind of part of my identity now. Yeah.

I'm lucky that it wasn't worse. Safer hunter now, probably. A lot safer hunter and I'm mindful of other people in layout blinds and that's something people need to remember i'm trying to think of any good application for lying where you'd be like um i could count on my hands and feet you know what my least favorite how many times times I, right? And people's right ahead goes, their head goes to 20, but you're talking about 18.

Yeah. My least favorite expression. Three-man limit of ducks. My least favorite expression is, oh, shot yourself in the foot on that one. I hate when guys say that to me. Huh. All right.

That's great, man. I mean, I'm not glad that it happened, but it's just real. Well, you know, I've talked about this before. My father was shot in the foot by a shotgun. Oh, really? Yeah, and because of who shot him, my dad hid what happened and lied about what happened and had to hobble around on crutches, and they didn't tell anybody.

How severe was it he uh had i think it was camera was like 13 or he had a side he had a huge foot he had a size 13 foot but i feel like he was like 13 or 20 pellets were stuck in the um stuck in his foot really yeah pellets no he got from a distance then nope point blank point blank hunting rabbits guy was walking along you know how you do thumb cocking your shotgun and then releasing the hammer on over under yeah so he's what his guys walking around fiddling around cocking it releasing it cocking it releasing it just nervously it's thumb slip yeah crazy yeah right after this right after the war right after world war ii and he said that it always the irony of it that he uh made it all through world war ii and never got

scratched by a bullet. And then came home and promptly got shot in the foot. Yeah. Something. Yeah. Hey, folks. Exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Man, want to talk about duck hunting a little bit cal tell everybody about our duck hunt um well i guess as far as like duck hunting goes it's just very good duck hunting there's a lot of

birds around good as it could be i mean i mean i i really think so i mean you could i guess be in a situation where you go bang and everybody's got their limits really fast and you're at the coffee shop at 7 25 in the morning or something like that but um ours are taking a little bit longer here in two days but it's i, you're never in that situation where you're really feeling like we are in the wrong area. This isn't going to work out. There's always ducks flying and it's just very incredibly ducky. Like the, I struggle with the word habitat. I feel like I'm not describing it well by saying habitat.

It's, I mean, it's just a giant food source right now. There's soybeans and corn everywhere that have not been cut. The fields are flooded heavily with water, not by really like constructs of man. They're just, it's just crazy weather cycle that this area is holding a ton of water and that water spilled out into the agricultural fields. So the fields have cover by the way of unharvested food crops. They have food because they're food crops like soy and corbin corn soy and corn and

and then there's water so it's like an absolute utopia for ducks um yeah cornfields and knee-deep water well i don't know if it's that deep in some spots for sure i'd say where we were sitting today was knee deep oh yeah we were in a knee deep cornfield yeah can you talk can you discuss uh sean the scope of the flooding here pretty much from well now in north dakota too they weren't flooded earlier in the year they're flooded now well I guess the best way to put it is northeast South Dakota. All of eastern South Dakota really is at like 300% above annual precip on the air. So, man, which is an unrealistic number. That seems like a weird number to just throw out there kind of casually, but the lakes in general have risen anywhere from 5 to 12 feet,

depending on the lake. And then you have tens of thousands of acres of flooded corn and beans. And even counting this spring, you had 2.8 million acres of flooded corn and beans. And even counting this spring, you know, you had 2.8 million acres of, like, unplanted crop in South Dakota. Because it was too wet to plant. Too wet to plant. And it's that, you're saying, like, around here, zero harvest. No one's harvested anything.

Yeah, no one's harvested a thing. We were commenting on our drive back tonight. We finally saw a combine starting to roll. Oh. Just as we were leaving town, there was a combine rolling. But that's the only combine I've seen. Cutting corn in the field. Mm-hmm.

Huh. So there's the first one. When I hear the word flood, I think of like a river. Right. No, that's what's so weird about it. Yeah. It's like it's. The whole time we were getting ready for this, and you were talking about the flooding. Right. I had the... No, that's what's so weird about it. Yeah, it's like... The whole time we were getting ready for this,

and you were talking about the flooding. Right. I had the same image, too, that you're in a big floodplain of a river, and the water's high. Yeah. Yeah, so the strange part about here, we're in what's called the Katoda Prairie.

It's a set of hills in eastern South Dakota formed by the James Lobe of a glacier. I can't remember the name of the glacier off the top of my head. The James Lobe and the Des Moines Lobe split and parted around these hills, which eventually formed the James River Valley and then the Des Moines River Valley. Okay.

And those glaciers kind of cut around this set of hills and the hills are flattened right out flattened it right out and the hills are a closed water basin meaning there's no real rivers i mean on the sides or south end of the kato or the north end of the Coteau. There's a couple of creeks and rivers, but in general, the water doesn't leave. So it's the water here is precip dependent. Like the water can't come from anywhere else. It comes from here and here alone.

So if you have a heavy winter of snow and heavy summer of rain, you're going to have a lot of water. And then, you know, you go into your drought a lot of water. And then, you know, you go into your drought cycles and it's the other way around. The water rising here is so extreme that there are, um, farm houses with water up to the ground floor windows.

Yeah. Yeah. Silos that are submerged. You have entire old farmsteads. We can even say maybe 50, 60-year-old farmsteads on islands. But then you have newer houses, houses built in the the last 15 20 years now on islands like livable houses that people had to move their stuff had to move their stuff out of this summer by boat and they're not living out there no not living in their own house in roads that vanish you know yeah whole state highways.

Yeah. Like somebody went about planning those highways thinking, oh, these highways are in a place that's probably not going to get flooded. Right. Oh, very. Yeah. These are like full on roads. Yeah.

They were thinking that this is just a road now and then it'll just be a road. Yeah. But like people plan around the future. Like, OK, maybe a year or two, we get like some heavy rains and these areas will be low line and get flooded. So we're going to build this road in this place that doesn't flood. And it's under... Yeah, I mean, there's... U.S. Highway 81.

Highway 25. Was for a while. Highway 10 has been. Highway 10. Gone underwater. Yeah. Or portions of it gone a lot of them have been built up since oh they've prepared some highway 12 yeah like us highway 81 right now it's still closed been closed since may or june i want to talk about what it means for the for the lakes and lake access but first talk about what it means for the for the lakes and lake access but first talk about what it means for i mean obviously it's is it it's devastating to farmers yeah but sure but

are people on average this something that's covered on average by uh this flooding is it crop insurance and stuff and and i honestly don't know much about that um to what degree you're economically exposed when this happens it can't be pretty no it can't be um luck well not luckily i truly don't think there's an insurance situation where uh you're not missing a beat right where it's it's like, oh, well. Then got it all flooded. Yeah, we'll get it better next year. Yeah, I don't think, I can't look around here and imagine that situation.

I think some folks are getting real hard hit to the point where they're looking at different means of livelihood. Yeah, I saw an article today. I didn't authenticate it, so this might not be true, but it was a South Dakota news article. 43 farms in South Dakota have gone bankrupt in the last two weeks. Oh.

So, I mean, it's hard on people. Yeah. Prices aren't exactly good either. Oh, grain prices are yeah which doesn't matter if you can't go out there and pick the stuff anyway so that'll that'll drive them up yeah so ducks love it man ducks love it it's like whole soybean fields underwater yeah i mean like he was thousands and thousands and thousands of acres of cropland underwater yeah and because this area is so rich with slew environments to begin with a lot of these fields have you know slews that were in the field

where the farmers have driven around them planted around them but then those sloughs have you know bloated and flooded up into the habitat around so now you've got these isolated sloughs out of sight out of mind which is what a duck wants out in the middle of nowhere just loaded and the cover is food yeah and they can land out in there and swim up into the corn fields land in open water in a slew and then swim up into the corn sleep and eat be lazy yeah yeah ducks like it uh one of the more interesting things around here is what it means like this historic high water which has happened a couple times in the last 30 years right yeah yeah is uh it's kind of interesting to think about where

as anyone who's listening knows you got like a lake right uh and a lake will have a boat launch and or whatever there's a beach boat launch whatever the hell a park and you go down and you put your boat in the lake you then proceed to just drive around the lake you don't need to go you don't go ask everyone who lives on the lake's permission if it's okay for you to be out on the lake right it's just once you're on the lake there's the boat launch you're on the lake you go where you want you're on the lake, there's a boat launch. You're on the lake. You go where you want. You're out in the water. And it's just like the lake is treated as public land. Here, is it fair to call it a fight? Yeah. It was real contentious there for a while.

It's kind of taken a backseat now. But yeah, real contentious for a while. Where imagine that you have. So imagine, like everyone who's listening, just imagine their own lake they know about, where they've ever taken a boat out boating. And you have the point where you launch the boat, and then you just proceed to go where you want.

Now imagine that lake increases in size tenfold and it's now spread up uh and subsumed houses fields yards fences fences and you put your boat in at the boat launch do you now do like you always done and go wherever the lake is or do you now impose these imaginary lines of where the lake used to be and the new part of the lake is off limits that's a pretty good way putting it that yard that used to be here is 25 feet below you with a fence line and a mailbox maybe underwater underwater the whole kit and caboodle is underwater but what you see is lake lake so if a guy didn't know and hadn't been there before and he goes down there launches his boat he just thinks it's a big damn lake but then all of a sudden there's someone hey, you're riding your boat over my yard. Yep.

Which is 13 feet below you. And says, I don't, get out of my yard. Get off my lawn. Yeah, get off my lawn. You were saying that people, you know. This is a major issue now. Yeah. Yeah.

Property taxes. On, you know, if it's seasonally flooded it's one thing but then when does seasonally flooded become like permanently flooded and then the lakes all like it's there right it there's there's so many facets to it all like we're talking about hundreds of lakes hundreds you're talking all together i want to say i can't remember the number it's around 300 000 acres of water we're talking about altogether of is that public or is it not and so you have two classifications yeah and i was gonna say now go back in time to the one day back when they used to just come up with weird explanations and stuff and talk about when south dakota founded. So in 1868,

the federal government... Fetterman Massacre. Very true. 1868, they ordered... That was the first patent for diaphragm call. Right around there. Can you believe that? Crazy. Wasn't it 68, Cal?

Yeah. First patent for diaphragm call. And also... Can you believe that? Crazy. Wasn't it 68, Cal? Yeah. 67, 68. First patent for a diehard. No, 68 and also. This son of a bitch, he patented that year. Cal was pointing out, why was he not busy with the Civil War? No, no, no, no. Civil War is 66.

Yeah. Cal, how did we cover that no we're talking about the guy that came up that first patented the diaphragm call and he patented basically what we use today same exact thing as those different materials and you pointed out seems like you'd have been thinking about other things back then yeah because it he was from alabama alabama and yeah i was just thinking about he's you know reconstruction in the south dealing with the car post civil war like and it yankees running around trying to tell you what i thought it was a good thing to where it was like he's like yeah yeah yeah well check this out yeah yep yep yep but still guys i was trying to take his mind

off more uh but no matter what springs are coming yeah i bet that guy killed a lot so what the hell are we talking about oh class 1868 yep Someone comes and says what? Hey, you guys need to figure out what's a lake and what's not. So a bunch of guys rode around, and if it was more than four foot deep and they believed it had a permanent shoreline, they classified it as a meandered lake which is a deceiving term it's so deceiving i wish i would have just called it like a cupcake lake or whatever a meandered lake because it's the opposite of what it should be okay but they they so they drive around ride around, probably on horses or whatever.

And they're like, yeah, it's a lake. Yep. And they're saying, like, nah. No, that's not like a lake. Yeah. And they mark them all. Yep. And so they classify, I want to say it was 270 bodies of water

or something like that as meandered. So the lake bed was state owned property of South Dakota. Gotcha. The ones they felt looked like a lake. Right. The ones that they felt would go dry. And some of them they said, you lake but could go dry uh yeah there's even an old map where we're staying there's an old map that says like something lake and it says could go dry

yep yeah lake but could go but but could go dry and uh those were classified as non-meandered. So those were put into deed and title. Private property available for purchase. And a large portion of that land ended up being waterfowl production areas, South Dakota game production areas, things of that nature. Public land. Well, then, I believe it was the 60s, pretty much everything goes dry, even the meandered lakes. Like I said before.

Big drought. Yeah, big drought. These lakes are so dependent on precipitation. They're going to wildly fluctuate because they don't have a consistent, they don't have water coming from the north or water coming from the west or anything like that. Yeah. Whatever happens here is what happens to the lakes. There's not a big mountain range getting packed full of snow.

Right. Every winter. And in the spring, that snow comes down and fills up the lake. Yeah. And so. That's not what's happening. Not at all. And so you have these lakes all go dry some of our biggest lakes like uh lake thompson is a good example of one one of the biggest natural lakes in south dakota

completely bone dry what about that one we were fishing on tonight that's never been dry has it um i don't think it was ever completely dry i I know it was wadable at one point. Really? Like you could duck on it in waders. Yeah, didn't you say like in the 60s it was like tiny? Yeah, small, real small. And now it's 20. We're fishing at 29 feet of water.

20-some thousand acres. Yeah, I think it's 21,000 acres. 21,000 acres. Yep. Went from a puddle to. 35, 30dle 35 30 foot you know 35 36 foot deep spots and so hey rick did you uh enjoy what did you enjoy more did you enjoy more uh filming me getting all those ducks or getting all those walleyes what was better for you keeping in mind that i got that really big walleye i mean that's pretty

that's pretty enjoyable anytime you get a you're when you get a big smile on your face and i'm filming it makes me happy inside so you like you liked me getting the walleye for the record steven ronella was doing some smiling tonight big yeah smile that. Not a forced TV smile, but like a genuine. First genuine smile. Yeah. If only your mother could have been here to see it. Well, now we got to tell them how big the walleye was. 29 and a half.

29 and a half inches. Monster. Big old fat belly. Yeah, I got guilted into turning him loose. And somehow Cal got to keep his. There was another monster caught that night. A lot of folks said it couldn't be beaten, but with a lot of hard work and determination,

old Steve came through. Came through and whooped it. So that lake has always had some water in it. Yeah. So go on to what happened. So historically, they're like, hey, this is a lake, but then lo and behold, it does go on to what happens so historically they're like hey this is a lake but then lo and behold it does go dry yeah so they go dry and then and when the lake goes dry and you live on the edge of the lake your yard just grows and grows and grows

and then the water comes up and your yard shrinks and shrinks and shrinks the basin of lake thompson they used to graze cattle in and now now this year, it's overtaking homes. So what happened is, you know, in the 70s, it's progressed since the 70s. The lakes filled back up in the 70s, or at least the basins did. The 80s, they expand more. And then the 90s, they hit a unreal growth pattern that everyone says is never going to happen again. And is this when you start hearing the word flood? This is when you hear the word flood.

Highest water they had in 100 years at least. Yeah, by far. Because it's the highest water they've had since the surveying in 1868. Yeah. And that was mainly 1990, 1993, 1998, I believe it was, floods. 93 being the worst. So early to mid-90s, all of a sudden you have these lakes that were confined to a basin, filling out flooding private land, like you were mentioning,

those are the meandered lakes. But then all of a sudden you have these sloughs, really marshes that no one considered lakes. All of a sudden now way too deep to be considered just a slew now all of a sudden there's there's lakes that are 19 20 foot deep that before were just you know a duck marsh and the map doesn't show it as a lake and the map doesn't show it as a lake and uh i mean there's stories out there of you know farmers moving their cattle up out of these basins the night it started raining hard and they've never seen the land again since and in and correct me

if i'm wrong here but eventually people started putting fish in these things too right yeah so and not just people but sometimes the state a lot of times the state yeah so you have a you have a mix of the state seeing recreate recreational opportunity value value you know revenue we got to do something with this water well let's put fish in it why wouldn't you that's the first thing guys when i see some water heck yeah i get to wondering about that especially because you had you know public right-of-ways going through this and you have a pretty substantiated history of public water access you know like uh the public trust doctrine, the Desert Act. There was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

Anyway, there's a few different historic pieces of legislation and judicial rulings that they looked at as, oh, this is justification that that's public water. Yeah. And so why wouldn't the state put fish in public water? So you have the state pulling down flooded roads, dumping fish. You have people doing bucket biology. That's what a lot of people call it yeah being that yeah yeah catching some going and catching some yellow guys i grew up a lot of people did it when i was growing

up i mean every i mean nothing happened just where i'm at but yeah like you go out well just take tonight for instance we went out and caught a bunch of walleye yep we would have saved some of those walleye for eating but maybe we keep a couple alive and on the way home we swing into some spot that's a little bit closer to home and we just let a few of those walleye go i always picture it happening like this too where you go out you're fishing say you go out fishing bluegills. And you got a bucket. And you got, right away, bam, bam, bam, you get three. And you're like, oh, man, I'm going to clean up a whole mess of them. But then fishing goes to shit. And you got three bluegills in your bucket.

Or four. What did I say? How many did he get? He said three. So he's got three. And he's like, yeah, do I really want to dirty the knife over this? You know what I'll do? Go dump them in that.

I'll dump them in the lake by my house oh you man great example i'm not sure what the statute of limitations are here but uh we don't we'd always go fish these bass ponds when you were young early early on in high school yeah and uh one of us uh his folks had a uh water feature a little pond in their backyard okay that they like to maintain and keep looking nice and we thought it'd be funny or cute or something to take a red-eared sunfish pumpkin seed or whatever um and that we had caught and throw it in that water feature which that is funny and cute and our buddy's mom thought it was great but then eventually as the summer progressed um and you know we had long forgotten about this thing. Fall comes in, and they're going to turn the water feature off, and she's, you know, we show back up at some point doing whatever we were doing, and the water feature's dry,

and we're like, oh, son of a gun, what happened to that fish? And she's like, oh, you know, I had to turn this this thing off so i just took it down and threw it in the river right so there's another like yep you know incidental yeah another way it happens i don't know why the hell we're on this but it's just interesting you would you used to be able to they're trying to change this now but you'd go and like get bait so you'd buy fishing bait like in the winter you're gonna be like oh i'm gonna buy a dozen sucker minnows yeah to fish northeast and you get your sucker minnows and then you wind up driving over three counties and you fish at the end of the day you just dump the sucker minnows down the hole and then maybe they got maybe the the things that are in there maybe you're supposed to have a thing

of fathead minnows but you just got a bunch of baby suckers like real suckers because now and then on my lake growing up now and then there's no suckers in that lake but now and then you stand on the dock and here comes cruising by a freaking giant sucker and our assumption was ours that's like an ice fishing bait sucker that he never found a mate but he just lives in the lake he's got a little circle hook scar in his back yeah and his dorsal fins got a hole below it because some guy was ice fishing with him so i think we've established the people's moon fish around so yeah and honestly i i think most of it was a state but in general lakes get stocked yeah because what else are you going to do with the excess water well as you'd learn too Cal, if you listen to Cal's Week in Review,

everybody always used to say when you're a kid, they'd say, oh, fish eggs stick to the birds' feet. And the birds fly around and move the eggs everywhere. But Cal reported on a case, an instance where fish eggs were surviving in bird shit. Remember that, Cal? Yeah, in the, yeah, I mean. That actually makes sense. It was shatting out.

Yeah, birds can pass stuff so fast. Shat out viable fish eggs. Yeah, they probably eat a lot of fish and moved fertilized a bird moved fertilized fish eggs and delivered it to a new water system in its feces that's about that it's good stuff right and they're not like actively trying to eat fish eggs they're just down there sifting through and eating grasses and everything and think all the eggs that are oh yeah and then all the stuff that lays eggs that stick on like carp lay eggs that stick on grass yeah and frogs and salamanders and all that stuff you know they're just sieving that stuff out that uh spoon bill i shot today was probably a carrier of you know a vector of all sorts of species. And Cal found three salamanders.

Dandies too. Yeah, big old, big honking salamanders. One the size of a hand, human hand. And then he found two of them making love. Oh, I mean, it just keeps getting better because when I was backing in the boat today, jumped out of the truck, caught a frog with my left hand and caught a toad with my right hand.

This place is like... Herp Central. I mean, for... Herpetologist. Herpetology. Yes. I mean, if you're an overgrown kid like myself, this place is just a wonderland.

That's Rick's Tinder handle. There's probably a few jokes I can make about that. So people move fish all over the damn place. The lakes get filled with fish. Yep. And it turns out that some people don't like fishermen over their land. Yeah. Even if those fishermen are trying to target fish that belong to the state.

Right. And so you have a well-recorded history of the water itself being held in the public trust. And then you have public or state-owned or state-stocked fish in those public waters. But then the argument is, well, just because it's public water doesn't mean you have the right to access my land. Yeah. Now, this is where this starts to make its own gravy. just because it's public water doesn't mean you have the right to access my land. Yeah.

Now, this is where this starts to make its own gravy, as they say. Right. So this is where it gets goofy. Can I ask you a series of questions? Yeah, go ahead. This is how I'd like to handle this. We got an existing lake. And everybody, like those boys back in 1886, those boys like that's a lake okay yep and there it lives and the lake just lives there then all of a sudden lo and behold last handful of years

the lake metastasizes that's not a word i use often but i don't use it lightly the lake metastasizes and grows big and there used to be a boat launch but now the boat launch is gone the boat launch is under 12 feet of water yep and the lake grows grows grows grows grows and covers up a highway covers up a road yep in that case where it was, everyone agreed that it was a lake and the lake now passed up the boat launch and covers a highway or a county road.

Public right of way. A public right of way. Yep. Are there people saying that you can't use that lake at its current shoreline? Correct. Because they're saying you'd have to cross my property to get to what used to be the lake and even then they

just in general it doesn't matter if you're crossing or not they don't want a boat over top of their land here but what about what used to be the lake if you could somehow magically get your boat to the middle let's say you could you could imagine you could helicopter your boat in and get it to what was the lake people they'd be cool with that right but they don't want you crossing putting it in in 10 feet of water right on the new part of the lake yep yeah it's uh you know there's so there's so many different like opinions on what certain people want some guys want to buoy off you know their 40 acre flooded piece so they want to like mark with buoys what used to be the lake and that's where everybody can hang out and nobody can fish in this 40 acre flooded piece so they want to like mark with buoys what used to be the lake and that's where everybody can hang out and nobody can fish in this 40 acre piece because that's my 40 acres

to fish but then you know and they'll go out and mark it with buoys yeah yeah so like mark your like a fence but buoys yep and they're by God, this is my part of the lake. This is my part of the lake. Because it used to not be a lake. Right. It's really weird. Ice season, driving trucks, like right down, a bunch of signs sitting on the ice saying no trespassing.

They put T-posts in the ice with the signs on them, like every, what would you say, 30 yards? Yeah, 40 yards. To have their own private fishing spot. So everybody's lined up on the edge thinking that's where it's going to be good, you know? We're going to catch them right on the edge of that private. Catch them coming in and out of the private.

Like hunting deer. Exactly. You'll see them lined up right on that edge. Grass is always good. Oh, yeah. Like, man, if I had permission on that, the perch would be three inches bigger. That's amazing. It's so weird yeah and you know what i do understand i want to put my spin on it i want my spin on it about like what's what i think is right and wrong okay but i'm not gonna

do it till later i want to talk i want I want to explore this more because it's too interesting. It's such an amazing thing, though, because, man, like, what's the timeline, right? I mean, if it's like you got sucked in by some shady real estate agent who knew the place was going to be underwater in three months, but was like, just saw that you were kind of a rube and was like, Hey, I'll give you the lakefront property. Give you a heck of a deal. I got to move town.

Mom's sick in the next County. Yeah. And then all of a sudden your property's underwater. You'd probably be like, man, I got taken advantage of. This is crazy, but I'm out of here.

Well, you know, the lake's going gonna be in the basement took 300 years or 100 years or 85 years or grandpa had no idea the water was that ever gonna get that high you know then you got a little bit more of an attachment to the property right right yeah like for a lot you know the 90s was an act of god but now the flooding this year has been just as bad if not worse than anything that happened in the 90s almost my question is is this just a precipitation thing that's above average or is it what else is going

on besides just rainfall is it just like more rain equals more lakes or is there? Yeah. I mean, we're so much above what this area is supposed to get traditionally on precip. And then it's just been year after year. It's just been above average, above average, above average. You know, there's plenty of argument and talk about changing land and farming practices and all that. But I'm not really super interested in that being a part of it because at the end of the day we're we've got way more water than traditionally at least in the you know 150 years of people settled here and records we've got more water than we would have had in that 150 years, sir. So how many lakes have we lost access to

because the lake grew up onto what was regarded as private property before? So during the initial fight on this whole meandered versus non-meandered waters, the meandered waters are safe. They haven't been closed down or anything. Well, unless you can't get onto them. Well, the state's pretty much been able to gain access. Oh, okay. So they've gone in and made deals.

Right. Yeah. And a lot of them, they have public land that butts up to it. You know, a lot of those meandered lakes, they owned game production areas or whatever that they then now go put a boat ramp in on what used to be duck hunting ground or pheasant hunting ground. Yeah. The non-meandered lakes is where the real issue was.

Let's paint a scenario where people understand where this comes up. Okay. No, let me throw one out there. Yep. Here you have a lake that people historically didn't have access to. Okay, so it's a non-meandered lake.

Yep. Okay. So it's never been regarded as a public waterway, and it's small. so it's never been regarded as a public waterway and it's small now it's huge and there used to be no point of access because someone owned all the land but now the lake grows so much that it grows up and covers up a county road yep so now you can't drive your car correct because it's underwater you could drive your car. Correct. Because it's underwater. You could drive your car to where it hits the water and be like,

now I will continue on my way in my boat. Right. And so you're like, I now have public access to the water. Yep. Because I'm legally entering the water. And once I'm on the water legally, I can just take my canoe and go where i want to go but in these cases they're saying no you can't even though you got in where a public roadway is yep you can't zoom around the lake at all and fish yep and that's

another part of this yeah that's that was the most contentious part of it that started all this was you have water that goes up to a public easement yep that the public pays for but because a couple hosers back in 1886 said yeah i think that's a lake right because they because they didn't think it was a lake all of a sudden now you're not supposed to have access to that it's 20 feet deep and full of walleye full yeah never mind the state has been paying to put fish in it yep i mean that's like a have your cake and eat it too type of scenario hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes.

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onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Did just kind of dawn on me that Dan here may be

playing a bit of a game. Oh, you playing a game with us, Dan?veport louisiana fun time right he uh he's from a place where he's seen plenty houses on stilt yep comes up here in a steadily rising tide marries a local gal maybe uh knocks a couple of toes off with an endearing story you know in the uh the land of the rising rising waters the uh louisiana man may be king right it could be yeah it's like i heard they got rising waters yonder i like the way walleye taste yeah no it's gonna import some gator yeah so what uh what's your guys gripe with all this like what's your take on all this well the biggest problem you guys talk a lot about oh yeah so the biggest problem

was first when this fight started they wanted to give no no due credit to the history of public water you know public trust doctrine said no it doesn't matter if the water's public the whole argument is recreation is it a beneficial use is it a public right yeah and the landowners say yeah the public has you know rights to the water but they don't have rights to recreate on the water the sportsmen say of course we do we're sportsmen that's what we do yeah and um and every town that i've been in in south dakota seems to absolutely celebrate sports one. Yeah. With signs that basically say, please come in here. Yeah.

Come in here and buy some beer. Yeah. Buy some gas. Buy a license. Yeah. But the biggest problem was, or is that you had a breakup of what was legal and what was not. So you had certain lakes with certain rules

and other lakes following a different rule. So we have here what's called injunction lakes. They're non-meandered lakes. So they're not official lakes so they're not official lakes they're not official lakes some of them have public land under them some don't and but they flood up over a public right away but because the landowners of those lakes you know fought in court for those lakes to be shut down to fishing they are now completely private lakes like absolute even with public landing so why do the guys what's uh what's motivating the landowners you think it's fishing privileges or just like general like not one scenarios yeah

there's all sorts of stuff um but the injunction lakes specifically isn't like what i have a problem with it's that you have a non-meandered lake in this county or over here 10 miles away five miles away you know having to abide by a completely different set of rules than that injunction lake. So here's a good example. You have non-meandered lakes. They should all fall under the same rules and guidelines. But you have three different sets of rules they have to follow. You have these injunction lakes that are not accessible at all,

completely closed to public fishing. Then you have the 27 exemption lakes that the state said have a proven and recorded history of lots of sportsmen use that for a landowner to close their land off in those lakes, they have to file pretty much a appeal i guess to the state saying why their land should be closed um otherwise if and the state so the that's like a game commission or whatever yeah that decides whether their application or their you know argument is valid so they can apply on those 27 lakes let's say dry lake number two that's a good example of one of the lakes dry lake number two those landowners

would have to go to the state and say hey i think i can close my land off on this lake the state says yay or nay so far they've not said yes to any of it okay on those 27 lakes but then the rest of these non-mandated lakes all you know 200 some of them all can be closed at landowner will but only their land they have to follow a specific set of signage and buoying of the lakes. Am I correct in saying that the injunction lakes were ones with public access provided by the state? As in boat ramps? Well, public easements, not necessarily boat ramps. So you have these lakes that are all supposed to be

under the same classification, that all are following a different set of rules rules and there's not really a clear precedent on the existing law because this existing law has different rules for these lakes different rules for these and different rules for these and none of it really makes sense are there any unexpected players in this meaning is everyone in this does their viewpoint on it make sense when you look at what their perspective is meaning like we oftentimes as humans this is the point i was gonna make about this sort of like sort of the take-home for me on it if you look at what we do as humans we'll have something happen that's

not good for us or good for us right and we'll take it and take the perspective that's advantageous to us and sell it as what's right yeah when really all it is is like what's right for me meaning how could it be let's take some examples of stuff everybody knows about how could it be like bill clinton lies about a relationship he had with monica lewinsky how could it be that the people that don't think that's bad belong to his political party but the people who think it's bad belong to another political party or you could have someone be like they get in some trouble with the ukraine and people who don't belong to his political party think that's bad but people who do belong to his little party think it's not bad meaning they're all acting like they think it's good or bad but that's not what they're talking about they're talking about

what's good for me yep and then i'll tell people about it as though i care about the truth so my perspective on i would just say like if i lived here and i was in this fight I would say you know I'm not gonna confuse it and act like that I'm a moral like I'm doing what's morally correct I'm gonna tell you that I generally like people to have places to fish so I'm gonna take the side of this that opens up the most fishing for everybody because that's just my groove right and people would be like i'm the kind of guy who likes to have a bunch of stuff for myself and i don't want other people to be able to do stuff so i'm gonna act like uh i think it's morally bad for you to come on my lake yep yeah like is anyone surprising is there anybody who's like um i own all this lake but by god i

want everybody to come on it um or people being like man i love to fish but it just wouldn't be right for me to fish that lake maybe a couple individuals but you haven't met them no i want to know like is there do you get what i, absolutely. Is there like a multi-generational ranch family out there? It was like grandpa was like, yeah, we grew such and such and ran all these fat cattle on this ground, but one day it's going to flood. I told my son. And then when my son got it, he's like, yeah, we ran some fat cattle,

but then the flood water started to rise just like grandpa said it would. And I told my son, hey, this is what's like, yeah, we ran some fat cattle, but then the flood water started to rise, just like grandpa said it would. And I told my son, hey, this is what's happening. But one day it's going to dry out. And he let some guy hunt out in the field and the guy blew his toes off. You know, the old toe pasture. But one day that pasture is going to be dry again. And now we're going to be another hundred years down the road. There's going to be more people in South Dakota, and that land is going to be dry again, and now we're going to be another 100 years down the road, and there's going to be more people in South Dakota,

and that land is going to be worth more, whatever you do hang on to it. Yep. I don't care how long. I don't care how many walleye are living on it. Don't let no bureaucrats take the land. Yeah. Like, who's square?

Forget all that. Who's squaring off in this sportsman yeah are squaring off against landowners or people representing landowners so sportsman squaring off against private property interest groups yep exactly and who's generally Oh, I think without a doubt, private property. So sportsmen are getting locked out. Now, see, the private property interest groups or landowners or whoever would argue against that because there hasn't been a whole lot of water shut down. I think we're at like 5,000 or something which it's a lot but um you know percentage wise it's not it's not a lot now i don't i'm not worried about what's happening right now i'm worried about you know the long term yeah eventually

like you said what happens when losing access the non-meandered waters run into the meandered waters oh yeah that we've ran into that issue so you have a public lake that is public by definition from the state constitution even through this relatively new amendment And now it joins up. So they put a fence across it. So that non-meandered water then becomes part of the meandered lake. Oh, it does? Yeah, so that becomes fair game. So there's been some lakes that got way bigger.

There's been two this year that were split, non-meandered and meandered at the start of the year and are now meandered. They coupled. They coupled. So that's a net gain if you're on the pro sportsman side right here's a good way to think about it it's a great point cal glad you brought it up let's think about it like this do sportsmen hunters and anglers in this neck of the woods here, has their total acreage,

you might not know the answer to this, has their acreage that's accessible to them increased or decreased due to the flooding? Total acreage. If you added it all up. I would still say before or after the new law. Right now the flooding it's increased okay this year yeah this year this year it's increased before and after the law it's still a net decrease

god i got you so so this new round of flooding helped set things straight a little bit but it helped a little bit but it didn't completely offset what changed with the new law but it's so interesting too because what if you uh don't consider yourself a uh a fishy kind of sportsman what if you're more of a upland game to have a sportsman oh you're just screwed here yeah everything's underwater yeah pheasants are all swimming around all the spots you would pheasant hunter sloughs and full of ducks they got buoys tied to them now what i worry about don't touch that pheasant that was on my land what i worry about in the long run is just that there's no real precedent set because you have like i just can't imagine you know on let's

say the u.s supreme court i can't imagine where these three types of or you know these three different lakes that are all non-meandered being treated different i can't imagine how that would hold up as any precedent that oh this one gets special treatment because they fought it in court in you know yeah 1997 or something but this one didn't fight it in court in 1997 so it gets treated differently but this third one had more sportsmen using it than option two so it gets you know more preferential treatment than option two i just don't understand how that would ever hold up in the long run as any precedent so i'm not worried you know in the short run about our access we've still honestly the law has done its job for both

sides and it's hard for me you know it's hard for me sometimes that means that everybody's pissed off right right it's it's allowed you know a lot of landowners the option of closing off land if they choose to but for the sportsman you know a plus is a lot of landowners haven't wanted to and haven't made a fuss and so yeah but in the long run you're not comfortable with the way things are left up in the air things are left up in the air you know my brother has a sign on his property that says trespassers welcome i like that yeah you don't see me those signs no he had to have it custom made he couldn't find one. Is the state buying up land that private landowners can't use? They're not allowed to.

There's like a no net state property law or something like that. They're leasing it. Oh, yeah. That changed the access so like one lake they're leasing the access to for eight thousand dollars a year and you can only fish it for it's like six months or what is it five six seven months it's pretty much summer basically winter you can't fish it right fall and winter you can't fish it um 8 000 a year and then the landowner sets the fish limits and what they want to be done with the fish biology no really that's curious what i was getting to a spot where, but I mean, no.

That's European system, man. That is not how we do things in the United States of America. I ain't American. No. No. Man, I mean, I think it is a raw deal if you have water that the state puts fish into and then you make up the bag

limits? Yeah. Yeah, it's goofy. But it's like a new lake. And the thing is... I'm like, if your initials are S-R, there is no limit. It's different. But there are C.

Yeah, lake to lake. Every lake is like, not every lake. Every lake that the state leases is on a case-by-case basis. You can imagine a golf course, and somebody just makes a lake in the middle of their private property, and they can just do whatever they want with it. Nobody would freak out about that. It's really true man because it depends like if you have a private lake you're not exempt from fishery laws oh you know i'm saying you don't like you could own

all around lake you could just stock a bunch i mean well you can't put a bunch of northern snakehead in there goldfish no no okay there's a lot there's a lot there's permitting there's permitting processes for all this right even if you just have like a little like it's different you don't set you don't think if you own a farm okay yeah you own a big farm you don't say you don't set, like if you own a farm, okay, you own a big farm. You don't set the deer season and set the bag limit for deer on your farm. The state does because the state's wildlife. You're just hosting it. Right, but like if you put a bunch of goldfish in your pond

in the middle of your little private, like in your yard, you have to. Well, let's take the state of south dakota for instance yeah and all of a sudden your little private pond grows exponentially and connects to subsumes 10 other ponds and then your goldfish for some reason didn't read the property boundaries on the plat map and connected themselves. Yeah, you got it all full of mermaids. All of a sudden, now you filled a meandered lake with goldfish. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but, I mean, the state for a long time didn't care about invasives, right?

They just stocked all sorts of stuff. Do you know about our controversial t-shirt coming out? Nope know we had the teacher of a gnome we had the gnome packing out a unicorn t-shirt yes was aware yeah very popular shirt uh it's a gnome we got more coming out sold them sold out of them oh we sold them out and sold them out and sold them out again and then they went off now they're coming back for the holidays it's a gnome with his bow and he's got a decapitated unicorn he's got a unicorn head like a unicorn cape strapped to his backpack well we got one coming out now it's the same gnome he's a recurring character and he's on his boat it's a recurring character. And he's on his boat. It's a crazy little gnome boat. And he's tied in with his crazy little gnome rod,

like a level-wind gnome rod. And what he's hooked into is a mermaid. He's fighting a mermaid. Yeah. Circle hook? Don't know. You can't see the hook. You can see her, but you can't see the hook.

She's lip hooked. Oh, man. But you can't see her lips. Quarter of the mouth? Can't see the hook. You can see her, but you can't see the hook. She's lip hooked. Oh, man. But you can't see her lips. Quarter of the mouth? Can't see her face. But the direction of the line suggests that she's lip hooked. Sure. She's your one over for the day, though.

People have found that some people, people who've gotten a sneak peek at this and have seen this or seen it on social media it's generated some controversy like people are some people are like oh you're saying um it's okay to eat mermaids mermaids or some people feel it has a sexual connotation which makes me wonder what they do with fish they catch. But yeah, it's a controversial t-shirt. Even within our company, there's been some people who've tried to censor the shirt. So that'll probably make it more popular. Yeah, because they're like, it's a make-believe creature,

catching a make-believe creature, but it's somehow someone... Yeah, but a human can dress up as a mermaid pretty easily. Yeah. Versus a unicorn is a little harder. Ridge Pounder felt that it should be someone scaling a mermaid's tail. But the gnome is scaling its tail, which I didn't think was great. But I think it's a courtship ritual between gnomes and mermaids.

That's how they courtship. That's how they court. What's the creature created from a gnome and a mermaid? It's not... It's not viable offspring. It's not a viable offspring. Sure. It's like a...

It's a no harm, no foul scenario. Is it real good at packing out elk? It's like a mule. Yeah. I don't think I have a judgment on it. It's a weird shirt. It's a great shirt. It's the best shirt I've ever made. Is it real good at packing out elk? It's like a mule. Yeah. I don't think I have a judgment on it. It's a weird shirt. It's a great shirt. It's the best shirt ever made.

Is it your favorite? Best shirt ever made. Really? I'm thinking about having it printed. Get this on baby blue. Because I feel like that baby blue offsets some of the impending violence. Soft. Yeah.

If you wouldn't put it on a camo shirt i mean if the mermaid was catching the gnome too aggressive i like that i like the mermaid catching the gnome but uh the gnome doesn't live underwater well the mermaids drown in the gnome maybe she's like coming up out of one of those little backyard waterfall ponds she's in there comes up grabbing the yard no yeah not a yard no oh if that happens and we can't come out with another t-shirt the gnome no just stops there third gnome shirt is in the works so you got another already follow-up to the the follow-up is in it involves the gnome and another mythic creature also caught in a violent act

i mean yeah i only bring that up because i was talking about you having mermaids stocked in your pond and they all get away and get into the into the deal yeah so uh here's why i think this is relevant even to people that aren't in south dakota one you just never know driving around here cal has remarked three or four times in our in our last two uh great days of dog hunting and one day of walleye fishing um that man you think you going to tell my nature how it goes? And you can now and then a little bit. But you think you're going to tell my nature what's up? Or you, like, picture that the earth is away.

But that's a field. Yeah. Yeah. Then all of a sudden she's like, ah! It's not. It's a lake. lake yeah and on time scales surprise this is so fast that it's a time scale that we can actually understand like we obviously know things used to be oceans or seas mermaids swimming around everywhere yeah whatever we like hear these things geological history but this is like so fast that you're like oh like five years ago there was

no lake and now it's a 25 foot deep lake yeah i mean you're talking about people that are sitting at the bar that remember when there was no water exactly so or you're trying to find follow your gps system and it's just you're an out-of-towner with a rental vehicle and you're following your GPS system. And it keeps wanting you to drive through a lake. Yeah. Yeah. There's two lines from John McPhee's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Annals of the Former World, which is like a geological history book. There's two lines that I think of hanging around here where you're like, man, it changed so much. But one is this. One line from McPhee's book is that the top of Mount Everest,

the highest thing in the world, in our world, the top of Mount Everest is marine limestone. Wow. The other thing is this, is that if you imagine the earth's history as your arms stretched out so it's a line a number like a line you imagine it's history expressed by your arms being stretched out wide he explains that you could remove the entirety of human history with one stroke of a nail file and so yeah oh there goes that part of the earth's history off the number line so when you think about all that you know I can't man of course yeah yeah so you

know shit like no shit it's a lake now yeah like of course that mountain that's 20 how 29,000 20 yeah that used to be the bottom of the ocean yeah well just northeast of here lake agassi you know used to cover states monster lake yeah yeah you're talking about the big lake these have all the dinosaurs winding around on the edge of it yeah yeah yeah so but the rapidity it's so fast it's fast enough that it makes sense in our we're not very good at long-term things like all that stuff we can kind of imagine it on some arm length metaphor but it's fast enough that you're like huh i used to be able to drive down this road. Yeah. It affects your daily life.

When I was on my prom date. Just a little bit ago, this was a county road. You feel, Rick has commented a number of times that it's like, welcome to the Anthropocene. I mean, one, it's a super visual

of an apocalyptic... Tell people what the anthropocene is just like the human human age where we are sort of affecting the earth on a global yeah we had the pleistocene the ice age the holocene which we're in now but some people feel the holocene was cut short by the anthropocene meaning man yeah became the driving factor of the driving global factor yeah unlike a geological uh there were the geological epic now epic driver yeah and in this in this case you know irrespective of what's causing the increased rainfall you just it feels apocalyptic in some ways to see barns underwater barns underwater it feels like a like a roads that go nowhere

horror movie kind of thing like there's just i'm not getting a horror vibe off no horror yeah there's just like whole buildings that are just like in a likeplain. Yeah, I'm getting a horror vibe. Yeah, we saw a house that looked fairly new. Yeah, fairly new. That had water like the waves were hitting the side of the house. Yeah. A little A-frame? Yeah. Yeah, we were wondering if that dude

was still living in there or not. No, and then there's like sandbags. Close the door! He's got his muck boots on. No, but then... Watching's watching the packers you know it depends who you are if you're if you're a farmer and your field is underwater it's like you can't harvest it's like a loss on the year or whatever but if you're oh horror movie like that kind of horror movie just i see lots of horrors yeah but i feel like i could set like some spooky supernatural situation oh in here yeah i don't know but outside of the movie deal uh it's just like depending on who you are it's either

like oh this is the greatest thing ever like the duck hunting aided by all these all this water is like increased habitat the ducks seem super happy thrilled thrilled about oh yeah walleye are thrilled yeah oh yeah so there's like winners and losers in whatever change happens and and as things whatever change in the environment there's there's winners and losers these guys what i really love is uh that you guys have been catching walleye um bouncing jigs down the road oh yeah that is truthfully like catching walleye off blacktop roads in In April and May, there is absolutely not a chance there's any better spot to catch walleye than a road.

Flat out. So you go down the road, the road vanishes under a lake, you park, you put on your waders, and you keep walking down the road casting. You wade till you're just at that point where your elbows would start to get wet don't go any farther and then start casting the ditches into the ditch yeah cast ditch work up along it well white plastics

catch one hook it to a stringer hook to your waiters yep yeah white plastics in the ditches only one over 20 yeah i wonder if they'll be saying that about miami like wow amazing structure yeah people are like people are getting like i used to go to this coffee shop but now i'm so happy because there's these giant snapper yeah where'd you get that grouper you know the stone crab place um no it's really terrible oh it's so weird to be here man and i keep trying to here's the problem i keep running into as a human being i keep running into this problem is that i'll look around in some part like i i look around i look at all the ducks here and everything and all the fish and some part of me's

um i don't think i don't want to say it's a bad part of me but some part of me is like not horrified like kind of like good nature won this deal or just some some sort of like i don't know like just being so like blown away by it right and all the all the ducks if you were looking at an absence of wildlife it'd be different but you're looking and it's like it's like stuff using it we've seen huge white tails giant salamamanders, waterfowl everywhere. I force myself to be like, but there are people who are losing their, not losing their lives, but losing their livelihoods. So I'm like, man, this is amazing.

But remember, but it's always the first thought I always have is like, wow. Then I got to go, but don't feel too good because look what this means for people yeah but it's been like confusing for me because i'm an outsider too and when you're an outsider you don't um your empathy is a little bit tougher because you just don't know the people impacted right when you live here and you know the players you know maybe you get to where you look at and it just all looks like disaster but to be an outsider um to be an outsider here for the purpose of hunting ducks here for the purpose of fishing you look and ducks and fish like water you're looking like man this is like a wildlife paradise

yeah and you go like but you're kind of an for saying that because this is people's livelihoods yeah yeah how many times like tons and tons and thousands and thousands and thousands of tons of food gone to waste yeah how many times this morning were we sitting there look out over that flooded bean field and you know the cloud gets up and we all go wow look at all those ducks and in that moment that moment, you're so excited about that cloud of ducks, but you realize they just came out of 100 acres of flooded crop that is not going to be harvestable. And it costs a lot of money to put in.

A ton of money. I made the comment about when you look at this giant field, fields of corn and fields, it might dry out and they get the corn used for silage or whatever, but you're looking at all this, but a lot of it was get dissed into the ground. Yeah. You look at all that.

And you imagine just like the, the, the grain trucks and grain cars. And you think about the way, like I'll yell at my kids about not finishing the cob corn. They'll do the tight. They'll do like three typewriter rolls off of corn. They'll do three typewriter rolls off cob of corn. They'll be done. I'll be like, no, no, no.

Take that last. Don't waste that food. Shouldn't waste food. You get annoyed at them. They got half a cob of corn. They didn't eat a quarter of that. And you're pissed. And you look at that corn field and you're like, oh, man.

Yeah. Dude, imagine scraping that into the trash oh it's been so interesting being here man all that tofu gone to waste bowling co-op shooting ducks over wasted tofu uh fed ducks yeah but i don't think that they would this soy wouldn't wind up there because this is an organic soybeans you know no do they make a non-organic tofu i bet someone does oh i'm sure yeah i would imagine a lot yeah but if you talk about eating ducks you talk about them being organic you got another thing coming man especially in this area no these are not organic ducks. Like you said, there's probably not a non-GMO duck in the country.

Yeah. If you killed a duck of the year up in Alaska. Right. But once that thing spends a few months in lower 48, there's probably little chance that he didn't at some point in time wind up. No. At some point in time wind up eating eating GMO GMO products with pesticides and herbicides

and how many ducks did we eat last night nine nine ten of them no eight more than nine or ten of them and I mean I didn't hear anybody complain about a single bite and I had two big duck. Oh, man, they were good.

And I had two big duck breasts and legs, and man, they were absolutely delicious. Oh, did we clean our walleyes yet? No, not yet. Ah, man. Yeah. All right. I mean, we can just ice those things for tonight. Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. I think it is a fascinating thought of like how we impose order over the landscape, right? We got this area that's been in flux for thousands of years. I mean, where we are right now is how it is because of, you know, this giant glacier that sat over the top of this place. Yeah, we used to be under a half mile of ice. So think about that. We're doing real good compared to that. That was shit for ducks back then. That seems like progress.

Right? And then we lay out this incredible grid system of fences, these neat, tidy rows of crops, all running at right angles all gps mapped these roads county roads highways interstates all running neat tidy squares rectangles and then it just fills up with water and eliminates that stuff we're're like, there will be order. Right. And it's like, well, yeah. There will not be order. Yeah. Just wait a bit.

Maybe we'll come back, you know, and it will come back. And it's just, it's fascinating to try to wrap your head around that. And then the fact that, you know, what we've been talking about is it is because of that change that this area, you know, has been so good to us wildlife wise. And you got to think like if this water continues to rise just a little bit more, nobody can get in those fields. All that vegetation lays over, you get a big ice cap on it.

This winter that vegetation dies nukes all the oxygen underneath right so you just have this giant layer of decay all that food is gone like this area is not going to get a bunch of ducks back in it right not not like we're seeing right now what yeah one thing they were saying is if it doesn't get picked it'll get disc'd in if it dries out in spring it'll get disc'd in like if that corn doesn't like like you were saying if it doesn't lay over and all that but if it's if it's standing but rotten it'll all get disc'd in and then there's a lot of corn sitting there for those ducks. But if it stays underwater, who knows, right? But what's a wet spring

look like? Right. Can't get in the field. But, you know, it's like, it's not, just because, let's say you're just like so pro-duck, you're like, yeah! Screw the houses and the ranches. Like, let it just go back to wildlife.

It's not going to be like it is right now no no no no like there's no sense of permanence and these guys brought up an interesting point as we've been driving around discussing this is uh dan and sean have been saying like a wetland is a thing that goes dry yeah when we talk about wetlands we're talking about things that are intermittent yeah by nature they're temporary that's what they're that's what their whole purpose is they get wet and dry out get wet and dry out and it makes them rich yeah makes them not stagnant mud you know stagnant silt on the bottom gives them that richness yeah yeah so yeah it's like the same sense of permanence right it's like well it's a wetland well god now it's dry is it still a wetland

and the guy who put in his fence in his house down here yeah sense of permanence right is i mean it's just a it's an amazing thing to try to wrap your head around. It wasn't a wetland 10 years ago, so it's not a wetland. Well, there's water sitting there now with grass growing and all sorts of wild bugs. You had a wetland hiding in plain sight. Yep. And a bunch of kids dumped a bucket of walleye in there. I like that it sounds like a bad thing,

but I like the indifference of nature. It doesn't care what you really want or how it all fits the puzzle. It just kind of does its thing irrespective of any end goal. Yeah, Cal talked about that in Cal's Week in Review. When the hailstorm killed Hummy Ducks. Oh, gosh. Oh, that was in Montanaana right yeah thousands yeah ten thousand i think yeah that was down like on the tongue yeah big ass hail balls killed oh yeah thousands ducks but the way it was covered in the news it was like the end of mother nature slaughters mother nature heartlessly right and

he's like it's just hail it's just hail it's just hail and it's gravity there was no motivation there was yeah there was no like motivation no there's no motivation or end like she was trying to reclaim what it originally you know like like... Mother Nature's like, you son of a bitch and ducks. No, it's just like... I smite thee! Yeah, there's no... And the game warden's like, on the report, was like, um...

The lake's pretty full now. All the hill melted. That was last week, and it was a bitch. Yeah, a lot of ducks made it through it or whatever. It'll be interesting in a year, two years from now, to see what this area looks like. Because two years ago, if you'd told me,

this area would have two foot of water and all the corn and beans and thousands and thousands of ducks. This whole area two years ago was in a drought. That's what's crazy, too. And so, man, it's... Yeah, you're saying there was no water within 20 miles and there's no ducks. Yeah, there was no ducks.

Yeah, this time of year, you should look off on the horizon and see dust from combines. Right. Yeah. If you look off on the horizon you see the clouds of ducks. It's apocalyptic. It's a duck

apocalypse. And a year from now you could be right back to dust. Dust. No standing water. None of that. No.

It's just the nature of it. Well Sean give us your concluders and tell people tell people about this the work you do. Um.

Film a show. Yep. I do. Film a show. Yep. I film a bunch of stuff. Dreamweaver Creative. Dreamweaver Creative. Dreamweaver. That is how the business got its name. It was that song.

Is that right? Yeah. That was my nickname growing up. Oh. Sister Christian. Hey, Sethh that's a good tape what tape is that it was out of a med kit it's a great medical tape man 29 and a half inch walleye cutting up your thumb no that's my other cut oh that's from a pair of ice grips that's some tang that's some rassling the 29 inch walleye's teeth um yeah so tell about the show you film uh dream weaver creatives my production business and we film uh waterfowl show called the grind and uh travel all over chasing ducks and it's uh

man it's been super cool got to meet a lot of cool people across the country and see something we didn't really talk about but um i love just learning duck behavior learning the little different things they do in different areas you know yeah you know pretty well i've been impressed you. You can go to Nebraska and see them. When it snows a foot, they'll just be in winter wheat because that's what they do there. But they wouldn't do that in South Dakota. I don't know.

Went on my first duck hunt when I was nine and just been hooked since to the point I'm traveling, chasing them for a living. You learn a lot, man. Yeah. It was fun. It's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun so far.

Learned a lot. Still got some more of those fat teal to stack up. Oh, yeah. That's my conclusion. Little butter balls. Cal's got more teal. He's got more teal to stack up. We processed a few teal today

that looked like it was disproportionate in the amount of meat to lard. It looked like a like a large serving spoon full of red meat wrapped in snow cap lard yeah when you breasted that teal out with the skin still on man those things are fast man

they're coming so low and so fast and so zigzaggy i have swung on i think four groups of teal and have not squeezed the trigger one time because each time i was like i'm just a little seven feet behind that one so yeah i've pulled up on a bunch thought about pulling up on more i have not touched a round off on a teal yet i killed a drake mallard that came in with some teal that was cool because they all came through and blew my hat off the top of my head almost and i was i realized there's a mallard like man you're like hang on wait up no no uh yeah boy and Sean, thank you guys so, so much for, man, helping us out. Yeah, you guys rolled out the red carpet. Being excellent hosts and, you know, teaching us a lot or teach me a lot.

You know, walleye are climbing the chart as far as respectable fish go. That's for sure after this evening. Yeah, because you started out the evening anti walleye yeah i mean honestly pretty anti walleye i i was like the only good way to catch these things is trying to free dive for them with the spear um and uh these ones tonight they actually like hit your uh your lure your your jig and instead of just licking it and they kind of tugged a little bit that was cool oh they were tussling yeah they were tusslers yeah um good eating to boot so so that was that was cool man and it's just yeah man so much fun to be down here

and um yeah you guys live in a sportsman's paradise man and back in like a duck camp again yeah and uh looking at the little the social scene around here is pretty fun so sports we're happy to have you guys it was a blast that's what i'm talking about south dakota man holy cat screwed ourselves by going to bozeman and here i am wanting to move to montana no no no no i wouldn't move i'd move here man yeah you don't have enough toes for those mountains dan yeah you need to live in flat land with all the missing toes so what do you got danny got any final thoughts you wanted to live in this flat land with all the missing toes so what do you got danny got any

final thoughts you wanted to wedge in there i guess i want to end on a local proverb that'd be whiskeys for drinking and waters for fighting that's not local it's used a lot locally you know i bet i bet yeah you gotta salt the cow if you want to catch the calf. Damn right. That ain't local either. Damn right. Too thick to drink, too thin to plow. Rick? I don't know if I have a good concluder.

Out like boner in sweatpants. If you want to catch the calf, Rick. I have a good one. Lauren told me that, but I cannot say it on this program. Please don't, then. Assault the cow if you want to catch the calf, Rick. Season 8 is out. Oh, yeah. It's out on Netflix.

This won't come out. People still go watch and leave it on, so it seems like they're watching it a bunch of times in a row. It's hard to film these shows. Maybeubscribe from netflix yeah wait a minute resubscribe and then just why then leave the show on it'll look like you got sick of it and quit and then this show came out and you went back and got it again i think that's probably how a lot of the viewers feel they like it that much yep that's a great idea, Cal.

Yeah. And then make sure to leave it on so it just seems like you can't get enough. Two weeks straight. You got nothing? No. How old are you now? 39.

Gross. I know. 39-year-old man. Almost 39. 39. Yeah, but... Yep. 39-year-old man.

Oh, my real concluder is you walk extremely fast in deep water. Yeah, it's a different kind of walk. I know. You can't walk like you normally walk. I wasn't walking like I normally walk, but I just... You know what it is? You drive your knees forward. No.

Well, once you told me that it's because you were a muskrat, you know. We come full circle to the rat trap. Fishing, muskrat trapping. Yeah. Muskrat trapping, you learn to walk. I mean, I was driving my knees forward. They just don't drive forward as fast as you are. Did you watch me bird dog that crippled Mallard today?

Out in the grass strip? I watched you out there. That was an amazing retrieve. there that was good retrieve well i look like he was dancing i gotta practice that because look like he was dancing out there in the water keeping up keeping up on our somehow duck hunting you made duck hunting out active yeah i called steve for like two hours walking through. Yeah, I didn't realize you duck hunted by walking around. You don't. We were doing a little loop. Yeah, of course.

Of course we were. How did you get the ducks up? Seth? No conclusion. Just awesome here. Yeah. Just sportsman's paradise. Your right eye is bloodshot, Seth.

It's almost midnight. I want to go to bed that's my include i can't control my eyes it's almost midnight all right let's go ice our wall eyes yeah guys thanks so much man yeah thanks we're gonna come back hunt turkeys i'm gonna come back again and hunt something else and you're gonna do some ice fishing yeah oh i'm gonna come back and ice fish then i'll come hunt something else only hunt white tails sounds like we've got a couple there's no white tails up here dude we saw just the ones that stand out so a lifetime drive it like cross the road buck of a lifetime you mean big body not no and i turned to sean and i said now that would be like regarded as a shooter hereabouts, right? And he goes, oh, yeah.

I was like, okay, I just want to make sure we're all on the same page. A 200-pounder. All right. Thanks, guys. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians.

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