If you wanted to feel the soul of our country, you might dip your hands into this water. From the headwaters in the far north land of the Great Lakes, from the Ohio River in eastern steel mill country of the Three Rivers, and across the Great Plains from the great American West where the…
The winter of 2015 was a bitter season. Fishermen railed against it, but gales and hoarfrost blustered from the north. Sons and fathers gazed out the windows at the ruthless milieus and longed to be on the water, forced to live on the stuff of their dreams even as their patience withered to suffering. While…
Nolo contendere and on to the next good story, you say? But it happened here before. Just a stone’s throw from where you’d knock back a cold one on the beach is the Chixulub crater. This is where the world ended, some 65 million years ago with a meteor blast of such magnitude that it…
There have been many nights spent far up unnamed river tributaries, the only sounds those of tiny frogs, the rustle of wind in the thatch roof and a distant deep voice of mystery from the jungle. But not this time. Not in this place. San Juan, Puerto Rico, waits until well past the witching hour…
“Time is but the stream I go a-fish-ing in.” This thought from Henry David Thoreau’s musings on Walden Pond swirls in the cold morning air, over the Fraser River’s brown boiling water and up to Mount Chan, still purple in the early dawn’s light. The metaphor that connects the flow of the river to the…
There’s an old adage: “Can one understand what it means to be a leaf without knowing that it’s part of a tree?” In the early morning netherlight at Guatemala’s Puerto Quetzal Marina, a small tropical tree grows near where my son is combing the water’s edge. On its branch a leaf dances in the breeze,…
“I’ve got a big one!” The thick pole was bent u-shaped in my small hands and was being pulled down toward the boat’s gunwale. “Try to keep your rod tip up, partner,” said my father looming large next to me. With his strong hands the rod seemed to come up easily. “That’s it; make him…