Me, posing with my fish necklace.

Country folks are a mysterious breed to many people. City dwellers don't understand how we have fun without bright lights and busy urban activity.

Please allow me to demystify this perplexing group of people for you. If you read this post in its entirety, you will become educated on the lifestyles of the "small-towners" and country folks living in my area of the Upper Midwest. I will keep your limited amount of time in mind as I provide a photo documentary of this strange lifestyle. Please do enjoy.

What We Do For Entertainment.

We enjoy spending a weekend uncivilized -- meaning drinking beer and camping by a pond in the woods.

We like to fish (while drinking a beer).

We like to pose our prized hunting dogs with our favorite 30 pack of beer.

(These dogs are actually trained to open a cooler, sniff out and retrieve a can of Busch out of all other brands of beer, then deliver it to their owner!)

We keep pet catfish in our ponds.

And in our homes.

We hunt for morel mushrooms.

Then pose them beside our can of beer for a size scale.

We blaze through creek beds with ATVs.

And Jeeps.

On Fourth of July weekend, we float all day in a pond, drinking beer and staying cool.

We even keep a 30 pack floating on the surface for easy access. When we run out of ice, we tie our beer to a boat anchor and sink it to the frigid bottom of the pond, where we can retrieve it by a rope when we need a new one.

We make emergency survival cooking stoves from beer cans.

We spend entire weekends on river canoe trips.

Or disappear for a whole week in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, with no outside contact whatsoever.

We take a school bus and convert it to an RV with a deck on top.

When we are camping in the Boundary Waters and realize we forgot a spoon, we improvise with tree bark.

Did I mention that we like to catch fish?

In fall, we like hay rides in the country.

When a friend gets married, we have bachelor parties in the country that involve guns, fireworks, ATVs, and a vast quantity of beer.

Heck, we even build functioning wood stoves from retired mailboxes to heat our campers!

Have I mentioned yet that we like to fish?

We build our own blinds to hunt out of.

And cover our walls with dead animals.

We ice skate on ponds.

We pick up snakes (and sometimes get bitten).

Notice the laceration on my finger from this aggressive Bull Snake.

We enjoy having a cold beer and watching a river flow by.

We enjoy harvesting fresh fruits and vegetables from our own yard.

We like playing with large machines and doing fun jobs.

Like digging our own ponds.

Have I mentioned fishing yet?

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In Conclusion

I hope I have clarified the enormous question that has been keeping you awake at night and distracting your mind during the day: How do country folks entertain themselves?

It is important to note that many of these photos were taken during my younger years, before I was a father. These were the days before I knew the Lord, and my life was misguided. Not that these activities are bad, but the excessive drinking is not an accurate representation of who I am today. I am just a good ol' boy who loves the Lord and the family He has given me. And it is fun to look back on some of the good times of my past.