I pulled the watering hose under the hot sun trying to accomplish the endless task of watering plants at a nursery in August. My coworker David pulled his truck into the driveway sweating at the end of his shift.
“Hey man, here’s that lure I was goin’ to give you. You rig it like this,” and he proceeded to wrap a long silver-flecked white piece of plastic around a large fish hook. I verified the directions to the stream he had told me about earlier in the week but after telling me what road to take he added, “But don’t go right where we went. All those fish have sore mouths.” Then he shoved a few of the floppy plastic lures into a bag, handed it to me and drove off.
Like most fishing trips this one started on time but with me worse the ware after a long Friday night. Nonetheless, faded, I poured my travel mug full of coffee and went to pick up my friend Kyle in the Applebee’s parking lot. We drove through some of the richer sections of the nation’s tenth richest county until at last we were in rural middle Tennessee countryside, just south and west of the Natchez Trace and Loveless Café, out where people still plant gardens and raise tobacco and where Indian mounds abound and the glyphs they painted and carved into limestone bluffs slowly erode into the oblivion of their creators. This is Harpeth River country…a last stand of middle Tennessee’s bucolic past but an area soon to be ensnared by Nashville’s burgeoning growth and sky rocketing land prices.
The Harpeth River is a rare free flowing river that drains 895 square miles of middle Tennessee’s Central basin south of the Cumberland River and north of the Duck River. It is a river made up of a handful of tributaries: the Little Harpeth, the West Fork of the Harpeth, the South Harpeth, all feeding into the Harpeth. The river and its flood plains abound with the ordivician fossils and the river gravel occasionally parts to expose a mastodon bone, revealing to our contemporary eyes the identity of past inhabitants. Along with the moundbuilders and their predacesors who once built villages along its bank the river flows through over two hundred years of American history past the homes of great statesmen, explorers, and rouges, and past fields of battle where thousands died in an afternoon and lead minnie balls from the opposing armies can still be found in a plowed field.
Turning off Highway ‘hunert (100) we drove out the curvy little road David had told me to turn onto looking for the bridge where he said we could park and gain river access. “Park at the second bridge, not the first one.” The road followed the side of the bluff as the river snaked around the edges of horse pasture and fields planted in its fertile plane. At the first bridge we stopped midway across and watched two does wading and sipping water. As tranquil as the scene could have been Kyle and I both shared a common thought: Is there enough water down there to find any fish? The creek was split into two channels neither over twenty feet wide. The bottom was rocky and the water clear but there just wasn’t much of it. Is the South Harpeth really just a creek?
At the second bridge we parked in a gravel pull off, rigged our rods and walked down to the creek. Stepping in the water was cold. We headed upstream. Small fish were everywhere, minnows and smallmouth were easily seen zipping around. One thing was obviously clear: the big, floppy lure David had given me wasn’t going to work on any of these fish. It was big enough to eat them and they’d be scared of it. So I replaced it with a small plastic minnow. Kyle used a small green crayfish. On his third cast he pulled out a little smalljaw. I mean really small, less than eight inches. We waded about 750 yards through the idyllic scene and I had one hit that released a twinge of adrenaline in my stomach but nothing else.
After an hour I decided we were going to go to my fishing spot off McCrory Lane.
Driving out to the spot I pointed out the new Travis development. In a former career as a land surveyor I had staked the future course of neighborhood streets just the year before, hacking through a thick woods of cedar, honeysuckle, and saw briar. Now the woods had been scraped off, dirt was exposed and the land has been eviscerated by a wide road cut. Houses will be popping up soon and those little cul de sacs I helped lay out will become a reality. A VA cemetery fans out in waves of white headstones across the road from the development. We fished along the bluffs beneath the cemetery.
I decided to wade upstream aways but the water got chest deep and was strewn with large rocks which made walking hazardous and wading impractical. We managed to fish for a while standing on a rocky ledge at the base of the bluff but this wasn’t a good spot for smallmouth. However there were plenty of fish. A two foot long buffalo swam right up to my toes and just stayed there awhile, making sucking motions with its mouth. Farther out gar swam languidly through the green water. I walked farther up the bank stepping into the water some but still finding it to have too many large rocks for wading. A big Labrador retriever came out of nowhere exhibiting a more surly manner than I would have expected from a lab. I threw a few sticks into the water and the lab agitatedly but obligingly swam out and collected the sticks and delivered them to the far side of the river, never swimming all the way over to me, never releasing me from it’s hackled gaze.
We waded back downstream probing all the way and that’s when I finally caught my one and only fish of the day. Earlier in the summer fishing in the Duck River I caught what was perhaps the world’s smallest bluegill. But my lone fish of the day on the Harpeth was undoubtedly the world’s smallest sunfish. He looked smaller than the lure he bit and I don’t think it was an optical illusion. This fish was less than the length of my middle finger.
Farther downstream the riverbed was better suited to wading. I switched back to the floppy plastic lure. After a couple of casts I had a hit. A good hit. I saw the white belly and felt the rush and in the blink of an eye the fish was gone. Obviously I wasn’t fishing the lure right but that kind of hit is what makes bass fishermen endure early mornings after long Friday nights. We talked with two other men who like us were luckless on this little river that usually abounds with fish. I blame it on the high pressure system that brought in the cloudless blue sky that arched over our heads.
We waded downstream over a thousand yards, past spots where I have extracted many a smallmouth on more successful days but the fish were having none of what we offered today. About two o’clock we decided to punt and headed back upstream toward the truck. Just before we got to where we would climb up the bank to the parking lot I passed a young boy in the water and saw him reeling in a good size bluegill. “Boy, look at that,” I said. “It’s bigger than anything we’ve caught today.”
“Yeah, I caught another one while ago but this one is bigger,” he replied with a big smile.
So I didn’t catch anything but that’s not important. I’m glad the little boy caught a couple of fish. It will keep him coming back and with the interest of a new generation good rivers will continue to have a voice.
P.S. – After talking with David I learned that in my post party haze I had not noticed one of the bridges and the small creek where we began the days fishing was actually Brush Creek.
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Color Brings 'em In
Color brings people into a garden center. A knowledagble staff brings them back again and again.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Meriwether Lewis Grave
I’m a bona fide lover of nature but this year I’ve been working six days a week all summer and there hardly seems time enough to get out and do what I want to do. (I work outside which is the only reason I can tolerate a six day work week). So yesterday after a couple of rousing, beer sodden days celebrating the United States’ 232nd birthday I woke up with an agenda to get out and get away…into the country. I took a fishing pole, a journal I rarely ever open up but keep on hand in case it’s needed, and a book called The Character of Meriwether Lewis by Clay S. Jenkinson. I knew where I was headed at least for the first part of my day.
Nashville is the northern terminus of the famed Natchez Trace. The Trace was once a wilderness road called the Devil’s Backbone due to the surly riverboatmen and bandits who passed along its deep woods shrouded length between Nashville and Natchez, Mississippi. Walk a few stretches of the original Trace and you’ll find it is not a cheery place. These woods are deep in the more remote locations and tangled with vines and a thick canopy over most of the route. Along with the ruffians traveling the trace were Andrew Jackson and his fiancé Rachel who was still unwittingly married to another man. Later some of Jackson’s army of mostly Tennesseans going down to defeat the Creek Indians and the British would pass this way. But the most tragic character to ever make his way along the Natchez Trace was Meriwether Lewis - naturalist, writer, ambassador to Indian nations, leader of the Corps of Discovery, personal secretary to Thomas Jefferson, and governor of the Louisiana Territory. At the age of thirty-five he died by his own hand at a little inn called Grinder’s Stand, the first white holding travelers came to after leaving the Chickasaw nation. Grinder’s Stand is about twelve miles outside the present day Swiss settlement of Hohenwald, Tennessee and not too far from Grinder’s Switch, the hometown of country comedian and wonderful lady Minnie Pear (Sarah Cannon).
Lewis must have made a striking impression on the inn keeper at Grinder’s Stand. She wouldn’t allow him or his servant into the house. Instead he readily agreed to stay outside as had been his custom. Since the end of his journey with the Corps of Discovery he had not slept in a bed, instead preferring to lay down on bear skins and blankets. This from a man who a few years earlier had made a fuss over the frumpish cut of his officer’s coat he had ordered and who made fun of the pedestrian palates of his fellow countrymen, his own palate having been refined at the French influenced table of Thomas Jefferson. Ironically the only disagreement Lewis would have during the three years he spent exploring the Louisiana Purchase with William Clark would be over Clark’s lack of enthusiasm for dog meat which Lewis had grown to enjoy eating.
In 1809, three years after returning from his famous journey, Meriwether Lewis was a famous man, a good looking man, and a scientifically if not classically educated man. But he couldn’t get a woman to marry him (he asked several), he couldn’t manage his debts, and he couldn’t lead men outside of the martial style at which he excelled. Men with a choice in what to do didn’t generally do what Meriwether Lewis wanted or needed done. Where his mentor Thomas Jefferson turned to frenetic activity to ease his mind Lewis turned to whiskey. Most people agree he was an alcoholic…on top of suffering from “melancholia”, depression in our current vernacular.
So in hindsight it isn’t surprising to us that Meriwether Lewis would take his own life at a remote frontier outpost in the middle of the night on 11 October 1809. And it wasn’t too surprising to the young nation either. A newspaper account from Nashville read, “In the death of Governor Lewis, the public behold the wreck of one of the noblest men.” Jenkinson summarizes Lewis perfectly in Character:
“Some men don’t belong in the wilderness…some don’t belong in civilization. And a few, having spent time in both, find they no longer have a home in either world.”
So my trip was to stand at the grave of the great explorer. I feel a kinship to Lewis that is unmistakably rooted in my often melancholy view of the world. Like Lewis I see the greatness at my fingertips but can’t quite grasp it. All my efforts usually fall a little flat and short of their mark. I accomplish just enough to be frustrated. I think that is a lot of what Lewis felt. I want to write something of merit. He knew he had to rewrite his journals into a scientific and political manuscript. In letters Jefferson inquired, occasionally with some irritation evident, as to whether or not Lewis had begun the project. As far as we know Lewis never wrote a word of the book that would describe his exploration of the Louisiana Purchase.
I sat at Lewis’ grave for a few minutes then walked back to my truck to, well, explore. I walked around in Little Swan Creek, catching a crayfish. A father and his kids were catching crayfish in little nets. While we were stopped and talked for a minute a water snake came slithering right up between us, quite fast. The kids were wild with excitement, sort of. Snakes are so common along the Buffalo River and its tributaries that there is no need to get too excited about them.
Afterwards I drove into Hohenwald to buy $3.98/gallon gas and eat a most un-Meriwether Lewis lunch at McDonald’s (number 3 value meal…large size). Then I headed back to the Trace and north, stopping at the Gordon House and Gordon Ferry stop west of Columbia. I’ve always liked this stop on the Trace. It was here that I found an arrowhead in good condition while walking along a trail back in 1997. I walked down a rocky little creek for two thirds of a mile to where it emptied into my beloved Duck River (by some accounts it is the most biodiverse river in North America.)
Although comfortable in the wilderness Lewis felt a certain sense of awe as well. Writing of a solo jaunt in Montana during the expedition Lewis writes:
“I then continued my rout homeward …the succession of curious adventures wore the impression on my mind of inchantment; at sometimes for a moment I thought it might be a dream…”
In this passage Lewis eventually realizes he is not dreaming when his feet are stuck by prickly pear cactus. Throughout the journey Lewis described nature and animals in very human terms. He wrote that mule deers were “drearie” and of birds, which he loved, he wrote that they bring “gayety and cheerfulness”.
In my much smaller journey up the dark creek I encountered birds of a different feather. About the time the putrid smell of rotting flesh hit my nose I heard the whump whump of heavy wings and caught the glimpse of two very large turkey vultures jumping from the ground into a nearby sycamore. Spotting a couple of feathers on the ground and led by the unpleasant odor I walked by where they had been and found their meal of dead possum. I kept walking.
After trudging through some heavy sediment at the mouth of the creek I walked onto a rock strewn point and waded out into the river. Where the creek water had been refreshingly cold on my sandaled feet the river water was like bathwater…predictable for July. I fished a little minnow lure with a silver belly and an olive back. I cast and cast in the late afternoon sun which was beginning to cast a beautiful light over the whole scene. I fished the channel and I fished the eddies. There I caught perhaps the world’s smallest bluegill, so small that I wondered why it had even chased my minnow. Wading into the leeward side of the channel I cast some more then spotted a stick looking up at me from about three feet away. It was another water snake. As soon as I moved again it stuck its head back down into whatever lair it had there among the water weeds and mussel shells. I cast a few more times and decided to call it a day. No, I wasn’t done in by the snake. My dog and I have swam with cottonmouths on this river. Snakes aren’t a problem. Not catching any good fish is.
I walked back up the creek, once again hearing the whump whump of three buzzards taking to the trees. If birds were larger (and these buzzards are big) we would have issues with them. They are prehistoric dinosaur brained creatures that would surly look at our puny pipedal bodies like we look at chicken on a stick. Coming out of the creekbed I looked at the late afternoon glow on the red brick of the old Gordon house and thought about how happy travelers would have been to see it 190 years ago. They were only a day’s ride from Nashville. They may not have traveled to the farthest, unknown shores of the Pacific Ocean but, on this journey at least, they had come farther than Meriwether Lewis, who sleeps by the side of the road just a few miles back.
Nashville is the northern terminus of the famed Natchez Trace. The Trace was once a wilderness road called the Devil’s Backbone due to the surly riverboatmen and bandits who passed along its deep woods shrouded length between Nashville and Natchez, Mississippi. Walk a few stretches of the original Trace and you’ll find it is not a cheery place. These woods are deep in the more remote locations and tangled with vines and a thick canopy over most of the route. Along with the ruffians traveling the trace were Andrew Jackson and his fiancé Rachel who was still unwittingly married to another man. Later some of Jackson’s army of mostly Tennesseans going down to defeat the Creek Indians and the British would pass this way. But the most tragic character to ever make his way along the Natchez Trace was Meriwether Lewis - naturalist, writer, ambassador to Indian nations, leader of the Corps of Discovery, personal secretary to Thomas Jefferson, and governor of the Louisiana Territory. At the age of thirty-five he died by his own hand at a little inn called Grinder’s Stand, the first white holding travelers came to after leaving the Chickasaw nation. Grinder’s Stand is about twelve miles outside the present day Swiss settlement of Hohenwald, Tennessee and not too far from Grinder’s Switch, the hometown of country comedian and wonderful lady Minnie Pear (Sarah Cannon).
Lewis must have made a striking impression on the inn keeper at Grinder’s Stand. She wouldn’t allow him or his servant into the house. Instead he readily agreed to stay outside as had been his custom. Since the end of his journey with the Corps of Discovery he had not slept in a bed, instead preferring to lay down on bear skins and blankets. This from a man who a few years earlier had made a fuss over the frumpish cut of his officer’s coat he had ordered and who made fun of the pedestrian palates of his fellow countrymen, his own palate having been refined at the French influenced table of Thomas Jefferson. Ironically the only disagreement Lewis would have during the three years he spent exploring the Louisiana Purchase with William Clark would be over Clark’s lack of enthusiasm for dog meat which Lewis had grown to enjoy eating.
In 1809, three years after returning from his famous journey, Meriwether Lewis was a famous man, a good looking man, and a scientifically if not classically educated man. But he couldn’t get a woman to marry him (he asked several), he couldn’t manage his debts, and he couldn’t lead men outside of the martial style at which he excelled. Men with a choice in what to do didn’t generally do what Meriwether Lewis wanted or needed done. Where his mentor Thomas Jefferson turned to frenetic activity to ease his mind Lewis turned to whiskey. Most people agree he was an alcoholic…on top of suffering from “melancholia”, depression in our current vernacular.
So in hindsight it isn’t surprising to us that Meriwether Lewis would take his own life at a remote frontier outpost in the middle of the night on 11 October 1809. And it wasn’t too surprising to the young nation either. A newspaper account from Nashville read, “In the death of Governor Lewis, the public behold the wreck of one of the noblest men.” Jenkinson summarizes Lewis perfectly in Character:
“Some men don’t belong in the wilderness…some don’t belong in civilization. And a few, having spent time in both, find they no longer have a home in either world.”
So my trip was to stand at the grave of the great explorer. I feel a kinship to Lewis that is unmistakably rooted in my often melancholy view of the world. Like Lewis I see the greatness at my fingertips but can’t quite grasp it. All my efforts usually fall a little flat and short of their mark. I accomplish just enough to be frustrated. I think that is a lot of what Lewis felt. I want to write something of merit. He knew he had to rewrite his journals into a scientific and political manuscript. In letters Jefferson inquired, occasionally with some irritation evident, as to whether or not Lewis had begun the project. As far as we know Lewis never wrote a word of the book that would describe his exploration of the Louisiana Purchase.
I sat at Lewis’ grave for a few minutes then walked back to my truck to, well, explore. I walked around in Little Swan Creek, catching a crayfish. A father and his kids were catching crayfish in little nets. While we were stopped and talked for a minute a water snake came slithering right up between us, quite fast. The kids were wild with excitement, sort of. Snakes are so common along the Buffalo River and its tributaries that there is no need to get too excited about them.
Afterwards I drove into Hohenwald to buy $3.98/gallon gas and eat a most un-Meriwether Lewis lunch at McDonald’s (number 3 value meal…large size). Then I headed back to the Trace and north, stopping at the Gordon House and Gordon Ferry stop west of Columbia. I’ve always liked this stop on the Trace. It was here that I found an arrowhead in good condition while walking along a trail back in 1997. I walked down a rocky little creek for two thirds of a mile to where it emptied into my beloved Duck River (by some accounts it is the most biodiverse river in North America.)
Although comfortable in the wilderness Lewis felt a certain sense of awe as well. Writing of a solo jaunt in Montana during the expedition Lewis writes:
“I then continued my rout homeward …the succession of curious adventures wore the impression on my mind of inchantment; at sometimes for a moment I thought it might be a dream…”
In this passage Lewis eventually realizes he is not dreaming when his feet are stuck by prickly pear cactus. Throughout the journey Lewis described nature and animals in very human terms. He wrote that mule deers were “drearie” and of birds, which he loved, he wrote that they bring “gayety and cheerfulness”.
In my much smaller journey up the dark creek I encountered birds of a different feather. About the time the putrid smell of rotting flesh hit my nose I heard the whump whump of heavy wings and caught the glimpse of two very large turkey vultures jumping from the ground into a nearby sycamore. Spotting a couple of feathers on the ground and led by the unpleasant odor I walked by where they had been and found their meal of dead possum. I kept walking.
After trudging through some heavy sediment at the mouth of the creek I walked onto a rock strewn point and waded out into the river. Where the creek water had been refreshingly cold on my sandaled feet the river water was like bathwater…predictable for July. I fished a little minnow lure with a silver belly and an olive back. I cast and cast in the late afternoon sun which was beginning to cast a beautiful light over the whole scene. I fished the channel and I fished the eddies. There I caught perhaps the world’s smallest bluegill, so small that I wondered why it had even chased my minnow. Wading into the leeward side of the channel I cast some more then spotted a stick looking up at me from about three feet away. It was another water snake. As soon as I moved again it stuck its head back down into whatever lair it had there among the water weeds and mussel shells. I cast a few more times and decided to call it a day. No, I wasn’t done in by the snake. My dog and I have swam with cottonmouths on this river. Snakes aren’t a problem. Not catching any good fish is.
I walked back up the creek, once again hearing the whump whump of three buzzards taking to the trees. If birds were larger (and these buzzards are big) we would have issues with them. They are prehistoric dinosaur brained creatures that would surly look at our puny pipedal bodies like we look at chicken on a stick. Coming out of the creekbed I looked at the late afternoon glow on the red brick of the old Gordon house and thought about how happy travelers would have been to see it 190 years ago. They were only a day’s ride from Nashville. They may not have traveled to the farthest, unknown shores of the Pacific Ocean but, on this journey at least, they had come farther than Meriwether Lewis, who sleeps by the side of the road just a few miles back.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
I call this Mind Massage...
I took this pic in Iceland in December 2003 or January 2004. south coast.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Overcoming Fear
I have been reading a lot lately and that is one thing I'm going to try to cut back on in 2008. Both of the authors who I have been reading advise against the the folly of reading too many books and the accumulation of too much stagnant knowledge. Those are outrageously backward ideas on the surface and one has to speculate why an author would advise against reading. The answer lies in the way we are educated.
We are taught to read the most inane material under the guise of "classics" and we are told that such works hold the key to our lives. We are usually between ten and twenty years old when we are told these things. No one knows anything at that age. The work that finally did in Henry Miller and led to his dropping out of college was Edmund Spencer's "The Fairie Queen". Like Miller, I can't imagine a work more irrelevant to the lives of 99.999999% of the people on the planet.
The second author, Napoleon Hill, brings up the fact that the facualty of a great university commands the collected knowledge of civilization but by and large college professors hold a miniscule amount of the world's financial wealth. His examples of "uneducated" men who reaped great rewards from little formal education include Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.
Miller's and Hill's separate philosophies can be brought to assembled in one sentence:
Read deeply from a few books which hold meaning for you at this stage in your life and then put the knowledge gleaned from these books to use with an organized plan.
Both men ultimately write about success and self-realization. Like so many others before and after them their secret to success lies in following your personal dreams and passions. Believeing in yourself and your well-thought out ideas.
Miller didn't learn this secret to happiness and self actualization until he was forty years old. That’s when he left his postion as personnel director for Western Union and moved to Paris to live on the streets as penniless bohemian artist. Hill learned the philosphy over the course twnty years by interviewing more than 500 successful men from the first third of the twentieth century.
Miller and Hill both point out the symptoms of people who haven't discovered and pursued this secret to self realization. Hill goes so far as to lay out the principals of inaction as a series of fears:
Fear of poverty, fear of criticism, and fear of ill-health (which I transpose with fear of growing old). I recognize these fears in my own life and the result of these fears. Shortness with other people, lack of belief in one's ability to follow through and be profitable, cynicism, distrust of others, loss of enthusiasm, and a steady succession of minor sicknesses.
I always remember my grandfather, who was the only successful entreprenuer I've ever known, told me, "Don't let your life be dictated by fear." There is so much truth in these words. I plan to take his advise in 2008.
We are taught to read the most inane material under the guise of "classics" and we are told that such works hold the key to our lives. We are usually between ten and twenty years old when we are told these things. No one knows anything at that age. The work that finally did in Henry Miller and led to his dropping out of college was Edmund Spencer's "The Fairie Queen". Like Miller, I can't imagine a work more irrelevant to the lives of 99.999999% of the people on the planet.
The second author, Napoleon Hill, brings up the fact that the facualty of a great university commands the collected knowledge of civilization but by and large college professors hold a miniscule amount of the world's financial wealth. His examples of "uneducated" men who reaped great rewards from little formal education include Henry Ford and Thomas Edison.
Miller's and Hill's separate philosophies can be brought to assembled in one sentence:
Read deeply from a few books which hold meaning for you at this stage in your life and then put the knowledge gleaned from these books to use with an organized plan.
Both men ultimately write about success and self-realization. Like so many others before and after them their secret to success lies in following your personal dreams and passions. Believeing in yourself and your well-thought out ideas.
Miller didn't learn this secret to happiness and self actualization until he was forty years old. That’s when he left his postion as personnel director for Western Union and moved to Paris to live on the streets as penniless bohemian artist. Hill learned the philosphy over the course twnty years by interviewing more than 500 successful men from the first third of the twentieth century.
Miller and Hill both point out the symptoms of people who haven't discovered and pursued this secret to self realization. Hill goes so far as to lay out the principals of inaction as a series of fears:
Fear of poverty, fear of criticism, and fear of ill-health (which I transpose with fear of growing old). I recognize these fears in my own life and the result of these fears. Shortness with other people, lack of belief in one's ability to follow through and be profitable, cynicism, distrust of others, loss of enthusiasm, and a steady succession of minor sicknesses.
I always remember my grandfather, who was the only successful entreprenuer I've ever known, told me, "Don't let your life be dictated by fear." There is so much truth in these words. I plan to take his advise in 2008.
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