perspective

"Peter Parker is the guy who got bit by the radioactive spider, the toxic bug if you will, and became Spiderman. Normally he's a nebbish. No money, no prestige, and no future. But if you try to mug him in a dark alley, you're meat. The question he keeps asking himself is: 'Do those moments of satisfaction I get as Spiderman make up for all the crap I have to take as Peter Parker?' In my case, the answer is yes." Sangamon Taylor
"Zodiac" by Neal Stephenson.

"At length my dear Marquis..."

"...I am become a private citizen on the banks of the Potomac, and under the shadow of my own Vine and my own Fig-tree, free from the bustle of a camp and the busy scenes of public life, I am solacing myself with those tranquil enjoyments...."
George Washington, Letter to Marquis de LaFayette, February 1, 1784



Already a private citizen, I'm a long way from retirement so this quote is mostly an excuse to show off our burgeoning figs, for which we have high hopes in this warmer clime. I first read the portion of Washinton's letter where he expressed his desire to return to Mount Vernon years ago and, for some reason, the bit about "my own vine and my own fig tree" has always stuck. No grapes planted, though. Melons, eggplant, green beans, black eye peas, squash, okra, tomatoes, peppers, tomatillos, dill, basil, thyme oregano, tarragon, artichokes, currants, serviceberries, cherries, and peaches, yes, but grapes no, at least not yet.

Investment

"No doubt the admonition to 'take only photographs, leave only footprints,' is desirable in certain sensitive or pristine areas. But it is inappropriate in most situations because it is a fundamental denial of who we are: creatures of the earth whose most ancient heritage (or birthright, if you will) is foraging for food in the forest.

This enforced separation of human being from the natural world can only undermine support for public acquisition and protection of habitat. The more we view the forests and fields as a resource...the more likely we are to cherish that resource. Protecting habitat for aesthetic reasons alone lends credence to the argument that a few widely scattered parks are enough. But harvesting a sustainable yield of mushrooms, fish, and other wildlife creates a quantitative demand for habitat on top of a qualitative one."

David Arora, All That the Rain Promises and More, p. 254.

the rain

"The next day, at about three in the afternoon, the western horizon would be a wall the color of lead. On the front of the wall would be little clouds, pale silhouettes of torn cotton. I'd try to remain calm; baby storms would have been skittering by for a week now, teasing the powdery earth with sprinkles and infusing the dry air with a breath of mountain pine, but nothing had happened yet. I'd go back to work.
A half hour later, a dark blast of wind, laden with the odor of wet dust, would punch through the yard, swirling sand around the windows, rattling the panes. From the yard I'd see a wall towering over the town and know that we weren't going to have to water the asparagus again. We'd stand and inhale for a moment, stretching our arms toward the storm; then, as the hiss of a billion approaching raindrops bore down, we'd run. Pick up the hawk, call the dogs, slam the windows as the rain bashed in, soaking papers five feet from the sill. In the roaring cascade outside, we could not see the ground, hidden in the white smoke of atomized rebounding droplets. And then, hail--BB-sized, pea-sized--drifting in windrows beside the walk; thunder, shaking the house, lightning flashing all around, a nearly simultaneous bang and flicker. We'd grin and the world would smell like water."
Stephen Bodio, Querencia, Clark City Press 1990, p. 8-9.

Right now, we're in the "baby storms teasing" stage, hoping for the big ones to come in and wet things down.

"shades of gray"

I find it amazing how a good songwriter can use almost any subject matter. Fifteen years ago the Oklahoma City bombing was committed. To blow the song's punchline a bit, here Robert Earl Keen sings about the aftermath of that event; dealing with the subject tangentially, and respectfully, in the course of telling a darned good short story set to music.

the more things change

"We had spent the summer in New Mexico, and, during a brief stop in Santa Fe, we had been grilled on why we live in New York by that group of Eastern-refugee remittance men the place specializes in--the people who half-retire at forty-two in order to devote themselves to talking about a novel they might write and and overseeing the repairs of any cracks that might develop in the adobe walls of their house and discussing water rights their land carries by virtue of the original Spanish land grand and raising a herd of twelve or fourteen particularly elegant goats."
Calvin Trillin "The Dance of the Restaurant Trotters" American Fried (1974)

consumption

"Aldo Leopold once said; 'A wilderness without wildlife is of no use to me, a wilderness without wildlife is just empty country;' and he is right, and for some of us, walking on the land without tasting of its bounty is just empty walking. Some can survive on the sustenance provided by simple beauty, especially those that live far from the land. Others need to return with meat to feed their families and somehow justify the hours they spend in cold and lonely and lovely places. And yes, there are those that require the hides and horns of animals to substantiate their hunting tales, a brute addition perhaps, but a necessary addition, to their love of the silence and the beauty of the land. But we must all remember that whether we carry a gun or not, the strip-mine shovel digs for us. We are all takers. Takers removed by degree, not dimension, from the strip-miners, loggers and roughnecks. The only difference is in the giving back."

Bob Jamieson "Breaks", Gray's Sporting Journal, Volume Eight, Issue 4, Fall 1983, p. 46.

foreboding

"It was still hot back in Mississippi and in Texas, where I used to live, but it was already cold up in the mountains, up in the North, in this place where I was going to start a new life. The immediate, pressing problem, I realized, was that winter was perhaps a month away. I knew nothing about winter. I had never seen it before, and I felt dizzy with fear, giddy with wonder, anticipating it.

The dogs, I could tell, were worried too, and missed Mississippi. I could tell they thought I was making a mistake."

Rick Bass, "Winter"

quote

"Most modern hunters, good and bad, just want to hunt--not explore and debate why they do it and how they do it and what other think of them for it. Yet today, no thoughtful hunter can afford to just hunt. In order to defend what we do--to ourselves, our families, our friends, and, especially, to an increasingly urbanized, denatured, domesticated, and virtualized populace--in order to improve hunting ethices and invite and inspire tomorrow's hunters and assure that hunting has a tomorrow...for all of these reasons and more, hunters must ask themselves: Why?"

David Peterson "Heartsblood"

another quote

"I'd much rather my guns wore out in a dozen years than my dogs. There's something wrong with a world where even a good pair of boots lasts longer than a good gundog."

"The Big One One", Robert F. Jones, The Hunter in My Heart

scarcity

"As we crowd more and more on to public hunting lands, that nebulous something one of my friends calls The Quality Outdoor Experience grows more rare. As more people use less, more laws are passed, some to preserve that quality and some to preserve anything at all, stifling the freedom that is an intrinsic part of The Quality Outdoor. This crowding and regulation doesn't only apply to hunting. These days we have to apply a year ahead for reservations to camp in Yosemite National Park, and something very similar is going to happen to Yellowstone very soon. AS public forests in the East grow not just crowded but actually dangerous to hunt in, more and more hunters come West, to hunt forests already crowded by folks who moved to Wyoming and Idaho and Montana to get away from a crowded California.

And so it goes. Those of us who were lucky enough to be raised somewhere close to the land, with a sense of self-sufficiency and (dare I say it?) The Quality Outdoor Experience, just go deeper. That can mean hiking farther into the Wind River Range, moving to Alaska, or just hunting something not so damn popular, like sage grouse."

John Barsness, Western Skies

character

"One old-timer I hunted with by the North Dakota border advised me to never, ever get hold of one of those Chesapeake dogs, because he'd had one back in the thirties that was so stubborn and ornery that it finally refused to get out of the back of the pickup one day during a sharptail expedition. My friend finally tried to lasso the dog and drag it out by main force-and almost got his hand bitten off for his trouble. It's an image that attacks me on the verge of sleep some nights: a leather-faced cowboy whirling a rope around his head on an empty prairie ridge, preparing to toss the loop at the head of a bull-necked Chesapeake Bay retriever braced sullenly in the back of an ancient Chevrolet pickup-probably at the same time another hunter, a couple of thousand miles to the southeast, ate a leisurely sandwich from the lunch box of a mule-drawn wagon, while his well-trained pointin' dogs searched for yet another covey of quail."

John Barsness, Western Skies (again)

Isn't it ironic

"The suburbanite's desire to hunt must be deeply instinctive if it isn't buried by a world according to Trump. But the corollary must be that when modern America decides to hunt, it wants a sure thing. A place where your dollar always buys satisfaction, where if you pay for three pheasants you by God kill three pheasants.

.... The modern urban American hunter wants something certain, and in modern America a few dollars searching for something can find it. That's the law of the marketplace, and the marketplace has created Natty Bumppo as comparison shopper."

John Barsness, Western Skies

(Irony; the sole Amazon review for this most excellent book states: "Just a pleasant read and not informative of where and how to put a hunt together. This appears to be the author's intent, however most of us are in the execution mode, not the live/read about other lives mode." In other words, "just tell me where to go and how to do it, don't waste my time with your stories or 'philosophy' and please, please don't make me read closely and draw some of my own lessons".)

political

"If ever there was an opportunity for 'liberals' and 'conservatives' to come together it is with programs such as the CRP. The Right is right: incentives are preferable to government coercion in protecting the land, the water, land the wildlife. We've gone as far as we can go (perhaps too far) in forcing people to care for the natural world."

M.H. Salmon "Catfish as Metaphor"

for clarification, see "CRP"

veg

"I think of fruits and herbs as essential luxuries: joyous ingredients that I would never be without. Whereas vegetables are luxurious essentials; the primary building blocks for most well-constructed meals that I could not be without. When vegetables take center stage, even meat may become a spice."

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall "The River Cottage Cookbook"

quote

"...I've found that if you have a certain kind of inner peace (and no kids) you can buy things you want but can't afford and feel okay about it."

John Gierach "Another Lousy Day in Paradise"

talking rot

"But you have a feeling of happiness about action to come?"

"Yes," said Wilson, "There's that. Doesn't do to talk too much about all this. Talk the whole thing away. No pleasure in anything if you mouth it up too much."

"You're both talking rot," said Margot.

Ernest Hemingway "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"

(Best short story, ever, in my opinion.)

modern life

"Earlier that summer, I ran into an old poet friend I hadn't seen in over a year. I said, 'How are you, Jack?' and he said 'Busy. Busyness is endemic now, you know?'
I thought, if a seventy-year-old poet is too busy, what hope is there for me?"
....
"It's become an epidemic. People drive angrily, even through this pretty foothills country, because they're too busy to slow down and enjoy the ride. They eat the worst kind of food because they're too busy to even think about eating well, let alone take the time to do it. Even recreation has gotten loud, frantic, and competitive because no one has what you can honestly call free time anymore. Fun has become a desperate business where you have to enjoy yourself in a precious few hours or die trying."

John Gierach, "At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman"

religion

"I am a religious man in a nonspecific, nonpracticing sort of way. That is, I think the religious impulse is one of the finest things about the human race, but that organized religion can be one of the worst. As for other peoples' religions, I agree with Jim Harrison, who said, 'You cannot greedily suck out of another culture that which you have failed to find in your own heart.'"

John Gierach "At the Grave of the Unknown Fisherman"

shotgunning

"Now, of course, it is carved somewhere on a rock that lifting your head is the expert's miss, but often nothing short of a slow-motion video will prove to the average shooter that he doesn't have his head down. Keeping your head down is one of the first rules, but I know a pretty fair shooter who wrote a good book on skeet and didn't go into detail on that part at all. I asked him why he didn't emphasize that part. He lowered his voice. 'I never put my head down,' he said. 'I just point the damned thing. That's why I don't care if the pull is seventeen inches or twelve, and I am not going to write about something I don't know any thing about.'
I think this proves shotgunning is partly supernatural."
(the late, great) Charley Waterman "Field Days"