It brings a lark to your hand

All we had to do was cast our lines and pull out fish. Amazing.

It’s come to the hills. This weekend and last, the blueberries, larch, alder, and others have started their annual change. Snow fell and dusted the Wine Spires. I can taste fall in the air and feel it with my body.

I’m happy. Things are seemingly going my way in a remarkable number of ways. The only way I can keep that up is to remain honest. That’s really clear to me now. I’m indeed going in in my own way, but I don’t know if I want to find my way out.

I caught fish yesterday. It’s been a long time since I’ve killed a vertebrate, and even longer since I’ve killed and eaten one. Ate a bacon cheeseburger on the way home too. It’s an amazing thing to hold a slippery quivering thing in your hands. Life, alive and muscular, with unblinking eyes suddenly aware of an entirely new and presumably terrifying view on the world. A view with no water; no water to breathe. Even worse is when they slip a rough and bumpy stick, laden with other fish, backwards through your gills and out your mouth and place you back in the water to breathe your last breaths of now precious water…. They were mighty tasty, but that doesn’t make me any less appreciative of the suffering the fish went through. It’s a conundrum I’ve not solved, and may never come completely to terms with.

It was a blessing to me that the first fish whose skull I needed to crush in many many years received it from mercy, not the desire to improve our camp diet. It was also a blessing to have successfully fished with my friend, the son of a fisherman and a fisherman himself, to see how he and fish interact.

Driving to and from the North Cascades, I found recent memories waiting beside the road, in gas stations, signs, and turns. They all made me smile, inside and out, at the premise of a late summer well lived, and the prospect of a completely uncertain autumn.

I like Octobers. I love something about every month, but I’m pretty sure October is my favorite. I still feel the pangs of missing embedding myself in leaf-strewn rivers, particularly since seeing the bright red blueberry leaves flow by, something I’ve never experienced from a boat.

Enough with the drivel; it’s time to curl up beneath my blanket and sleep, cell phone close at hand in case a raven decides to call.

There’s something wonderful about the idea of a regular strong wind at dawn, just to let you know that Nature’s alive, well, and kicking. It’s especially good when you’ve got nothing better to do than lie there and drink it in.

In perhaps related news, I seem to have taken the tiniest of steps down the path to a thesis. How odd is that? Off to the lab now, perchance to have seen nothing.