The Big South Fork of the Cumberland River forms at the confluence of the New River and Clear Fork River. From here it winds ninety river miles cutting a six hundred foot deep gorge through the sandstone highlands of the Cumberland Plateau, flowing north into Kentucky where it lends its waters to the Cumberland River. The Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area encompasses 125,000 acres of the watershed of this wild, free flowing river. Formed in 1974, the BSFNRRA protects rugged mountain land that had been stripped of timber and mined for coal from the late 1800’s until the middle of the twentieth century. The extractive activities left the land scarred and the environment of a once pristine place in a dubious state. But nature heals her wounds and through photosynthesis and the freeze and thaw of the seasons the efforts of man crumble when left unattended and green creeps back over denuded landscapes.
It was in this high terrain that a friend and I retreated with a couple of good trail dogs to take breather during the fall break of my first college semester in fifteen years. Conceived as a get away three years previously after I first got out of the Navy the initial plan had been to wander cross country with my dog and a back pack with nothing but a compass and topographic map to guide me. But plans change. Still, we had planned on backpacking but that turned into car camping (a tip of the hat to Mark Sundeen’s cult classic of outdoor/slacker living), and ultimately what had started as a trip into the backcountry of the Big South Fork became a somewhat rollicking sampling of the surrounding region.
After the interminable twisting, drive over pretty country roads through the ever intensifying colors of autumn we arrived and set up camp in Bandy Creek Campground, site 49. At $19 per night to tent camp the park is proud of their camp sites. But the location is really good and central to anything one would ever want to do in the southern portion of the park.
Though a ranger had advised us against taking dogs on the Honey Creek Loop, we decided to do it anyway, starting a bit late in the afternoon and jumped into the woods. The trail walks down a very small creek which was soggy after days of rain though every day of our trip would prove to be nothing but outstanding with the painfully blue clear skies and increasingly warm days of an Indian summer. An unusually wet summer season had left the ground well primed for a plethora of fungi which we marveled at and photographed over the entire three days we were in the area. Along the trail we also found a fine example of a euonymus called strawberry bush or hearts a bustin’.
After three miles or so we came to a place to either continue on the long loop trail or take an abbreviated side trail directly to the Honey Creek Overlook, a spot the Audubon Society Field Guide to the Southeastern United States calls one of the most beautiful overlooks in Tennessee. The terrain is rugged and there was no easy way to get to the overlook…I tried to find it for the sake of the dogs. It turns out the only way up about forty feet of rock face is to climb up a couple of steel ladders that are pitched at a good 55 or 60 degree slope. Lilly, the smaller dog was hesitant but managed to go on up with a little encouragement. Maze Dog, sixty pounds of wild energy who has intrepidly lunged into raging rivers from the Cascade Mountains to flooded low country rivers in middle Tennessee, got about a third of the way up then started to whimper. I stood immediately behind her, helping her raise one paw above the other until at last she made it up.
The effort to get the dogs up was worthwhile. Honey Creek Overlook is a beautiful spot, looking down a long gorge where the oaks, hickories, and poplars were turning with the season. The river below was slightly flooded and powerful. The overlook is situated on a wooded platform. Countless visitors had left messages to lost loved ones written in Sharpie or carved into the railing…and on the benches…and on the posts. Below by one of the rockhouses (the overhang of a bluff where one can go in and rest on a dry bed of sand) we passed there was an unopened pepsi can which had been placed ceremoniously on a rock and a somewhat ambitious memorial spray painted on the rock. “Remember the sunrise has never failed us” was the quote my friend and I took and ran with as the recurring theme of our upper Cumberland expedition.
Leaving the overlook we walked a pleasant mile down a gravel country lane, testing our acumen as naturalist by spot identifying winged and staghorn sumac, sourwood, and dogwood.
Driving back into the park proper around loopy highway 297, we parked at the East Rim Overlook and hiked the 1.3 miles at the perfect time of day to Sunset Overlook. When we got to the narrow sandstone shelf the sun was at that perfect angle to set the world on fire. It’s the time of day I like to look into its brightness and imagine all that can be in the world. Its when everything is cast with the pall of that 1970’s film haziness that dissolves the sharpness of lines until the trees, rocks, people, everything in my field of view lose their sharp edges and blend into one, like some Siddharthic awakening. And like such awakenings these moments are brief and the most must be made of them, from both a photographic sense and as concerns rejuvenating the soul within.
Walking back out the trail we noted that the grey brown leaves of Umbrella magnolia that had fallen on the forest floor looked like litter. Then I found an umbrella magnolia tree and collected a specimen for my herbarium.
Getting camp going that night was rough. We fought wet wood and plunging temperatures but finally turned out a decent camp supper of roasted potatoes, onions, squash and zucchini, served along side grilled chicken breasts. Car camping with a color and little grill is really the way to go. A crystalline sky filled with a million stars and a bottle of Red Truck put us over the top, making the crawl into cold sleeping bags not quite so bad.
The next morning was coffee, boiled eggs and shivering until the sun had climbed a ways in the sky revealing another beautiful day and it was evident that the day would be considerably warmer than the day before.
After some consideration we drove down a narrow gravel road to the Twin Arches trailhead. The trail wound around the base of sandstone bluff past a number of rockhouses. We stopped and inspected each one for signs of sandwort, a plant my hiking partner had spent time protecting in nearby Pickett State park, and flint chippings and arrowheads. I really wanted to find another arrowhead but alas all we found were chippings and leaves that tricked us into picking them up.
We wandered onto the first of the arches almost without noticing it. This seems like it would be hard to do since these two arches constitute the largest formation of its kind in the eastern United States. The trail rounds a bend and suddenly the first arch is there. But unlike the formations in Arches National Park which are red and exposed the twin Arches of BFSNRRA are made of a whitish grey sandstone and well concealed by lush vegetation. But make no mistake, they are impressive. The South Arch is 70 feet high and spans 135 feet. We stood awestruck at the beauty of it for a moment. I can only imagine what the first longhunters thought in the 1760’s when they came across the arches for the first time. Undoubtedly some of them had seen the Natural Bridge in Virginia and, when viewed together, this formation is substantially larger than that one. A trail to the left leads to the North Arch. We paused for the obligatory pictures and enjoyed a cigarette. Then we climbed a series of wooden steps to the top of the arch.
A spectacular panorama of canyon and ridges revealed itself bringing up the obvious comparisons to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The chasm wasn’t as wide, the gorge not as deep, but this is about as big as one will find in the east. And it is big. Of all the reading I’d done researching trails none of the literature had talked about the view from on top of the arches. It provided us with the inspiration which people are looking for when they go out in nature. Under a sky of cobalt blue we sat on the edge and ate some lunch, enjoying the sixty-five degree sunshine after the long, cold night. Small Virginia pines grew from the slightest cracks in the rock, contorted and windblown like ancient bonsai trees. Later, walking along the ridge above the arches we Schumard Oak, glade privet, and sassafras in profusion. We came across a phasmid, or stick bug, laying immobile in the sandy trail. It looked like one of the dogs had stepped on it. But on closer inspection it turned out that these were two bugs mating. What I had thought was a broken leg was the much smaller male latched onto the female.
We walked a short side trail that led back to the parking lot. Here’s is where plans changed. Sometimes spending days hiking in nature one feels a sense of obligation to note every last feature on every single trail. I call it the beautiful waterfall- beautiful tree-beautiful rock formation syndrome. Having already walked a good bit and seen the best we decided to see something different. We drove out and got on the highway bound for Rugby.
Rugby is a relic of the last days of English colonialism, formed in the good faith of Christian Socialism with just an air of Victorian superiority. It was the brainchild of Thomas Hughes, a second son of England who was determined to establish a settlement where the second sons of the English gentry could come and make a rough living with their hands while retiring to the cultured world they were used to at the end of the day. Founded in 1880 on such high ideals the colony lasted seven years until at last it dissolved through poor management and what remains today are some Victorian carpenter gothic houses, an Episcopal Church (smack in the land of Church of Christ and Primitive Baptists) and an old cemetery.
I’d also heard there might be a winery nearby. Turns out there was. Highland Manor is Tennessee’s oldest winery. We stopped in and sampled all the varieties they had to offer. The reserve chardonnay was extra special. But cost/taste analysis dictated our purchase so we bought the cheapest red they had along with some fancy cheese and dearly, dearly, way overpriced rosemary crackers. Then back to Rugby.
It was late afternoon when we arrived at the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole trailhead which is a part of the BSFNRRA. But rather than immediately jump on the trail we wandered around the old Laureldale Cemetery, noting the curious English names on the headstones and the many types of fungi growing on the ground. A pair of pileated wood peckers flickered in and out of the large cemetery trees. Four British people walked around, I presume looking for some curious ancestor who had sailed off to America to settle in the Tennessee backcountry in an attempt to establish a utopia in an imperfect world.
Finally we hiked the half mile trail down to the Gentlemen’s Swimming Hole which is a short stretch of the Clear Fork, photographing fungi all the way. We saw large poplars and hemlocks, a couple of which were dead, possibly victims of the wooly adgelid which is certain wreak total devastation on the beautiful hemlocks of the Big South Fork when it arrives…if it isn’t there already. By the river we sat amid a tangle of rhododendron, watching the dogs play in the sand under river birch and silver maples. The light of day faded from the gorge and we walked just fast enough to reach the plateau before total darkness sat in.
That night, back at camp was pleasantly warmer, the fire easier to start, the meal a smorgasbord of expensive cheese, roasted ears of corn and mixed vegetables. The setting made the local wine phenomenal.
Sometimes we have to find renewal in little doses: a cup of coffee, a night out with friends, an afternoon run. But sometimes we need a couple of days away from everybody we know and every distraction that can come in on a cell phone or email. Sometimes we need rugged land and a failed utopian dream. Nothing fails that is attempted and nothing is attempted but that there’s a hole in us we need to fill. Big South Fork is a place of renewal where man can scratch the surface looking for coal and timber or a better way to live. But ultimately Mother Nature embraces her ever striving sons and daughters in the wilderness of the mountains and river, holding them close, eroding away all the karma they bring with them until all that is left is the sound of water rushing over the rocks and the wind blowing through the canyons.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Friday, October 16, 2009
Meriwether Lewis Memorial Service
Back on October 7th a friend and I took the long but scenic drive from Murfreesboro, down through Columbia, and across Highway 412 to the Meriwether Lewis Monument on the Natchez Trace. We were going down to pay homage to the man whom I’ve written about and read about so much in the past two years. Two hundred years after his death Meriwether Lewis was going to be memorialized and given a proper military funeral.
Like so much of the summer and fall of 2009 the days leading up to the event had been drearily soggy with leaden skies intermittent drizzle. But this day the clouds parted to reveal that deep blue, so clear you can see the domed ceiling of the earth’s cathedral. The front that blew out the clouds also brought in some comfortably cooler temperatures with a high that barely broke the mid-60’s.
I’d been told to arrive a couple of hours early but that proved to be a bit over cautious. Yes there were crowds but then again this was being held in a park so it wasn’t going to fill up. My friend and I had a couple of hours to kill so we walked up to the obelisk that marks Lewis’ grave. It is set on a stack of stones that were rededicated in 2001 because the old from the original monument built in 1848 had crumbled with time. Limestone is like that. The same interaction of limestone and water that caused the eternal memorial to have to be rebuilt 150 years after it was placed is also responsible for the immense cave systems in Tennessee and Kentucky. The shaft on top of the stones is a broken at to signify a life cut short…Lewis was only 35 when he died.
That morning I had been reading some more of Lewis’ journal entries from his long trek with the Corps of Discovery and came across a passage where he expressed frustration at not being able to give a faithful rendition of the Great Falls of the Missouri or convey the awe which the scene inspired in him. He “most sincerely regretted that [he] had not brought a crimee obscura…”. This puzzled me because I knew that photography didn’t come into existence until the 1839 when Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype. Or was there something before?
I walked over to man in period costume who was at work under a parasol standing behind what looked like an old camera. His name was John Staley and he said that he had also been puzzled by the mention of a crimee obscura…so much so that he had done some research and then built two of them. One was on loan to Monticello, the other was the one he was using at the monument. He explained that a crimee obscura isn’t a camera…however its everything but one. “All that’s missing is the chemistry,” said Staley.
He showed me how it works and it is decidedly clever. The lens is aimed at the object in question, the image is reflected off a mirror and projected onto a screen in the box of the instrument. At this point a thin sheet of paper is placed over the screen and the object is traced. Its an ingenuous way to capture perfect proportion and details.
Staley had come to capture the monument in his crimee obscura but he was attracting too much attention to get any work done. I think this day his work was really presenting some living history to people who obviously had an interest.
The program finally started at 3:00 p.m. and had the hushed solemnity of a funeral service which it was. Keynote speakers included a Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs, daughter of Stephen Ambrose, whose book Undaunted Courage brought Meriwether Lewis back to life in the mind of the general public. A collateral descendent of Lewis read a poem and the great-great-great grandson of William Clark told of the remarkable friendship that grew between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In the only levity added to the situation he read Clarks acceptance to Lewis’ invitation to join the expedition, commenting that in a thirty word sentence his ancestor had managed to invent one word and misspell three others. Clark was known to be an adventurous speller.
The crowd sat respectfully quiet through it all under a shady canopy of post oaks and sweetgum trees. At the end of the service a large procession made its way to the gravesite to the steady beat of a military drum down a road lined with flags from the states that would eventually be formed from the territory which Lewis’ expedition had explored. Re-enactors stood in formation at the gravesite as dignitaries laid wreaths at the base of the monument. Then plant specimens representing those Lewis had first discovered for science were laid among the wreaths. An honor guard from the 101st Airborne fired a 21-gun salute then a piper played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. As happens when “Amazing Grace” is played on the bagpipes people became teary eyed, weeping for the young national hero who took his own life too early…and probably moved by certain things going on in their own life that the shrill beauty of the tune can dredge up at moments of introspection.
I suppose Lewis was never given a proper funeral when he died in1809 but he definitely received on the day I was there.
Like so much of the summer and fall of 2009 the days leading up to the event had been drearily soggy with leaden skies intermittent drizzle. But this day the clouds parted to reveal that deep blue, so clear you can see the domed ceiling of the earth’s cathedral. The front that blew out the clouds also brought in some comfortably cooler temperatures with a high that barely broke the mid-60’s.
I’d been told to arrive a couple of hours early but that proved to be a bit over cautious. Yes there were crowds but then again this was being held in a park so it wasn’t going to fill up. My friend and I had a couple of hours to kill so we walked up to the obelisk that marks Lewis’ grave. It is set on a stack of stones that were rededicated in 2001 because the old from the original monument built in 1848 had crumbled with time. Limestone is like that. The same interaction of limestone and water that caused the eternal memorial to have to be rebuilt 150 years after it was placed is also responsible for the immense cave systems in Tennessee and Kentucky. The shaft on top of the stones is a broken at to signify a life cut short…Lewis was only 35 when he died.
That morning I had been reading some more of Lewis’ journal entries from his long trek with the Corps of Discovery and came across a passage where he expressed frustration at not being able to give a faithful rendition of the Great Falls of the Missouri or convey the awe which the scene inspired in him. He “most sincerely regretted that [he] had not brought a crimee obscura…”. This puzzled me because I knew that photography didn’t come into existence until the 1839 when Louis Daguerre invented the daguerreotype. Or was there something before?
I walked over to man in period costume who was at work under a parasol standing behind what looked like an old camera. His name was John Staley and he said that he had also been puzzled by the mention of a crimee obscura…so much so that he had done some research and then built two of them. One was on loan to Monticello, the other was the one he was using at the monument. He explained that a crimee obscura isn’t a camera…however its everything but one. “All that’s missing is the chemistry,” said Staley.
He showed me how it works and it is decidedly clever. The lens is aimed at the object in question, the image is reflected off a mirror and projected onto a screen in the box of the instrument. At this point a thin sheet of paper is placed over the screen and the object is traced. Its an ingenuous way to capture perfect proportion and details.
Staley had come to capture the monument in his crimee obscura but he was attracting too much attention to get any work done. I think this day his work was really presenting some living history to people who obviously had an interest.
The program finally started at 3:00 p.m. and had the hushed solemnity of a funeral service which it was. Keynote speakers included a Stephanie Ambrose Tubbs, daughter of Stephen Ambrose, whose book Undaunted Courage brought Meriwether Lewis back to life in the mind of the general public. A collateral descendent of Lewis read a poem and the great-great-great grandson of William Clark told of the remarkable friendship that grew between Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. In the only levity added to the situation he read Clarks acceptance to Lewis’ invitation to join the expedition, commenting that in a thirty word sentence his ancestor had managed to invent one word and misspell three others. Clark was known to be an adventurous speller.
The crowd sat respectfully quiet through it all under a shady canopy of post oaks and sweetgum trees. At the end of the service a large procession made its way to the gravesite to the steady beat of a military drum down a road lined with flags from the states that would eventually be formed from the territory which Lewis’ expedition had explored. Re-enactors stood in formation at the gravesite as dignitaries laid wreaths at the base of the monument. Then plant specimens representing those Lewis had first discovered for science were laid among the wreaths. An honor guard from the 101st Airborne fired a 21-gun salute then a piper played “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipes. As happens when “Amazing Grace” is played on the bagpipes people became teary eyed, weeping for the young national hero who took his own life too early…and probably moved by certain things going on in their own life that the shrill beauty of the tune can dredge up at moments of introspection.
I suppose Lewis was never given a proper funeral when he died in1809 but he definitely received on the day I was there.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Mary Travers - In Memorium
I just found out Mary Travers passed away today so now I’m sitting here in the dim light of a desk lamp listening to the wonderful music of Peter, Paul, and Mary.
I remember back in ’83 or ’84 when my dad brought home a 45-rpm record of “Blowin’ In the Wind” b/s “Puff the Magic Dragon”. That was the first time I’d heard the trio and Ms. Travers’ achingly haunting voice. Within a year I was learning to play the guitar, an old Ventura, and one of the first songs I picked out was “Puff the Magic Dragon”.
So much living has transpired since then: war, disillusionment, poverty,…everything I thought I’d never experience, winding up where I thought I’d never be. Now, after this, the longest of summers, I’m having my most meaningful musical moment in years. That’s the power of music and the legacy of Mary Travers. She left behind music that defined a time in America’s history and a shifted mindset, the remnants of which are still around today.
Through her death the curious of a new generation will discover her music. Seekers always do. I hope they enjoy it as much as I am tonight.
I remember back in ’83 or ’84 when my dad brought home a 45-rpm record of “Blowin’ In the Wind” b/s “Puff the Magic Dragon”. That was the first time I’d heard the trio and Ms. Travers’ achingly haunting voice. Within a year I was learning to play the guitar, an old Ventura, and one of the first songs I picked out was “Puff the Magic Dragon”.
So much living has transpired since then: war, disillusionment, poverty,…everything I thought I’d never experience, winding up where I thought I’d never be. Now, after this, the longest of summers, I’m having my most meaningful musical moment in years. That’s the power of music and the legacy of Mary Travers. She left behind music that defined a time in America’s history and a shifted mindset, the remnants of which are still around today.
Through her death the curious of a new generation will discover her music. Seekers always do. I hope they enjoy it as much as I am tonight.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Bicycles & Beer
When I was young I used to imagine myself as a fifty or sixty year old man, slightly retarded, riding around on a tricycle with three gears and a big basket. In these visions I wore a straw cowboy hat and those thick plastic glasses the Navy and Maries like to call “birth control” glasses. I think I may have even envisioned denim shorts with an elastic waist band at some point.
Thus attired and presumably homeless I would ride my tricycle around town and young jocks would chase me and try to beat me up. Pretty girls would always say things like, “C’mon Jake, don’t mess with that poor man.” I was grateful for their sympathy and would ring the bell on my handlebars and ride off while Jake’s attention was diverted.
So that brings me to today. I do ride a bicycle now, albeit a mountain bike, a fairly decent one at that. I ride commando in cargo shorts in lieu of the denim with the elastic band, wear a tattered ball cap rather than a cowboy hat, and Lasik got rid of the old birth control glasses.
But otherwise the vision has come true…or might, I’m only thirty-six so there’s still time.
I live in the old downtown part of Murfreesboro where people share $900,000 homes within a block or two of ramshackle section 8 housing. Last night I rode to the mini-market on the corner of Main Street and Middle Tennessee Boulevard and bought a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee. As I was about to walk out the door I saw some scraggly middle school kids standing around my bicycle. So, its back to this. Like so many bespectacled, pimply boys, I had problems in middle school. Not popular, pushed around, the kind of guy everybody thought would grow up playing D&D and video games. (Thankfully I actually spent my days out of doors so never got sucked into either of these geek traps).
Well, I walked over to my bicycle fully expecting some heckling, maybe a shove from behind…but instead they just asked if I’d bought the bike at the bike shop a few blocks away. “No, but I hear that place is good.” Then I accidentally stepped into one of the boys who was standing behind me and instead of a belligerent “what the fuck, nerd” he just said, “sorry, Sir.”
I got on the bike and rode toward my apartment carrying the 12-pack by its cardboard handle, hoping it wouldn’t rip and my $7.50 be shot to hell with a bunch of busted beer cans raddled with spouting pin holes. I took Cherry Street, a quiet little lane of nice houses and overarching shade trees. Coming up the street toward me I saw a young mother walking a midget child. She thoughtfully held the child’s hand as he waddled along beside her. As I got closer she looked up and we exchanged gazes.
I know the look, I’ve seen it many times. More women than would like to admit look at me with a certain desire. I’ve still got that going for me. But then they see what I’ve become: a guy in his mid-30’s riding around on a bicycle carrying a 12-pack of beer. I don’t even have the horrid fluorescent spandex of a true cyclist. It doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot about my accomplishments in life.
But maybe its just the head cold talking (I’m all stuffed up this morning). Last night at the bar this girl told me I had a glowing, enriching aura. She ate a special diet so she could see such things. It sounds like a good thing…of course she also described my aura with words one would hear in a shampoo commercial.
Thus attired and presumably homeless I would ride my tricycle around town and young jocks would chase me and try to beat me up. Pretty girls would always say things like, “C’mon Jake, don’t mess with that poor man.” I was grateful for their sympathy and would ring the bell on my handlebars and ride off while Jake’s attention was diverted.
So that brings me to today. I do ride a bicycle now, albeit a mountain bike, a fairly decent one at that. I ride commando in cargo shorts in lieu of the denim with the elastic band, wear a tattered ball cap rather than a cowboy hat, and Lasik got rid of the old birth control glasses.
But otherwise the vision has come true…or might, I’m only thirty-six so there’s still time.
I live in the old downtown part of Murfreesboro where people share $900,000 homes within a block or two of ramshackle section 8 housing. Last night I rode to the mini-market on the corner of Main Street and Middle Tennessee Boulevard and bought a 12-pack of Old Milwaukee. As I was about to walk out the door I saw some scraggly middle school kids standing around my bicycle. So, its back to this. Like so many bespectacled, pimply boys, I had problems in middle school. Not popular, pushed around, the kind of guy everybody thought would grow up playing D&D and video games. (Thankfully I actually spent my days out of doors so never got sucked into either of these geek traps).
Well, I walked over to my bicycle fully expecting some heckling, maybe a shove from behind…but instead they just asked if I’d bought the bike at the bike shop a few blocks away. “No, but I hear that place is good.” Then I accidentally stepped into one of the boys who was standing behind me and instead of a belligerent “what the fuck, nerd” he just said, “sorry, Sir.”
I got on the bike and rode toward my apartment carrying the 12-pack by its cardboard handle, hoping it wouldn’t rip and my $7.50 be shot to hell with a bunch of busted beer cans raddled with spouting pin holes. I took Cherry Street, a quiet little lane of nice houses and overarching shade trees. Coming up the street toward me I saw a young mother walking a midget child. She thoughtfully held the child’s hand as he waddled along beside her. As I got closer she looked up and we exchanged gazes.
I know the look, I’ve seen it many times. More women than would like to admit look at me with a certain desire. I’ve still got that going for me. But then they see what I’ve become: a guy in his mid-30’s riding around on a bicycle carrying a 12-pack of beer. I don’t even have the horrid fluorescent spandex of a true cyclist. It doesn’t say a whole hell of a lot about my accomplishments in life.
But maybe its just the head cold talking (I’m all stuffed up this morning). Last night at the bar this girl told me I had a glowing, enriching aura. She ate a special diet so she could see such things. It sounds like a good thing…of course she also described my aura with words one would hear in a shampoo commercial.
Monday, September 07, 2009
A Popular Tree
Not really a tree of southern rivers...I'd say southern highlands instead. But this is overlooking the Piney Creek Gorge so I guess that is close enough.
Monday, August 03, 2009
Vines (actually I'm describing Virginia Creeper
Green vines of five leaves creeps over and crawls around me
Three years of no upkeep
I look like an abandoned outbuilding covered in poison
But its only a vine that can be stripped away
And won’t hurt anyone with the hand to do it.
Three years of no upkeep
I look like an abandoned outbuilding covered in poison
But its only a vine that can be stripped away
And won’t hurt anyone with the hand to do it.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Who We Are
So much is misunderstood in this world about our intentions and who we are.
Are we the person the world sees groping through our own shortcomings, tipping the bottle to our lips, looking for courage that is not courage, only the euphoric rush of absolute despair, vibrant for a moment then consigned to a hole, deep and dank, where camelback cave crickets crawl over our dreams?
Or are we the shining star we see behind our own smile when dancing visions of greatness free our feet from muddy ground and we take wing with the hawk who has attained magnificent heights above the crows that were chasing him?
On a good day I feel I am looking at God’s perfection in a broken mirror.
Are we the person the world sees groping through our own shortcomings, tipping the bottle to our lips, looking for courage that is not courage, only the euphoric rush of absolute despair, vibrant for a moment then consigned to a hole, deep and dank, where camelback cave crickets crawl over our dreams?
Or are we the shining star we see behind our own smile when dancing visions of greatness free our feet from muddy ground and we take wing with the hawk who has attained magnificent heights above the crows that were chasing him?
On a good day I feel I am looking at God’s perfection in a broken mirror.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Southern Rivers 0001
My ode to southern rivers...One day I'll write and play the song myself, until then enjoy Norman Blake from his Whiskey Before Breakfast album.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
From My Back Pages: Tom Wicker
Here is a link to an article I wrote in 1999 when I had the chance to interview legendary newspaper man Tom Wicker. The New York Times report of Kennedy's assasination carried his byline. His other accoclades include Washington Bureau Chief for the New York Times and being on Richard Nixon's list of most despised journalists. The piece was published on the First Amendment Center web site.
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=4424
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=4424
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Floating Away The Day
Today I went kayaking down the Harpeth River from Kingston Springs Road to the bridge at the intersection of Highway 70 and Mound Bottom Road. The hot midday sun and blue skies made for conditions that could not have been finer. I brought along my fishing pole but had absolutely no luck despite changing lures three times.
I tried bouncing a weighted worm along the rocky bottom and then reverted to two different minnow lures that caught me a few smallmouth last summer. But I don’t let petulant fish cast any cloud on such a fine day on the water.
One of the highlights was about halfway through the float when I stopped at the mouth of Turnbull Creek and waded up into its clear, briskly flowing waters. The bottom was a mix of brown river pebbles and grey slate. In one fast moving channel I came upon a school of about forty or more gar all crowded into the fast moving water and surfacing to snap at the air. At times a mildly explosive roe would ensue with the long fish breaking the water with their tangled bodies.
This particular float down the Harpeth takes kayakers and canoeists past high river bluffs. Ages ago prehistoric inhabitants painted and chipped petroglyphs onto some of these bluffs. The petroglyphs depicted the sun and the moon as well as bison, which were once common in the area. One depicted a baton. These messages from those that came before could be seen as late as the 1970’s and are discussed by James Crutchfield in his relaxing book The Harpeth River: A Biography, but I don’t know that anyone can point them out today.
The river also passes through pastureland with crumbly loess banks and some low country filled with gravel bars supporting stands of water willow and sycamore shoots. In time the tree roots and collapsing banks will direct the river into new meanders that generations too distant to contemplate will explore in their own version of canoes and kayaks.
On a less contemplative note I would liked to have seen more ladies in bikinis. I talked to one girl during my stop at Turnbull Creek but she was perhaps too young and at any rate people have different things on their mind during a working day Monday float than they do on weekend trips when the river is packed with people…and beer cans in the process of being emptied. Still, this young lady was right pretty with her full figure and country girl tan lines. The way her bikini bottom angled down just below her left hip bone was rather sexy. As for me, my farmer’s tan has left me with a dark face and arms but the sun burn I received on my chest and belly today likely gave me the appearance of a boiled crayfish in her eyes.
I am rounding out the day by firing up the grill. The charcoals are burning down as I write and it will soon be time to put on the meat. The menu is simple: thin pork chops marinated in black pepper and soy sauce, fresh cucumbers and sliced tomatoes. The beverage is Miller High Life Light…which just goes to prove that sometimes its worth springing the extra $2.50 to get the 12-pack of Miller Lite.
I tried bouncing a weighted worm along the rocky bottom and then reverted to two different minnow lures that caught me a few smallmouth last summer. But I don’t let petulant fish cast any cloud on such a fine day on the water.
One of the highlights was about halfway through the float when I stopped at the mouth of Turnbull Creek and waded up into its clear, briskly flowing waters. The bottom was a mix of brown river pebbles and grey slate. In one fast moving channel I came upon a school of about forty or more gar all crowded into the fast moving water and surfacing to snap at the air. At times a mildly explosive roe would ensue with the long fish breaking the water with their tangled bodies.
This particular float down the Harpeth takes kayakers and canoeists past high river bluffs. Ages ago prehistoric inhabitants painted and chipped petroglyphs onto some of these bluffs. The petroglyphs depicted the sun and the moon as well as bison, which were once common in the area. One depicted a baton. These messages from those that came before could be seen as late as the 1970’s and are discussed by James Crutchfield in his relaxing book The Harpeth River: A Biography, but I don’t know that anyone can point them out today.
The river also passes through pastureland with crumbly loess banks and some low country filled with gravel bars supporting stands of water willow and sycamore shoots. In time the tree roots and collapsing banks will direct the river into new meanders that generations too distant to contemplate will explore in their own version of canoes and kayaks.
On a less contemplative note I would liked to have seen more ladies in bikinis. I talked to one girl during my stop at Turnbull Creek but she was perhaps too young and at any rate people have different things on their mind during a working day Monday float than they do on weekend trips when the river is packed with people…and beer cans in the process of being emptied. Still, this young lady was right pretty with her full figure and country girl tan lines. The way her bikini bottom angled down just below her left hip bone was rather sexy. As for me, my farmer’s tan has left me with a dark face and arms but the sun burn I received on my chest and belly today likely gave me the appearance of a boiled crayfish in her eyes.
I am rounding out the day by firing up the grill. The charcoals are burning down as I write and it will soon be time to put on the meat. The menu is simple: thin pork chops marinated in black pepper and soy sauce, fresh cucumbers and sliced tomatoes. The beverage is Miller High Life Light…which just goes to prove that sometimes its worth springing the extra $2.50 to get the 12-pack of Miller Lite.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Arrowheads
Green in vast expanses is a sheet
stretched across my memory
of hills and bottomland
filled with tobacco
sprung from dirt
holding onto Indian rocks
waiting to reveal
the ages of the world
to the curiosity of
a young hand
On a rather glorious day in mid-May I was walking with my dog at Bakers Grove in Tennessee’s Long Hunter State Park. A soggy three weeks of rain and cool temperatures had left the world muddy but clean washed and the hillsides were as deep of a green as I can ever remember seeing them. Everywhere life was fresh and emerging, easing into summer. I was on a walk to photograph wildflowers but the prettiest and most interesting of these were already a month past bloom. I did find Indian pinks and wild sedum along with some nearly impossible to identify mushrooms.
I have walked this trail many times in the past two and half years since returning to middle Tennessee. It’s a good trail that skirts Percy Priest Lake and rambles four and a half miles, just far enough for a good walk without having to make a day of it though there would be far worse places to spend an entire day. It is on this trail that I have had many conversations with myself about what to do with my life: “should I go back in the Navy”, “should I quit this job”, “did I make the right move quitting that job”, and the always troubling, “I wonder what she’s doing now…”. It’s a trail I choose in part because I can let Maze Dog, my Australian shepherd/Lab mix, run off the leash while I loose myself in thought.
On one of my early hikes at Bakers Grove while enjoying the yellows and oranges of the hickories and sugar maples of the first autumn since my return to Tennessee, I was walking along a muddy stretch of the trail when I happened to look down and saw a shiny bit of flint. I stepped over it then immediately wheeled around and dug it out of the ground with my pocket knife. It was an arrowhead, right there in the middle of the trail. It had been stepped on and stepped over thousands of times. It was in bad shape. The back end was broken off but with its triangular shape, chipped beveled edges and flanged corners there was no doubting what it was. It called to mind another time when I’d been walking in the woods, wondering what path to take.
Back in 1998 I was working a job I rather detested on a loading dock for the Saturn plant in Spring Hill. One day I was out at the Gordon House on the Natchez Trace, once again looking for wildflowers, when I looked down and saw a shiny piece of flint partly sticking out of the mud of the trail. It was a well formed arrowhead with only the least bit of the tip chipped off. At that time I was struggling (if I can call making a decision that) with the notion of quitting the “good” job with Saturn in order to go to school at Mississippi State and work on a Ph.D. in botany. I agonized over the decision for about another week, then I got fired. I went to work in the garden center of a large home improvement store and went on to study some journalism at an in-state university then headed off to sea for nearly seven years. (Condensed biography).
Above are partial retellings of a story anybody who has read much by me is now familiar with. So now it is many years later in May on a day with the most beautiful blue skies and my dog is running around through the woods chasing squirrels and eating frogs. Once again I am struggling with personal issues, specifically, should I quit my job at this upscale little nursery where I work and buy a lawn mower and just cut grass in small yards and do some landscape design and container plantings for the rest of the summer? You see, in the fall I will be moving to Murfreesboro to start that Master’s in biology that I have put off for so long. I will be starting my own landscaping company while I’m there and I will be leaving the nursery where I have spent the past year. But I do like the steady paycheck and 45-50 hours a week and decent wage I make at the nursery…et cetera. So I’m rather torn up with the whole situation (along with the headache from two too many beers the night before). Thus delving into myself for answers I asked God for a sign. What did I get?
I look down and there it is. Here we go again. Lying on the rock in just a bit of mud is a broken arrowhead. Keep in mind I’m not out looking for arrowheads. If I was going to do that I’d find a ploughed field in a river bottom. In Tennessee you’ll find arrowheads all day long in such places. But no. I’m walking through the forest, occasionally looking down at where I step over uneven terrain.
What does it mean? I don’t know. I do know that there is a thrill in picking up something a human being made and that no one else has touched for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. I sent up a quick prayer to the Creator hoping that this projectile had brought food to whoever had shot it. If in fact the arrowhead is, let’s say, five thousand years old I can only imagine how alien our world today would be to the person whose hands had crafted this Stone Age implement. There is no way a person picking up my spent shotgun shell’s plastic casing five thousand years from now could live in a world more different from the present than our world is from that indigenous hunter’s so many years ago.
Arrowhead,
Tucked between two remote controls (pieces of plastic that control my evenings and some peoples’ lives) you look so out of place:
Chipped flint, cutting edges with a rounded heart. Relic of the earth when man was a child of the dirt and trees and running water.
Were you a product of war or a missed chance at communal meat?
Our meat is wrapped in plastic, our wars fought from pushed buttons.
Despite the smooth edges and erogonomic design the wars are more terrible and the lives of our food animals so much more brutal than your sharp edges could ever be.
I continued my walk. I had little epiphanies throughout the day like maybe I should start a line of outdoor apparel or maybe I should buy a $20 scratch off ticket and try to win some start up money playing the lottery. At any rate I’m pretty sure I’m receiving signs from “on high” but short of a burning bush saying “Do this”, I don’t have any real answers.
stretched across my memory
of hills and bottomland
filled with tobacco
sprung from dirt
holding onto Indian rocks
waiting to reveal
the ages of the world
to the curiosity of
a young hand
On a rather glorious day in mid-May I was walking with my dog at Bakers Grove in Tennessee’s Long Hunter State Park. A soggy three weeks of rain and cool temperatures had left the world muddy but clean washed and the hillsides were as deep of a green as I can ever remember seeing them. Everywhere life was fresh and emerging, easing into summer. I was on a walk to photograph wildflowers but the prettiest and most interesting of these were already a month past bloom. I did find Indian pinks and wild sedum along with some nearly impossible to identify mushrooms.
I have walked this trail many times in the past two and half years since returning to middle Tennessee. It’s a good trail that skirts Percy Priest Lake and rambles four and a half miles, just far enough for a good walk without having to make a day of it though there would be far worse places to spend an entire day. It is on this trail that I have had many conversations with myself about what to do with my life: “should I go back in the Navy”, “should I quit this job”, “did I make the right move quitting that job”, and the always troubling, “I wonder what she’s doing now…”. It’s a trail I choose in part because I can let Maze Dog, my Australian shepherd/Lab mix, run off the leash while I loose myself in thought.
On one of my early hikes at Bakers Grove while enjoying the yellows and oranges of the hickories and sugar maples of the first autumn since my return to Tennessee, I was walking along a muddy stretch of the trail when I happened to look down and saw a shiny bit of flint. I stepped over it then immediately wheeled around and dug it out of the ground with my pocket knife. It was an arrowhead, right there in the middle of the trail. It had been stepped on and stepped over thousands of times. It was in bad shape. The back end was broken off but with its triangular shape, chipped beveled edges and flanged corners there was no doubting what it was. It called to mind another time when I’d been walking in the woods, wondering what path to take.
Back in 1998 I was working a job I rather detested on a loading dock for the Saturn plant in Spring Hill. One day I was out at the Gordon House on the Natchez Trace, once again looking for wildflowers, when I looked down and saw a shiny piece of flint partly sticking out of the mud of the trail. It was a well formed arrowhead with only the least bit of the tip chipped off. At that time I was struggling (if I can call making a decision that) with the notion of quitting the “good” job with Saturn in order to go to school at Mississippi State and work on a Ph.D. in botany. I agonized over the decision for about another week, then I got fired. I went to work in the garden center of a large home improvement store and went on to study some journalism at an in-state university then headed off to sea for nearly seven years. (Condensed biography).
Above are partial retellings of a story anybody who has read much by me is now familiar with. So now it is many years later in May on a day with the most beautiful blue skies and my dog is running around through the woods chasing squirrels and eating frogs. Once again I am struggling with personal issues, specifically, should I quit my job at this upscale little nursery where I work and buy a lawn mower and just cut grass in small yards and do some landscape design and container plantings for the rest of the summer? You see, in the fall I will be moving to Murfreesboro to start that Master’s in biology that I have put off for so long. I will be starting my own landscaping company while I’m there and I will be leaving the nursery where I have spent the past year. But I do like the steady paycheck and 45-50 hours a week and decent wage I make at the nursery…et cetera. So I’m rather torn up with the whole situation (along with the headache from two too many beers the night before). Thus delving into myself for answers I asked God for a sign. What did I get?
I look down and there it is. Here we go again. Lying on the rock in just a bit of mud is a broken arrowhead. Keep in mind I’m not out looking for arrowheads. If I was going to do that I’d find a ploughed field in a river bottom. In Tennessee you’ll find arrowheads all day long in such places. But no. I’m walking through the forest, occasionally looking down at where I step over uneven terrain.
What does it mean? I don’t know. I do know that there is a thrill in picking up something a human being made and that no one else has touched for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. I sent up a quick prayer to the Creator hoping that this projectile had brought food to whoever had shot it. If in fact the arrowhead is, let’s say, five thousand years old I can only imagine how alien our world today would be to the person whose hands had crafted this Stone Age implement. There is no way a person picking up my spent shotgun shell’s plastic casing five thousand years from now could live in a world more different from the present than our world is from that indigenous hunter’s so many years ago.
Arrowhead,
Tucked between two remote controls (pieces of plastic that control my evenings and some peoples’ lives) you look so out of place:
Chipped flint, cutting edges with a rounded heart. Relic of the earth when man was a child of the dirt and trees and running water.
Were you a product of war or a missed chance at communal meat?
Our meat is wrapped in plastic, our wars fought from pushed buttons.
Despite the smooth edges and erogonomic design the wars are more terrible and the lives of our food animals so much more brutal than your sharp edges could ever be.
I continued my walk. I had little epiphanies throughout the day like maybe I should start a line of outdoor apparel or maybe I should buy a $20 scratch off ticket and try to win some start up money playing the lottery. At any rate I’m pretty sure I’m receiving signs from “on high” but short of a burning bush saying “Do this”, I don’t have any real answers.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Rain Washed World
Yesterday was anxiety ridden and uncomfortable for much of the day. I had to play my little game of fighting the anxiety, doing my best to not flee while standing in line at Borders to buy The Lost City of Z with my 40% off coupon. Part of my courage came from the story in the book itself: an aging explorer going off into the Amazon one last time in search of Eldorado. After reading The River of Doubt about Theodore Roosevelt’s Amazon adventure I eat up such stories.
All went well at the counter as I knew it would, as it always does. I walked back out into the dripping early May air and drove down Franklin Road to Radnor Lake. It was about five thirty, about the latest I’d ever been out there. I took my camera and walked the lake trail in search of trilliums and other wildflowers to photograph. I think I was too late. The delphinium and may-apple of a couple of weeks ago were fading as well. But despite the lack of wildflowers I thoroughly enjoyed my walk in the gloaming along the cushiony trail. The air dripped from days of rain and was as fresh as anything I remember in my life. It was wet, cool and heavy on my skin. The living forest floor sent up its humus smell and I felt alive, the anxiety fading.
I nearly steppe don a young squirrel digging something out of the foot path and twice walked upon a doe nearly close enough to touch.
I love the Tennessee forest in May and June. There is nothing greener in the world, not even the Amazon. I’ve never been to the Amazon but I’ve ridden horses through the jungles in Panama so it’s got to be similar.
I once wrote a poem about a rain washed Tennessee May morning:
Slow day, May 1997.
Coffee sipped on her couch
Knowing I would never be the one
Grateful for the warm rain on leafy green maple trees
That makes falling so much softer than
Nothing at all.
Where was the other one?
Working at the bakery?
Curled under a light blanket in her bed?
Wondering where I was or (true love)
When I’d come back to see her…
But I sat unwanted on the couch
Sipping coffee
Knowing I had to be at work at eleven,
Hoping it would stop raining by then.
That poem was about a real event. It took place on a Sunday morning. I worked at a garden center then and I had to go in and work a short shift though with the weather I remember it not being too busy. Afterwards I went out and planted a big Bradford pear for an older lady. That evening I drove back out to Jackson County to my grandmother’s house. We had a supper of fried salmon patties. I was dead tired having spent the last two days working, drinking, and sleeping on couches. I took a shower that night and slept as peacefully as I ever have.
I still like what that poem has to say and the feeling that comes over me when I read it. It is relaxed. Sometimes I think about the “other one” from the poem and the evenings I spent with her in that little fresh air house she lived in that college town. There was something right about the whole thing, something I ran away from and occasionally still wonder “what if” when I think about her. All of us in the poem have moved on now but I think I have moved the least distance emotionally. I’m still working at a garden center chasing girls that marginally like me. But I’m getting too old for that. I’m retreating into the woods more often now. There’s a freshness I can get from the rain which recharges me more than the smooth loins of a convenient girlfriend.
In the forest I go back in time. I remember the layer of fog that settled into that little creek bottom where my granny lived as the air cooled after a warm, rainy day. The immense greenness of all that I love and embrace as my domain. The grey-skinned hackberry and moonlight seen filtered through the boughs of a walnut remind me of exotic places and new worlds to explore. I’m ready to explore. I’m ready to flee. I’m ready to find a good woman this time, who is more substantial than a morning after, who is as embracing as the rain washed air, who is a well spring of life and an inspiration to higher levels of achievement.
After my walk the evening improved. I met up with Kyle at The Pub in Brentwood. Wesat talking to the bartender, watching the NASCAR race at Richmond, sipping on a couple of tall boy cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, planning a day of smallmouth fishing in the near future. An award winning Nashville songwriter sang in the background. She was voted Nashville’s songwriter of the year last year. She was good but I don’t much enjoy singer-songwriter material. Having spent three years in Nashville I’m over it…even though I still write and play such songs myself. Her rendition of Bobby Gentry’s “Ballad of Billie Joe” was the highlight of what I heard. Afterwards we met up with a couple of more friends for a late dinner at O’Charley’s, a move that would have been unthinkable to me earlier in the day.
Eventually we wound up Applebee’s, our old standby. I chatted up a girl who had just moved up from Florida but wasn’t having any of it. She had to get back to her baby. She was well on her way through a series of mixed drinks. I made sure she was alright to drive before she left. Then I left and slept well.
Now it’s a slow Sunday morning in May. I sip coffee and look out on a rain washed world. The forest behind my apartment is a wall of green. The flowers have fallen off the locust trees. I’m waiting to go to work.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wildflowers
WILDFLOWERS April 2009
I spent the morning reading a book about how to find one’s true path in the world. The book used the analogy of the North Star throughout. There were words like essential self and social self and lots of helpful suggestions about getting the two types of selves connected. After a few chapters I realized I already knew what I wanted to do. Just ask me. I’ll casually wave my hand through the air painting a broad stroke and vaguely say, I want to do something with plants. I see that in my future.
If one wants to make a lot of money doing something with plants then I suggest the plants be Otto Luyken laurels, Nellie Stevens holly, or Green Giant arborvitae. But that afternoon of April 21, 2009 I walked out and found a wealth of a different sort in the richness of the wildflowers at Nashville’s Radnor Lake.
Starting from the east side of the park I took the Gainer Ridge Trail and found an abundance of Larkspur growing on the lower portions of a steep slope. As the trail winded its way through the little hollow and up onto the ridge the flowers thinned out until up on the ridge all I found was some spring beauty interspersed among the shagbark hickories, dogwoods, and chinquapin oak. Coming back down off the ridge into a secluded hollow the forest floor came alive with flowers: Jack-in-the-pulpit, may-apple, anemone, Virginia waterleaf, yellow violet, and a morel mushroom thrown in for good measure.
The walk reminded me of long ago when I was at the end of my first round of college. In May 1995 I graduated with a chemistry degree and, like so many new college graduates, essentially no life skills whatsoever. I got a job at a bookstore and worked part time at a grocery store named Super-Rama. Even though it was small that little store did more food stamp business than any other store in the county. I saw where I was headed: I’d be that wiry little guy with a slicked back duck tail of hair that walked in everyday wearing a stained white t-shirt. I’d buy a quart of Schlitz Malt Liquor and find a porch to sot on for the rest of the day.
This oblivion lasted only a couple of months until my parents thankfully kicked me out of the house. I moved back to the college town I’d known for the past four years, got a loan and started taking biology classes that fall. I did pretty well, finding the classes more interesting and easier than anything I’d done in chemistry. But I drank a lot, and hung out with a lot of drunks. There were lost weekends of social deviancy, of road trips and walking around on public beaches in tighty-whitey underwear. The police were involved on more than one occasion.
Also, I slipped into an anxiety ridden hell that locked me down emotionally and often physically. I will never forget the last day of classes before Thanksgiving of that year when I somehow found myself stuck in a building afraid to walk to my next class. I’d come out of the library, and breaking into a cold sweat of anxiety, I dashed into the adjacent building…a building where I’d earned miserable grades in my calculus classes. I needed to walk about a quarter of a mile to the center of campus to attend my literature and technology class. But I couldn’t do it. With shaking hands and sweaty brow I would go to step out side, get in people’s way, and be swept back in the door. This lasted twenty minutes until I finally stuck my head down and walked a b-line through hedges and across parking lots to my destination. The weekend went downhill from there.
The next semester I faired better. The true tonic was getting a job in an upscale garden center where I began learning the trade which I have worked in off and on till this day. One of the classes that helped me land such an enjoyable job was Dr. Gordon Hunter’s class on local flora which I enrolled in that spring. It continues to be the most enjoyable college class I have ever taken. With the warming days the class broke into little groups and set out to collect plants from fifty different families. Or maybe it was fifty different genus…it was a long time ago and I don’t rightly remember. I had also taken highly enjoyable entomology and invertebrate zoology classes around this time, both of which required a large amount of collecting so the numbers tend to run together.
I remember there was controversy over what to name the group: the flaming orchids or the big trees…college aged manly men that we were you can guess which name won out. At any rate we chose to study the Hardscrabble Hollow/Hidden Springs area of Jackson County. Its is adjacent to Wash Morgan Hollow which is administered by the Nature Conservancy due to the presence of endangered species in the micro-watershed so our little stake promised to be rich in wildflowers. We walked up and down the hills and hollows of the area, and scrambled up creek beds exploring the local flora, armed with Peterson’s Guide to Wildflowers, a contraption for pressing our discoveries, and 12-packs of Natural Light. I never said I wasn’t still a degenerate.
As that class ended I settled into the life of a working nurseryman for just over a year until another bad decision in June 1997 found me working in a factory cut off from a girl who wanted to marry me and just about all my friends. Somehow I was Calvinistic enough in all these situations to believe that I had no choice to reverse decisions. Stick it out, suck it up, learn to hold back your tears and do not expect too much good out of life. This is how adults earn steady paychecks.
I managed to get fired from the job at the end of the following March and immediately got back into the garden center and landscaping business. But I was still lonely. At the time I wasn’t very good at reaching out and getting to know new people. So that spring I reverted to my old habits of walking the woods. This time I wandered along the Natchez Trace. Using Peterson’s trusty and now worn guide I identified wildflowers at Jackson Falls, the Gordon House area, Fall Hollow.
It was at this time that I first had the idea to write a field guide. This one would be a field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I had the look of the book all planned out. I’d buy a new fangled “digital” camera and a bunch of 3½” floppy disks to carry around saving my pictures onto.
I transferred my job to Murfreesboro and went to school at Middle Tennessee State University, this time studying journalism. I told my advisor of the book I wanted to write. Having himself written a book about frogs he was sympathetic. I excelled for two years in my journalism classes then joined the Navy, shipping out for Officer Candidate School in February 2000. From 2001 until Spring 2005 I spent only 14 months in the United States. It was great. I won’t say the Navy corrected all my short comings but it did answer a lot of the “what-if’s” that had been holding me back. Someone else finally wrote the field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I saw it in a book store shortly after coming back from Iraq and just smiled. The field guide had been a worthy idea.
Which brings me to walking around in the woods collecting wildflowers on April 21, 2009.
When I left the Navy in late 2006 I had vague ideas about what I wanted to do: I wanted to write copy and landscape at the professional level. Well. I couldn’t find work writing copy and I didn’t know how to landscape like a professional. So I became a land surveyor. For the nine months it lasted that was probably the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. As one who likes to wander the woods land surveying offers ample opportunity to bushwhack through dense thickets, walk old fence lines, and use historical documents to identify the work of others. I worked my way up to junior party chief status before receiving a call from the State of Tennessee offering me a job as a water quality enforcement officer. I took it and went from being in the woods to being deeply ensconced behind a desk on the sixth floor of the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville. That lasted five months in which time I surfed until one day I found the end of the Internet. There was no pot of gold, just a 404 Error.
A man of action and entrepreneurial tendencies stifles in a government job. I was earning an easy, steady paycheck but wasn’t adding anything to my tool box of skills. So I quit. I found the most high end garden center in Tennessee’s most affluent zip code and got to work. I reacquainted myself with plant material (what a phrase to one who loves wildflowers and the woods). I learned to landscape and design, putting the diverse array of plant characteristics and habits I had committed to heart to work forming a cohesive picture, melding individual elements into a living, exciting landscape.
The next move as of this writing is to head back to Murfreesboro and earn a masters degree in biology. The Navy provided the money for it years ago and I need it for credibility as a nature writer. But a man in his mid-thirties needs to be making his way in the world as well so I’m starting a landscape design company.
Today walking out into the woods I can enjoy the wildflowers of a beautiful spring in a way I never have before. Even after a winter such as one the one just past, the harshest in years, the flowers lay dormant in the ground, waiting for the light, the warmth, knowing the sun was going to shine again. Aside from rebirth wildflowers have always represented a period of refocusing to me: a season has past followed by months of cold, bitter numbness. But buried in the ground, existing in the rhizomes and seeds, encoded, entwined, infused in the mystery that is DNA, each wildflower knows it has a purpose to fulfill. All it is waiting for is the time and place, a new season of growth announced by the return of the sun.
I spent the morning reading a book about how to find one’s true path in the world. The book used the analogy of the North Star throughout. There were words like essential self and social self and lots of helpful suggestions about getting the two types of selves connected. After a few chapters I realized I already knew what I wanted to do. Just ask me. I’ll casually wave my hand through the air painting a broad stroke and vaguely say, I want to do something with plants. I see that in my future.
If one wants to make a lot of money doing something with plants then I suggest the plants be Otto Luyken laurels, Nellie Stevens holly, or Green Giant arborvitae. But that afternoon of April 21, 2009 I walked out and found a wealth of a different sort in the richness of the wildflowers at Nashville’s Radnor Lake.
Starting from the east side of the park I took the Gainer Ridge Trail and found an abundance of Larkspur growing on the lower portions of a steep slope. As the trail winded its way through the little hollow and up onto the ridge the flowers thinned out until up on the ridge all I found was some spring beauty interspersed among the shagbark hickories, dogwoods, and chinquapin oak. Coming back down off the ridge into a secluded hollow the forest floor came alive with flowers: Jack-in-the-pulpit, may-apple, anemone, Virginia waterleaf, yellow violet, and a morel mushroom thrown in for good measure.
The walk reminded me of long ago when I was at the end of my first round of college. In May 1995 I graduated with a chemistry degree and, like so many new college graduates, essentially no life skills whatsoever. I got a job at a bookstore and worked part time at a grocery store named Super-Rama. Even though it was small that little store did more food stamp business than any other store in the county. I saw where I was headed: I’d be that wiry little guy with a slicked back duck tail of hair that walked in everyday wearing a stained white t-shirt. I’d buy a quart of Schlitz Malt Liquor and find a porch to sot on for the rest of the day.
This oblivion lasted only a couple of months until my parents thankfully kicked me out of the house. I moved back to the college town I’d known for the past four years, got a loan and started taking biology classes that fall. I did pretty well, finding the classes more interesting and easier than anything I’d done in chemistry. But I drank a lot, and hung out with a lot of drunks. There were lost weekends of social deviancy, of road trips and walking around on public beaches in tighty-whitey underwear. The police were involved on more than one occasion.
Also, I slipped into an anxiety ridden hell that locked me down emotionally and often physically. I will never forget the last day of classes before Thanksgiving of that year when I somehow found myself stuck in a building afraid to walk to my next class. I’d come out of the library, and breaking into a cold sweat of anxiety, I dashed into the adjacent building…a building where I’d earned miserable grades in my calculus classes. I needed to walk about a quarter of a mile to the center of campus to attend my literature and technology class. But I couldn’t do it. With shaking hands and sweaty brow I would go to step out side, get in people’s way, and be swept back in the door. This lasted twenty minutes until I finally stuck my head down and walked a b-line through hedges and across parking lots to my destination. The weekend went downhill from there.
The next semester I faired better. The true tonic was getting a job in an upscale garden center where I began learning the trade which I have worked in off and on till this day. One of the classes that helped me land such an enjoyable job was Dr. Gordon Hunter’s class on local flora which I enrolled in that spring. It continues to be the most enjoyable college class I have ever taken. With the warming days the class broke into little groups and set out to collect plants from fifty different families. Or maybe it was fifty different genus…it was a long time ago and I don’t rightly remember. I had also taken highly enjoyable entomology and invertebrate zoology classes around this time, both of which required a large amount of collecting so the numbers tend to run together.
I remember there was controversy over what to name the group: the flaming orchids or the big trees…college aged manly men that we were you can guess which name won out. At any rate we chose to study the Hardscrabble Hollow/Hidden Springs area of Jackson County. Its is adjacent to Wash Morgan Hollow which is administered by the Nature Conservancy due to the presence of endangered species in the micro-watershed so our little stake promised to be rich in wildflowers. We walked up and down the hills and hollows of the area, and scrambled up creek beds exploring the local flora, armed with Peterson’s Guide to Wildflowers, a contraption for pressing our discoveries, and 12-packs of Natural Light. I never said I wasn’t still a degenerate.
As that class ended I settled into the life of a working nurseryman for just over a year until another bad decision in June 1997 found me working in a factory cut off from a girl who wanted to marry me and just about all my friends. Somehow I was Calvinistic enough in all these situations to believe that I had no choice to reverse decisions. Stick it out, suck it up, learn to hold back your tears and do not expect too much good out of life. This is how adults earn steady paychecks.
I managed to get fired from the job at the end of the following March and immediately got back into the garden center and landscaping business. But I was still lonely. At the time I wasn’t very good at reaching out and getting to know new people. So that spring I reverted to my old habits of walking the woods. This time I wandered along the Natchez Trace. Using Peterson’s trusty and now worn guide I identified wildflowers at Jackson Falls, the Gordon House area, Fall Hollow.
It was at this time that I first had the idea to write a field guide. This one would be a field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I had the look of the book all planned out. I’d buy a new fangled “digital” camera and a bunch of 3½” floppy disks to carry around saving my pictures onto.
I transferred my job to Murfreesboro and went to school at Middle Tennessee State University, this time studying journalism. I told my advisor of the book I wanted to write. Having himself written a book about frogs he was sympathetic. I excelled for two years in my journalism classes then joined the Navy, shipping out for Officer Candidate School in February 2000. From 2001 until Spring 2005 I spent only 14 months in the United States. It was great. I won’t say the Navy corrected all my short comings but it did answer a lot of the “what-if’s” that had been holding me back. Someone else finally wrote the field guide to wildflowers of the Natchez Trace. I saw it in a book store shortly after coming back from Iraq and just smiled. The field guide had been a worthy idea.
Which brings me to walking around in the woods collecting wildflowers on April 21, 2009.
When I left the Navy in late 2006 I had vague ideas about what I wanted to do: I wanted to write copy and landscape at the professional level. Well. I couldn’t find work writing copy and I didn’t know how to landscape like a professional. So I became a land surveyor. For the nine months it lasted that was probably the most rewarding job I’ve ever had. As one who likes to wander the woods land surveying offers ample opportunity to bushwhack through dense thickets, walk old fence lines, and use historical documents to identify the work of others. I worked my way up to junior party chief status before receiving a call from the State of Tennessee offering me a job as a water quality enforcement officer. I took it and went from being in the woods to being deeply ensconced behind a desk on the sixth floor of the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville. That lasted five months in which time I surfed until one day I found the end of the Internet. There was no pot of gold, just a 404 Error.
A man of action and entrepreneurial tendencies stifles in a government job. I was earning an easy, steady paycheck but wasn’t adding anything to my tool box of skills. So I quit. I found the most high end garden center in Tennessee’s most affluent zip code and got to work. I reacquainted myself with plant material (what a phrase to one who loves wildflowers and the woods). I learned to landscape and design, putting the diverse array of plant characteristics and habits I had committed to heart to work forming a cohesive picture, melding individual elements into a living, exciting landscape.
The next move as of this writing is to head back to Murfreesboro and earn a masters degree in biology. The Navy provided the money for it years ago and I need it for credibility as a nature writer. But a man in his mid-thirties needs to be making his way in the world as well so I’m starting a landscape design company.
Today walking out into the woods I can enjoy the wildflowers of a beautiful spring in a way I never have before. Even after a winter such as one the one just past, the harshest in years, the flowers lay dormant in the ground, waiting for the light, the warmth, knowing the sun was going to shine again. Aside from rebirth wildflowers have always represented a period of refocusing to me: a season has past followed by months of cold, bitter numbness. But buried in the ground, existing in the rhizomes and seeds, encoded, entwined, infused in the mystery that is DNA, each wildflower knows it has a purpose to fulfill. All it is waiting for is the time and place, a new season of growth announced by the return of the sun.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Harpeth Channel Cat
Yesterday I went fishing on the Harpeth at the Harris-Street Bridge. It was a pretty day. March has seen its share of fine weather this year. Good thing after such a cold, wet winter. The pear trees have all passed their peak and the redbuds are in full bloom. It won’t be long now before the dogwoods follow suit.
I sat on the bank and fished with red worms. Right away I caught two small channel catfish. Over the course of three hours I caught five more catfish. Only one was of a size worth keeping but I turned it loose. All had some sort of grub looking parasite on their pectoral fins.
As the afternoon wound down I sat on the bank drinking a tall-boy can of Heinekan when the most god-awful racket came assaulting the peace and quiet from down river. It was a john boat with a big motor mounted on it. I was just getting a good tug at my line when the boat got close enough to scare my seventh fish (and probably the largest) away. The two occupants of the boat waved as they passed then ground their contraption to a halt. Their wake rolled to the shore with great splashes against the rock and muddied the water for over fifteen minutes. That is a lot of erosion.
I am not one to make a lot of rules on people but damn let’s have some common sense. Save your damn Mercury outboards for Old Hickory Lake or Percy Priest or the Tennessee River. The Harpeth is a small, free flowing river that’s been designated “scenic”. Wade it or canoe it, hell I don’t mind someone using a trolling motor on it. But don’t go destroying the quiet and eroding the banks with a 200 horsepower crotch rocket of a fishing boat. I honestly thought that was already against TWRA or TDEC regulations but apparently it’s not.
I sat on the bank and fished with red worms. Right away I caught two small channel catfish. Over the course of three hours I caught five more catfish. Only one was of a size worth keeping but I turned it loose. All had some sort of grub looking parasite on their pectoral fins.
As the afternoon wound down I sat on the bank drinking a tall-boy can of Heinekan when the most god-awful racket came assaulting the peace and quiet from down river. It was a john boat with a big motor mounted on it. I was just getting a good tug at my line when the boat got close enough to scare my seventh fish (and probably the largest) away. The two occupants of the boat waved as they passed then ground their contraption to a halt. Their wake rolled to the shore with great splashes against the rock and muddied the water for over fifteen minutes. That is a lot of erosion.
I am not one to make a lot of rules on people but damn let’s have some common sense. Save your damn Mercury outboards for Old Hickory Lake or Percy Priest or the Tennessee River. The Harpeth is a small, free flowing river that’s been designated “scenic”. Wade it or canoe it, hell I don’t mind someone using a trolling motor on it. But don’t go destroying the quiet and eroding the banks with a 200 horsepower crotch rocket of a fishing boat. I honestly thought that was already against TWRA or TDEC regulations but apparently it’s not.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
The River Bio
It began somewhere over the Cumberland. That perfect blend of all things Southern, for me, it was all things Tennessee. Sitting in a blue Cheverolet pickup truck between my granny and papa. The dashboard lights shone green and the tires made that ripping sound as we hit the deck plates where the asphalt turned to concrete and headed across the Cumberland River on a Friday night. Or was it a Saturday. Memories of childhood are always hazy. The Grand Ole Opry was on the radio. “Howdy boys…” The river seemed like it was far below and the brown beams of the iron bridge hovered just above our heads, so close when going over the hump that it looked like the top of the truck would hit them.
That was a young boy’s river crossing from the big city (of 20,000 people?) to the country. To the land of hills and hollers, goats and mules. River have always been a boundary that I could cross into a different world. The next day invariably found me walking in creeks, picking up rocks full of coils and curious shells imbedded in them.
And then there was my first job on the water, sinking pony beer bottles into the deep waters of Center Hill Lake while my dad and his friends smoked short cigarettes and drank Miller High Life…there was a steady stream of bottles to sink as that blue Dixie Devil boat speed across the water only to navigate into some out of the way cove and pull up next to a party pontoon.
And the triumvirate of my water birth came in a little green john boat on the same lake when granddaddy made me and my cousin poke our own minnows onto our hooks while my grandmother stretched out in the center of the boat working on a tan. We caught lots of crappie that day and I caught a bass of some sort, probably a large mouth which I knew by my granddaddy’s reaction he’d not expected me to do.
Somewhere in those deep memories began my love and appreciation of rivers. Beware the outdoor education given to your children. From the first time my parents took me to 135 foot tall Burgess Falls with its towering hemlocks and crashing water I have known the woods and water to be an enchanted place.
Later the river became a place to test my adolescent courage. Having just bought a bluegrass album (as if that didn’t take courage enough in seventh or eighth grade) a friend and I walked up to the pickup where the man sat staring out at the water. He had a trailer full of red canoes hooked to the truck. When we told him we wanted to rent a canoe he didn’t seem too concerned about our age or any number of things I would have thought about in this day and age. He just took our money and said “Be back here before six. And don’t go over the dam.” That first trip in a canoe I explored the water on my own terms, fighting to learn to steer, keeping a keen eye over my shoulder to see if the current was pulling us toward the crumbling concrete structure that once served to generate electricity in the old days before the TVA brought all the power to Columbia, Tennessee. We explored a creek where my friend swore he saw an alligator. Likely story.
As years went by I began to feel the first stirrings of an isolation and sadness that has lain with me on and off ever since. I sought the river as a place of solitude where I could sit and read or try to catch fish while others my age drove their cars over to friends’ houses or practiced high school sports or took part in their high school social groups. We are never as isolated or outcast as we think and now I realize had I just made the effort I could have been doing what other teenagers did on July 4th,1990 instead of sitting by myself at an out of the way point up the river with a new guidebook and a fishing pole. Sitting by the water amidst the mud crusted rocks, the water willow, and sycamore shoots had become my safe haven and my excuse for the laziness that kept me from putting forth the effort to make the social connections I should have.
In lieu of going to pool parties with the long, lithe high school girls I daydreamed about I spent my time alone or in the company of the poor and dispossessed; old overweight black people and affectionate “white trash ” women who sat on the muddy banks with chicken livers tied into knots of worn out panty hose hoping a catfish would come gobble up the rancid, sticky mess. Or maybe they would have a doughball twisted onto their hooks waiting for a carp or buffalo to suck it in. I’d sit with them then, as today, knowing I would likely catch the world’s smallest bluegill.
They would occasionally ask me about random books I’d be reading (“that boy reads all the time…”): “Walden, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Essays of E.B. White, assorted fields guides. But mostly we’d talk about how to catch and prepare certain fish. Carp was a common catch and a big topic of conversation was how to get the muddy taste out of it. (More than one recommended pressure cooking carp, bones and all, like canned salmon). These people were poor and though I grew up sort of poor I knew I wasn’t really poor. There would always be an out somewhere and sitting by the river with these women its something I realized they didn’t have. These fish that constituted my entertainment were part of their diet. Which invariably made me wonder why they would through plastic and Styrofoam containers into the river after they were done with them. Old Indian myths aside, it seems to me that those most connected to the land are the first ones to poor their used motor oil in the creek. Maybe it was all the couch cushions and tires and mattresses around us as we fished that made them feel like a little plastic chicken liver carton didn’t really matter. The detritus from upstream affects more than the landscape downstream…it affects the mindset for the entire course of the river.
I remember too when I first truly lost my way in the world. College, 1991. Having nearly failed chemistry in eleventh grade I decided to major in chemistry in college with an eye on medical school. I scraped and clawed all the way. For some reason English, history, or journalism didn’t seem like an option. Once again I let outside influences keep from what I’d rather be doing. I really didn’t think my parents would approve of a humanities major. One more reason to put the young ‘uns on their own as soon as they hit eighteen. Its better for everyone, especially the kid who is controlled by fear and inertia.
By the end of that first semester I sank into a dark funk as I’m prone to do in late fall and December. The one thing I remember (actually, I remember a lot of stuff like my high school girl friend giving me a hamster when I came home for Christmas break) from that time is an essay I wrote for English 101. In the essay I embrace my funk and surprisingly, my bad decisions. I go to the river where it is muddy, slightly flooded, and the trees are grey and bare against a leaden sky. I seem to face my demons amidst the noisy, nervous flitting of hundreds of thousands of starlings twitching in the trees and the menacing caw caws of crows. But Spring semester found me back at school, headed toward that chemistry degree, however poor my grades may be.
After college I didn’t know what to do. So I re-enrolled. I drank heavily, daily. I took ephedrine and spent my time with friends as damaged as I was damaged. One was a beautiful woman with a lush problem. She held my heart through a succession of relationships with other men. The other was a homosexual hell bent on booze, acquiring more and more student loans, and the eradication of religion from his life. His family were evangelicals.
The three of us and others would seek out waterfalls where we’d sit all day drinking cheap wine and being ne’er do wells. I remember the day I was supposed to report to jail to spend my 48 hours following a conviction for DUI. We sat at Hardscrabble Falls drinking Boones Strawberry Hill wine. We laid over one another in piles on big rocks pretending to be dead. There are pictures. At a quarter till six they dropped me off at the jail house.
This debauchery went on for a year or so. One summer day while driving back from the Rhea County Courthouse where we’d been to see the site of the Scopes Monkey Trial the homosexual (Tony) and I visited Fall Creek Falls State Park. We’d been drinking beer all day. Tony’s ire was up because of the trip to the courthouse, where Tennessee had been the first state in the union to put evolution on trial. (On the way back up Highway 111 we’d stopped at a church so he could urinate on the building).
At Fall Creek Falls we stopped at the overlook then began the short but steep walk down to the base of the falls. It was a hot summer day and a mist was rising off the falls despite the low, late summer flow. Two girls stood in the mist stretching their hands up toward the falling water. One of them, the prettier of the two had on a light yellow t-shirt and no bra. Her breasts showed sensually through the thin cotton. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I looked over at Tony and saw him sipping from his Styrofoam cup of beer looking suddenly drunk, disgruntled, and not pleased with his life. I wanted to tell him to stand with us and be cleansed by the water. But I knew he wouldn’t, he’d be suspect of anything approaching that close to baptism…even in the name of a pretty girls breasts which I don’t suppose he’d have had much interest in anyway.
I moved on. It was time.
I felt the young man’s itch to explore the big waters and see something of the world. I joined the Navy. For the first time I ventured into the oceans, swimming the white sand beaches and emerald waters of the Redneck Riviera at Pensacola. I moved to the West Coast, experiencing for the first time the high sea cliffs of Big Sur, and camping on the rocky headlands of Washington State. I went to sea on a destroyer. One February, on Pro Bowl weekend, I nearly drowned in a rip tide on Oahu’s North Shore, deciding to swim the big waves despite the warnings of those who had been there before.
The oceans carried me to exotic shores I’d never imagined I’d visit. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia. And after six years at sea, like the salmon looking for that special creek, I returned home.
Lost. That is what some people are after leaving the regimented life of the military. I had ideas for careers but didn’t know where to start. After several abortive efforts at becoming a copywriter, a magazine publisher, a mower of lawns, I settled into land surveying for a year then moved on to nursery work and landscaping. I was okay with the work and resigned to the vow of poverty. But there was something missing. Something more I could give, something I had to offer the world that I wasn’t fulfilling. God’s gifts are precious but can be pestering when they won’t let us alone.
Somewhere in me was an unresolved dispute. The rivers, creeks and oceans that carried me on through the good times and bad demanded I give something back. The best advice for a writer is to write what you know so I began writing about nature. The words soon flowed into a field guide and have evolved into an ode to Southern rivers. The words keep coming.
That was a young boy’s river crossing from the big city (of 20,000 people?) to the country. To the land of hills and hollers, goats and mules. River have always been a boundary that I could cross into a different world. The next day invariably found me walking in creeks, picking up rocks full of coils and curious shells imbedded in them.
And then there was my first job on the water, sinking pony beer bottles into the deep waters of Center Hill Lake while my dad and his friends smoked short cigarettes and drank Miller High Life…there was a steady stream of bottles to sink as that blue Dixie Devil boat speed across the water only to navigate into some out of the way cove and pull up next to a party pontoon.
And the triumvirate of my water birth came in a little green john boat on the same lake when granddaddy made me and my cousin poke our own minnows onto our hooks while my grandmother stretched out in the center of the boat working on a tan. We caught lots of crappie that day and I caught a bass of some sort, probably a large mouth which I knew by my granddaddy’s reaction he’d not expected me to do.
Somewhere in those deep memories began my love and appreciation of rivers. Beware the outdoor education given to your children. From the first time my parents took me to 135 foot tall Burgess Falls with its towering hemlocks and crashing water I have known the woods and water to be an enchanted place.
Later the river became a place to test my adolescent courage. Having just bought a bluegrass album (as if that didn’t take courage enough in seventh or eighth grade) a friend and I walked up to the pickup where the man sat staring out at the water. He had a trailer full of red canoes hooked to the truck. When we told him we wanted to rent a canoe he didn’t seem too concerned about our age or any number of things I would have thought about in this day and age. He just took our money and said “Be back here before six. And don’t go over the dam.” That first trip in a canoe I explored the water on my own terms, fighting to learn to steer, keeping a keen eye over my shoulder to see if the current was pulling us toward the crumbling concrete structure that once served to generate electricity in the old days before the TVA brought all the power to Columbia, Tennessee. We explored a creek where my friend swore he saw an alligator. Likely story.
As years went by I began to feel the first stirrings of an isolation and sadness that has lain with me on and off ever since. I sought the river as a place of solitude where I could sit and read or try to catch fish while others my age drove their cars over to friends’ houses or practiced high school sports or took part in their high school social groups. We are never as isolated or outcast as we think and now I realize had I just made the effort I could have been doing what other teenagers did on July 4th,1990 instead of sitting by myself at an out of the way point up the river with a new guidebook and a fishing pole. Sitting by the water amidst the mud crusted rocks, the water willow, and sycamore shoots had become my safe haven and my excuse for the laziness that kept me from putting forth the effort to make the social connections I should have.
In lieu of going to pool parties with the long, lithe high school girls I daydreamed about I spent my time alone or in the company of the poor and dispossessed; old overweight black people and affectionate “white trash ” women who sat on the muddy banks with chicken livers tied into knots of worn out panty hose hoping a catfish would come gobble up the rancid, sticky mess. Or maybe they would have a doughball twisted onto their hooks waiting for a carp or buffalo to suck it in. I’d sit with them then, as today, knowing I would likely catch the world’s smallest bluegill.
They would occasionally ask me about random books I’d be reading (“that boy reads all the time…”): “Walden, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Essays of E.B. White, assorted fields guides. But mostly we’d talk about how to catch and prepare certain fish. Carp was a common catch and a big topic of conversation was how to get the muddy taste out of it. (More than one recommended pressure cooking carp, bones and all, like canned salmon). These people were poor and though I grew up sort of poor I knew I wasn’t really poor. There would always be an out somewhere and sitting by the river with these women its something I realized they didn’t have. These fish that constituted my entertainment were part of their diet. Which invariably made me wonder why they would through plastic and Styrofoam containers into the river after they were done with them. Old Indian myths aside, it seems to me that those most connected to the land are the first ones to poor their used motor oil in the creek. Maybe it was all the couch cushions and tires and mattresses around us as we fished that made them feel like a little plastic chicken liver carton didn’t really matter. The detritus from upstream affects more than the landscape downstream…it affects the mindset for the entire course of the river.
I remember too when I first truly lost my way in the world. College, 1991. Having nearly failed chemistry in eleventh grade I decided to major in chemistry in college with an eye on medical school. I scraped and clawed all the way. For some reason English, history, or journalism didn’t seem like an option. Once again I let outside influences keep from what I’d rather be doing. I really didn’t think my parents would approve of a humanities major. One more reason to put the young ‘uns on their own as soon as they hit eighteen. Its better for everyone, especially the kid who is controlled by fear and inertia.
By the end of that first semester I sank into a dark funk as I’m prone to do in late fall and December. The one thing I remember (actually, I remember a lot of stuff like my high school girl friend giving me a hamster when I came home for Christmas break) from that time is an essay I wrote for English 101. In the essay I embrace my funk and surprisingly, my bad decisions. I go to the river where it is muddy, slightly flooded, and the trees are grey and bare against a leaden sky. I seem to face my demons amidst the noisy, nervous flitting of hundreds of thousands of starlings twitching in the trees and the menacing caw caws of crows. But Spring semester found me back at school, headed toward that chemistry degree, however poor my grades may be.
After college I didn’t know what to do. So I re-enrolled. I drank heavily, daily. I took ephedrine and spent my time with friends as damaged as I was damaged. One was a beautiful woman with a lush problem. She held my heart through a succession of relationships with other men. The other was a homosexual hell bent on booze, acquiring more and more student loans, and the eradication of religion from his life. His family were evangelicals.
The three of us and others would seek out waterfalls where we’d sit all day drinking cheap wine and being ne’er do wells. I remember the day I was supposed to report to jail to spend my 48 hours following a conviction for DUI. We sat at Hardscrabble Falls drinking Boones Strawberry Hill wine. We laid over one another in piles on big rocks pretending to be dead. There are pictures. At a quarter till six they dropped me off at the jail house.
This debauchery went on for a year or so. One summer day while driving back from the Rhea County Courthouse where we’d been to see the site of the Scopes Monkey Trial the homosexual (Tony) and I visited Fall Creek Falls State Park. We’d been drinking beer all day. Tony’s ire was up because of the trip to the courthouse, where Tennessee had been the first state in the union to put evolution on trial. (On the way back up Highway 111 we’d stopped at a church so he could urinate on the building).
At Fall Creek Falls we stopped at the overlook then began the short but steep walk down to the base of the falls. It was a hot summer day and a mist was rising off the falls despite the low, late summer flow. Two girls stood in the mist stretching their hands up toward the falling water. One of them, the prettier of the two had on a light yellow t-shirt and no bra. Her breasts showed sensually through the thin cotton. I smiled at her and she smiled back. I looked over at Tony and saw him sipping from his Styrofoam cup of beer looking suddenly drunk, disgruntled, and not pleased with his life. I wanted to tell him to stand with us and be cleansed by the water. But I knew he wouldn’t, he’d be suspect of anything approaching that close to baptism…even in the name of a pretty girls breasts which I don’t suppose he’d have had much interest in anyway.
I moved on. It was time.
I felt the young man’s itch to explore the big waters and see something of the world. I joined the Navy. For the first time I ventured into the oceans, swimming the white sand beaches and emerald waters of the Redneck Riviera at Pensacola. I moved to the West Coast, experiencing for the first time the high sea cliffs of Big Sur, and camping on the rocky headlands of Washington State. I went to sea on a destroyer. One February, on Pro Bowl weekend, I nearly drowned in a rip tide on Oahu’s North Shore, deciding to swim the big waves despite the warnings of those who had been there before.
The oceans carried me to exotic shores I’d never imagined I’d visit. Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia. And after six years at sea, like the salmon looking for that special creek, I returned home.
Lost. That is what some people are after leaving the regimented life of the military. I had ideas for careers but didn’t know where to start. After several abortive efforts at becoming a copywriter, a magazine publisher, a mower of lawns, I settled into land surveying for a year then moved on to nursery work and landscaping. I was okay with the work and resigned to the vow of poverty. But there was something missing. Something more I could give, something I had to offer the world that I wasn’t fulfilling. God’s gifts are precious but can be pestering when they won’t let us alone.
Somewhere in me was an unresolved dispute. The rivers, creeks and oceans that carried me on through the good times and bad demanded I give something back. The best advice for a writer is to write what you know so I began writing about nature. The words soon flowed into a field guide and have evolved into an ode to Southern rivers. The words keep coming.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Duck River Bridge at Plant, Humphreys County
I went out on a photo gathering expedition last Thursday and captured this shot of the iron bridge over the Duck River in the Plant community in Humphreys County.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
The Fish Artist
The Fish Artist
Halfway through the original draft of A Field Guide I got excited and started looking for an illustrator. I went on craigslist like people do when they want to find quality work at low prices. I didn’t have any money to offer so I offered half authorship for the best artist I could find. Back in those early days of the project I was going for the warm, nostalgic look of the Golden Guide series that I grew up with. The quality illustrations in those books have always brought me great comfort in times of upheaval or when I’m sitting on the toilet. They are broken down into little vignettes of information with an accompanying informative picture or illustration that makes a bowel movement just perfect. A cup of coffee, a cigarette, and the morning is complete.
After several days I received a response to my craigslist posting from a guy who said he was a professional fish and wildlife artist and he assured me that he would be the perfect person for the job. He gave me a link to his web site which I followed. I’d found my man. His name was Ted McKay.
After a couple of phone conversations he invited me to his house for dinner and to hash out some more details of A Field Guide. He lived in an old farm house just north of Nashville on Old Hickory Lake. The bricks had the pocked texture of an old house. Several outlying buildings where the servants had lived and the meats had been cured still stood on the two acre lot. All I could imagine upon seeing the house is that Ted McKay must be doing pretty well with his art.
Ted’s wife greeted me at the door. She was what I’d expected, a calmly attractive housewife in early middle age. I’d soon find out she was the perfect juxtaposition to her more exuberant husband. “Ted’s back there in the garage. He’s so excited to meet you.”
I walked into the garage/studio and found Ted fumbling at a very large printer, pushing a button, bottle of beer in hand. He turned when he heard me come in. “Hey man, it’s good to finally meet you,” he said, extending me his hand to shake. “Do you want a beer?”
“Yes sir,” I replied. I could see this was going to be a fruitful working relationship. What I was surprised by was that Ted didn’t look like a McKay at all. I would have guessed Chu or Woo. His mother was Korean and his Asian features showed him to have inherited most of her looks. Even in his speech he rounded out vowels with that “woe” sound you hear from some speakers of Asian languages. Over the telephone I had assumed it was a speech impediment in his otherwise twangy voice.
“I hope you like fish,” he said.
“Well, I’m writing a whole book about ‘em.”
“Good. I’m cooking crappie and French fries.” Crappie is among the best eating of fishes.
The walls of the studio were covered with Ted’s paintings of various species of fish. Other projects lay around on tables in various degrees of completeness. He had revived the old style of fish painting known as gyotaku in which a fresh caught fish is laid out on a table and ink or water colors are applied to capture the true color and distribution of colors on the fish. Next a thin sheet of rice paper is pressed onto the fish’s body creating highly textured, mirror image of the fish. Gyotaku doesn’t allow the fisherman wiggle room when recording the size of the fish. It started in Japan in the mid 1800’s (about the time Ted’s house was built) as a way to record the exact size of a fish. A large gyotaku rubbing of a three and a half foot long stripped bass hung by the door.
There was also a curiously taxidermed rabbit with antlers hanging on the wall.
We sat in the studio discussing the finer points of A Field Guide’s tone and overall the thoroughness of its treatment of the subject matter. We talked a little about the time line to publication which Ted was excited about. However when I tried to guide the conversation to establishing a timeline for some sample illustrations to send off to potential publishers and agents he grew a little more vague. “Well, I’m going to be on the road a lot the rest of the month going to art shows. Maybe I’ll have a chance to get some samples done by mid-August.”
“Great. No rush. I’d like to have a good sampling ready by the fall to really get this thing up and running.”
“I heard that, man. We’re goin’ to make us some money.”
We proceeded to the kitchen and Ted got the fish ready to dump into the fryer outside. Despite having had a couple of beers I was having a case of nerves which sometimes happens to me around food. I went to the bathroom and gagged a few times. Retching in private makes me feel better in those situations.
Outside at the deep fryer we sat around watching the grease get hot. We each had another Amber Bock. A pretty girl about my age pulled into the driveway and got out of her car. “Hi Marrissa,” said Ted.
“Hi Ted,” she replied.
“Do you want to have some fish with us?” he asked. I hoped she would say yes.
“No I’ve got to go to my yoga tonight. But thanks anyway.”
“Okay.” After she walked into the small shack behind the house Ted whispered to me, ”She lives in the slave quarters.” I laughed, sort of wishing I lived in a refurbished slave cabin instead of my small, climb-many-stairs-to get-to apartment. “She’s a sweet girl. Maybe I can try to hook you two up but she’s really shy.”
“Well, you have my phone number. You can give it to her. I wish you would.”
The fish smelled good and the potatoes even better, frying up with plenty of onions thrown in with them. Ted, his wife, and I sat in the old dining room that had been hosting meals since the mid-1850’s. We talked about politics, art, and my past. References to my time in the Navy usually resulted in an eruption of “Fuck George Bush,” from Ted. He wasn’t fond of the administration at the time. He said that during the Clinton administrations his art had sold in over 1,100 galleries and now it didn’t. I suppose the Iraq War dampened the public’s appetite for paintings of bluegill and bass. Political rants behind us Ted pointed to a painting on the wall of a group of birds. Their bodies were round and textured and russet colored. Their heads were drawn with clean, albeit simple lines. This was much different from the fish art he had shown me.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked. I told him it looked like a group of birds.
“It is but it’s actually a booby picture,” he said laughing.
“Why is it a booby picture,” I asked. Ted’s wife rolled her eyes in anticipation of what I imagine is a familiar story.
“I get a pretty young model and rub over her nipples with a pencil on onion skin paper.”
“Ted will be Ted,” allowed his wife. “I knew I was getting an artist when I married him.”
Over dinner I learned more about Ted’s uncanny talent for finding fish. Or maybe he was good because of practice. Over the years his income as an artist has given him the freedom to fish lakes and streams all over the Southeast. He tends to find a body of water that looks interesting and then fishes it. “That’s how I started fishing in Loretta Lynn’s creek at Hurricane Mills. I just started wading. The caretaker came out and told me to get out, that I couldn’t fish there. I told him I was that guy that had been on TV the week before with my art. He’d seen it so he told me it was okay. Now I go down there all the time. I catch a lot of good smallmouth in that creek.”
“I’d love to go with you sometime.”
“I’ll take you down there and show you how to really catch smallmouth.”
After dinner we said our good-byes and made promises to keep A Field Guide on track for publication the following spring. “We’re goin’ to go fishing and we’re goin’ to make a lot of money,” reiterated Ted. I petted the dog who was sniffing the fish grease on my pants leg then drove off. I stopped on the side of the road and peed in the lake because it was a long drive back to Nashville.
July ended, and August came and went. No word from Ted. I sent an email. He replied:
I'll give you a call next week, I have to leave for Fort Wayne this morning and I do need your phone number.
A couple of weeks later in early September I gave him a call and he told me to come on out to the house for a beer. By this point I doubted I was going to see any illustrations but the nights were pleasant for sitting outside and Ted’s house was a good place to sit and drink beer.
I arrived and once again Janelle let me in. “Ted’s in the studio,” she said.
I walked through the kitchen and opened the door to the studio. “Oh, hi man,” said Ted with his good natured smile. “How’ve you been?”
“Oh, just fine,” I replied, just then realizing a topless woman was lying under Ted’s hands and a piece of onion skin paper. “Maybe I should wait outside-“
“No, you’re a grown man. You’ve seen these things before. Go to the refrigerator and get you a beer. Get me one too. Carol, do you want one?”
“Yeah I’ll take one,” said the model, sheepishly.
I took the beer over and watched Ted rub the broad pencil across the onionskin paper, picking up the texture of Carol’s areola. As you would imagine it protruded up where her nipple was. I was sort of in awe at this unexpected good fortune. Carol was a pretty girl with pale shoulders and dishwater brown hair. She had dyed a neon purple streak through one length of hair. Her lip and eyebrow were pierced. She studied art at the local community college.
“Man, we never have gone fishing yet.”
“Yeah, I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“We’ll go before it gets too cold to wade. We’ll catch a bunch of smallmouth down at Loretta Lynn’s.”
“I’d love that. I’ve fishing some on the South Harpeth but haven’t caught too much lately.”
“Cause you’re tense my man. The fish know it.”
“I’m broke. That has a lot to do with it. And my latest fling has apparently decided to take her loving elsewhere.” [Note: this will be discussed in more detail in a later story.]
“Awe, I’ll set you up with Marissa. And when our book comes out we’ll make a lot of money.”
I decided not to press the issue. I enjoyed the atmosphere. Up on the wall above where Carol lay hung a picture of a martini glass. The olive was one of Ted’s booby rubbings and you can guess what part was the pimento.
Ted finished up on Carol and she casually sat up. Her breasts were perky but still hung with a sensuality one doesn’t find in a hard body. She put on her tank top sans bra and I consciously made an effort to not watch her getting dressed. Janelle brought out a tray of cheese and crackers and we sat out by the koi pond talking fishing and art shows with Ted throwing in the occasional “Fuck George Bush” to accentuate a point. It was pleasant evening but something in the casualness of it all caused me to loose hope that Ted would illustrate my book. In his defense I realize that providing eighty to one hundred quality illustrations is a lot more difficult than writing eighty to one hundred two hundred word descriptions of species.
I told Carol to look me up on myspace but she never did. Marissa never learned my name. And Ted still hasn’t taken me fishing.
But when A Field Guide eventually comes out I will be happy to give Ted a complimentary, autographed copy. He and Janelle showed me great hospitality and a couple of good nights of diversion during that summer.
Halfway through the original draft of A Field Guide I got excited and started looking for an illustrator. I went on craigslist like people do when they want to find quality work at low prices. I didn’t have any money to offer so I offered half authorship for the best artist I could find. Back in those early days of the project I was going for the warm, nostalgic look of the Golden Guide series that I grew up with. The quality illustrations in those books have always brought me great comfort in times of upheaval or when I’m sitting on the toilet. They are broken down into little vignettes of information with an accompanying informative picture or illustration that makes a bowel movement just perfect. A cup of coffee, a cigarette, and the morning is complete.
After several days I received a response to my craigslist posting from a guy who said he was a professional fish and wildlife artist and he assured me that he would be the perfect person for the job. He gave me a link to his web site which I followed. I’d found my man. His name was Ted McKay.
After a couple of phone conversations he invited me to his house for dinner and to hash out some more details of A Field Guide. He lived in an old farm house just north of Nashville on Old Hickory Lake. The bricks had the pocked texture of an old house. Several outlying buildings where the servants had lived and the meats had been cured still stood on the two acre lot. All I could imagine upon seeing the house is that Ted McKay must be doing pretty well with his art.
Ted’s wife greeted me at the door. She was what I’d expected, a calmly attractive housewife in early middle age. I’d soon find out she was the perfect juxtaposition to her more exuberant husband. “Ted’s back there in the garage. He’s so excited to meet you.”
I walked into the garage/studio and found Ted fumbling at a very large printer, pushing a button, bottle of beer in hand. He turned when he heard me come in. “Hey man, it’s good to finally meet you,” he said, extending me his hand to shake. “Do you want a beer?”
“Yes sir,” I replied. I could see this was going to be a fruitful working relationship. What I was surprised by was that Ted didn’t look like a McKay at all. I would have guessed Chu or Woo. His mother was Korean and his Asian features showed him to have inherited most of her looks. Even in his speech he rounded out vowels with that “woe” sound you hear from some speakers of Asian languages. Over the telephone I had assumed it was a speech impediment in his otherwise twangy voice.
“I hope you like fish,” he said.
“Well, I’m writing a whole book about ‘em.”
“Good. I’m cooking crappie and French fries.” Crappie is among the best eating of fishes.
The walls of the studio were covered with Ted’s paintings of various species of fish. Other projects lay around on tables in various degrees of completeness. He had revived the old style of fish painting known as gyotaku in which a fresh caught fish is laid out on a table and ink or water colors are applied to capture the true color and distribution of colors on the fish. Next a thin sheet of rice paper is pressed onto the fish’s body creating highly textured, mirror image of the fish. Gyotaku doesn’t allow the fisherman wiggle room when recording the size of the fish. It started in Japan in the mid 1800’s (about the time Ted’s house was built) as a way to record the exact size of a fish. A large gyotaku rubbing of a three and a half foot long stripped bass hung by the door.
There was also a curiously taxidermed rabbit with antlers hanging on the wall.
We sat in the studio discussing the finer points of A Field Guide’s tone and overall the thoroughness of its treatment of the subject matter. We talked a little about the time line to publication which Ted was excited about. However when I tried to guide the conversation to establishing a timeline for some sample illustrations to send off to potential publishers and agents he grew a little more vague. “Well, I’m going to be on the road a lot the rest of the month going to art shows. Maybe I’ll have a chance to get some samples done by mid-August.”
“Great. No rush. I’d like to have a good sampling ready by the fall to really get this thing up and running.”
“I heard that, man. We’re goin’ to make us some money.”
We proceeded to the kitchen and Ted got the fish ready to dump into the fryer outside. Despite having had a couple of beers I was having a case of nerves which sometimes happens to me around food. I went to the bathroom and gagged a few times. Retching in private makes me feel better in those situations.
Outside at the deep fryer we sat around watching the grease get hot. We each had another Amber Bock. A pretty girl about my age pulled into the driveway and got out of her car. “Hi Marrissa,” said Ted.
“Hi Ted,” she replied.
“Do you want to have some fish with us?” he asked. I hoped she would say yes.
“No I’ve got to go to my yoga tonight. But thanks anyway.”
“Okay.” After she walked into the small shack behind the house Ted whispered to me, ”She lives in the slave quarters.” I laughed, sort of wishing I lived in a refurbished slave cabin instead of my small, climb-many-stairs-to get-to apartment. “She’s a sweet girl. Maybe I can try to hook you two up but she’s really shy.”
“Well, you have my phone number. You can give it to her. I wish you would.”
The fish smelled good and the potatoes even better, frying up with plenty of onions thrown in with them. Ted, his wife, and I sat in the old dining room that had been hosting meals since the mid-1850’s. We talked about politics, art, and my past. References to my time in the Navy usually resulted in an eruption of “Fuck George Bush,” from Ted. He wasn’t fond of the administration at the time. He said that during the Clinton administrations his art had sold in over 1,100 galleries and now it didn’t. I suppose the Iraq War dampened the public’s appetite for paintings of bluegill and bass. Political rants behind us Ted pointed to a painting on the wall of a group of birds. Their bodies were round and textured and russet colored. Their heads were drawn with clean, albeit simple lines. This was much different from the fish art he had shown me.
“Do you know what that is?” he asked. I told him it looked like a group of birds.
“It is but it’s actually a booby picture,” he said laughing.
“Why is it a booby picture,” I asked. Ted’s wife rolled her eyes in anticipation of what I imagine is a familiar story.
“I get a pretty young model and rub over her nipples with a pencil on onion skin paper.”
“Ted will be Ted,” allowed his wife. “I knew I was getting an artist when I married him.”
Over dinner I learned more about Ted’s uncanny talent for finding fish. Or maybe he was good because of practice. Over the years his income as an artist has given him the freedom to fish lakes and streams all over the Southeast. He tends to find a body of water that looks interesting and then fishes it. “That’s how I started fishing in Loretta Lynn’s creek at Hurricane Mills. I just started wading. The caretaker came out and told me to get out, that I couldn’t fish there. I told him I was that guy that had been on TV the week before with my art. He’d seen it so he told me it was okay. Now I go down there all the time. I catch a lot of good smallmouth in that creek.”
“I’d love to go with you sometime.”
“I’ll take you down there and show you how to really catch smallmouth.”
After dinner we said our good-byes and made promises to keep A Field Guide on track for publication the following spring. “We’re goin’ to go fishing and we’re goin’ to make a lot of money,” reiterated Ted. I petted the dog who was sniffing the fish grease on my pants leg then drove off. I stopped on the side of the road and peed in the lake because it was a long drive back to Nashville.
July ended, and August came and went. No word from Ted. I sent an email. He replied:
I'll give you a call next week, I have to leave for Fort Wayne this morning and I do need your phone number.
A couple of weeks later in early September I gave him a call and he told me to come on out to the house for a beer. By this point I doubted I was going to see any illustrations but the nights were pleasant for sitting outside and Ted’s house was a good place to sit and drink beer.
I arrived and once again Janelle let me in. “Ted’s in the studio,” she said.
I walked through the kitchen and opened the door to the studio. “Oh, hi man,” said Ted with his good natured smile. “How’ve you been?”
“Oh, just fine,” I replied, just then realizing a topless woman was lying under Ted’s hands and a piece of onion skin paper. “Maybe I should wait outside-“
“No, you’re a grown man. You’ve seen these things before. Go to the refrigerator and get you a beer. Get me one too. Carol, do you want one?”
“Yeah I’ll take one,” said the model, sheepishly.
I took the beer over and watched Ted rub the broad pencil across the onionskin paper, picking up the texture of Carol’s areola. As you would imagine it protruded up where her nipple was. I was sort of in awe at this unexpected good fortune. Carol was a pretty girl with pale shoulders and dishwater brown hair. She had dyed a neon purple streak through one length of hair. Her lip and eyebrow were pierced. She studied art at the local community college.
“Man, we never have gone fishing yet.”
“Yeah, I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”
“We’ll go before it gets too cold to wade. We’ll catch a bunch of smallmouth down at Loretta Lynn’s.”
“I’d love that. I’ve fishing some on the South Harpeth but haven’t caught too much lately.”
“Cause you’re tense my man. The fish know it.”
“I’m broke. That has a lot to do with it. And my latest fling has apparently decided to take her loving elsewhere.” [Note: this will be discussed in more detail in a later story.]
“Awe, I’ll set you up with Marissa. And when our book comes out we’ll make a lot of money.”
I decided not to press the issue. I enjoyed the atmosphere. Up on the wall above where Carol lay hung a picture of a martini glass. The olive was one of Ted’s booby rubbings and you can guess what part was the pimento.
Ted finished up on Carol and she casually sat up. Her breasts were perky but still hung with a sensuality one doesn’t find in a hard body. She put on her tank top sans bra and I consciously made an effort to not watch her getting dressed. Janelle brought out a tray of cheese and crackers and we sat out by the koi pond talking fishing and art shows with Ted throwing in the occasional “Fuck George Bush” to accentuate a point. It was pleasant evening but something in the casualness of it all caused me to loose hope that Ted would illustrate my book. In his defense I realize that providing eighty to one hundred quality illustrations is a lot more difficult than writing eighty to one hundred two hundred word descriptions of species.
I told Carol to look me up on myspace but she never did. Marissa never learned my name. And Ted still hasn’t taken me fishing.
But when A Field Guide eventually comes out I will be happy to give Ted a complimentary, autographed copy. He and Janelle showed me great hospitality and a couple of good nights of diversion during that summer.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
Sauger Time In Tennessee
It’s sauger time in Tennessee. And when you’re after sauger there’s no better place to go than the Cordell Hull Dam in Carthage, Tennessee. At least that’s what the host with the radio voice said on my Tennessee’s Wild Side the other morning. They sent one of their “wild side guides” out with an accomplished sauger fisherman and filmed a segment of them at the base of the dam. The sauger guru caught a fish on every cast, albeit small ones. The guide didn’t do so well. The sauger guru laughed at the guides misfortune and slung light insults his way as he continued reeling in one fish after another. It looked fun. The mere act of sauger fishing looked to be a badge of honor since to do it right the sky should be leaden grey, the air temperature twenty-three degrees with a slight spit of snow blowing around.
The sauger is a smaller cousin to the walleye. The fish look very similar. Sauger populations have faired better in the Tennessee Valley because they tolerate turbid water better than the more walleye which thrives in clear cold water. Thirty plus years of siltation above TVA dams have caused a significant drop in walleye populations.
I decided to try my hand at catching sauger. The temperature wasn’t in the twenties but it was cold enough. Sauger in Tennessee are caught in the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. On the Cumberland Old Hickory, Cheatham, and Cordell Hull Lakes all boast decent sauger populations but with my poor luck at fishing where there is actually a fish to catch I decided I’d better stick with a proven location so I drove to Carthage.
When fishing the worst case scenario is that you will have a scenic drive getting to the spot. I drove east out Interstate 40 to the Carthage exit and then several miles across Highway Twenty-five. On the modern road I skirted the hymn of Carthage proper and headed up a hill where cinderblock shacks slowly disintegrated in to the muddy yards. One house sported a pile of plastic fascias off long dead Saturn vehicles and another was made of yellow brick and plywood and looked like a Dutch barn…perhaps it was the ugliest house that was intentionally built that I have ever seen. I am country people myself but I don’t know why country people like so much junky crap in their yards.
I turned onto Turkey Creek and passed a store that sold Levis, shoes, and minnows and lickety split was on the Corps of Engineers property. They built most of the dams around middle Tennessee. I passed the Visitor’s Center and saw it had been destroyed by fire. The makeshift visitors center was across the road in a mint green and white sheet metal building. I walked in and was greeted by tall attractive red head who smiled at me. Before she could speak a man wearing all denim came out of the back and I asked him where to catch sauger from the bank and he said, “The other side of the river.” He told me people were catching sauger around the dam structure and around any of the series of concrete steps that lead to the river from the parking lots above. He also told me where to buy bait when I headed over to the other side of the river which would turn out to be a more involved evolution than seemed necessary. I said thank you and waved good bye. The red headed lady was still smiling at me. I don’t think they get many visitors at the visitors center this time of year.
I drove down to the damn and found that it is not an attractive structure. It’s not like Hoover Dam or even Pickwick Dam. The Cumberland is a decent sized river but the dam looked short and sort of like a flooded dry dock. Electrical poles shot up out of the concrete as if the river were Frankenstein’s monster being brought to life. Apart from three boats under the spillway the other six or seven fishermen all sat on the far bank.
I drove out to the lock which is what the structure is called on the other side of the river. As the crow flies I was only going less than eight hundred feet. But country roads being what they are it was a journey of nine or ten miles. On the way I crossed an old iron bridge across the Caney Fork River. It reminded me that this is the hometown of Al Gore. He filmed footage of the Caney Fork and used it in An Inconvenient Truth. The Caney Fork is a small cold water river and is one of the few places in middle Tennessee where the stocked trout can live through the summer and reproduce. Shortly past the bridge I stopped at the Caney Fork Market. I asked how to get minnows. “Just take your bucket and count out the minners as best you can. They‘re a $1.29 a dozen.” I put two dozen minnows in my igloo lunch box cooler and also bought a spinner lure. Luckily it was cheap because I wound up losing it in the river.
From the store I turned onto XXXXX and for six miles wound around a beautiful road that wound up and down and hugged the sides of the limestone hills. The drive was pretty but I look forward to returning in the summer. Tennessee has the curious distinction of being the greenest state in the union for seven or eight months a year but being utterly grey and desolate looking as a prison yard from late November through early April.
I finally arrived at the lock and took a position at the far end of the line of men I’d seen from across the river. I was farther away from the structure than I would have liked but I was right beside one of the steps the guy at the visitor’s center had recommended. I rigged my line and I’m sure it was all wrong for what I wanted to catch: two good sized led pellets about eighteen inches above the hook. [Note: A proper rig would have been to have the wait right above the shank of the hook jig fashion to bounce the minnow across the bottom but in two sentences you’ll see why this wouldn’t have worked for me.] I hooked my minnow on through his lower jaw and the top of his nose so he was free to wiggle (unfortunately in pain I’m sure) and cast in. Within thirty seconds I was hung up. I rerigged my line, let it sit in the water for about three minutes and was hung up again. There was a weed growing in the water that I kept getting tangled in. Sometimes I’d reel in pieces of it on a bent hook.
The other fishermen were using corks to control their depth at about four or five feet but that didn’t seem deep enough to me. Besides, only one of them had any fish and that was a stringer with three or four fairly small crappie on it. I was here to catch sauger. I tried the lure, lost it on the third cast then went back to the minnows. An hour later I moved to the upper side of the dam.
For some reason no one was fishing on the upper side except a great blue heron which flew away in shrieks of protest when I crushed through the brush to the rocky bank. Using a cork I fished at four feet but didn’t even get a bit. But the clouds had broken up and my spot was sunny. Enjoy the view if you can’t enjoy the fishing.
I later drove out to a boat ramp at the mouth of a creek that came into the river just above the dam. I fished an alcove and two man-made points but still nothing. Over three hours without a bite wears out my patience. I was done for the day but am looking forward to going back when it is warm outside and the trees have leafed out and this beautiful newfound fishing spot is green and full of life.
The sauger is a smaller cousin to the walleye. The fish look very similar. Sauger populations have faired better in the Tennessee Valley because they tolerate turbid water better than the more walleye which thrives in clear cold water. Thirty plus years of siltation above TVA dams have caused a significant drop in walleye populations.
I decided to try my hand at catching sauger. The temperature wasn’t in the twenties but it was cold enough. Sauger in Tennessee are caught in the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers. On the Cumberland Old Hickory, Cheatham, and Cordell Hull Lakes all boast decent sauger populations but with my poor luck at fishing where there is actually a fish to catch I decided I’d better stick with a proven location so I drove to Carthage.
When fishing the worst case scenario is that you will have a scenic drive getting to the spot. I drove east out Interstate 40 to the Carthage exit and then several miles across Highway Twenty-five. On the modern road I skirted the hymn of Carthage proper and headed up a hill where cinderblock shacks slowly disintegrated in to the muddy yards. One house sported a pile of plastic fascias off long dead Saturn vehicles and another was made of yellow brick and plywood and looked like a Dutch barn…perhaps it was the ugliest house that was intentionally built that I have ever seen. I am country people myself but I don’t know why country people like so much junky crap in their yards.
I turned onto Turkey Creek and passed a store that sold Levis, shoes, and minnows and lickety split was on the Corps of Engineers property. They built most of the dams around middle Tennessee. I passed the Visitor’s Center and saw it had been destroyed by fire. The makeshift visitors center was across the road in a mint green and white sheet metal building. I walked in and was greeted by tall attractive red head who smiled at me. Before she could speak a man wearing all denim came out of the back and I asked him where to catch sauger from the bank and he said, “The other side of the river.” He told me people were catching sauger around the dam structure and around any of the series of concrete steps that lead to the river from the parking lots above. He also told me where to buy bait when I headed over to the other side of the river which would turn out to be a more involved evolution than seemed necessary. I said thank you and waved good bye. The red headed lady was still smiling at me. I don’t think they get many visitors at the visitors center this time of year.
I drove down to the damn and found that it is not an attractive structure. It’s not like Hoover Dam or even Pickwick Dam. The Cumberland is a decent sized river but the dam looked short and sort of like a flooded dry dock. Electrical poles shot up out of the concrete as if the river were Frankenstein’s monster being brought to life. Apart from three boats under the spillway the other six or seven fishermen all sat on the far bank.
I drove out to the lock which is what the structure is called on the other side of the river. As the crow flies I was only going less than eight hundred feet. But country roads being what they are it was a journey of nine or ten miles. On the way I crossed an old iron bridge across the Caney Fork River. It reminded me that this is the hometown of Al Gore. He filmed footage of the Caney Fork and used it in An Inconvenient Truth. The Caney Fork is a small cold water river and is one of the few places in middle Tennessee where the stocked trout can live through the summer and reproduce. Shortly past the bridge I stopped at the Caney Fork Market. I asked how to get minnows. “Just take your bucket and count out the minners as best you can. They‘re a $1.29 a dozen.” I put two dozen minnows in my igloo lunch box cooler and also bought a spinner lure. Luckily it was cheap because I wound up losing it in the river.
From the store I turned onto XXXXX and for six miles wound around a beautiful road that wound up and down and hugged the sides of the limestone hills. The drive was pretty but I look forward to returning in the summer. Tennessee has the curious distinction of being the greenest state in the union for seven or eight months a year but being utterly grey and desolate looking as a prison yard from late November through early April.
I finally arrived at the lock and took a position at the far end of the line of men I’d seen from across the river. I was farther away from the structure than I would have liked but I was right beside one of the steps the guy at the visitor’s center had recommended. I rigged my line and I’m sure it was all wrong for what I wanted to catch: two good sized led pellets about eighteen inches above the hook. [Note: A proper rig would have been to have the wait right above the shank of the hook jig fashion to bounce the minnow across the bottom but in two sentences you’ll see why this wouldn’t have worked for me.] I hooked my minnow on through his lower jaw and the top of his nose so he was free to wiggle (unfortunately in pain I’m sure) and cast in. Within thirty seconds I was hung up. I rerigged my line, let it sit in the water for about three minutes and was hung up again. There was a weed growing in the water that I kept getting tangled in. Sometimes I’d reel in pieces of it on a bent hook.
The other fishermen were using corks to control their depth at about four or five feet but that didn’t seem deep enough to me. Besides, only one of them had any fish and that was a stringer with three or four fairly small crappie on it. I was here to catch sauger. I tried the lure, lost it on the third cast then went back to the minnows. An hour later I moved to the upper side of the dam.
For some reason no one was fishing on the upper side except a great blue heron which flew away in shrieks of protest when I crushed through the brush to the rocky bank. Using a cork I fished at four feet but didn’t even get a bit. But the clouds had broken up and my spot was sunny. Enjoy the view if you can’t enjoy the fishing.
I later drove out to a boat ramp at the mouth of a creek that came into the river just above the dam. I fished an alcove and two man-made points but still nothing. Over three hours without a bite wears out my patience. I was done for the day but am looking forward to going back when it is warm outside and the trees have leafed out and this beautiful newfound fishing spot is green and full of life.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Hayden Ridge Bigfoot Sighting
The leaden sky will soon fade to darkness and the cold air of a January day will just grow colder as I sit with Lonnie Taylor under the bare winter trees waiting for our quarry. I have traveled forty miles west of Nashville with hopes of catching a glimpse of, well, Bigfoot. I haven’t just idly entered the woods hoping blind luck will bring the fabled creature of cryptozoologists dreams my way. My guide is the self-professed guru of the great apes that live (or may not live) on Tennessee’s wildly wooded western Highland Rim.
Taylor came by his expertise on the subject of Bigfoot by accident. Not a man given to whims or flights of fancy, he doesn’t believe in most things until proven to him. He’s not even too sure a man ever walked on the moon. On this subject he allows there would be plenty of room for propaganda, considering the space race with the Soviets.
But one day in 2002 while deer hunting on Hayden Ridge in Humphreys County he became a believer in Bigfoot, a creature he had never given any previous thought. Hiking up a steep hill side he pointed to an uprooted tree that had pulled a good six feet of earth out of the ground when it tumbled.
“Right over there behind them tree roots, that’s where I first saw something standing looking at me. The root ball was a little bigger then but I could feel the eyes on me. It was eerie.”
“Did you know then it was something out of the ordinary for lack of a better word, or did you maybe think it was a deer or a bear or something like that?”
“It was upright so I immediately knew it wasn’t a deer and I’ve never heard of bears around here but I thought it might be another hunter. But it just stood there staring and anybody else would have said something.”
“Did you think about shooting it?”
“No. Because there was a chance it was another hunter but even by the time I figured out it wasn’t, even though I got a little scared shooting it just wouldn’t have seemed right.”
“So what happened next?”
“It just turned around and walked away. That’s when I could tell how big it was. It was over six feet tall, and broad across the shoulders.”
After that Lonnie ended his hunting trip early and walked at a quick step back to his truck on the little chert road. Headed back into town he said he debated who to tell and then decided he’d be better off not telling anybody. “Not even your wife?” I asked.
“We were going through a divorce at the time,” he replied.
So Lonnie sat on his encounter for two years until late 2004 when he saw a special on cryptozoology on the Discovery Channel. One of the commentators on bigfoot was with the North American Bigfoot Research Society (NABRS) and mentioned stories of encounters posted on the groups web site. Lonnie went to the library and looked through the group’s web site. He read several of the encounters from different posters and encouraged by the honesty of what he read he posted the details of his own encounter.
After reading Lonnie’s encounter on the web site Hank Davidson of NABRS contacted Lonnie by telephone to flesh out the story. “Actually we contact posters by telephone unless they click the Do Not Contact Me box on the web site,” says Davidson, who works as a state water quality inspector in Ashville, North Carolina when not moonlighting as a bigfoot field researcher. “We try to flesh out their stories and see if it sounds legit before we research it further.” I spoke to Davidson by telephone in my own attempt to pin down the veracity of Lonnie’s story. But I had to remind myself that Lonnie had only reported a bigfoot he had seen when he wasn’t looking for one. Davidson on the other hand had dedicated a second career to an animal that 300 years of science and settlement hasn’t proven to exist.
“After speaking with Mr. Taylor on the telephone I concluded that he had had an encounter with some creature that he couldn’t explain away as a trick of lighting or any other condition that sometimes makes familiar things seem unfamiliar. So I took a long weekend and drove over to Tennessee to conduct an onsight inspection with Mr. Taylor.”
Lonnie took Davidson to the spot he had just shown me. Davidson investigated the area for wallow areas, foot prints, and stray hairs on old barbed wire. “All he found was some deer fur in the bob-wire,” says Lonnie. “You can always find some deer fur in old bob-wire out someplace like this.”
Davidson concurred that he didn’t find anything of interest but that the area was sufficiently remote and wooded to harbor a large hominid and for that creature to go undiscovered “for a long time”, apparently forever.
One thing is for certain, Lonnie Taylor and Hank Davidson aren’t the only bigfoot believers.
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Skookum, Stink Ape…native legend, eyewitness accounts, and no shortage of tall-tales tell us that there is a pipedal hominid running around the remote places of North America. The First Nation tribes of the Northwest incorporated Sasquatch onto their totem poles. The stink ape has been running around the swampy land of Florida for years and a Bigfoot-like creature reported near Fouke, Arkansas inspired the 1973 film The Legend of Foggy Bottom. According to the Bigfoot Field Research Office there have been sightings all over Tennessee including Lewis, Hickman, Marshall, and Williamson counties.
One need not be an aging hippie or shaggy mountain man whose spent too many nights alone in the woods to believe Bigfoot exists. In a 2002 interview with National Public Radio Jane Goodall, the world’s most noted primatologist, professed, "you'll be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist…". The club of Bigfoot proponents includes Ph.D.'s and fish-and-game and law enforcement officials.
What makes so many people believe (or at least want to believe) such a creature exists? If these giant hominids do exist why have they never been scientifically documented? I will tell you now I am no believer in Sasquatch or creatures like it. I've spent a lot of time in the woods in the Northwest and Tennessee and many, many other people have spent their entire lifetimes in the remote backcountry of the United States and never reported such a creature…never even knew to think about it. I can't believe that such a creature could be out their and remain undiscovered, leaving no indisputable evidence, for so long.
But like so many I want to believe. I've read the books of the true believers and that is what I intend to share here, there evidence.
Like so many stories Bigfoot has its roots in legend, both mythology of native peoples and the urban legends of the recent masses. A giant hairy wild man was a real but unseen entity feared by the Native American tribes of northwestern North America. Skookum or Saquatch were two of the common names given to this animal who hovered just below the realm of the spirit world. The creature haunted their dreams, adorned their totem poles in an effort to ward off the evil spirits, and I suspect kept the children from running off too far from the village.
Early white settlers to the area learned of the tales and had their own encounters. In his 1893 book The Wilderness Hunter future-president Theodore Roosevelt relates a story told to him by an old trapper who had a fatal run in with a hominid in the mid-1800's.
Referred to as the Baunum account after the old man who related it, he describes how he and a partner were trapping in then little known mountains between Montana's Salmon and Wisdom Rivers. Having been terrorized by a shadowy, smelly bipedal creature for several days Baunum returned to camp at the end of the fourth day to find his partner dead, his neck broken with fang marks in his throat.
The next time a Bigfoot creature gained widespread public attention was in 1924 when construction worker Albert Ostman took a vacation to Toba Inlet, British Columbia to look for an abandoned gold mine he'd heard about. While in the deep Douglas fir and sitka spruce forests Ostman claims to have been abducted by a family of Sasquatch. According to Ostman he spent a week with the hominids. His story goes that he was treated well and may have been the intended beaux of an adolescent female who he describes as demure. At any rate Ostman made his escape and the world lost its first chance at Sasquatch/human romance. His story went out to newspapers all over the United States and Canada.
Depression and World War occupied the minds of Americans throughout the 30's and 40's but in 1958 Bigfoot burst onto the national scene once again and hasn't been out of the American consousness since. A contsruction crew was building a highway through a remote area of Humboldt County in California when bulldozer operator Jerry Crew reported finding large, human looking footprints. The story was picked up by the Associated Press and garnered international attention. Ray Wallace, one of the contractors on the road project took advantage of the attention and turned Bigfoot into a cottage industry, selling plaster casts to tourist from a roadside stand. Upon his death in 2002 Wallace's family confessed that he had forged the tracks found by Crew. In fact he kept the fake feet in a shed behind his house. But this apparent forgery inspired two down and out cowboys from eastern Washington to travel to California and collect the most controversial evidence of Bigfoot's existence to date.
Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin were a week into their search on the afternoon of October 20, 1967 when they stopped by Bluff Creek to water their horses. This is when they saw a large, black hominid, a female as evidenced by the breasts, walking away from them on the other side of the creek. Hurriedly Peterson got out his camera and filmed ninety seconds of grainy footage that has become the holy celluloid canticle of the true believers. The film has been examined umpteen different times and has held up to the best measure of proof that exists: it can't be completely dismissed by non-believers. Though this is backward logic from the scientific method of proving a fact, it at least casts some degree of possibility on an unlikely prospect. Of course as of late 2007 there is an old cowboy up in a little sage brush town in eastern Washington who says he was in the monkey suit that day but he hasn't garnered too much credence from believers or skeptics.
Perhaps the most credible proponent of Bigfoot's existence was the late Grover Krantz, Ph.D. and Professor of Anthropolgy at the University of Washington. Krantz studied Bigfoot casts with a more critical and learned eye than prior researchers who, for the most part were self-proclaimed (and self taught) experts at tracking and hunting. The evidence that turned Krantz into a believer was the existence of dermal ridges on casts of Bigfoot prints. These ridges were a curious anatomical detail that he hypothesized no hoaxers would have thought to carve into an imprint making device. Additionally Krantz looked at the shape of the foot, differentiating fraud from credible evidence by the relation between the big toe and the ball of the foot. Most hoaxes produce a flat footed uniform indention not compatable with the anatamoically function of an actual foot in motion. Perhaps Krantz's most memorable support of the existence of Bigfoot is his espousal of the anatomical veracity of the Skookum cast.
The Skookum cast came about during a Bigfoot hunting expedition in 2000 in Washington's Giford Pinchot National Forest. The researchers laid some bait WHAT KIND? in some soft mud. When they checked the "trap" they discovered some prints and the hollows of likely butt checks where the animal had sat down and leaned over on its side. The resulting 300 pound plaster cast was examined by a team of scientists, wildlife experts, and law enforcement fingerprint specialists who agreed that they had found the imprint of an animal not easily classified. While short of the holy grail (a carcass) the Skookum cast is among the strongest evidence cited by Bigfoot believers as to the existence of such a creature.
But I must confess I lump Krantz, Peterson and other Bigfoot "provers" in with all people who want to believe. For me the most compelling research (not evidence) into the existence of Bigfoot is contained in Robert Pyle's 1995 book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. Pyle, a renowned nature writer and holds a Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry, entered the woods of western Washington with a simple premise: Is this area large enough and bountiful enough to hide and support a large hominid?
Pyle spends a summer and fall wandering the remote backcountry between Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams. He talks with local Native Americans who tell him their native mythologies of such creatures, he talks with an old road builder who tells him of contracts he had with the U.S. Forest Service forbidding him to go public any sighting he may have of Bigfoot type creatures…and he eats a lot of salmonberry to show there is ample vegetation to support a large animal (of course bears have been supporting themselves on salmonberry in the same area for millennia). And at the end of the book, after weeks and weeks spent walking alone (and often naked) in this vast wilderness, Pyle has an encounter he isn't able to explain. I'd like to tell it here but that is Pyle's story and a selling point for his book so I don't think my divulging the curious and slightly creepy episode would be right.
But Pyle's study of the sustainability of Bigfoot's habitat is more important than the search for the creature itself. The earliest encounters with giant hominids come from men who were inherently seekers: hunters, trappers, prospectors. They had left behind the familiar to make a go of it in the unknown. Their search for precious metals and fur was just an extension of their inward search for themselves. It is little wonder they should return and grow old telling fantastic tales of what they found.
Lonnie and I leave the woods with the gathering twilight and it’s fully dark when we get back to his truck. We drive the eight miles into Waverly and go into a bar called At Work for a beer. We haven’t seen any sign of the creature today. In fact, despite many subsequent deer hunting trips in the same woods Lonnie hasn’t seen any other sign of the elusive creature since his chance encounter seven years ago. I wonder if this makes him doubt what he saw.
“No, I’ll always know what I saw was real that morning,” says Lonnie, staring at his bottle of Bud Light, peeling the label. “If I never see another one I’ll never doubt the one I saw. It’s like falling in love, even if it never happens again you’ll always remember the first time.”
And I can hardly believe how appropriately Lonnie summed up my own thoughts of his experience and everyone who claims to have had an encounter with Bigfoot. What they experienced so unexpectedly makes a profound impact, and like love, though they may never experience it again, that first encounter lives on in their psyche, and they become a true believer.
Taylor came by his expertise on the subject of Bigfoot by accident. Not a man given to whims or flights of fancy, he doesn’t believe in most things until proven to him. He’s not even too sure a man ever walked on the moon. On this subject he allows there would be plenty of room for propaganda, considering the space race with the Soviets.
But one day in 2002 while deer hunting on Hayden Ridge in Humphreys County he became a believer in Bigfoot, a creature he had never given any previous thought. Hiking up a steep hill side he pointed to an uprooted tree that had pulled a good six feet of earth out of the ground when it tumbled.
“Right over there behind them tree roots, that’s where I first saw something standing looking at me. The root ball was a little bigger then but I could feel the eyes on me. It was eerie.”
“Did you know then it was something out of the ordinary for lack of a better word, or did you maybe think it was a deer or a bear or something like that?”
“It was upright so I immediately knew it wasn’t a deer and I’ve never heard of bears around here but I thought it might be another hunter. But it just stood there staring and anybody else would have said something.”
“Did you think about shooting it?”
“No. Because there was a chance it was another hunter but even by the time I figured out it wasn’t, even though I got a little scared shooting it just wouldn’t have seemed right.”
“So what happened next?”
“It just turned around and walked away. That’s when I could tell how big it was. It was over six feet tall, and broad across the shoulders.”
After that Lonnie ended his hunting trip early and walked at a quick step back to his truck on the little chert road. Headed back into town he said he debated who to tell and then decided he’d be better off not telling anybody. “Not even your wife?” I asked.
“We were going through a divorce at the time,” he replied.
So Lonnie sat on his encounter for two years until late 2004 when he saw a special on cryptozoology on the Discovery Channel. One of the commentators on bigfoot was with the North American Bigfoot Research Society (NABRS) and mentioned stories of encounters posted on the groups web site. Lonnie went to the library and looked through the group’s web site. He read several of the encounters from different posters and encouraged by the honesty of what he read he posted the details of his own encounter.
After reading Lonnie’s encounter on the web site Hank Davidson of NABRS contacted Lonnie by telephone to flesh out the story. “Actually we contact posters by telephone unless they click the Do Not Contact Me box on the web site,” says Davidson, who works as a state water quality inspector in Ashville, North Carolina when not moonlighting as a bigfoot field researcher. “We try to flesh out their stories and see if it sounds legit before we research it further.” I spoke to Davidson by telephone in my own attempt to pin down the veracity of Lonnie’s story. But I had to remind myself that Lonnie had only reported a bigfoot he had seen when he wasn’t looking for one. Davidson on the other hand had dedicated a second career to an animal that 300 years of science and settlement hasn’t proven to exist.
“After speaking with Mr. Taylor on the telephone I concluded that he had had an encounter with some creature that he couldn’t explain away as a trick of lighting or any other condition that sometimes makes familiar things seem unfamiliar. So I took a long weekend and drove over to Tennessee to conduct an onsight inspection with Mr. Taylor.”
Lonnie took Davidson to the spot he had just shown me. Davidson investigated the area for wallow areas, foot prints, and stray hairs on old barbed wire. “All he found was some deer fur in the bob-wire,” says Lonnie. “You can always find some deer fur in old bob-wire out someplace like this.”
Davidson concurred that he didn’t find anything of interest but that the area was sufficiently remote and wooded to harbor a large hominid and for that creature to go undiscovered “for a long time”, apparently forever.
One thing is for certain, Lonnie Taylor and Hank Davidson aren’t the only bigfoot believers.
Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Skookum, Stink Ape…native legend, eyewitness accounts, and no shortage of tall-tales tell us that there is a pipedal hominid running around the remote places of North America. The First Nation tribes of the Northwest incorporated Sasquatch onto their totem poles. The stink ape has been running around the swampy land of Florida for years and a Bigfoot-like creature reported near Fouke, Arkansas inspired the 1973 film The Legend of Foggy Bottom. According to the Bigfoot Field Research Office there have been sightings all over Tennessee including Lewis, Hickman, Marshall, and Williamson counties.
One need not be an aging hippie or shaggy mountain man whose spent too many nights alone in the woods to believe Bigfoot exists. In a 2002 interview with National Public Radio Jane Goodall, the world’s most noted primatologist, professed, "you'll be amazed when I tell you that I'm sure that they exist…". The club of Bigfoot proponents includes Ph.D.'s and fish-and-game and law enforcement officials.
What makes so many people believe (or at least want to believe) such a creature exists? If these giant hominids do exist why have they never been scientifically documented? I will tell you now I am no believer in Sasquatch or creatures like it. I've spent a lot of time in the woods in the Northwest and Tennessee and many, many other people have spent their entire lifetimes in the remote backcountry of the United States and never reported such a creature…never even knew to think about it. I can't believe that such a creature could be out their and remain undiscovered, leaving no indisputable evidence, for so long.
But like so many I want to believe. I've read the books of the true believers and that is what I intend to share here, there evidence.
Like so many stories Bigfoot has its roots in legend, both mythology of native peoples and the urban legends of the recent masses. A giant hairy wild man was a real but unseen entity feared by the Native American tribes of northwestern North America. Skookum or Saquatch were two of the common names given to this animal who hovered just below the realm of the spirit world. The creature haunted their dreams, adorned their totem poles in an effort to ward off the evil spirits, and I suspect kept the children from running off too far from the village.
Early white settlers to the area learned of the tales and had their own encounters. In his 1893 book The Wilderness Hunter future-president Theodore Roosevelt relates a story told to him by an old trapper who had a fatal run in with a hominid in the mid-1800's.
Referred to as the Baunum account after the old man who related it, he describes how he and a partner were trapping in then little known mountains between Montana's Salmon and Wisdom Rivers. Having been terrorized by a shadowy, smelly bipedal creature for several days Baunum returned to camp at the end of the fourth day to find his partner dead, his neck broken with fang marks in his throat.
The next time a Bigfoot creature gained widespread public attention was in 1924 when construction worker Albert Ostman took a vacation to Toba Inlet, British Columbia to look for an abandoned gold mine he'd heard about. While in the deep Douglas fir and sitka spruce forests Ostman claims to have been abducted by a family of Sasquatch. According to Ostman he spent a week with the hominids. His story goes that he was treated well and may have been the intended beaux of an adolescent female who he describes as demure. At any rate Ostman made his escape and the world lost its first chance at Sasquatch/human romance. His story went out to newspapers all over the United States and Canada.
Depression and World War occupied the minds of Americans throughout the 30's and 40's but in 1958 Bigfoot burst onto the national scene once again and hasn't been out of the American consousness since. A contsruction crew was building a highway through a remote area of Humboldt County in California when bulldozer operator Jerry Crew reported finding large, human looking footprints. The story was picked up by the Associated Press and garnered international attention. Ray Wallace, one of the contractors on the road project took advantage of the attention and turned Bigfoot into a cottage industry, selling plaster casts to tourist from a roadside stand. Upon his death in 2002 Wallace's family confessed that he had forged the tracks found by Crew. In fact he kept the fake feet in a shed behind his house. But this apparent forgery inspired two down and out cowboys from eastern Washington to travel to California and collect the most controversial evidence of Bigfoot's existence to date.
Roger Patterson and Robert Gimlin were a week into their search on the afternoon of October 20, 1967 when they stopped by Bluff Creek to water their horses. This is when they saw a large, black hominid, a female as evidenced by the breasts, walking away from them on the other side of the creek. Hurriedly Peterson got out his camera and filmed ninety seconds of grainy footage that has become the holy celluloid canticle of the true believers. The film has been examined umpteen different times and has held up to the best measure of proof that exists: it can't be completely dismissed by non-believers. Though this is backward logic from the scientific method of proving a fact, it at least casts some degree of possibility on an unlikely prospect. Of course as of late 2007 there is an old cowboy up in a little sage brush town in eastern Washington who says he was in the monkey suit that day but he hasn't garnered too much credence from believers or skeptics.
Perhaps the most credible proponent of Bigfoot's existence was the late Grover Krantz, Ph.D. and Professor of Anthropolgy at the University of Washington. Krantz studied Bigfoot casts with a more critical and learned eye than prior researchers who, for the most part were self-proclaimed (and self taught) experts at tracking and hunting. The evidence that turned Krantz into a believer was the existence of dermal ridges on casts of Bigfoot prints. These ridges were a curious anatomical detail that he hypothesized no hoaxers would have thought to carve into an imprint making device. Additionally Krantz looked at the shape of the foot, differentiating fraud from credible evidence by the relation between the big toe and the ball of the foot. Most hoaxes produce a flat footed uniform indention not compatable with the anatamoically function of an actual foot in motion. Perhaps Krantz's most memorable support of the existence of Bigfoot is his espousal of the anatomical veracity of the Skookum cast.
The Skookum cast came about during a Bigfoot hunting expedition in 2000 in Washington's Giford Pinchot National Forest. The researchers laid some bait WHAT KIND? in some soft mud. When they checked the "trap" they discovered some prints and the hollows of likely butt checks where the animal had sat down and leaned over on its side. The resulting 300 pound plaster cast was examined by a team of scientists, wildlife experts, and law enforcement fingerprint specialists who agreed that they had found the imprint of an animal not easily classified. While short of the holy grail (a carcass) the Skookum cast is among the strongest evidence cited by Bigfoot believers as to the existence of such a creature.
But I must confess I lump Krantz, Peterson and other Bigfoot "provers" in with all people who want to believe. For me the most compelling research (not evidence) into the existence of Bigfoot is contained in Robert Pyle's 1995 book Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. Pyle, a renowned nature writer and holds a Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry, entered the woods of western Washington with a simple premise: Is this area large enough and bountiful enough to hide and support a large hominid?
Pyle spends a summer and fall wandering the remote backcountry between Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Adams. He talks with local Native Americans who tell him their native mythologies of such creatures, he talks with an old road builder who tells him of contracts he had with the U.S. Forest Service forbidding him to go public any sighting he may have of Bigfoot type creatures…and he eats a lot of salmonberry to show there is ample vegetation to support a large animal (of course bears have been supporting themselves on salmonberry in the same area for millennia). And at the end of the book, after weeks and weeks spent walking alone (and often naked) in this vast wilderness, Pyle has an encounter he isn't able to explain. I'd like to tell it here but that is Pyle's story and a selling point for his book so I don't think my divulging the curious and slightly creepy episode would be right.
But Pyle's study of the sustainability of Bigfoot's habitat is more important than the search for the creature itself. The earliest encounters with giant hominids come from men who were inherently seekers: hunters, trappers, prospectors. They had left behind the familiar to make a go of it in the unknown. Their search for precious metals and fur was just an extension of their inward search for themselves. It is little wonder they should return and grow old telling fantastic tales of what they found.
Lonnie and I leave the woods with the gathering twilight and it’s fully dark when we get back to his truck. We drive the eight miles into Waverly and go into a bar called At Work for a beer. We haven’t seen any sign of the creature today. In fact, despite many subsequent deer hunting trips in the same woods Lonnie hasn’t seen any other sign of the elusive creature since his chance encounter seven years ago. I wonder if this makes him doubt what he saw.
“No, I’ll always know what I saw was real that morning,” says Lonnie, staring at his bottle of Bud Light, peeling the label. “If I never see another one I’ll never doubt the one I saw. It’s like falling in love, even if it never happens again you’ll always remember the first time.”
And I can hardly believe how appropriately Lonnie summed up my own thoughts of his experience and everyone who claims to have had an encounter with Bigfoot. What they experienced so unexpectedly makes a profound impact, and like love, though they may never experience it again, that first encounter lives on in their psyche, and they become a true believer.
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