Every once in a lucky while, a poet, writer, musician, or artist of some kind will come along and speak specifically to you. Thankfully, Jack Gilbert came to me through podcast whispers and secondhand comments and now I can't put his work down. I haven’t read a poet that has resounded with me so much since Gary Snyder back in late teens and early twenties when I was living out of a backpack doing trail work. I think what I love most is how Jack speaks about life without making it any more than just life. "we must unlearn the constellations to see the stars..." I have found myself lately, much like the protagonist in The Talking Heads’ song “Once in a Lifetime”, in a large automobile, letting the days go by, and the water holding me down. Then Jack came along and spoke clearly about this adult malaise that seems to afflict us at some point. Thank God. One day you may wake up old thinking you know it all, seen it all, and exist simply to just put in another day. The eggs are burnt to the pan and the coffee needs some sugar; minor adjustments just to make sure the routine goes smoothly. Maybe that’s what life eventually becomes and maybe that’s what life is, but we don’t have to suffer the knowledge of knowing it all before it happens. Sometimes we need to let our eyes wander over to the trees on the horizon as the sun bakes its last leaves for the day. But going back toward childhood will not help. As we grow older, as another day passes, it’s easy for us (maybe it’s a human nature) to begin finding patterns in life, routines. We slowly begin to live these patterns, expecting certain things to happen at certain times, expecting certain people to be nice, others to offhandedly shake us off. Through these expectations and their inevitable disappointment, we end up missing out what is actually there - life. We become blinded by the constellations we project onto our daily existence and lose sight of real moments right in front of us. I think that’s what Jack is trying to tell us here: tear down your preconceived notions and pre-judgements of people and experiences and find the heart of it all. I highly recommend Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems. It's a collection of pretty much all his work. Often times I'll find myself sitting down after the day is done and flipping through this collection, reading which poems stand out at that time. A poet (or artist of any sort) that speaks to you is worth more than most other things in life, that's for sure. It is imperative that we find those voices that speak to us. Seek them out, listen to them, and then use your own. “Tear it Down” - Jack Gilbert
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. But going back toward childhood will not help. The village is not better than Pittsburgh. Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh. Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls of the garbage tub is more than the stir of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not enough. We die and are put into the earth forever. We should insist while there is still time. We must eat through the wildness of her sweet body already in our bed to reach the body within that body.
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Luck. No, just kidding. Well, kind of. I landed the largest fish I've ever laid into the other day. I was working a big piece of water (at least for the area I'm from) that had been stocked with rainbows a month before. This water also has a nice population of wild browns that use its many tribs as spawning ground. The geology of this stream lends itself to big holes and even bigger boulders. I stalked up to one and starting casting above it, letting my nymph tandem of a prince and wet fly get low into the feeding channel before it swept past the boulder. With my third cast I thought I snagged a rock as I set the hook, but after a second, my line began to shake back and forth and I knew I was into something bigger than normal. He was sluggish at first as I lifted him off the bottom of the deep run, but he soon started to fight. He kept trying to get himself back under the rock, but I played him out. I knew he would try to take off downstream, so I waded with him and worked him over to the other bank and eventually landed him directly across from where I was originally casting. I quickly took a few pics and released him to see another day. Here's what I mean when I said "luck" earlier. I didn't even know he was there. Knowing me and my giddiness and general lack of couth, if I'd had known he was there, I would have most likely spooked him. I read the water ahead of me and planned an approach that kept me hidden. The boulder that I was casting over shielded me from the brute, which enable me to lay into him and have a nice quick conversation about the beauty of the world and spontaneous nature of life that lead us to meeting and saying goodbye. "I ain't good with numbers I just count on knowing when I'm high enough..." - Mike Cooley, Drive-By Truckers. This rainbow was easily pushing 22+ inches. He was fat, too, which leads me to believe that he was a pretty recent stocker. He did have some really nice dark spots considering he was a stocked fish. As I worked my way back upstream, I decided to do a quick run up a trib to see if I could find any wild browns. I switched from tandem nymph rig to a dry/dropper (yellow stimulator and a green caddis) and started working some nice runs. I landed quite a few wild browns; most would slap at my dry and then take my dropper. Sometimes it's best to just follow your curiosity and see where the water leads you. I woke up at 4:30 yesterday morning and headed up to Penn's from my place in Lancaster. I was stuck in thick fog for most of the drive up until I gained some elevation around Lewistown. The yellows, reds, light greens, and browns of fall reached out through the fog once I got up int o the Kishacoquillas Valley. They were relentless and beautiful. It was cold when I got up to Poe Paddy, right around 38 degrees. I put some miles on my waders and found a nice secluded section of Penn's. I spooked up some doe when I got to my spot, but one stayed on and followed close behind me (15 yards) and ended up standing and watching me fish for a good 20 minutes. Her fur was darkening, mottled, becoming the same color as the dried tall grass enclosing the riverbanks. I had a great section of riffles and pools to myself all morning and was blessed with some nice fish and beautiful fall foliage. Every time I come up to this area, I fall in love with it a bit more. Fall has to be my favorite time of year to be outside. Everything is trying to get its last bit of life out of world before things go dormant and hard. Trout seem more aggressive and leaves want one last look before they fall. The days start cold and end warm - perfect beanie weather. They browns were hitting the nymphs pretty consistently when they were swung close to the bottom. After fishing all morning and into early afternoon, once my yellow stimulator stopped drawing attention, I hiked back to my car the entire time singing that Dylan line "I was walking through the leaves, falling from the trees..." from that masterpiece "Mississippi". I had to pause one last time to take in the whole valley and its wide range of color this time of year. I was easily reminded why I love Pennsylvania, especially in the month of October. We finally got some much needed rain last week and with it came high, off-colored water. The temperatures also dropped to a pleasant degree so I decided to try out a local brookie stream, even though the stream conditions weren't ideal. When I fish for brookies, I like to use a dry-dropper combo as much as possible - stimulator/royal wulff/caddis with a prince/pt/hare's ear dropper. Catching brookies on a dry using a 3 wt. glass rod is quintessential fly fishing. The glass let's you really feel the fish, and it makes a 7" brookie feel like a brute. However, after fishing a few riffles and pockets where I always land a few natives without any takes on my stimulator, I went to my default fly when I'm prospecting for trout - the Greenie Weenie. I love this fly and have caught more trout on it than any other fly - because I fish it a ton and because it's highly effective. This is my ode to the fly which works for me. There's something instinctual about how we attach ourselves like leeches on skin to the first thing that makes us feel successful. Sometimes we hang on to it too long, and other times it's worth hanging on to for as long as needed. The greenie weenie is the fly that I've grown attached to, for better or for worse, because it's made me feel like a mildly successful angler. It didn't catch me my first trout (thanks black wooly bugger!), but it has caught me the most, most consistently. Some call it the "weenie", others the "weenershnitlz", and the more erudite (or too ashamed) refer to is as the GW Emerger. For me, I always bless it with its full stream-side name - the Greenie Weenie. And I fish it without care or any possible shame, scold, or scowl. It catches fish. I guess some may think it too close to bait fishing, but I see it as simply matching the hatch. I'll fish it with graphite, with glass, and even with bamboo. I'll fish it on my little home limestone, out on big western waters, and if I ever get the chance, I'll even fish it at some fancy New Zealand or Patagonia lodge. I'm like that dude walking down the street proudly sporting a mullet and jean jacket rocking out to Bon Jovi on his walkmen while everyone else has tight pants, tight smiles, and tight ear buds listening to some highfalutin podcast about certified humane vegan smoothies. He's his own man, and I'm my own angler. I'll strut up to any stream, tie on a greenie weenie, and start slaying them trout (respectfully and reverently, of course). I was first introduced to the GW by my buddy Scot. He also taught me most of what I know, especially the importance of nymphing (tip - find someone to take you fly fishing if you want to learn, it's the quickest way. Then, take what they tell you and practice it over and over for a few months. You'll start landing trout. Also, buy them beer as thanks and a subscription to The Drake). I was fishing my local water, struggling to catch some freshly stocked 'bows - flinging line around, muttering some curse-word infected prayers, hoping for the best but expecting another skunking, when Scot walked in behind me. He politely asked how I was doing and I admitted my lack of action. He watched me flail around a bit and then handed me my first GW. First cast and I bring in an beast of an 8" fingerling rainbow. I was stoked, even had Scot take a trophy shot (yeah, I know...). Luckily Scot taught me a few more things and showed me a few more flies - enough for me to take out on my own and start actually feeling like an angler. But it all goes back to that Greenie Weenie. My comfort food. Being a simple fly, there are only a few variations to it that I've come across. The most effective I've found has a nice little loop of a tail, some flashy wire wrapped around the chenille body, and a bit of red thread marking the connection between body and beadhead. I almost always fish it as my top fly in a tandem nymphing rig. I like to think of it as an attractor, where I'll drop a prince or pheasant tail or one of the other few nymphs I fish behind it on 12-16" of tippet. I think a lot of times trout will move to investigate the GW and then see the small nymph and end up taking that (note: these theories probably originate from my buddy Scot - see above about learning from the best). I've also landed most of my largest browns when they fly out of some little crease created by rocks on rocks and fast moving water to maul the hell out of it right as it hits the water thinking it's an inchworm dropping off a branch. Match the hatch! I also like it because at the end of my drift I can let it swing like a wet fly, making it look like some sort of caddis emerging or something (I'm barely a competent fly fishing, so take my etymology with a grain of salt). Trout will nail it then and sometimes I'll even start to lift my line off the water for another cast only to realize there's a trout there (I always try to make it look like I knew the entire time....). What it comes down to is this - if I want to consistently catch trout when nymphing, I'll use a Greenie Weenie. It's versatile, it catches a ton of trout in all types of water, and it's effective. Maybe, someday, when I actually know what I'm doing, the weenie will quietly take a back seat to some other fly, but for now, I'll keep throwing it out there with the same unabashed enthusiasm as a kid flying down a hill for the first time on a bike without training wheels screaming at the top of his lungs. Here's a really great, soulful medley. I love how music can take you back to specific moments in your life. Every time I hear this song I slip back into the first time I heard it taking a lonely drive from Millinocket back into Baxter State Park after doing my weekly laundry and making my weekly phone calls on the payphone downtown to friends and family back home or scattered about.
The drive was always bittersweet for I was blessed with a not-so-subtle landscape of Kathadin and its brothers & sisters captivating my eyes while simultaneously feeling subtle pangs of loneliness. Though, that feeling never ventured into disconnect for I worked hard at sending letters and making calls on my weekly visits back into town. Oddly, whenever I look back at that particular time in my life - living out of my pack, traveling every six or so months to a new place that would most definitely be in the middle of nowhere due to the nature of trail work, finally learning how to cook since no one was going to cook for me - I feel like I was more connected to my family and friends than I've been since. My relationships were more deliberate - laying in my tent at night writing a letter instead of sluggishly scrolling through mindless chatter and meaningless memes, taking a trip to town to find the only pay phone and dialing those 20 numbers on my calling card hoping the entire time someone will actually pick and if not, opening my tattered "address book" to find someone else to call I hadn't talk to in awhile - and therefore kept me more connected to those in my life, even if they were thousands of miles away. I guess sometimes the further away you are from people the closer you feel. Random Note About the Song: This is a quintessential "Maine" song for me. Probably because of the geographical location of the son, but more importantly also the length and cadence.... it's the perfect song to drive down seemingly endless dirt roads in thick forests where you can lose yourself in a beautiful story. "What a way to ride... ah, what a way to go..."
Ah, a week later, and I'm slowly falling back into the "home for the summer" routine - waking up, drinking coffee, riding down the bike path to Shock's Mill Bridge, reading on the porch, and planning my next fishing journey. I've also had a bit of time to reflect back on our Vermont/New Hampshire road trip we just got back from. First off, we absolutely fell in love with Vermont. The greenness, the mountains, the vibe, the water, Everywhere we went, there was water and there were inevitably people enjoying it - fishing, rafting, swimming. It was great to see. We will be going back there, maybe for a long while some day. Montpelier was especially awesome.
The first piece of water I fished was the West River, which ran right next to our campsite in Jamaica State Park (great place to put up a tent, by the way). It's large water and would probably be great in the spring right after a stocking. However, it was more of a Warm Water Fishery during the time I was there. I got a lead on a small brook outside of Jamaica that I got to check out one evening. Big boulders, gravel, black bears. Great stretch of stream that put me on some beautiful Vermont natives. Jess & I also hiked up to Hamilton Falls one afternoon. I decided to take my glass 3 weight and got into a few small brookies right below the falls. This is how we do vacation - find a great little hike that takes us to a good place to sit and I meander down the stream fly fishing while Jess sits and water colors. It's a good life.
Rock Art Along the Trail
Eventually we made our way up to northern Vermont to a cottage we rented along the North Branch of the Lamoille. I got to stop in at Green Mountain Troutfitters for some intel and flies. A perfect fly shop - nice folks, willing to help, and even to laugh when I said LAMWHAA instead of LamOIL (not Frenchy...). We really dug that area - vibrant small towns, beautiful meadows that roll right up into mountains. The streams are different up there than the brooks I was fishing in the southern part of the state. Giant, round boulders giving into really fine gravel. As the gradient increased, so did the amount of random "potholes" formed in the swirling water. I got lucky and landed some wild rainbows on a yellow stimulator and rolled some nice browns with a crazy looking bugger that I picked up at fly shop.
We ended our trip with a few days in the White Mountains. Probably the closest to feeling like I was "out west" anywhere on the east coast - dramatic mountains and alpine lakes strewn throughout. Cool place, but way too touristy for our liking. I'm glad we saw it, glad I fished it and landed some beautiful natives, but it's not on our list to get back to anytime soon. It's a fine line between preservation and exploitation. It's hard for me to enjoy a place of natural beauty when everything is monetized - want to go see this cool flume? gotta fork over 15 bucks. Oh, you'd like to canoe on this lake? 20 bucks an hour. It's great to see these places "preserved", but sometimes I can't help but feel like they are being "loved to death", or in the case of the Whites, bastardized by economics.
One last thing - I think Jess & I are finally figuring out how to vacation. One of the highlights - the first night we got to Vermont it was raining. We set up our tent and canopy and sat in our gravity chairs (the ones Jess made us buy and which are amazing) and just listened to the rain hit the top for hours. That's vacation. We did miss Whitman and his stupid little face, which is why we are on the hunt for a small fiberglass trailer...
And because I've been listening to way too much Dead this summer (sorry Jess), here is a great "Eyes of the World" (gotta love that Lesh bass). Watch out for that dude with the fire. Oftentimes in the middle of the winter, when I'm feeling cooped up from the cold and drained from constant interaction with my students, I begin daydreaming and plotting where I'll go over my summer vacation. A lot of those ideas and plans fall through or get pushed aside for others. This one stuck and turned out to be a great time for reflection, rejuvenation, and landing beautiful fish. My grand plan was to spend a week camping and fly fishing in and around Potter County. The Wilds of PA, God's Country. There were quite a few streams I wanted to check out so I chose two camping spots as my home base - Little Pine State Park and Ole Bull State Park. These would put me in the Pine Creek and Kettle Creek Watersheds respectively. I spent the most of the week at Little Pine State Park. I fished Pine Creek proper and landed some beautiful browns and some beat up rainbows (all on really small prince nymphs). I spent another few days exploring some of Pine's great tribs (Slate, Cedar, etc) and some other watersheds that run parallel to Pine through Sproul State Forest. Slate Run is a crazy stream. I drove way back Slate Run Rd. to access the stream and successfully freaked myself out after a few hours of slipping on the slate-like rocks and convincing myself I was hearing Rattlers around every bend and branch. It's streamside is covered with high grass and ferns. Beautiful to look at, but creepy to walk through when your by yourself in the middle of rattler country and far from anyone or anything. It's good to be humbled by nature on a regular basis. The only downside to fishing alone is that there is always a small voice in the back of your head reminding you that if you were to fall, get bitten, etc, no one would likely find you for a few days. Eh, it's worth it though.
After a few days in the Pine Creek valley, I packed up and moved on over to Ole Bull - up and over the next set of mountains and into the Kettle Creek Watershed. Unfortunately, due to a few days of downpour, I only got to fish Kettle Creek and missed a few gems that I really wanted to get to. I landed quite a few beautiful browns in the FFO section of Kettle Creek and even got a few to take a wicked small grifffith's gnat. I'm hoping to make this an annual thing and to make it back up to Ole Bull sooner rather than later. Having explored new water the entire trip, I quickly realized how much I had to realize on my instinct to find fish. This, in turn, showed me that I actually have learned quite a bit over the past year or two since fly fishing has become something I do quite frequently. A few random non-fishing thoughts - it was really great to get away by myself for a few days and to let things settle. I end up spending a lot of time alone anyway simply because of what I enjoy doing - fly fishing, biking, etc - but this was different. Most days I barely interacted with more than two people and probably only said a total of a few sentences. It was nice to get away from the ego a bit, to wake up and have nothing to do but explore remote streams and try new water, to get of routines and to get back into just being. It's all pretty simple, really - just be. My soundtrack for the week of solitude and fly fishing including a lot of Steve Gunn. Love this guy's music. His album Time Off is actually what got me into the Dead a couple of years ago. There's a random painted highway And a muzzle of bees My sleeves have come unstitched From climbing your tree And dogs laugh, some say they're barking I don't think they're mean Some people get so frightened Of the fences in between And the sun gets passed from tree to tree Silently and back to me With the breeze blown through Pushed up against the sea, finally back to me I'm assuming you got my message On your machine I'm assuming you love me And you know what that means Sun gets passed, sea to sea Silently, and back to me With the breeze blown through Pushed up above the leaves With the breeze blown through My head upon your knee Half of it's you, half is me Half of it's you, half is me I'm not sure what there really is for me to say about this song other than that I absolutely love it. The lyrics... pure poetry. The performance... man can Nels Cline rip. I also love the people you can see walking outside the windows. It seems to fit very well with the performance and lyrics.
With ice flows coming down the river, freezing up currents and slowing down time, my thoughts are turning to the upcoming year and what my focus will be. I've decided that I'm going to go native this year. Last year, my goal was to get out as much as possible and to finally figure out the motions and philosophy of fly-fishing. This year, it's going to be brookies. Brook trout are native to Pennsylvania and though usually smaller than the 'bows and browns you'll find in this area, I tend to think they are much more beautiful and detailed. Plus, the fight these little wild ones put up is a ton of fun on a 3 weight.
I'm also a firm believer that fishing for these natives pushes me to become a better fly fisherman. You have to be silent, observant, and make every cast count when your trying to land one of these beauties. Much like the blue halos that speckle across a brook trout, every movement and cast becomes magnified when fishing for them. Therefore, I hope to learn from these fellas. I'm excited to see what they can teach me about being an angler and a student of place and wildness.
That said, I'm not going to just fish for brookies. In end end, I think we too easily get caught up in the names and types of fish - wild, native, stocked, etc - and forget that the real pursuit of this is to get out there and fish. Catching trout on a fly rod is a heckuva lot of fun, no matter their heritage and lineage. One of the best albums of 2014 was Damien Jurado's Brothers & Sisters of the Eternal Son. It's folky, it's surreal, it's metaphysical, it's psychadelic, it's unique. Damien can easily carry a song with just with voice and guitar playing, but this album is both sonically & lyrically layered so beautifully that I keep coming back to it. Just last night I found myself enamored with the song "Jericho Road". Here's a performance of it - This particular performance is pretty powerful. Jurado includes a lot of Christian imagery in his songs, and "Jericho Road" is no exception. My wife has a much stronger Biblical understanding than I do, so I had to have her explain the story associated with this place called Jericho Road. According to her, this is the road in which a Samaritan helped a man who had been beaten and robbed and was culturally his enemy. This after men of religion had passed over this downtrodden man. Hence, where we get the term "Good Samaritan". Please forgive my paraphrasing of the story, I know I probably left out a lot.
I can make fair interpretations of most of the lyrics (at times it feels like a conversation between two men instead one single narrator), especially in the context of the Biblical story. However, one line stands out that I'm still rolling around in my head like a koan - "We are secrets sold".... For some reason I find that line pretty powerful; I just don't know why. That's OK to me. I'll let it roll around in my head for a couple of weeks or years and maybe something will eventually click. Much to my wife's disappointment and annoyance, I've slowly fallen in love with The Grateful Dead over the past few months. I've always liked their music and listened to them casually, but this summer I really dug in and found myself loving certain runs of certain years, able to discern the different "Sugaree"s, etc. Out of all the things I love about the Dead, one of the things that keeps me coming back to them is that the sheer size of their discography lets me fall in love with certain songs and certain periods. Even though they aren't making anymore new music, I feel like I'm constantly discovering something new about them. Once of those recent discoveries has been the brilliant song "Jack Straw". To be honest, I probably didn't realize the greatness of this song earlier because Bob Weir sings it... I usually skip over his songs... This is one of those epic Western songs with outlaws, killings, and hangings. There's multiple characters, and the Dead are designed perfectly to carry out a song like this with Bob and Jerry switching back and forth on the versus in order for the story to really come together. The climactic build up is as grand as the story itself. One more thing... I love how the story itself can be interpreted a few different ways - "Jack Straw from Wichita cut his buddy down..." leaves a few things for us listeners to wonder. Did Jack Straw kill him because he was too slow, maybe didn't have anything else to share? Or did he cut him down after he was hung, out of brotherly respect? My answers change depending on the mood. All in all, probably one of the Dead's best songs. It captures their truly unique way of storytelling both through song and lyrics. Just last week I fulfilled my New Year's Resolution for the first time in my life. In fact, I don't think I've ever really had a resolution until this year. My secret to success? Picking something that I actually wanted to do - catch at least one trout every month of the year (on a fly, of course). I reached my goal when I landed a little rainbow on, believe it or not, an elk hair caddis, in the cold December rain. It's been a great year of fly fishing - one in which I feel like I finally figured out how to fish. I've been keeping a pretty detailed journal, and I'm looking forward to compiling all the streams I've explored and fish I've caught (and released). Today was a pretty mild day for December, so I decided to do some exploring on new water. I went to a stream I've been wanting to fish for quite awhile, but I heard it was all on posted land. I finally found a stretch of it that was open to the public, so I ventured down south. I was hoping for higher water than what we've had, but the water was still pretty low. I managed to bring a few wild browns to hand, all on nymphs. There were some midges hatching, but I couldn't get them to take anything on top. Still proud of this piece that was published in The Drake back in the Winter of 2011. I've sent another piece; I hope to hear back soon.
Here's a direct link... http://tinyurl.com/mg32u7m Whitman & I looking out over the West Virginian mountains from Spruce Knob. We just got back from our short trip down to West Virginia. Man, what a beautiful place. We stayed in a nice cabin along the Glady Fork. Unfortunately, it didn't really hold any trout, but it was still idyllic. Only 5 hours outside of Marietta and we felt like we were out west or up in the North Woods. Because of the length of the trip, I didn't get to do as much fishing as I wanted to. The only stream I got to fish was Seneca Creek - a really nice brookie (and wild 'bow) stream. We hiked down from the Witmer Road side. The water was really low so I ended up spooking more fish than I caught (and my dog Whitman kept running into holes). I did manage to land a few, all on little hare's ears nymphs. The hike itself was beautiful. The trail use to be a road, long ago. Over the years, its reverted back into a nice walking path. A native West Virginian. Seneca Creek Geology. We were continually impressed with the shear beauty of the place and the varying ecosystems we encountered. The above photo is of Dolly Sods Wilderness. Right after this photo was taken, clouds started to pour in over the mountain and the trees become dimmer and a dew started to collect on our clothes. I hadn't felt like that since I lived in Maine and I would take naps on the side of Katahdin during our lunch break. This is the view from the Spruce Knob overlook. Spruce Knob is the highest point in West Virginia sitting at 4863 Ft. It's an easy drive up to the top and affords some great views. On our way there, we stopped to hike around Seneca Lake. Once again, I felt like I was back out west meandering around an alpine lake. Next time we go back we'll be bringing our kayaks along. I first fell in love with trains after watching Stand by Me when I was a kid. It’s a story about a group of boys that decide to take an adventure in search of something. Their way out of town? The train tracks. These tracks lead them on a journey that shapes all their lives in very different ways. At the core of this journey is a sense of freedom that resonated with me. I would daydream about hitching a pack on my back and wandering through the secret crevices of America all the while creating deep bonds with my fellow travelers. From that point forward, trains symbolized the possibility of living a truly unique and inspired life. They symbolized an untaken path, an alternative way of traveling. Something different.
Eventually, the likes of Jack Kerouac, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits came into my life. Waits’ gravelly, sandpaper scraped voice took my love for trains and created magnificent sculptures of freedom loving train jumpers and other-side-of-the-tracks poets waving poems around like trainmen’s lanterns lighting my way away from my small hometown into big cities and tall mountains. From boyhood dreams to adulthood meandering, the symbolism of trains has always found a way to seep into my world view. I took all of the weighty connections trains have developed for me in my head and I went traveling on my own journey, searching and experiencing. I filled my backpack with all my camping gear, a few choice books (I’m pretty sure some Gary Snyder made its way in there), a journal, and some clothes and set off. For three years I stretched myself out across this country: Baxter State Park in northern Maine, up and down California, Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado, and plenty of places in between. It felt good to have everything I needed on my back, a home wherever I laid my head and lit a fire. I learned more in those three years of working in the woods than I did in my four years of college. That journey eventually led me here, to Marietta, where my wife & I bought a house and settled in. The train comes through every few hours, just a few yards away from our front yard. I hear that train working in my garden, sitting at Shanks weaving tales with friends, eating dinner with my wife in our kitchen, and I can’t help but feel light and free every time I hear that rumble of steel on steel or the low call of the horn. I no longer feel the need to pack a sling and “walk those tracks” away from the place I live, but it’s nice to know that right out my front door somebody could and somebody will. I’ll look forward to hearing their stories. I finally got back in the saddle of my bike today. When I had younger legs and bigger lungs, I used to ride everywhere and every day. But for too many inane reasons, I haven’t ridden as much as I used to. It was my way of exploring a place, and I missed it. So this afternoon I finally pumped up my tires, put in my headphones, filled my water bottle, and set out on a ride. I live down on the far end of town, in brick row, so I went up on 441 and headed towards Maytown. My goal was to complete a nice big arc from my home, to Maytown, then back to Marietta on the Charles Greenway. It didn’t take but one block for my legs to remember the motion and the rhythm of pedaling. I slowly got into a good pace and started to feel a good burn in my legs. I had to drop the hammer to get up Maytown Road, but luckily The Doors and Ray Manzarek’s manic rhythm greased my gears. I rounded the circle and turned my wheels down Vinegar Ferry Road, towards the river. As I coasted down the road towards the River, I took note of the geographical placement of Marietta. From my vantage point, I could see that Marietta sat just a bit lower than the surrounding area, pretty obvious considering all the natural laws of rivers, land, and watersheds. However, something more of awareness of people, and of community, grew out of that view. One thing I love about this town is that people seem to be here deliberately. They seem drawn here like salmon are to their headwaters, like mayflies are to the river in June, like my smelly old dog Sid is to cheese. Just as I was drawn to move to this town, I’m now drawn towards it once again, riding downhill towards Riverfront Park. Gravity pulls my bike and I towards the banks of the trail along the river. I ride until I hit those banks and take a sharp left onto the Greenway, winding through cornfields and silver maples. The town itself has its own type of banks that defines it. We live on the banks of the river and the banks of River Road. The town, its buildings and roads, can’t go over those banks, but the community can grow. There’s something beautiful about that idea – a community growing in its geographically constrained area.
Like the water of the Donegal and the Chiques, I have found myself on the banks of the Susquehanna in this little town on the elbow of the river. Maybe it’s simple geography that drew me here, or in matters of bikes, simple gravity. But I like to think it’s something more. Either way, no matter how I got here, I’m pretty darn happy to be able to finish my ride with the Cherry trees of Front Street flashing by in my peripheral. |
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