Nessmuk, among the best known writers of the era preceding establishment of New York’s Adirondack Park, chronicled thousands of miles paddled in light-weight canoes across the waterways of that region. His writing, while not verbose or particularly elevated, conveys much about the reality of that region, at that time. Though much of it may have […]
Read more "The Organic and the Beautiful"This is the second half of a long article of mine which was published in a literary journal last year. It’s the story of an urban oasis of wild things and how I think about places like this – seeing opportunity rather than wasteland. (Part one Here) Migratory birds rest and feed […]
Read more "Libertarian Park Part 2"“Libertarian Park” is a long-read article of mine that was published late last year in the literary journal Confrontation. It’s a Pittsburgh story with broader implications, I think; presented here in 2 parts. Chalfant Run seeps to the forest floor in a tangle of underbrush between blocks of planned housing in east Pittsburgh. […]
Read more "Libertarian Park Part 1"This will be a very simple post about a nice place in the West Virginia woods. Dick and Martha Hartley have deep family roots in the red clay soils of western West Virginia. They grew up with the simple pleasures that the wooded countryside could offer, content yet ambitious, I think. They met […]
Read more "A Place Worth Seeing"I’ve been reading a lot on the history of northern Maine lately. I have a connection to the place – it’s where I spent my adolescence – and my thoughts often run back to its wilds. Maine shaped my view of the world as a wild place ripe for exploration, a view which I carried […]
Read more "Trade Offs"The blog you’re now reading is named after my 2016 book, “The Dying Fish (A Sojourn to the Source)” In 2007 I began hiking north from Dawson County Georgia along the spine of the Appalachians. I would attempt to walk through the entire native eastern range of the brook trout which would […]
Read more "The Dying Fish"I write a lot on The Dying Fish blog about minimizing government’s role in conservation, rather than thinking of the EPA and state agencies as the only bulwarks against environmental ruin. I also write a good bit about the danger of coming to think of public lands (state game lands, state parks, national forests, etc.) […]
Read more "Stewardship"