Allegheny Almanac

January Thaw

by Reg Darling

My Aunt Gert (Gertrude Miner) died on January 5, 2010. She was ninety years old.

 One of the many great good fortunes of Gert’s life and one of the most important lessons she taught me was the extraordinary depth and wholeness of her sense of home. She taught me that a relationship with a place—with a creek, a rock, a tree, or a little village in Forest County—could have the same passionate intensity and spiritual commitment as a relationship with a lover or child.

Trout fishing was a form of prayer for Gert.

When spring comes, I’ll drive out Route 337 and take Heart’s Content Road to Forest Road 116. I’ll follow 116 down Bobb’s Creek to Mayburg and park near the bridge. I’ll spend an hour or two or three fishing there—or perhaps just sit a while. Then I’ll drive down Route 666 to Cougar Bob’s. I’ll ask for a Jack Daniels and water and tell the bartender to go heavy on the Jack Daniels and light on the water. I’ll drink a toast to Gert, venison, brook trout, campfires, and the music of creek water flowing over polished rocks. Gert will be there with me, smiling.

Reg Darling is the author of two novelistic memoirs about our area. You can enjoy more of his writing or buy one of his books at his web site.

Photo of Windhound Farm from 1974 is copyright 2010 by Reg Darling

 

Today's Weather
 

Bowhunting

by Reg Darling

-Late Season-
A few days into Pennsylvania’s late archery season, I went out with my bow ostensibly seeking fresh venison, but also because bowhunting is my sweat lodge. The bow revitalizes my roots in the Pleistocene and, in the late season, it helps me shed the brutality of my rifle.

Fresh tracks warmed me with alertness until late morning, when cold finally leaked through wool into my blood and thoughts. I built a fire. A passing raven announced the unique silence of winter woods. The fire’s murmur and crackle were a strange lullaby.

I needed stillness more than meat, senses more than thoughts freighted with words, worries, and distraction. I was weary of issues and opinions, of myriad constant reminders of our powerlessness in the face of money’s leaderless tyranny. The dialogue between the forest’s silence and the fire’s soothing song was more subversive than anything I’ve written.

The endangered thing we must preserve and protect with wild land isn’t a bird, bat, or mussel; it is the remnant wildness languishing in our over-civilized hearts, the anarchic edge of resistance to all tyrannies large and small, the wild mind wandering in the smoke of a campfire, silence defined by a raven’s voice.

. . .

 

James Morrison Memorial Bridge at Kinzua.
copyright Reg Darling

 

 

Reg Darling is the author of Hartwell Road and Coyote Soul, Raven Heart. His articles have appeared in several national hunting magazines. You can visit him anytime you want at his web site.

Copyright 2010 by Reg Darling. All rights reserved.