Elderberry Season 2025

 

    It's officially elderberry season here on the East Coast, a season about as bittersweet as the waning of summer. The nights have been quite cold, at a time where it was hard to remember what cold really feels like. In the meantime, Elderberries are deepening their bottomless irises of blacks and purples. I went to a spot shown to me by a friend and was greeted by hanging clusters forcing the branches to stoop and bow to the soil that raised them. 

    Black Elderberry (Sambuchus nigra) can be identified by hanging clusters of white flowers, green unripe berries, or purple ripe berries come August, usually with reddish stalks and opposite arranged, slightly compound leaves. The species is generally found around trailside disturbed habitat, likes water, and is chock full of great immune system boosting antioxidants. However, it is not advised to consume the species raw. 

    To make a great elderberry syrup, simply cook the berries down with a little water, stir in some ginger and clove, strain, then stir in some raw honey to sweeten and thicken. Taking a spoonful a day will help boost your immune system as the days shorten and mornings become so crisp you can reach out and snap the morning dew. 

Lost Muskie Musings

 

    I lost a muskie this morning. I timed the window oh, so fucking perfectly too, with mornings that for the first time in months were crisp and cold that suspended a slight mist above the river, an uptick in flows and downtick in water temps, and a lunar major that coincided with the rising of the sun. I woke up at six and immediately drove down to the river, throwing topwater and figure-8-ing after each cast. 

    Hopping spots, skipping around back and forth like a little rippling flatstone between all the river spots that at this point I've fished for so many years and know like the back of my hand. I had a small muskie barely tail-smack my glide that I missed. Still kept moving down river, moving to a canal lock where I'd seen them stack up in the mouth of before. I watched my bone colored glidebait swipe left past a tree, then watched a giant muskie swipe right out of the tree and t-bone it. I had her one for about five seconds before my line suddenly went slack. My 50lb flourocarbon leader looked like hell. I sunk to the ground in defeat, immediately called Max and told him what happened. If that glidebait had just popped out of it's toothy maw I wouldn't have been so upset, but the fact that it broke off had me worried that it wouldn't be able to properly feed with such a large bait stuck in its jaw. However, I've seen videos of fish with practically no upper jaw, muskies with what look with propeller wounds, slash marks, all ilk of injury. We should do our best to conserve and handle well all fish we plan on releasing, but nature is a tough bitch and fish are hardier than we think. I'm gonna muskie fish more and that means I will lose more fish. 

    Muskie fishing is one of the most adversarial things I've ever had the privilege of becoming obsessed with. That's something that I will just have to accept if I'm going to become a member of the muskie guild, which is a full intention that I have. 

    Muskie anglers have an obsession like no other breed of angler on the planet, following moon phases about as closely as the mouthless Luna moths I've been finding the past few days at work. Lunas don't feed in their adult form, packing all feeding activity into the walnuts while in larval form in the July full moon and then emerging two to three weeks later glowing green under the moonlight to breed and dance and die. 

    Embrace loss, both mouthed and unmouthed. Life's a blessing to have lost at all! How lucky you are to have such things to lose. 

Snakes on Blueberry Hill

 

    "But all Supernatural means up here is a little bit more natural than regular ol' natural" 

    - David James Duncan 

    I enjoyed stumbling and dozing as the world shrunk to glistening blueberry sized as my legs did the same thing when I closed my eyes. My mother dragged me along to a Family Church Retreat, where all weekend my waking hours were unceasingly evangelized. I'm glad I went, but I'm not a frequent churchgoer, never felt God in churches. My spirit is instead assaulted each time I step outside by bits of the flowing Creator in moving water, mountains, in ancient trees and the flitter of shadows in between them. I worship spontaneously, the way I treat all sacred, and believe that the same God that send down the Son of Love who taught loving your neighbors, who healed the sick, and who broke bread with lepers, prostitutes, and tramps instead of shaming them in the streets, also is in each and every living thing, mountain, ocean, and moving water. The buzzards circle ahead. I pray to the Unseen Perfection that I can take them as a sign to keep dying, keep rebirth, keep improving. 

Things I liked about the Church Retreat: 

- The blueberries that grew everywhere in the nearby woods 

- Swaying to music 

Things I disliked about the Church Retreat: 

- Protestant Work Ethic 

- Support for Zionism 

In case you wanted a touch of color in nature, here's a Blood-Red Russala, some Blueberries, and a Ghost-pipe, all of which I found in the past week: 

    On the fish front, shallow water snakeheads on hollow-body frogs seems to be the name of the game, as it seems to always be at this point of the summer. I tried pickling red-onions for the first time and they elevated my fish taco game enough that any future taco game I have will now require copious amounts of freshly squeezed acids. My family ended up eating all of them before they had time for a proper definitional "pickle." I'll make more. 

Swamp Bones

    "The sound of water says what I think." 

    - Chuang Tzu 

    About an hour into our swamp trip, the lilies started narrowing and the faint oily current began to slow, that current that carried with it the lifeblood of the marshes that ebbed and flowed and lived with the tide, leaving in its wake with the ebb all of the slimy mud and roots that drank deep of the swamp's indifference and embraces. Wetlands are one of the most underappreciated ecosystems on Earth. Mountains and coastlines are beautiful, awe-inspiring, well written about. But swamps are where life happens, where millions of amphibians and fishes and insects that are crucial for life on Earth dance their dances, copulate, and hatch, spreading their crucial progeny far and wide from the womb that is the swamps. 

    

    Max and I were exploring new snakehead water, paddling our kayaks far into the marshes where the red-winged blackbirds sang and circled. Kayak fishing has become a sort of trade-off, where I exchange back pain in my cheap red sit-on-top for the opportunity to explore all kinds of new water, a trade-off that I never refuse. But a few hours in, while Max had a bowfin launch out of the water trying to eat his whopper plopper and I missed one snake, we felt as though we should have been seeing more. We hopped out onto a set of abandoned railroad tracks, stashed the kayaks, and set-off down the hot summer rocks and tracks for who knows where. 

    We found some good looking water, some beautiful swamps that drank the incoming tide oh so gleefully and bloomed in purples and whites in return. We fished it, had very little movement. I found a bunch of bleached white bones, from whitetail deer, possibly some egret or other large bird, and some fishes as well, including a snakehead spine and the jaw of a bowfin that I found accidently through the sharp pain in my foot when I stepped on it and it went straight through my rubber wading shoe. I gathered bones in a sort of reverse burial, taking samples to bring back to work so that they can be displayed for the sparkly-eyed and swamp-curious. Birth and rebirth, all thanks to the courtesy of wetlands. 

    As the sun began to set, the two of us worked our way back through the emerging sounds of frogs. A bald eagle perched up on a tree at the exact point of convergence between marsh and main-river channel. A cast was made by the same point I missed my fish and a snakehead's black and undulating dorsal fin appeared behind my frog for a split second until the fish popped and inhaled the bait. I waiting the painfully long second and set the hook, had it on for a second, before my line snapped. Bites are hard to come by in the dog-days of summer, making that one hurt enough that I sunk how little I could in the belly of my kayak. Red-wings blessed all around me. Swamp bones rattled in my cooler bag. 

    

    

    

The Sweet and the Sour

    Earlier today I was loading my kayak back onto the roof of my car when my properly mud, wet, and sweat covered mess of a self detected the wine-red crowns playing queens of the forest adorning one of my favorite plants. It was a little bittersweet, a little sour. Staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) is by the book and through experience a late-summer-to-early-fall bloomer and the fact that they've blushed and reddened already is making July fly by even quicker than it usually does. Lately the woods have been very red, coming in through both the sweet and the sour, blending together just like the reds and greens in my eyes that the doctors told me at nine were going to be defective. Blessed in my blindness! 

    Wineberry, blackberry, raspberry. These canes are everywhere here in the Mid-Atlantic adorning jewels into areas of arboreal disturbance, temporary jewels that are the sweeter all the while. The brambles typically ripen in my area around the Fourth of July, but they were about a week late this time. 

    Earlier last week, my old friend Katie and my new friend Li and I all went foraging after work, with Katie showing me one of her ghost-pipe spots. Sure enough, as the clouds began to move in and every sound and smell indicated an oncoming rain, we spotted a few of the pale-white parasitic flowers poking out of a clearing amongst a grove of young beeches.  Along the way I picked some elderflower, which ended up going into a traditional Eastern European drink made up of elderflower and lemons with a little bit of fermentation going on. 

    As if to serve as yet another reminder of changes in the cosmos that permeate into changing of the seasons and therefore into the bodies of flora and fauna, the July full-moon corresponded with the kids I teach finding multiple lunar moth caterpillars in a few days span. In a few weeks time, these plump green walnut eaters will eventually turn into beautiful pale green moths with no mouths that dance and breed in the New Moon before going back to the dust. 

Northern Snakehead: A species profile and two recipes

 

    A backcreek with six inches of water that gets up to sweltering bath-tub temperatures during the hot summer months, dog days where its 100 degrees out and every piece of self-respecting member of Ichthyological life is staying tight to the shade and you can't step outside without becoming instantly soaked in sweat. These are conditions and places most freshwater anglers dread, those that drag out the summertime season and turn us to nocturnal or at the very least, crepuscular predators. However, the Northern snakehead (Channa argus) doesn't give a damn. 

    Snakeheads first arrived in this country in Maryland sometime in the early 2000s, as both a popular food fish and aquarium fish, from their native range of China, Korea, and South-East Asia. Personally, I've seen restaurants in Central China that keep Northern snakeheads in a small kiddie pool in the front that you can choose from to end up on your dinner plate. The species can spawn several times a year, is highly tolerant of warm water and low oxygen, and soon spread all throughout the East Coast. I fish for them in the Delaware River system, where they've existed for about 20 years. 

    To catch these spectacled death-rolling critters, fish shallow. Snakeheads love vegetation, are an ambush predator that mostly sits along the bank, weed lines, or hard structure and waits for food to come to them. Pretty much any bass lure works well for them, especially ones that run weedless and shallow, but they fight dirty and have a rock solid jaw, making the hardware on most bass lures inadequate. One of my favorites is the original Z-man chatterbait, but even with filing the hook back into a razor sharp point after each fish, it generally turns into a mangled mess after I've landed a few snakes with it. Get out and explore, look in weedy, slow back creeks, and don't get discouraged if you find nothing at first. If you like topwater fishing, these fish are perfect. Their habit of hunting shallow makes them extremely susceptible to topwater frogs, prop baits, and spooks. 

    I don't release snakeheads anymore. I once did, and in most states you legally can, at long as if it is right back where you found them. I don't think they're doing the same kind of damage to gamefish populations the way that we originally thought, and most of those gamefish like largemouth, trout, and walleyes aren't native either. However, I've been seeing more and more snakeheads expanding their range every year, and I think that they have the potential to be causing damage to our native amphibian populations that live and spawn in the waters that snakeheads hunt in. Luckily, the species is delicious, with firm white flaky meat that is better than walleye and on-par with many saltwater species like black seabass.

Snakehead Tacos: 

- Rub filets with a generous amount of cajun style seasoning, get a cast iron skillet roaring hot, and sear for a few minutes on both sides with butter 

- Mix up diced mango, red onion, lime juice, cilantro, jalapeno, salt, and pepper for a quick mango salsa. 

- Toast some corn tortillas and serve together 

Portuguese snakehead Cebolada 

- In a pan, start sauteing a whole sweet onion or white onion with a healthy amount of garlic in olive oil 

- Add some diced chorizo, tomato paste, and half a red bell pepper and continue cooking down. 

- Throw in a can of crushed tomatoes, paprika, and sofrito. Simmer for a bit until the sauce is thick and pasty 

- Put in snakehead filets, cover in some of the sauce, bake at 375 for about 10-15 minutes. For the last few minutes, put it under the broiler. Serve on top of toast. 

Golden Oyster Summer

 

    June came in wet and wild, glowing gold in remarkable contrast to the burning blues and burnt browns of last year. June came in practicing mountain magic, making mycology of all that rain. It's been a fantastic summer so far for Golden Oysters. My friend Sonya and I found a few while on a hike on a nearby hill overlooking my favorite river. It was getting dark, a thin layer of fog clung to the mountain and served to deepen all colors around us, when I spotted something whose ghastly aura shone in the fog. Those mushrooms I harvested and made some pasta the next day to bring to work. A few days later, more rain hit, the river raged and swelled, and eventually, while checking on a highwater snakehead spot, Slavik and I found even more, the most I've found on one log. The woods brought gifts in a chain, gifts of rain, of mushrooms that grew because of the rain, and public lands that we can go look for mushrooms and critters and fishes on. These things are worth fighting for! A huge victory was just won, Mike Lee retracted the public lands sale from the Big Beautiful Bill, but the fight's not over. Keep fighting for them! 

    Sunspots and deadwood 

    Sacred drinking of the land

    Oh, how the spores sway

Unofficial Golden Oyster Pasta Recipe: 

- Salt and boil water, drop in fettucine or whatever noodle you desire and cook al dente 

- Chop up your mushrooms, any cured pork product (I used prosciutto), onion, dice garlic 

- Drop the pork in a steel pan, render out the fat. Put the meat aside. 

- Fry onions and garlic in the fat until fragrant. Drop in mushrooms and pork. 

- Drop in a knob of butter, bit of milk or cream, and your cooked noodles. Stir in shredded mozzarella and parmesan and whatever other cheeses you desire. Shake well before enjoying. 

Strawberry Moon and the Grave of the Fireflies

     "Maybe the sacred, today, is someone misspelling "scared," then loving the skewed meaning caused by their misspelling. Maybe that reasonless loving is a sacred act." 

                - Thomas Soares 

    I'm a now 20 year old product of fervent belief on the simplicity of the American dream, and yet, I generally have a memory like a young child or a slippery jetty rock. Yet, for some reason, anything with a remote semblance of nature-relatability implants itself like a metal stud, drawing me in with an air of magnetism. I can narry remember where I put my keys, but I can close my eyes and picture the tiny stream from which I pulled turtles and frogs as a rogue 4 year old. 

    One of these earliest memories is the symphony of thousands of fireflies lighting up the sky on a summer night. So many summer nights I spent illuminated by fireflies, catching little pieces of saved sacred light, going to sleep with their constant ghastly flickering. An old high school friend of mine lives on an old farm, old enough to be haunted deeply by its past. It was there, during an old summer bonfire years ago, that I laid eyes on my 1st group of blue fireflies, an Appalachian native rumored to be possessed by the spirits of Confederate ghosts. Maybe all fireflies have some sort of ghost. Maybe that had reasons to stick around, but the world that they decided to stick around to was too fast and left them behind in the dust and this is all that's left. 

    Fireflies are disappearing all throughout the East. Too many bright lights out at night have outshone their ancient mating glows and now people no longer look at open fields on summer nights in the same type of awe that they used to inspire. 

    Last week, we had the Strawberry Moon, the full moon of June that glowed a reddish hue and signaled the ripening of wild strawberries for thousands of years for native peoples. Under that moon, things began to shift. Cicadas began to emerge back in Central Pennsylvania, fireflies began to start to appear, although not in their old numbers. That same day, however, things began to shift in our political scales. The Senate announced a bill that would open up over 3 billion acres of American public lands, the birthright of our nation and its citizens. The bill would also open up large amounts of oil and gas leases in Alaska and across the West. 

    American public lands are what separates us from the rest of the Developed World. Almost nowhere in places like Europe are there the opportunities to hike, forage, hunt, and fish as freely as we do. Wildlife and wild places belong to the people, not to some pompous aristocrat. That is the promise that was issued for the American people and was secured in blood with the American Conservation Movement. And this new bill erodes away at all of that. Support agencies like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, rage, give your elected officials the hell that they all deserve. For more information: https://www.backcountryhunters.org/take_action#/487

10,001

 

    I've been sleeping right next to a open window to summertime and foxes and the requiem of mourning doves. No bluelight up to an hour before bed does wonders for the body, mind, and spirit; that holy, angular trinity that appears everywhere. My dreams are becoming more often and vivid, only require naturally about 6 hours of sleep. Prayer and cooking are sacred acts because they are spontaneous; I should like to be spontaneous as well. To see windows everywhere. 

    One of those windows opened this morning, letting in the drizzling rain that deepened the colors of the Sycamores and faded away the white spots on the fawns that followed me down the riverbank. That window was a mysterious one of moon phases, lunar majors and minors, astrological things that caused our mortal brains to buckle under their joyous divinity and would probably still bear such weight until the end of time. 

    It opened with wide, toothed jaws of Esox masquinongy. I'm not quite sure where I first learned of the existence of the muskellunge, but from that moment on they became a mythical river monster in my mind, not a species to be targeted but one whose existence you-know-of and encounters with are druid-like and accidental. Muskies are a strange ordeal. No fish drives anglers madder than striped bass, but muskies are a close second; however, muskie madness is different. There are no "muskie blitzes," no situation wherein a crowd casting plugs can stand shoulder to shoulder hooking muskies every cast. Muskies drive a solitary madness, the greater kind, for the weight of isolation can drive one to a greater madness of swirling thought than any sort of demented company. 

    I think of fishing in general like windows too, interceptions into tiny pockets of ichthyological life. Spots where you cast for hours until the ripples on the water start to blur together and you start to question insanity can become teeming with life in seconds. On this day, I worked my way down a smaller creek that drained into my beloved Delaware River where I knew muskies sometimes sat, both up in the deeper pools as well as at the creek mouth where suckers and stocked trout would get washed out. I threw a large topwater spook and managed to catch a decent smallmouth, saw some suckers, and found a newly hatched Map Turtle walking about. It felt right. It felt full of life. 

    I worked my way out of the creek mouth, still throwing that spook around with nothing to show for it in the river. A few carp jumped around. I almost decided to call it a day, pack up and head out. However, there was one more bend that looked good. I brought my lure over it, walking it almost all the way back to the bank, when a giant green shape comes out of nowhere and inhales the bait right at my feet, jumping clear out of the water. 

    I don't remember setting the hook. All I remember was the reverberations of my 8ft heavy casting rod, me wrestling with this fish in waist-deep water, all the while hoping, praying that I could land it. When I got her shallow and grabbed the tail in my hand, I screamed. This was it. This was the culmination of five years of wanting a muskie under my belt. It was surreal. I shook as I snapped a few pictures. She was still super green from the short fight and I kept her in the water for most of the time. I popped the hook out and she kicked off before I could get a proper release. Still shaking, I checked my lure and one of the hook points was broken off, a little souvenir, something taken. 

    I've caught a lot of fish in my life. That muskie right there probably made me happier than any singular fish ever has in my entire life. It almost felt like something divine happened, some window had to have opened, with the key being something spiritually between all of the river trash I had picked up over the years, hours and hours in the cold and rain around moving water without another soul around, or simply the dumb luck that I don't believe in. As soon as I got back into cell service range, I called Max. The first words out of my mouth were, "I did it." 

    A few days before that I caught that fish, Slavik and I were having dinner and talking about a muskie that he lost two winters ago. I said that right now, I think that muskie fishing is something that I could get into, but I'm not sure that I want to. Slavik responded that he thinks if I don't want to get into it, I won't. Now that I've done it once, I think I want that high again. Gonna start working on my figure-8s. 

The Jersey Blues

 

    At least once a year, I like the stumble upon a good jetty bluefish bite. Very few things in fishing compare well to the carnage that happens when a school of bluefish come through and the most effective lure in the spread simply becomes the one that you can throw at them quick enough. At Barnegat Inlet the other day, the wind was ripping from the South-East at about a billion knots and the fluke bite was pretty much non-existent. I got a small blue on a fluke bucktail and mistakenly thought that the school had arrived, but my next few casts bore no fruit and I was proven wrong, simply driven back to first base.

    I walked further down to the tip of the jetty, where I had access to not only the ripping current of the inlet side but also a shoal of rocks on the open ocean. When I arrived, there was a line of anglers crowded along the tip, with one guy consistently picking off bluefish on plugs by casting into the whitewater in that shoal. I threw a diamond jig at first, the only lure that could cut through the crosswind just by the quality of being a solid chunk of metal. However, I threw that around for about 15 minutes with no bites and I believe that picky bluefish are a myth, so I tried a few more plugs then switched back to fluking. 

    Making bottom contact with such a cross-wind soon proved to be a monumental task and so I was cursed with the Jersey blues. I switched back to the diamond jig as the wind died down and the tide went out, creating a small belt of whitewater along the edge of a rocky shoal where all the bluefish stacked up in. I started catching them every cast on the metal. Most of them were smaller fish, but still fought like the possessed little yellow-eyed demons that they are. 

    A limit was soon put together, and I began to catch and release fish or otherwise give them to a Mexican family that was also lined up on the tip of the jetty. I tried to break the language barrier and ask them for bluefish recipes but my communication was poor and this was unsuccessful, making Spanish just one more thing I need to learn. 

    

    While the blues that myself and the people around me were pulling in averaged around a pound, I soon got a thump on a metal jig that felt much heavier. This fish pulled drag and I had to fight it around several large jetty rocks before I got it close enough to see that it was the nicest bluefish I had laid eyes on all day. I climbed down the rocks, wearing jetty cleats, and waiting for a wave to powerwash some whitewater over the jetty so I could pull up him up, ending with my personal best bluefish in hand. 

    That fish was released as my limit was already established and a big bluefish like that would have a filet that was more bloodline than light meat. After I landed that fish, several other inlet anglers immediately rushed over and started hurling metals and plugs over where I was standing, which I took as a sign to head out, following the lighthouse back to the parking lot with the satisfactory weight of a full fish cooler slung over my shoulder, taking the opposite path of decades of boat travel. 

    The summer's begun, it flows in like sunrays that permeated through the windows on my drive home and lit up the scent of salt and the sound of gulls. My hands felt properly torn and salt-coated too.  Beautiful little vagrantries. 

Earning your Stripes

 

    It's hard to pick favorites, but if I had to choose one species to fish for the rest of my days, my vote would be heavily drawn towards ol' Seven Lines. I do stupid things for stripers. Swimming/wading out to rocks in the middle of a river boulder field, cutting significant chunks of time reserved for sleep in the fall to striper fish, dropping way too much money on plugs, etc. etc. etc. I have an entire collection of books whose topic is the sole pursuit of this one fish. I've seen fights break out between grown men over striper spots. And I wouldn't change a thing. 

    The river was unfishably high for almost two weeks, giving time for fish to push into new slots and seams for when it finally drops down to peak flow. That first day, I waded out to a partially submerged boulder and climbed up, beginning to whip several large plugs through a current seam. I've got what I call a top-> down approach to striper fishing, where I'll start off trying to draw a strike with a pencil popper or adjacent large surface plug, then begin to work my way down. I popped that current seam for a while, worked through the white water, then switched to a minnow plug again without so much as a scratch. I figured going deeper was probably then going to be a necessity, and so into my plug bag I reached and out came the 3/4 oz bucktail, no trailer necessary. 

    Launching the bucktail past the current break and letting the current swing it through, I gave two bounces and came tight on the first cast. This fish pulled drag and I had to muscle it around a big boulder before she showed herself in all striped and glistening glory, ending up as the largest river bass to ever chew up my right thumb. 

    I snapped a few shots of her before placing her back into the water, where she clamped down on my hand and then let go to give a big kick of her broomtail and going off. That morning, I picked another smaller fish on a jig before I had to head out. 

    Striped bass are built for power, not speed. One look at that wide broomtail without a deep forkage can tell an experienced angler that these fish can hold in some extremely fast water, with powerful bursts of energy to snatch prey out of that shallow water. My river bass game has a lot to do with finding fast whitewater with lots of rocks, where fish will be sitting to ambush prey. 

    I've also been enjoying the positive pressures of putting others on fish. After a good morning where I had a steady pick of fish on swimbaits and minnow plugs, I've been taking Slavik out to a few spots where I've helped him get on some stripers, the first ones he's caught in a long time. As an aspiring outdoor guide and as a human being who tries to put experiences on a higher pedestal than materials, watching my friend catch fish in places that I love has been very rewarding and I encourage any other experienced angler or outdoor enthusiast to do the same. 

    Striper fishing can be challenging, frustrating, and incredibly rewarding. There are two primary times of year when my mind becomes completely and utterly occupied with seven stripes. The first is in the spring, right now, when the fish begins to run up the rivers down the street from my house, a time where tree frogs sing and current breaks over rocks try to whisper and roar over them. The second is the fall when they start going back down the open, by then desolate sand beaches of New Jersey in sprays of bait and silver and blood-red sunrises over the ocean. My fishing logs these times of year sound more like the ravings of a man possessed. But I'll keep fishing for them and keep writing, as long as I'm haunted by moving water.