A Fish Tale

When Aldo Leopold included a chapter on fishing in his book A Sand County Almanac, he spoke to generations of conservationists and sportsmen on the beauty of small places. “The Alder Fork” described in his July chapter was not big in volume or rapids or in the size of the trout it yielded. It was big in its unique beauty and in the chance that it yielded fish on a hot July day. Leopold admitted that none of the trout had to be folded double or beheaded to fit the creel.

The story brought to mind an event from my college days, spent in my home town as a commuter student. I knew trout were nowhere to be found in the Ohio waters I fished, but I remembered stories of Todd’s Fork, a branch of the Little Miami River, and reputed home to smallmouth bass. I also remembered a sign which read “Fishing, but no Hunting or Camping.” It proclaimed its message where a back road passed near the fabled creek.

I had caught Largemouth Bass before in the nearby lakes, but it was only from photos that I knew the look of one of those “bronze backs.” Wishing to experience them for myself, I picked up a friend with his fishing gear and we headed for the spot. When we arrived, the pull off accommodated our car and left room for one more, though that second spot was never taken. We hiked a dirt road through a cornfield, and we were at a bridge overlooking Todd’s Fork. 

My friend unhooked his spinning rod and eyed the creek with disdain. It was narrow, but looked to my eye as though it held deep pools with some promise. As he complained about time spent on a “Wild Goose Chase,” I pulled out a few feet of level fly line and attached a leader and a red and white deer hair fly. Not exactly a Royal Coachman, but close.

On my second upstream cast a fish hit and I landed it after a short fight.  I noticed the dark bronze color, checked the size of the mouth, and discovered it did not extend behind the eye. Smallmouth Bass!  My friend looked at the fish and watched me release it, only slightly the worse for wear. I usually ate the fish I caught, but this one was too small for the frying pan.

Three more casts and I had another, slightly larger fish, but my friend was unimpressed. He didn’t see any fish that would make the pages of an angler’s newspaper, and was now anxious to leave. I don’t believe he ever cast a line.

I haven’t spoken to that friend in years, and don’t know if his opinion of our fishing adventure has changed. As for myself, I left with my heart full of a pleasant morning fishing a creek I had never before explored. For me, the morning’s adventure was not in the fish, but the fishing.

The events I describe here took place in the mid 1970’s. I later learned that the really good fishing was further downstream, and that I was actually fishing a small branch of Todd’s Fork. The main stream has since become noteworthy as a canoeing destination and continues to be known as a great spot to fish for Smallmouth Bass.

Snow Melt, February 26, 2015

Last night I saw snow, enough to remind me of years spent in more northern lands. It fell so hard and fast that my photos showed white streaks crossing the field of vision. The grassy yard and nearby trees, usually alight with cardinals, chickadees, titmice and wrens were strangely silent the next morning.

A colleague said she had salted her driveway before the snowstorm, but it didn’t work. My neighborhood roads got no treatment whatsoever, and no vehicles left all day.

Salt is great for removing ice, but not so good for eight inches of snow. Although I am hopeful of the roads being cleared so I can get out with my vehicle, I love to see the snow on the ground. Unbidden, the thought comes that I am an old man with a bad heart and this could be the last time I see the snow. It’s not likely, but possible.

Salt lowers the melting point of ice, gets it off the roadways, and it allows tires to get traction, especially when it is mixed with light gravel. When I leave my apartment overlooking the Tennessee River valley below, I hope for no ice on the roadway. I hope for days when salt is unnecessary.

Forty degree weather will melt snow fast, but eight inches is a lot of snow. Even with a layer of salt beneath it, there will be plenty left over for night time temperatures to refreeze. I will walk to work on Friday morning.

In his magnificent book, The Forest Unseen, David George Haskell recorded his observations of a square meter of virgin forest, never cut. It was on the property of the University of the South. He observed this square meter over the course of a year, and the winter portions include stories of snow, ice, cold temperatures, and the sometimes surprisingly warm days of winter months. He called the location “the Mandala”

Most of Haskell’s observations were biological, but he made forays into the realm of physical sciences. He examined ice and snow, and commented on the six sided snowflake. Haskell described how Johannes Kepler, discover of night sky wonders, took a break from astronomy and examined snowflakes. Kepler rejected the theory of the atom, regaining popularity in his day. He examined the pomegranate and the wax cells in bee hives, commented on the repeating six sided structure in each.

Haskell says that Kepler might have had more luck had he accepted the existence of atoms. I am not so certain that this would have led to the discovery of the six-sided ring formed by six water molecules. Kepler would also have to have known about the weak bond between the hydrogen atoms of one molecule and the oxygen atom of an adjoining molecule, credited with the hexagonal structure.

Some purveyors of health food have recently discovered this fact about water, and begun marketing “hexagonal water.” Caveat Emptor, all water is hexagonal or not, depending on temperature. Any consumer can have hexagonal water in quantities equal to the capacity of their ice maker.  Lest some defender of the faith take this as an attack on health foods generally, let me state, for the record, it is not. Some health food claims are certainly legitimate, but every form of business has practitioners both honest and otherwise. Some are mere hucksters, P.T. Barnums, looking for those proverbial suckers, one of which is born every minute.

The hexagonal ring structure makes ice expand as it freezes and cools. This is why ice floats on top of the water. I have seen fish trapped in ice and apparently frozen solid. When the ice thaws they may revive and skid about on their fins on top of the ice until they find a hole and return to the pond from whence they came. The sight of fish swimming in puddles atop the ice astonished me.

On this particular day though, I observed the clouds at sunset, saw a pink wash from a setting sun. Of course, the sunset itself is never visible here on the east side of the mountain. Each time I came inside to work on a project, I looked out the window and was back outside. I did not want to miss one minute of the fading pink light on snow.

Nature’s Bookshelf

By Ray Zimmerman

Edward Abbey

            “Let us throw metaphysics to the dogs. I never heard a Mountain Lion bawling about the fate of his soul.” Edward Abbey wrote those words in the introduction to the final (1986) edition of his classic book Desert Solitaire. These words are an appropriate introduction to the author. His books are set in the world of sandstone under foot, a cowboy on his horse, a raft on a wild river, and the embrace of two lovers in the night.

            Abbey was born January 29, 1927 near the town of Home, Pennsylvania. He died March 14, 1989 in Tucson, Arizona. Between those two dates he served in World War II, received a master’s degree in philosophy, authored twenty books, and married five times. Three marriages ended in divorce. His third marriage, to Judy Pepper, ended when she died of leukemia. Her death inspired the book Black Sun.  His final marriage, to Clarke Cartwright, ended with his death in 1989.

Abbey worked as a park ranger, a fire tower lookout, a journalist, a newspaper editor, a bus driver, and finally as a university professor. The years with the Park Service and the Forest Service provided much of his source material. The land itself not only provides the setting for his works, but emerges as a major character. Abbey loved the red rock sandstone mesas and canyons, and especially the rivers. His connection to the rivers is perhaps best stated in “Down the River,” a chapter of Desert Solitaire. In this chapter he traveled down the Glen Canyon portion of the Colorado with his friend Ralph Newsome. That trip was just before completion of the Glen Canyon Dam, nemesis of all that Abbey held sacred in nature, and the creation of Lake Powell, termed a sewage lagoon in Abbey’s writings.

The phrase Down the River emerged again a few years later as the title of a book. In this work Abbey employed several meanings of the phrase, including rivers as symbolic of the passage of time, descriptions of float trips physically going down several rivers, and a statement that both man and nature have been sold down the river.

This last sentiment is reiterated in his novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, in which he is said to have initiated the term eco-defense. It may have inspired environmental activism through direct action. It certainly gave us the monkey wrench as a symbol for direct intervention. Some of Abbey’s detractors claim that it is a fictionalized account of actions that the author encouraged if not actually participated in. Although Abbey was known to remove a few survey stakes from development projects, he himself maintained that The Monkey Wrench Gang was a strictly fictional work written solely for the entertainment of his readers.

This statement has since been supported by Ingrid Eisenstadt. She was the real life woman whom the character Mizz (sic) Bonnie Abbzug “not related to the senator” was almost certainly modeled after. Her verbal portrait of Abbey and their sometime life together was published in “Abbey’s Picnic,” Sierra magazine, 2002.

Abbey’s work is often cited as forecasting a future where wilderness continues to be eroded by the work of man. His most prophetic passage however was perhaps the final paragraph in a chapter of Desert Solitaire titled “The Dead Man at Grandview Point.” In this chapter, Abbey joined a search party to find an elderly man missing in the desert for two days. Coming home from this job he records his feelings of identifying with the dead man. The passage prefigures his own illegal burial in an unmarked grave in the desert by sympathetic friends carrying out his last request, years later:

“I feel myself sinking into the landscape, fixed in place like a stone, like a tree, a small motionless shape of vague outline, desert colored, and with the wings of imagination look down at myself with the eyes of the bird, watching a human figure that becomes smaller, smaller in the receding landscape as the bird rises into the evening – a man at a table near a twinkling campfire, surrounded by a rolling wasteland of stone and dune and sandstone monuments, the wasteland surrounded by dark canyons and the course of rivers and mountain ranges on a vast plateau stretching across Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, and beyond this plateau more deserts and greater mountains, the Rockies in dusk, the Sierra Nevadas shining in their late afternoon, and farther and farther yet, the darkened East, the gleaming Pacific, the curving margins of the great earth itself, and beyond earth that ultimate world of sun and stars whose bounds we cannot discover.”

A few books by and about Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire (Final Edition)

Edward Abbey

University of Arizona Press, 1986

Desert Solitaire was drawn from the author’s journal entries written during two years when he served as a park ranger at Arches National Monument. It was first published by McGraw-Hill, 1968. Previous editions went through several printings.

Down the River

Edward Abbey

E.P. Dutton, New York, 1982

This book includes four sets of journal entries written while running rivers on white water rafts. It also includes essays on natural history, politics, people and places he has known, and two book reviews.

The Monkey Wrench Gang

Edward Abbey

Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2000

Four environmental activists meet on a rafting trip on the Colorado River. They hatch a plot to sabotage projects they deem to be environmentally harmful.  Avon Books, 1976        

Black Sun

Edward Abbey

Simon and Shuster, 1971

In this book a park ranger falls in love with a beautiful woman.

Slumgullion Stew, an Edward Abbey Reader

Edward Abbey

E.P. Dutton, New York, 1984

This work contains excerpts from several of Abbey’s books.

Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist:

The Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey

James Bishop, Jr.

Athenium, New York, 1994

This work is a biography. The author had access to Abbey’s personal papers.

Edward Abbey, a Life

James M. Cahalan

The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2001

This is a biography.

Fiery Gizzard: Voices from the Wilderness

Mary Patten Priestly

This unique book blends history and natural history to tell the story of the Fiery Gizzard, now a part of South Cumberland State Park. The Author edits The Plant Press, newsletter of the Sewanee

Herbarium, so the emphasis on native plants and botanical rarities is not surprising.

She also reveals the geologic history of “the Giz” and speaks somewhat of the fauna, but her real story is one of people. From Bartrum and other early explorers, to modern day naturalists, artists, and citizens, Priestly explains why these people found the Fiery Gizzard an important place, and sought to live nearby and, eventually, to preserve it as a park for future generations.

This short book is an easy read, but fascinating for anyone interested in conservation or the outdoors.

Diary of a Citizen Scientist: chasing tiger beetles and other new ways of seeing the world

Sharman Apt. Russell

Oregon State University Press

2014

Sharman Russell teaches creative writing at the college level and has authored several books of natural history, with topics ranging from butterflies to flowers to archeology.  In her most recent book, Diary of a Citizen Scientist, she documents her efforts to support scientific research. Russell presents the material in a format accessible to general readers, who may not be as familiar with the idea of citizen science.

Throughout the book, Russell weaves three narrative threads together into a unified picture of citizen science. She begins with her own research on tiger beetles in which she was the first person to observe all three larval stages of the Western Red-bellied Tiger Beetle. To this strand, she adds lyrical descriptions of her home and research area in New Mexico, near the Rio Grande valley. In the third narrative thread she presents descriptions of numerous citizen opportunities. These include projects from the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology with which bird watchers are already familiar.

                                                                                                                              

Other projects she describes include Nature’s Notebook, which asks citizen scientists to observe the times when various species of trees reach the bud stage and leaf out or certain wildflowers come into bloom. Some are computer based such as the video game Foldit, which helps biochemists working on protein synthesis and Galaxy Zoo, in which participants review telescope photos to classify distant galaxies. Russell even gives some examples of projects which can be applied in the schools, and describes how her daughter used a schoolyard bird survey and a project to examine fossil evidence in soil that had surrounded a dinosaur.

She also sparks the imagination with inspiring quotations from scientists such as entomologist Dick Vane-Wright of the London Museum of Natural History: “You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet.” This is a jumping off point for the book, but it also sums up her enthusiasm which brought about the hard work she did to complete her project, work any citizen scientist comes to understand, in the hours of tabulating data and confirming results.

Wild

Propelled by grief and the dissolution of her family, Cheryl Strayed impulsively decided to hike a long portion of the Pacific Crest Trail. The untimely death of her mother, the driving force that held her family together, devastated her at age 22. Her loving siblings and step father became distant and the family dissolved, as did her own marriage.

She had been camping and canoeing before, but had no experience backpacking. She had not even walked with a full pack to prepare for this adventure. Readers may be sympathetic or incredulous as the story of this woman unfolds with tales of her shouldering a too heavy pack as she set out alone to cover several hundred miles. Along the way she crossed a snow field with an ice axe. She also encountered a variety of people, most of whom were generous and helpful. One experienced backpacker emptied her pack and split the belongings into two piles - items she should keep and those she could do without. For example, he suggested she keep the ice axe but not the folding saw.

Strayed refers to herself as the girl with the hole in her heart, but along the way she gains both physical and emotional strength. She includes flashbacks about her history of drug use and infidelities, which put her on a trajectory that ended in divorce. Her remarks are candid and confessional without penitence, which will undoubtedly put off some readers. 

Some reviewers also responded negatively because the book is tightly focused on the author and her experience of the trail, some might be tempted to use the word self-absorbed.  One went so far as to say that it could just as easily have been written in a detox ward. I disagree. Admittedly, she neither extols the beauty of nature which daily surrounded her, nor exhorts her readers to preserve the vanishing wilderness. The narrative is about the challenge of the trail as a transformation experience.

Most readers will find the book is a great read, a well written narrative of a quest for wholeness. She is deeply motivated by the challenge of the trail and somewhat by the beauty of the natural world. In the end, she achieves a spiritual core, albeit in non-traditional spirituality, and is changed for the better by the experiences she records. I give this book five stars.

The Gospel of Nature

John Burroughs

Applewood Books

ISBN 155709-131-5

I do not know that the bird has taught me any valuable lesson. Indeed, I do not go to nature to be taught. I go for enjoyment and companionship. I go to bathe in her as in a sea; I go to give my eyes and ears and other senses a free, clean field and to tone up my spirits by her “primal sanities.”

            So begins chapter 3 of The Gospel of Nature a long essay originally included in a book of essays by American naturalist John Burroughs. The publishers at Applewood Books thoughtfully republished this essay in a stand alone 44 page booklet which, according to the introduction, describes …man’s relationship to nature and nature’s relationship to religion.

At age 75 Burroughs was still actively farming and writing. He credited his vigor to a close relationship with nature, a theme woven throughout the essay. He begins by extolling the health benefits of nature for the senses and the body.

He claims inspiration for the essay came from a parson who asked him to speak on the topic. He replies, in part, with this statement: The forms and creeds of religion change, but the sentiment of religion – the wonder and reverence and love we feel in the presence of the inscrutable universe – persists.

This quotation describes the spiritual view of a naturalist, one in total awe of the universe and its majesty. Unlike Shakespeare, Burroughs sees no “Sermons in Stones,” but lessons from history that teach us an appropriate path.

He concludes Part I with a description of a sap bucket left beside a maple tree through winter and spring. Cut off from the rest of nature, the bucket has filled with sap and rainwater and the bodies of drowned animals. He kicked over the fetid mixture with the assurance that the soil would absorb every part and make it pure and sweet.

The story is no less than a metaphor for his view of man. Cut off from nature we decay. Reunited with nature we are made whole.

Part II is as close to a “how to,” a guide for aspiring naturalists as Burroughs gets in this essay. He states that he has not “studied nature so much as visited with her.” He does not aspire to a scientific field study, but enjoyment, though he admits that knowledge will enhance that enjoyment. His delightful story of the ichneumon wasp is but one example of how his knowledge structures his enjoyment.

Burroughs’ gospel is the simple mysticism of the naturalist. It is a belief in the wisdom of nature with little thought to the supernatural. It is a belief that all things happen, not according to some grand plan, but according to what works best.