"Now I am drunk on vastness" - Giuseppe Ungaretti
Earlier today I was at one of the largest football stadiums in the Western Hemisphere, watching my school play some small team out of the edge of no-where, Ohio, amidst a sea of blue and white fans hungry for blood. Americans are the most violent and passionate peoples on the planet; no matter where you came from, you needed a few screws loose enough to roll here, this country full of misfits and vagrants from sea to shining sea. And nothing gets our blood pumping quite like college football.
After watching about a quarter of the game, getting cursed out by a father at least three beers deep judging by the crushed tin cans at his feet right in front of his young son for trying to move past, I eventually had enough, leaving the stadium to an empty State College and deciding to go do some brook trout fishing.
A few miles, ten brookies and a brown later, and I casted off the last of the small handful of dry flies that I brought with me into a cedar. I decided to then turn back, look for some mushrooms. I ended up finding some birch polypores, a small white shelf fungus used to make amadou, an ancient type of firestarter. Simply cut the polypore into thin strips, boil them in ash, beat the living crap out of it with a rock, mallet, or other flat object, and you have yourself a tinder that will catch a spark like nobodies business. So useful, even Otzi the Iceman had some amadou on him when he was defrosted so many thousands of years later, clinging to fire, to warmth.
I made my way across the ridge and past massive sets of logs piled up like the old bones of giants across the moss-covered landscape. I placed a foot on what I thought was a moss covered rock that turned out to be a moss covered not much at all, causing me to fall through and tumble, tumble down the mountain hitting several rocks and logs on my gravity propelled tour until I stopped with a crash, my hand landing in a soft patch of moss just inches away from a jagged rock waiting to split something open. Ouch.
I'm stubborn about locations, not really giving a shit when it comes to writing and sharing about spots everybody and their mother knows about, but as someone who likes to disappear into the woods, out of cell service, for longer and greater hours than what my mother would be comfortable with, this serves as a reminder of the dangers of doing what we love, for it is with danger that we find the most love and life. I chalk it up to divine intervention that I've wandered through this world relatively unscathed, for it is in wilderness where God is most present. Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Siddhartha, all of them found this out first hand.
At the moment, I'm in a large and twisted hickory above a sea of it's smaller brethren, all waiting for sunlight in the dimly lit shadow of the north slop at dusk. I have a good idea of what made me turn, for God designed the paws of Ursa americanus to be light as shadow yet lumber with the weight of hundreds of pounds of meat and bone and fur, supporting a hulking dark mass of fish and berries and nuts and fawns and dumpster waffles and all in between. At the end of this turn, 20 yards away, was my first wild PA black bear, lumbering away and up the slope upon seeing me, where she must have thought I was eating up her hickory nuts for the winter.
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