But we don’t think much about the trees that lay horizontal now; they’re not special to us. But that’s because we didn’t know them the way the birds did who nested thirty or forty feet off the ground in their strong green branches.
Read more "Sylvania"I wasn’t hopelessly tied to the comforts of home and work life. I could still make it out here. I could adapt – I’d done it before.
Read more "The Soft Chains of Comfort"In my 2016 book, The Dying Fish, I tried, in Chapter 28, to capture an idea I felt was important as I went on with my long walk and talk on nature and attempted in this chapter to merge those ideas with some much more human concepts. The excerpt below pertains to risk and I […]
Read more "Risking it All"At the store there’s no 2% milk or the hotdog bun section is bare or our favorite breakfast cereal has all been consumed by the locust swarm – the shoppers who got here a little earlier than we did. Immediately, the mind turns toward survival snaring, the digging of choice tubers or the use of […]
Read more "No Need to Starve"Today’s post is a little different; it doesn’t fit well with my ordinary writing on fish, watery places and living in the wild. But these are extraordinary times. We as a society are suffering now due to the weak minds of our media and politicians. But it’s maybe just a reflection of the weakness […]
Read more "Infectious Weakness"The first time I rolled my kayak in the February ice flows of the Allegheny River, I realized that it wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined and I was likely to survive the invigorating exercise. I swam the boat to shore, carried it up to its dry dock and went in search of dry clothes. […]
Read more "Panic and Preparedness"Maybe it’s the solitude. Maybe it’s the adventure. Maybe it’s the stark simplicity. Maybe it’s because of all of these but it’s certain that I love to drop baited lines through holes in the ice. I do so as much as winter temperatures allow, frozen lakes remaining always a prerequisite. In southwestern Pennsylvania there are […]
Read more "Plunge of the Polar Bear (Do it with good form and you too could stay alive this winter!)"In 1986 twenty-year old Chris Knight parked his Subaru Brat at the end of a northern Maine woods road, set the keys inside and walked away into the woods. What might have been expected in the days ahead was for Chris to get tired of the woods and start trying to find his way back […]
Read more "A Stranger Response (Part 1)"Today I trampled 7 miles of unfrequented trail here in Pittsburgh’s north hills. I watched the hawks and crows fight (they’re always fighting) and I mingled with my deer friends – they all know me. Some of the trail was nice and some was snow and some was ice. I can’t say it easy run […]
Read more "Readiness"“Watch out for spiders!” Susan warned as I left to go ice fishing a few days ago. She knows the history of arachnids that sneak into camp and into sleeping bags when least expected. Yes, even in mid-winter. But it was particularly cold today, the high only reaching about 20. I wasn’t […]
Read more "The Spiders of January"