This is the worst time of my year.  In some areas, March is beautiful and there are adornments such as cherry blossoms to enjoy.   For those of us in the Red River Valley, it’s time to watch the dirty snowdrifts slowly recede, the rivers rise, and anxiously wait for the walleye opener (which was ridiculously close to ice-out last year and it’s in MAY!).

I just returned from a trip to Illinois via Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa (thus my absence from Blogville).  There were lucky folks fishing on the Mississippi river from boats, waving as we drove past, taunting me, as I’m sure they could tell clearly from afar that I was from North Dakota.  ”Poor bastards,” I imagined them saying as I left them and drove back north.  I thought of my own boat lying in state in my best friend’s quonset.  He probably won’t have the doors busted free from the ice and snowdrifts for another month so I can free my vessel.  And then about all I will be able to do is bring it home, park it in the driveway, and sit at the helm, making outboard motor noises and dreaming of open water.

At this very moment, I’m waiting for the melt to really break loose to test my newly installed 3/4 hp sump pump.  The Red River here near the headwaters is going to be above flood stage, as usual, and is due to crest on Wednesday.  Fargo prognosticators are predicting a crest there to match the 1997 flood.  Having lost a home to the 1997 flood when I lived in our sister city of Breckenridge, my back aches for pretty much the entire month of March, and I think about water non-stop.  Ironic that a fisherman would experience so much stress over the very same thing that provides so much enjoyment later in the season.

So I wait.  I can’t even do boat prep for the season yet.  The tackle has all been obsessively organized several times over the long winter, and the gear is ready to go back in the boat.  I guess I’ll stand in my garage and look around at all of my stuff, plug in the bait fridge, and wait for the river below the dam to break up so that I can at least drop a jig in it sometime in April.  And I will think of the guys below all the dams I passed on the way back up the Mississippi.  Catch one for your northern brethren, boys.  It will be a spiritual work of mercy for us souls in purgatory.