Where We Feel the Power of this Planet

Fred calls them brain farts. Not always bad ideas. Besides, when you step into streambed muck this coming spring, smell that sulfur gas...anything released from underneath this hallowed planet can't be all bad. The last couple of days, I've been musing a little on the naturalist within me, sort of uselessly hoping for time to read Darwin, read Ewell Gibbons, read taxonomic botanical texts, read more about reptiles and amphibians, go out and apply some of my learning. Now I add, use my camera equipment besides. Re-connect with my young genius as a nine-year-old when I read Aristotle. Collected reptiles, amphibians, fishes, insects, arthropods, blithely unconcerned with and naïve to any laws that might have then existed, as if I perhaps were born millennia before my time, my manic mind racing to try and catch up, and yet I still don't know what the laws were in 1970. Twenty terrariums in the basement of our family home serving as looking glasses for my ethological studies, note cards at hand, obviously my parents didn't care a whit about any laws either, but I did care about natural law and trying, years before abstract thought normally sets in at age 14, to devise a theoretical scheme to frame behavior of animals in captivity, though in reality, I was far from the status of a zoologist. Not from that of a young naturalist.

I don't remember keeping any of the fishes until I was 12. One aquarium. I still have 3 x 5 notecards with my writing and diagrams on them depicting a little of what sunfish, bass, a stone cat did in the tank. I let all this go by age 13.

Today another day off, the plan was to write my monthly article for New Jersey Federated Sportsmen News, which I not only did, but progressed further than the anticipated rough draft to perhaps the finished completion, although I always seem to find a word or two to change after I think a piece is finished. I also sent an essay to Boston Globe Magazine, not that I altogether anticipate acceptance. I worked on a poem: "Numismatic Prism." Most of all, I worked on a big article assignment, but not under the sort of feverish state of nerves anticipated, and by working with a sort of deliberate slowness instead, I've managed to get more of it done than I really expected to do.

Past two hours, I've been drinking a little of a sulfurous substance--red wine. Rick got back to me in the morning, telling me it was unlikely he'd leave the bank early to fish the surf for those stripers with me, but that he would call if he could. We chatted online about someday trying for Pulaski steelhead in the spring. Read--years from now. Shift work and very little Paid Time Off means no time for that. At least for now.

Let me take another sip. That might help me remember that fart.

Two sips. And here it is, as I anticipated it would come, and don't think for a moment wine was not essential to its arrival. Fishing and naturalism melded together in my head. But I'm convinced this idea is not subjective, because I--rather fuzzily, I admit--see that naturalism, taken for what it is, has to do with observance in the field of natural facets. Fishing has to do with catching fish, but more than this, we do observe not only how they are caught, but take note of all sorts of interesting facets of their behavior, so we might catch more, all this obvious to anyone who fishes seriously.

But here's the thing as it relates to naturalism. Naturalism per se is supposed to appreciate nature as it is. But do we turn over rocks, capture specimens, move apart brush, etc.? Sure. So interaction is part of it, just as, while fishing, we appreciate nature while interacting with it by the use of varying levels of sophisticated tackle. We go a step further while fishing, perhaps. We modify nature, the fish, as once they are hooked, they bring our entire method and approach, basically technological, if very basically so, into play as a gaming success if the fish is caught, and so we include ourselves as tool masters in the whole scheme of nature, if we so presume a naturalist's perspective at the same time.

Who cares about naturalism, right? But remember home base. None of our fishing will come to anything at all, if we were to destroy life on this planet, not that I think there's much danger of this, but for certain this planet is changing very rapidly. It's not a superman issue, as if we as mankind can "save the planet." It's way too late to avoid a changing climate, so the issue really involves how we will change with the change. But even that idea is too grandiose to attract much interest. It's true enough, but in our own lifetimes, it's much less an issue of what we can do, than how any of us might better appreciate nature as it really is when we're out. And as we fish it.

Don't forget sulfur. That's the key. It's what's underneath it all that calls us to the depths. And that's where we feel the power of this planet.

As we might become this power.