Weeding

We strive to achieve perfection, every shrub and flower in its assigned place, looking its best, and nothing else crowding things and making a mess, nothing interfering with appearances or first impressions.

State of Mind

“It’s just much, much too cold. The valley never warmed this morning and the trout are really, really put off. They’re just not eating anything,” Nigel consoled and rationalized for us both.

Walking

Walking can be thought of as the basis of almost all your further activities in the wild.

Back Out West

So, on October fifteenth, my packed-to-capacity Kia Soul merged onto the Pennsylvania turnpike, headed west. Susan was in the passenger seat and Washington State lay somewhere out on the horizon.

Welcome to the Forest

So, I’m turning over a new leaf today, at least for a while, and writing a series on the basics – how to get started outdoors from square one, from venturing out your back door to pursuing fish to survival.

Crippling Complexity

On October 22, 1853 Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal, “As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth.” It sounds nice but isn’t this merely the rumination of a 19th Century […]

Montana

Cross-posted from the blog at MarchOfLiberty.com, with apologies for the delay. July 27, 2021 The creature who stood there in the rain waiting for me was certainly a woman, but a woman who’d known abuse and neglect and sorrow and disappointment, all in doses higher than most of us will ever know. She stood at […]

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.

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 […]

The Good News

The news told me that this was the end of the world as we know it. But when I went outside, I noticed the sparrows gathering twigs for this spring’s nests. I noticed the skunk cabbage and ramps unfurling a rich green in the floodplain and reaching for the clear sky. I saw the squirrels […]

the dying fish

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nature