I know – the name of my website/book is confusing. It’s meant to be. And when you think you really know what it means, you probably still don’t. Those who have read the whole thing have invariably told me it wasn’t what they’d expected. It’s about a year and a half now since I launched […]
Read more "The Dying Fish Lives On"Catfish have always been a fascination of mine. Maybe it’s because I grew up in the north where there were almost none of them and I went through childhood hoping to some day catch a catfish. Actually, I’m told that I caught my first one in Indiana at the age of 3 on a cane […]
Read more "Pole Cats"A practical scheme for maximizing Liberty may have been the greatest of American inventions and worth remembering this Independence Day. All good things spring from Liberty, beginning with freedom of conscience and then manifesting as our choice of occupation, our many avocations and the causes we support, to enumerate just a few of […]
Read more "America: Bastion of Liberty, Land of the Free"There’s a sharp dichotomy here in Pennsylvania among anglers and this same split applies equally well to the fishers of other states. I think that I captured this difference best in my long read book, The Dying Fish, but here’s the quick read version. When I came to Pennsylvania other fishermen who discovered our shared […]
Read more "FISHING ON THE WILD SIDE"Ecology: A branch of science concerned with the interrelationship of organisms and their environments Ecology is too complex a thing to think we know it all. And it’s too big an idea to imagine we can understand it from a book, without in situ experience. It’s all change and every organism is linked […]
Read more "Ecology Beyond the Textbooks"I hope that people who attempt to read The Dying Fish will see it through to the end. The simple-minded first half, chronicling day to day life in the woods, is setting the stage for something grander in the second half. Hopefully, something worth your time. A few years back, I picked up a […]
Read more "Aldo Leopold Revisited"The morning’s run actually began with a walk, just trying to loosen up the legs after last night’s speed lap around North Park here in the Pittsburgh suburbs. The run also began with rain. Pavement passed under my feet through the first mile and a half, the rain splashing loudly and heading quickly to the […]
Read more "The Life Aquatic"I titled this piece “Exploratory Fishing” but I probably could have just called it “Fishing.” Almost all of my fishing is exploratory because the very joy of the sport is the search for new places to wet a line and determination of who hides just below the reflective surface. Yesterday morning began with a rushed […]
Read more "Exploratory Fishing"How do you deal with change? This question addresses one of the most fundamental partitions among humans, I think. During my long walks through the eastern mountains, recounted in The Dying Fish, I became painfully aware that, really, it was all change. If there are others who think I’m right about this, then it seems […]
Read more "Warming to Change"The photo used here is not my own and, regrettably, I’m unable to find the photographer’s name. In today’s early morning hours, my mother, Joy Keith, passed away. Her days ended at a constant care facility here in Pittsburgh’s North Hills after a long struggle with cancer. She was at peace as she left, ready […]
Read more "She Never Left Home"
the dying fish 