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.