welcoming fall

    Autumn’s come early to the northeast this year or at least to Pennsylvania. As a lover of cold weather, I’m thrilled to see it. How do I know fall’s come early? Well, obviously, the daily highs have been significantly below what I can remember from recent years around the beginning of September. That’s […]

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Bionomics – A Book Report

    During the later years of the Eastern Brook Trout Solo Adventure, I thought I caught sight of something that looked like a self-regulating economy among the organisms of the eastern forest. And by the time I was done, it seemed odd to try to fit the strictures of command-and-control governmental policy to a […]

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Take a Kid Fishing

Drew’s not really a kid these days but 20 years ago he was, and so was I. We met at a small Christian school where Drew, as I remember, was mostly into computers – the high speed Commodores of the day and their incomparable role-playing and first-person shooter type games like Wolfenstein and the timeless […]

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Free to Flourish

During the long hikes recounted in The Dying Fish, I discovered that I was a libertarian. I can’t really say that I discovered a love of liberty though – that had always been a part of me. It’s amazing how your world view changes when you place liberty at the top of your values heirarchy. […]

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Summer Nights Well Spent

The hiking stove featured here is the Emberlit.   In my book, The Dying Fish, I recount the story of catching my first brook trout late one summer evening in Newfoundland, long ago. The moment was magical because I was seeing this fish for the first time, a fish that would shape my life in […]

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Get Out Alive

I cover a lot of outdoor topics here on my blog but I’ve never done one on survival. Strange that I haven’t; It seems to be a topic of great interest among all kinds of outdoor folks – with good reason. I thought I knew survival before the long hikes recounted in The Dying Fish, […]

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The Dying Fish Lives On

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 […]

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Pole Cats

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 […]

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Big Adventure in a Tiny Car

My years alone in the wild left me with many impressions – some more profound, some less so. The hermit-like wanderings certainly helped me figure out what’s really needed to live in this world; it’s not hard to determine when you’ve got to carry it all on your back. Living in such a real and […]

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