Great Big Winter

Now, in mid-February we have, if anything, an over-abundance of both ice and snow. This is as it should be.

Sylvania

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.

First Epistle to Wisconsin

I wrote a letter last night to a fellow who wants to learn to ice-fish this winter, a letter meant to prepare him for the harsh realities of the world of ice-fishing in advance of my January arrival where I will take on the role of personal trainer for a few days, demonstrating the cutting […]

Gratuitous Nature

The whole valley of Turtle Creek – my polluted little brook – is manifestly greener than it was a hundred years ago, a time when much of the surrounding hillsides would have been strip mines or tailing piles and the trees would have been almost all cut for firewood or simply to clear pasture land to feed cows and horses.

The Soft Chains of Comfort

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.

Risking it All

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 […]

Hope Springs Eternal

Fishing is the finest pasttime known to man and one reason for this is that your enthusiasm for it can quickly be “re-set” if it ever becomes dull. The people I’ve met who have given up fishing over time usually describe years of going to the same places and fishing for the same things, imagining […]

Diagnostics

At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. H.D. Thoreau “Walden” Andrew and I started by taking the windshield wipers off then removed nuts and bolts […]

Tubular Bliss

For me, the joy of fishing arises from its variety. First, there is great variety in the species of fish themselves, especially here in Pennsylvania. Our fishes largely adhere to our major watersheds, the Ohio and Susquehanna but then also the minor watersheds: Lake Erie, the Genesee River, Delaware River and Potomac River, […]

Wealth is Good for Us and Our Environment

During the months of coronavirus lockdown, I’ve been eating more from the wild. I haven’t been working as much, there have been shortages of things I want to eat and I simply won’t wear the mandatory mask to the grocery store. Things haven’t been dire though and I certainly haven’t gone hungry. I just did […]

the dying fish

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