I am not here to lament all that we've supposedly lost due to the digital age. Nah. I love my Apple Music (though I wish streaming paid artists more) - I love how easy it is to FIND new music and to share that music and to listen to that music. I still buy records, occasionally, of my favorite albums. It's good to have a physical copy of something - there is a ritual to putting on a record. Just like there is a ritual to listening to all the Dylan bootlegs I have on cassette. Sure I could easily download them, but it's just not the same - I want that distant feeling like he is actually off on stage and I'm sitting in the grass of a general admissions show. BUT there is one thing I miss. The Hidden Track. 

The Hidden Track was like a secret, shared moment you had with the others that found it. Back before we could Tweet out links to our favorite songs or share playlists, the ways to share music were much more direct, connected. You could listen, together, to a song in the car. You could make a mix tape and give it to the person (man do I miss mix tapes). You could go see it live and experience it that way. But for me, as a teenager without a car, the hidden track was a beautiful little gem that you found and held and hoped that others did as well. 

Here are two of my favorite hidden tracks - 

Live - "Horse" from Throwing Copper

My sisters and I shared a cassette tape of this album and whenever we were going someone, we made my parents put this into the tape deck of our Dodge Caravan Minivan. I was lucky and always got the middle bench seat to myself whereas my two older sisters had to share the back. Anyway. Live was a local band - they were from York, we lived in Lancaster just across the river. They were IT. They were OUR band and we knew every single word to that album. But I always loved the last song... which was really two songs. "White, Discussion" is a political song - I knew that then - but never really understood what it was about. I just loved that it was political - it spoke to my burgeoning rebellion (which eventually lead to an obsessive Rage Against the Machine/AIM/Free Leonard Peltier phase) against everything that the little suburban Christian conservative town I lived in represented - and especially the way he just yells and screams "Look where all this talking got us, baby!" over and over and over as it fades to black and the cassette, you can still hear the plastic cogs turning in the player and then "1,2,3,4" and an acoustic guitar and cymbal splash and this beautiful pedal steel guitar and now I'm along the river, sitting on a porch watching mayflies gather for their last hoorah around the one light and "Horses," "Horses" this perfect song, this hidden song, perfect for the cassette tape with that spinning plastic and crinkly tape added an ethereal layer to that song, another long lonesome whine of the pedal steel. And you listen to it hoping that someone else, somewhere also found this beautiful little nugget of music and a hidden track becomes a shared experience. 

"Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - "Zero is Also a Number" - The X-Files Soundtrack

Oh man. Much like "Horses" was perfect for the cassette tape, "Zero is Also a Number" was perfect for the CD. It was MADE for the CD. It could only EXIST because of the CD. I was pretty obsessed with The X-Files as a 13-14 year old. I loved staying up for it every Friday night and the weirdness it projected into the mundane existence of 8th and 9th grade. They eventually released a soundtrack - Songs in the Key of X - an incredible collection of music that had the likes of Sheryl Crow next to Soul Coughing and Burroughs and R.E.M.

But what made this hidden song the, in my opinion, best hidden song ever, is that you needed to have a CD and needed to read the liner notes to catch that little blurb at the top that "Nick Cave and the Dirty Three would like you to know that '0' is also a number." Holy shit. HOLY SHIT. HOLY SHIT! Okay, so let me put the CD in and have it start on track one, then let's hold down the "back" button and HOLY SHIT NOW THE NUMBERS ARE GOING NEGATIVE HOLY SHIT HOW LONG IS THIS??? It went all the way back to like "-10:00" and then you let it ride and you hear what I think is one of the most beautiful, transcendent pieces of music from this group of artists.

You are transported into what feels like an actual X-Files episode - it's dark, it's dreamy, it's creepy, there are people flitting in and out like ghosts. Goddamn. The lyrics are sparse and the interplay between Cave's voice and Warren's violin tells its own story, a story within a story. But the story centers around "being called to the forest" and that image, that call to action, appears quite randomly throughout my days, still. The song seems to find itself as it develops, it's a story being told, that doesn't seem to be written down, but is finding itself as it is played - much like how you have to find the actual song. And that discovery is communal, a shared experience built on faith that others have also put the clues together. 

Winter

I've always loved fishing in the winter. It may be harder to catch anything, but there are far fewer people and with all the undergrowth dormant, you can really see the riverine landscape you're exploring. I started the year with a pretty beautiful brown trout and then began to fall in love with exploring post-industrial watersheds. 

Spring

I took advantage of the high water we had throughout the spring and fished smaller streams for large brown trout. I also continued exploring streams throughout the Pennsylvania anthracite region that are in acid-mine recovery. Some of these streams have brookies and browns returning and thriving in their orange waters. I also landed what was probably my personal best wild brown trout while casting a black woolly bugger upstream and stripping it down through a riffle into a deep hole under a sycamore tree. 

The Summer

Summer was fun. I started it off up in Potter County for the annual #POCO trip and ended up finding some beautiful brook trout elders in small streams. Then, we took a few days in the Catskills before I ventured up to the West Branch of the Penobscot in Maine for a week of fishing. Maine was, as always, beautiful and inspiring. But this time the fishing was tough due to their long, wet spring and the black flies were mind-bogglingly torturous. Finally, I ended the summer with a ten day trip out to Yellowstone and the Bighorns with a good friend I hadn't seen in years. I ended up camping 4 out of the 12 weeks I had off. The only downside to this summer was the lack of good bass fishing on the Susquehanna River. Something is up with that waterway. 

Fall

After my epic summer of traveling and camping, I slowed down quite a bit in the fall. I went back to work and fell into that routine. I didn't catch a ton of fish, but I did manage to land a few really nice ones. I was really hoping to finally get into some bass on the Susquehanna River, but the river never really seemed to wake up. I did manage to get into two of the most beautiful trout I've ever landed. 

A former student surprised me with an incredibly gift of two prints for my poem, "How to Live Away from Home," she made for a final project in one of her college classes. I really love her design and the way she interpreted this piece. 

I recently wrote two short essays - one on the inspiration and craft behind my poem, "Deer Mountain," and another recommended the great song "Old Strange" by Steve Gunn. 

You can find them here: 

• Michael Recommends "Old Strange" by Steve Gunn - Memoir Mixtapes, November 2019
• On "Deer Mountain" - Split Rock Review, September 2019

Thanks for reading! 

Down in southern Lancaster County, where the river stutters through a few dams, there are a couple of rocks that have petroglyphs carved onto them. 
These carvings are anywhere from 400-1000 years old. There are Thunderbirds, serpents that mark the four equinoxes, swirls, various animals, human figures, and etchings that mark the Pleiades. It's a pretty incredible experience to pour water over dry rock and have these ancient symbols of language appear. ​

Within about a half mile of the trailhead, the valley keeps opening and Jesus it's beautiful and you forget who you are and why you are there because all you can do is just try to take it all in 

Big salmon flies and stone flies were hatching and fluttering in the air. I had some massive cutthroats nudge my flies, landed a few small ones. It was already mid day so we started to work up the stream we hiked down. Soon, we found this pool. Soon, we couldn't stop catching beautiful Yellowstone Cutthroats on big dry flies. ​The water was so clear, the cutties so bright, that you could see them streak up from the bottom or from the far banks for these flies. ​

"The greatest warriors are those who dangle a human for hours on a string, break sacred water for the profanity of air, then snap fiercely back into pearly molecules that describe fishness" - Joy Harjo

Every few years, I find myself returning to the north Maine woods to exist, even just for a few days, in the shadows of Katahdin and the murmur of the Penobscot. It is this mountain and this river that I seem to owe so much to. They have shaped my life's path more than most anything else. 

I was first taken in by these woods and waters while I was working on the trail crew at Baxter State Park. I didn't do much fishing then; instead, I spent my time relentlessly exploring, expending all that 21-year-old energy into rafting down the class 5 rapids of the Crib Works and reaching every peak I could over our three day weekends after working four-tens building rock staircases up Katahdin and clearing twenty miles of blow-downs in a day. My knees never hurt, my skin grew immune to the hordes of black flies, my eyes were always looking beyond each false peak and around each river bend. I didn't take much time to study what I was rafting or hiking - too much to see up ahead. 

Now I make a pilgrimage every couple of years not to push myself into deep unknowns, but to revisit certain trails and pools and to find those tiny mysteries that exist right in front of us. And to hopefully land some beautiful landlocked salmon and brook trout. I found myself this year questioning this idea of "revisiting." Has it just become a pattern that I've fallen into that, in some ways, constricts my experience down to a simple reliving instead of living something "new?" Over the week, as I fished my favorite eddies and runs, I realized that a pilgrimage is a different type of "revisiting." 

It isn't a reliving, it's a going-back-to-in-order-to-find-something-new. The salmon here in this water revisit it every year as they spawn, yet they are experiencing something completely new. Some may pool up in the same eddy every year, but they are reaching for different caddis during those last nights of June when they flood the air. I may fish this same run I did last year, but when I look up, the clouds clipping across Katahdin have a notion I've never seen before and the salmon that just attacked my emerger takes me for a ride downstream that I'll never forget, his last jump over my head a fine farewell until I come back. A pilgrimage is about honoring the steps already taken while also experiencing and discovering something new. 

A day after school let out, I found myself rambling up hollows of Potter County. 

It is here, where rock tightens its grip to water, that everything grows more full. 

Color, life, sound, smell, the way deadwood lays across rock - patterns stitched by the quick wind that slices down these drafts. 

Patterns of the elders

It is a good way to start the summer - sitting on the tailgate with mountains in the windows, looking at maps, tracing hyphenated courses and blue lines, waiting for the sulfurs to hatch. One night, after we caught brook trout on little bright yellow flies, I made burritos. We sat around the fire and ate them. The thin moon showed us the movement of night. The next morning we sat on the porch and drank coffee for a few hours, watching the valley and the clouds slowly shake by. During the day we bushwhacked through thick brush and found plunge pools. The long thin red marks across my shins, those are good scars, tattoos of exploring. 

One of the many great answers - 

"The Key That No One Has Lost" 

Poetry serves no purpose, I am told
and trees caress one another in the forest
with blue roots and twigs ruffling to the wind, 
greeting with birds the Southern Cross
Poetry is the deep murmur of the murdered
the rumors of leaves in the fall, the sorrow
for the boy who preserves the tongue
but has lost the soul 
Poetry, poetry, is a gesture, a landscape, 
your eyes and my eyes, girl; ears, heart
the same music. And I say no more, because
no one will find the key that no one has lost
And poetry is the chant of my ancestors
a winter day that burns and withers
this melancholy so personal." 

- Elicura Chihuailaf 

Found in the great anthology Barbaric Vast & Wild

I've had the honor of having poems published by two really great journals over the past month- Hawk & Handsaw Journal of Creative Sustainability and Sky Island Journal​.  

Four poems, all centered on the relationship between humans, nature, industry, and water were published alongside some really great photographs at Hawk & Handsaw Journal of Creative Sustainability. I love how the photographs work alongside the poems. They do a fantastic job at capturing the rough beauty of Pennsylvania's mining country.   

"Life-Cage" was published in Sky Island Journal. I've been reading a lot of Robinson Jeffers over the past few months. I think he has influence my work more than any other poet. I wrote "Life-Cage" after finding the phrase in his poem, "Theory of Truth." His stanza- "Because only / tormented persons want truth. / Man is an animal like other animals, wants food and success and women, / not truth. Only if the mind / Tortured by some interior tension has despaired of happiness: then it hates /its life-cage and seeks further...". 

Inevitably, I find myself walking the tracks back home, humming some Charlie Parr song about rivers and cedar. I tend to be drawn towards rivers that run parallel to rail lines. It is here, in these crevasses that wildness and industry collide and, hopefully, coexist, that I find so much beauty. Oftentimes we think of nature and wildness as some idyllic, far-away "thing" or "place" when it's really right in front of us. If we aren't able to find the wildness in the spaces where we live, we'll never truly be able to appreciate any sort of wildness.

Maybe it's because I fall asleep every night to the calls of trains running the Susquehanna River a few hundred yards through the woods. Maybe it's my early love of Stand By Me and the journey of walking the rails and that boyhood bond that shapes life. Maybe it's the music I obsessively listen to that connects me to place and time- Dylan, Parr, Jerry, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Gunn. But there is it, frozen backwater full of sycamore and young maple that holds my attention, that buries itself in the palm of my hand like a pebble I rub with my thumb. 

The skulking creek branches towards sunrise with orange
creamsicle stained rock, ​ covered in the spittle
of mine spill striking through the Appalachian mountains
​that have folded into ridges and valleys,
Worn thin from the erosion of age. 
There's beauty in its coarse recovery
​into a watershed that holds
​thriving wild brown trout. 

This stream was killed, years ago, by acid mine drainage. Now, thanks to remediation, brown trout have found a niche among stained rock and rhododendron. It's a wildness of recovery, of the melding of steel and water. 

We decided to take a long weekend up in the Finger Lakes since work has been pretty consuming for both of us over the past few months. It was time to disengage from the routines of home life, to shake off a bit of the dust from all the sawing and shaping we've been doing. We left early Saturday morning and took a straight shot up 11/15 into New York. We got to camp around 1 and by the time we were set up, a torrential rain came through. We stayed dry in the camper - this seems to be a "thing" that happens to us - getting to camp right before a rain sets in (Rock Creek in Montana, Big Eddy in Maine...). It's good, though. It forces us to settle into a place. 

The sleet and snow finally stopped around lunch, so I decided to sneak out for a few hours to explore some water. I found a blue line on a map - a tributary to the lake - and decided to take a look. It had a cool name and it looked like a decent place to possibly find lake run brown trout and landlocked salmon. I found a public parking spot near the mouth - no cars. Possibly a great sign, possibly a sign that the run hadn't started yet. I hadn't be able to find any information online about fishing conditions which I kind of loved. The locals here don't advertise their water. I respect that. 
​
I worked my way upstream, hitting the deeper runs. I was hoping for more water in the stream, but there were still some deep troughs that looked like great holding water. I didn't see any fish until I moved a really big lake run brown trout on a black woolly bugger. He sniffed at it, then turned away. I reached a really long, deep pool with a maple tree that had fallen in about halfway through. It was there, under those branches, that laid the darkest water. I drifted an egg through it once, twice, three times. On that last drift my line went tight and my Winston 6 weight bent down in praise of some holy idol lurking deep in the bottom of the pool. It knelt like that for a solid ten minutes as I fought this fish. At first I thought it was a sturgeon as it stayed hovered along the bottom. It fought like a catfish as it kept trying to get lower and lower in the water. I couldn't coax it up at all. The only other landlockeds I've landed were in Maine and they'd leap out of the water every chance they got. This one was different. She wanted to stay low.

​It ran upstream a bit, then settled back down in its original spot. Finally, she started making runs downstream. With each run I tried to nose her down into the shallow part of the pool. On the fourth run, I finally got her to oblige as I literally ran downstream with her. I netted her with my little trout net and luckily a dude showed up right then who had a bigger net. I slid her over to it and removed the egg pattern and the big black conehead bugger that she had ripped off someone else's line. He took a few quick pictures and she swam away.