Archive for March, 2011

Mar 29 2011

Profile Image of Walt

Winter Kill

Filed under Blog Post

A big thaw about a week and a half ago melted off most of the snow in my yard.  That and the return of robins, blackbirds and geese gave me an early case of spring fever.  But temps have hovered around freezing since then, making me surly.  It’s been a long, snowy winter this time around, and I’m ready to see the end of it.

I reworked my Paris travel book this morning, getting it ready for publication.  At first working on it was a pleasant escape from the reality out my window.  But after a while, it got to me.  I can only take that bubbly, upbeat narrative a few hours at a time.  It really doesn’t suit my end-winter mood.

I went for a short hike this afternoon, more to burn fat than anything else.  I had expected the temps to climb into the 40s by now.  No such luck.  So I donned my thermals for what I hope will be the last time this year.  Then I loaded my dog Matika into the car and headed for the Rail Trail.

The trail was clear at first, while we were passing through farmer’s fields, but quickly turned to hard-packed snow under the cover of trees.  Yeah, it’s still winter in the woods.

Matika was happy to be outside, as always.  There were plenty of new and interesting smells to keep her busy.  I let her do her thing undisturbed while I trudged along leaving tracks in the snow.  I daydreamed about finding the first shoots of skunk cabbage, or some other sign of spring.  Maple sap lines appeared.  That’s about all.

Where’s Matika?  I looked around, catching her silhouette against the snow about thirty yards off trail.  She was tugging at something.  I called her away from whatever it was that she had found, then went over to investigate.  Sure enough, the bloody leg bones of an unlucky deer protruded from the snow.  I didn’t have to dig up the rest of it to know what had happened.  Like I said, it has been a long, snowy winter.

A short while later, Matika and I found the fresh tracks of another deer pressed deep into a muddy stretch of snow-free trail – a survivor most likely searching for food.  I turned us around before spotting it, concerned that my canine companion might give chase.  We had gone far enough, anyway.  And while walking back to the car, keenly aware of my winter fat, I wasn’t quite as surly as I’d been before.

Comments Off on Winter Kill

Mar 23 2011

Profile Image of Walt

A Voice for the Wild

Filed under Blog Post

I like to think of myself as a one-of-a-kind writer, whose quirky ideas are utterly new and different.  But I too have my influences.  Emerson and Thoreau are foremost among a hundred writers who have left their mark on me.  Among my contemporaries Gary Snyder looms large, and for good reason.  His book, The Practice of the Wild, came at a time when I was defining myself as a writer/thinker. When it comes to articulating the wild and our relationship to it, I am more indebted to him than I care to admit.

Recently my wife gave me a copy of The Etiquette of Freedom as an early birthday present.  This book is accompanied by a DVD that’s also called “The Practice of the Wild,” even though it’s a conversation between Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison on various subjects, along with a succinct portrayal of Snyder’s life and work.   To those interested in Zen Buddhism, beat poetry and their influence on the counterculture of the 60s, this film is insightful.  To those who want to better understand the roots of Environmentalism, it’s a must-see.  But it struck me in a different way.

Snyder is 80 years old now.  Even though he’s remarkably fit for his age, with a sharp mind to boot, it’s clear that the bulk of his work is behind him.  We assume that our contemporaries will always be with us, and we eagerly await their next books, never considering the possibility that this flow of ideas might end.  What happens when it does?

When I was a young man, I saw myself as God’s gift to the literary world.  But every great book I’ve read since then has humbled me a bit.  And I’ve read a lot of them through the years.  Time marches on and those we idolize soon become history.  This winter two of my favorite nature writers, John Hay and John Haines, passed away.  The generation previous to my own is retiring, fading into the background, checking out.  Can those in my generation fill their shoes?  More to the point, can I be a voice for the wild the way someone like Snyder has been?  My gut says no.

Snyder made it clear in the film that when he uses the word “nature” he means the entire universe, not just the outdoors.  My sentiment exactly.  And when he later said: “Life in the world is not just eating berries in the sunlight.  I like to imagine a depth ecology that would go to the dark side of nature,” he was talking dirty to me.  This is my domain – the wild that I have come to know firsthand.  So maybe, just maybe, I have something to contribute to the conversation.  That said I’m hoping he will write just one more book before, as he put it so eloquently, “walking the ghost trail in the stars.”

Comments Off on A Voice for the Wild

Mar 16 2011

Profile Image of Walt

Almost Spring

Filed under Blog Post

A sunny day with temps in the high 30s.  Good day to head for the hills, so that’s what I do after a few hours of desk work.  “Is that a robin?” I ask myself, catching the shadowy shape of one on a rooftop while loading gear into my car.  On second look, it’s gone.  Maybe I was just imagining it.  Too early for migrating birds.  After all, there’s still a foot of heavy snow on the ground.

Stepping out of my car at the trailhead, I immediately hear the rush of water.  I walk over and, sure enough, there’s Preston Brook open and running fast towards the lowlands.  That puts a smile on my face.  I strap snowshoes to my rucksack and shoulder the load.  A trail of hard-packed snow points up Honey Hollow Road – closed for the season to all vehicles.  Then I begin what should be my last winter hike, going deeper into the mountains.

For nearly an hour I trudge steadily uphill, putting one foot in front of the other.  My dog Matika dashes from one sniffing spot to the next.  The woods are full of good smells this time of year.  Hares, squirrels and other forest creatures are awakening and moving about.

When the road levels out a bit, I fasten the snowshoes to my boots and leave the trail.  Matika runs across a thick crust of snow.  I sink no more than an inch into it, pleasantly surprised by this ease of movement.  Good thing.  Soon I’m following the trace of an old skidder trail next to a deeply cut ravine, descending rapidly towards the brook.  It’s a bushwhack now, just me, my dog and the trackless wild.

A smile breaks across my face when I spot the brook again.  It is rock-strewn and running hard, but still wide open and as clear as any mountain stream gets on a cloudless day.  The sun burns bright through naked trees, warming my face.  I’m hatless and in shirtsleeves now, yet still breaking a sweat.  Matika catches a scent then so do I.  It’s the nearly forgotten smell of the earth just beginning to thaw out.  Several days before the equinox, it is almost but not quite spring.  I caress exposed ferns and moss growing on the side of a huge boulder before following the brook farther downhill.

Matika cavorts about the woods, delirious with the freedom of the hills.  I tramp along as if living a dream.  The warm season is about to unfold in all its muddy, wet, bug-ridden glory.  And that’s a prospect that makes me happier than words can say.

Comments Off on Almost Spring

Mar 09 2011

Profile Image of Walt

Trout Dreams

Filed under Blog Post

A big winter storm struck northern Vermont two days ago, dumping two feet of snow.  That’s the third largest dump on record for these parts, making this the third snowiest winter.  Or something like that.  I spent the better part of yesterday shoveling and roof raking, and that was after the plow guy had cleared my driveway twice.  Yeah, a lot of white stuff.

Right now it’s sunny outside, about twelve hours before the next storm strikes.  I should grab my snowshoes and take advantage of this break in the weather.  But that’s not where my heart lies.  Last night I dreamed of a mountain stream teeming with large, wild trout.  And this morning, well, let’s just say the view out my window doesn’t match the fantasy.

Stepping outdoors for a moment to start up my wife’s car, I hear a cardinal singing loudly from atop a leafless maple.  He’s thinking the same thing I’m thinking.  And the warm morning sun assures us both that spring can’t be that far away.  But all this snow . . . egads!

Judy and I have a late-winter ritual: when the snow is deep outside, we cook and eat the last of the trout that I brought home the previous summer.  Granted, I’m mostly a catch-and-release fisherman these days, but I make sure to bring home a few of them just for this occasion.  We ate the trout a couple weeks ago.  And that’s just about the time I started yearning for the warm season.

This morning I opened the newspaper and learned that the writer/naturalist John Hay just died.  This news sent me to my bookshelves right away.  I cracked open The Immortal Wilderness where I had it bookmarked and reread this:  “Behind the world so recklessly and uncertainly claimed by politics and economics lie the magic and inexorable laws of the wilderness, known to every life.  The flower is wiser than the machine.”  My sentiments exactly.  So now I’m dreaming of wildflowers as well as trout.  Right now I don’t give a damn about the government’s budgetary problems, the health care debacle, or the price of oil.  I just want to see a brook trout and a purple trillium again.

Is this cabin fever talking?  You bet it is.  But there’s no sense stewing in it.  So I’ll strap on my snowshoes and make the best of the situation.  My dog Matika is ready to roll.  Unlike me, she lives in the moment.  She will romp in the snow as if it’s the first powder of the season.  And I will follow, somewhat reluctantly, dreaming of spring.

Comments Off on Trout Dreams

Mar 03 2011

Profile Image of Walt

Journey’s End

Filed under Blog Post

Eighteen months ago I leaned against a big rock, making one last entry in my field journal.  I was exhausted from a punishing hike across north-central Maine on a section of the Appalachian Trail known as the 100 Mile Wilderness.  Judy came along and took this picture of me.  Not very flattering, but telling in more ways than one.

I remember feeling both a deep sense of satisfaction in that moment, and tremendous sadness.  These are predicable sentiments at journey’s end.  But I also remember thinking that the easy part was behind me.  Now the hard part – the telling of the tale – lay directly ahead.  Or maybe it’s the other way around.

This morning I reworked to completion the final chapter of the Maine hiking narrative, thus finishing the journey in another sense.  The physical effort of hiking and the mental effort of writing are behind me now, and all that remains is publication.  That’s always anticlimactic.  So now the trek truly is finished.  Once again, I feel both satisfaction and sadness.

I don’t really know whether I hike in order to write or vice versa.  The two are so much a part of me that I can’t untangle them any more.  What I do know is that I love to hike as much as I love to write, and that journey’s end – actual or literary – always leaves a void in my life.  No doubt there’s another book in my future, along with another trail.  But there are times, like now, when it seems like a crazy way to live.

At midday I went for a walk along the Rail Trail despite a biting cold.  The trail had been groomed for snowmobiles so I walked in the tracks of those fast-moving machines.  Occasionally I stepped aside to let one of them zip past.  And it seemed like the perfect metaphor for the literary life – especially one steeped in wildness.  I plod along at a snail’s pace while the rest of the world races by.  How very Thoreau-like of me.  Am I the lucky one or a pathetic creature?  I know what Thoreau would say, but I am not he.

I’m still on the greatest journey of them all and have, as the old poet said, “miles to go before I sleep.”  That means I’ll be an old man before I can answer that question with anything approaching certainty.  Even then, I might not be able to sort it all out.  Perhaps it isn’t for me to say.

Comments Off on Journey’s End