A decade is too long.

Too long indeed!


I need to write I feel it... Follow it into the wilderness the wilderness of words.


So where is my wilderness.  Growing up on the muddy degrading banks of the Des Moines River I found my first wilderness or was it in the timber of Chequest creek no that cam later.


It was that baptism in the river I caught the bug the bug of the wild... Yes I know a dammed agricultural ditch is not what one thinks of a wilderness but it was my first.  Out there in a boat by myself, too young, but in those days boys were left to explore and I used that Mercury and aluminum to do my travels before I could anywhere else. I found myself making my own way and only occasionally meeting another person.  All limited to the few turtle trappers and old chain smoking river rats that one could con a short conversation out of.  Likely a mumbling ramble about yellow cats or price of soft shells.  They have now all but faded into the past... we no longer spend our time as we did once in the company of herons and beavers. Maybe that is why we see so few see them or even have time to commune with calls as we did in my youth.  How did the wildlife and wilds once our companions become so lost to us or did we lose them in our strive for a few dollars and a career or materialism.  Maybe this is about me or maybe I just moved to larger wilds.  The ducks drew me away from my first wilderness, called me to another like a drake looking for a mate. 


I've found many... all across the plains and into the largest true wilderness outside of Alaska...  It has been quite a journey... I'll try muse more on them but for now back to the first. 


I remember the first thunder pumper call I herd floating down one sleepless night on a warm summer night.  I was pitching jigs for walleye, something I did rarely.  There I was floating bouncing off the logs caught ashore and probing them with the jig hoping for a meal.  It was the call of that American Bittern that may have stirred my curiosity just enough to get me to learn the calls of the birds for identification.  Knowing the animals in the dark takes the fear away from the black it lets you know we are not alone, not at all. In that wilderness I learned the way of water and wildlife. I also saw how our use of that wild made it less, well less to me and less to the critters that made it home.  But it was still wild and that wild led me on, on to here.  For that I thank the fading river of my childhood coughing from the chemicals of corn production, tainted with the smell of hog effluent stronger than the castorium of its full character.  Some day maybe you will be whole again someday maybe children will eat you bounty again and new villages will arise from your shore.  Free villages ones with local markets and local vegetables to pair with the local wine, fresh fish and turtle, maybe a frog will remain to croak at the feast.  All is possible in time.