Kids are born hunters. “Can I go catch a grasshopper?” asks my son at dawn. “Sure” we tell him, and off he goes through the dog-door, clad in cape and undies, to creep around the dewy lawn with his jar. The jar rarely comes home empty. “You have to be quiet.” he tells me, Read More
It’s a park now, mown green-space and graveled paths owned by the city of Williamsburg Virginia. But when I was a boy, not so much older than my son is now, “Government Property” was a tangle of tidewater forest and marshland where earthen battlements – remnants of the civil war – lay hidden in, Read More
“Dada, um… Dada is it raining again today?” asked the five-year-old who’d come to wake me. “I don’t know man. You tell me.” Little feet jumped to the floor and trotted to the window. I knew from the pause what his answer would be. “Yeah… still raining,” he said finally, sounding too solemn for, Read More
If I’d had a pipe and an Irish setter, we could have been in a Norman Rockwell painting. Puffy white clouds floated in a bluebird sky above vibrant green sage and the rolling red-dirt prairie. A man, at ease with the world and confident in his forthcoming conquest, strides forth, a shotgun cradled across, Read More
The more I learn about hunting and fishing, the more I recognize how much I don’t know. Adding a kid to the mix has really driven that humbling realization home for me. Not only do I have the perpetual need to refine my approach in the field, but now I also need to develop, Read More
Stacks of informative articles and level-headed opinion pieces have been written of late about our slinking progress toward wholesale public land transfer and the ongoing efforts to stop it. See Todd Tanner, Bob Marshall, Scott Willoughby, Ben Neary, Judith Kohler, Raph Graybill, and as always Hal Herring for particularly eloquent examples. What follows here will, Read More
He’s peering skeptically from behind a boulder at a shin-deep seam that looks to be another of his son-in-law’s eccentricities. The koi pond back home in Florida looks more promising. Fishing? Sure, he loves fishing, been doing it all his life. 360 degrees of Gulf Stream blue horizon, a mile of water under the, Read More
“Is it still spring break Dada?” asks the four year old at my bedside. “Yes it is son,” I answer into the pre-dawn gloom, then add without hope of success, “so you should go back to bed and rest up.” “Ohhhh yeaaaaaah!” he cheers, then launches into a pajama-clad spring break dance. The choreography, Read More
“Dada, um when we get home… I’m gonna tell Mama that um… I’m gonna tell her we didn’t catch ANY fish,” said the voice in my head. Or near my head anyway. With the squirt slung over my shoulder it can be hard to tell the difference. Regardless of its origin, I wasn’t, Read More
“Where are you going Dada?” asked my four year old as I rounded up layers, snacks and a water bottle. “Fishing,” I said. “Oh yeah,” he said knowingly, like it had been his idea to begin with. “With Ollie’s dad.” “Nope,” I said “Not with Ollie’s dad. All by myself today.” “But um… Cause, Read More