Woods Wanderer

Some aspects of wild nature are more mesmerizing than others.  I can walk a trail all day long without seeing anything more than “the green tunnel,” but a stream walk usually produces at least one geologic formation that gives pause. The most dramatic is a great fist of rock hanging over a favorite stream in northern Vermont – one that never fails to make me stop and think.  It appears at the end of a mile-long section of water that I often ply for trout.

More than once I have hiked to the overhang just to sit at its feet and question the ways of the world, much like a pilgrim seeking out a guru.  It never fails to impress.  Sometimes I ponder its incongruity, marveling at the fact that such a small stream could carve out a formidable wall of rock. Other times I wonder how many years will pass before the overhang collapses.  Either way, past or future, the rock’s story dwarfs my own.

This unusual rock formation is not indicated on any maps that I know about.  Surely others have seen the overhang but I’ve never seen anyone else near it.  Nor has anyone I’ve talked to ever mentioned it to me.  Does it exist outside of my imagination?  The moment one asks that question, one has reached a sacred place.  So I often go to the overhang to exorcise my personal demons.  It’s a good place for that.

Geo-logic.  The natural world makes sense in a way that mocks the human capacity to reason. Certain rock formations are especially good at this.  We are good at making tools, designing systems, building grand structures, and manipulating our environment.  But we often miss the obvious.  We fail to see the big picture, or simply ignore it.  We act as if a five-year plan is really thinking ahead, and relegate everything that happened fifty years ago to the history books.  But certain rock formations have been works-in-progress for millions of years.  More to the point, nothing about the natural world is static on a geological time scale.  Given enough days and nights, everything changes . . . and changes profoundly.

Newspapers are chock full of stories of little or no importance, yet my overhang tells a tale that everyone should take to heart.  I take it to heart, anyhow.  And when I walk away from it, all my troubles diminish.  It is good to think beyond the human scale of things every once in a while.  It’s instructive.

Tags: change, reflection, the elements, the passage of time

They appear when least expected: late at night as I’m getting home from work; early in the morning when I’m retrieving the newspaper; sometimes in broad daylight, just sitting there in the middle of the yard.  There have been rabbits in our neighborhood for as long as I can remember, but never have they been so ubiquitous.  They are everywhere now, and in great abundance.

I told my granddaughter, Maddie, that she would probably see rabbits when she, her cousins, and her brothers came to visit Judy and me last week, and sure enough she did.  They all did.  We flushed one from the day lilies during the first hour of play.  My dog, Matika chased another one to the backyard fence late that afternoon.  Maddie chased another shortly thereafter.  On the last day, we saw a rabbit sitting in someone’s yard just as we were finishing a hike up Aldis Hill.  They’re all over town it seems – not just in our neighborhood.  Why the sudden influx?

Rabbits are closely associated with the idea of proliferation.  “Breeding like rabbits,” someone says, and a horde of cute, furry creatures comes to mind.  Then we smile.  Even in great numbers they are non-threatening – our vegetable gardens notwithstanding.  Come on now.  If there was a movie about rabbits taking over the world, could it be anything but a comedy?

When tough guys talk about the “survival of the fittest,” they think of themselves as predators not prey.  They identify with those fierce, toothy creatures at the very top of the food chain.  But there are other survival strategies that work just as well, if not better.  Proliferation is one of them.  The hungry trout gobble up the mayflies as they hatch, but the mayflies survive anyway.  There are simply too many of them.  Clearly rabbits “survive” the same way.  Breeding is the key to their success.

When I read Darwin’s The Origin of Species a few years back, I was surprised by the amount of sex talk in it.  We commonly think of Darwinism as a tooth-and-claw worldview, but it has more to do with reproduction really.  And rabbits, well, they do that quite well.

Fecundity.  That’s one of my favorite words.  I use it all the time when talking about wild nature. Top predators might get all the media attention, but it’s the breeders that dominate the planet. Most biomass consists of insects, vegetation and bacteria – all very fecund life forms.  In the animal world, frogs, rodents and certain species of birds proliferate . . . along with rabbits.  Yeah, rabbits.  Bugs Bunny was no dummy.  And the predators never did get the best of him.

Tags: backyard nature, Darwinism, fecundity, survival, wild nature

It’s been a year since I last fished this brook, yet I still remember this particular pool and where the trout are located in it.  Beneath the huge rock on the far side of the pool, there is ample cover for an aquatic predator to lie in wait for whatever the current carries downstream.

I crawl into position on the gravel bank, keeping my dog Matika behind me with a simple hand signal.  The stream is low and clear, as it usually is this time of year.  I draw closer than I would during springtime, confident that the August heat has driven the trout into the cool shadows.

Sure enough, I spot a tiny splash just beneath the huge rock.  I wait patiently and it happens again.  That has to be a trout sucking down flies just now breaking the surface, so I cast my trusty Ausable Wulff fly over there.  The first couple casts come up shy of the shadows, but I wait until my fly has floated to the shallows before lifting it out of the pool.  Try again.  A third cast puts the fly right on target and, sure enough, the trout gulps it down.  Seconds later I am landing a 9-inch brookie with all the delight that a trout hunter feels when a hunch pans out.

Matika dances around me as I remove the hook from the fish’s mouth.  She dashes into the shallows when my quarry swims free.  But the trout is lightning fast so it’s gone before my dog’s snout hits the water.  I can’t help but laugh.

I fish for another hour and catch a few more trout, but it’s all rather anticlimactic after such a perfect setup and resulting interplay.  On rare occasions, trout dreams are realized.  And the rest of the day is merely a long, lazy, summertime indulgence.  It doesn’t get any better than this for a brookwalker like me.

Tags: fly fishing, mountain stream