My other writing...
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.
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