outdoors

Black Spots

adventure, backpacking, freedom, hiking, sense of place, Uncategorized, wild places, women and nature, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
THAYER LAKE, THE BRANDRETH PROPERTY

THAYER LAKE, THE BRANDRETH PROPERTY

PREFACE — My essay, Black Spots, tells the story of my adventure at a 15,000 acre camp in the Adirondack Mountains in New York.  My partner, Kevin and I, camped, paddled, and fished in the middle of the wilderness for a couple of days with permission of the Nature Conservancy who had just purchased a portion of this family’s original tract.

                                                           BLACK  SPOTS

KATIE IN FRONT OF OUR QUONSET HUT

KATIE IN FRONT OF OUR QUONSET HUT

Late last August I went to the Brandreth family tract in the Adirondack Mountains of New York.  The same Brandreth as Paullina Brandreth, an early twentieth century hunting and fishing writer who wrote under the pseudonym of Paul Brandreth.  I had read her book, Trails of Enchantment, and couldn’t believe my luck when Kevin, a friend and landscape painter, invited me to spend a week there in a Quonset hut type cabin  on Thayer Lake, one of several ponds on the property.  The Nature Conservancy had recently purchased the 15,000 acre  property and they were eager to show it off.  I was to write about and Kevin was to paint the reclaimed property that had been in the same family for over one hundred years.

As we drove on the twisting private dirt road fifteen miles into the cabin, we surprised two bears who were feeding on the blackberries that were growing on the verge between the road and the woods.  When they heard our truck, they ran as fast as they could down the road, leaped into the heavy brush, and disappeared.  All we saw were two large round bear bottoms dashing away ahead of us.  People hunt bear here. The woods, thick with alders, are perfect bear habitat and difficult to see or walk through. In fact, you can’t see more than a few feet into the woods on either side of the road.

We stopped at a couple of ponds along the way, one whose water was so clear it was hard to believe that it was dead, a victim of acid rain.  Acid rain works like bleach does on fabric.  It irradiates everything: all color, design, and life. But just as the fabric looks spotless, so does the water.  Spotless and lifeless.

We passed Shingle Shanty Pond where Paullina Brandreth had had a lean-to they used for

SHINGLE SHANTY POND

SHINGLE SHANTY POND

hunting expeditions.  When you own, hunt, and fish on over 24,000 acres its nice to have shelter here and there.  I planned on kayaking its 100 acres, searching around the perimeter in hopes of finding the remnants of her camp.  Two hours after we had begun bumping and winding  up and down over the hilly woods, we arrived at Thayer Lake and our Quonset cabin.  We had expected a dilapidated, primitive structure filled with mice and spiders.  To our delight we would be living, sleeping, and cooking in a steel twenty by fifteen foot building with a pine table and matching chairs, aluminum cots with thin mattresses, two folding deck chairs, and a deck overlooking the one mile long lake.  We also had a clean, new privy 25 yards away and a barbecue pit style fireplace just off the deck, feet from the water. We had arrived in paradise.

As if it had been choreographed by a Wild Kingdom producer, two loons, a male and female, swan up to within 30 yards of our place.  As they swam they called their tremolo, “hahahahahaha” back and forth to one another and to us, we hoped.  The pair stayed for fifteen minutes yodeling and diving, dipping their heads and watching — watching us. After unpacking the truck and making our beds, we carried the red camp canoe into the water and paddled out onto the lake.  We paddled to the middle, stopped, and just sat.  Silence.  We were in it, deep in the north woods, surrounded by 100,000 acres of wilderness.  The dirt track on which we had arrived was our only way out unless we wanted to hack our way through thousands of acres of dense brushy woods so thick with dead fall, alders, black flies and mosquitoes that we would need a machete and  several bottles of bug dope.

After paddling the shore line, we decided upon a likely location for catching some small mouth bass.  We were told the lake was full of them, and so we had visions of a dinner of  crisply grilled bass, baked potatoes, and  steamed string beans accompanied by a couple of glasses of shiraz.  Since we only had one fly rod,  I had planned on doing the paddling while Kevin, an expert fisherman, did the fishing and catching.  But after a couple of casts, Kevin insisted I try, saying it was easy and small mouth bass are  fun to catch.

I am a worm fisherwoman and proud of it.  Back home on the Gunpowder River in Maryland, I catch lots of rainbow trout and brown trout on my spinning reel baited with worms dug up on the river bank. A fly rod is baited with a fly and has a much longer line than a spinning reel and rod.  One must cast back and forth and then out, making the fly appear to the fish as if it is a real insect just waiting to be caught and eaten.  I tried it  after much cajoling, and incredibly, a bass attacked my bait.

My line went out, and my rod bent over U shaped towards the water’s surface.  I had a bass.  I actually had a bass! But as I reeled it in, Kevin announced that he’d forgotten the net so I’d “just have to tire it out” before bringing it along side the canoe.  I followed his patient directions as I broke my tension with loud high pitched “oooh’s”, imploring every other second, “What should I do now”?  Miraculously, the bass stayed on and tired.  Carefully, I hauled him up and over the gunwale and into the bottom of our canoe.

I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe I’d done it and without a net.  I wanted to try  again.   I cast sloppily, but the bass didn’t mind; they jumped onto my bait at almost every cast.  Getting them tired and into the boat was harder.  As soon as they got close to the boat, they swam away from it as fast as they could.  I had to be ready to give them line, but not too much, or they would be able to jump up out of the water and get off of the hook.  Every one of them jumped, at least once.  And every time, I squealed like a child at an amusement park.  After I had caught six and kept four, we called it quits.  We couldn’t eat more than two a piece.

As we paddled to shore, the loons called from the other end of the lake.  This time their calls sounded primordial like a bevy of ghosts wailing loudly, plaintively.  Their “hoooo-lii” echoed ten times over the water, woods, and hills, sending shivers up our  backs and raising the hair on our arms.  .

COMMON LOON WITH BABY

COMMON LOON WITH BABY

Common Loons are large birds, 32 inches long with a wing span of 46 inches.  They are described by the Audubon Society as “black-headed, with a heavy, dagger like black bill,  a white and black striped necklace, prominent white checkers on their back, and white underpants.” Their eyes are red.  They eat mostly fish, sometimes diving 240 feet  for them  and staying submerged for fifteen minutes.  Because they can stay submerged for so long, Eskimos and Native Americans thought them capable of magic.

Back at the shore in front of our cabin, we pulled the canoe out of the water and changed into fleeces and long pants.  It was chilly, about 55 degrees. I opened the shiraz as Kevin sharpened his knife.  We chatted back and forth about our day, how lucky we were to be here, such a nice cabin and no sign of mice.  We’d had bright sunshine and seventy degrees with only a slight breeze.  The water in Thayer Lake was still warm.  We could swim in it tomorrow.  The loons came floating back, looking us over quietly this time.  Kevin spread a wooden board on a flat rock and began to filet the bass.

As he cut, he explained that bass smell bad when you gut them, so he was just going to avoid that and simply filet their sides for the only meat we would eat anyway.  Why make a mess when you didn’t have to.  After cutting the filets from the first fish he stopped and looked at them closely.  “Katie, look at this.  The fish has parasites.”

I looked and sure enough hundreds of little black spots as small as the head of a straight pin dotted the meat.  “Why don’t you clean another one and see if it has any?”

Kevin did and the second one had them and so did the third and the fourth.  “I guess the whole lake is infested with them.”

I didn’t want to give up my image of wilderness camping, the image of fishing and eating our catch. “Maybe they’ll be alright if we cook them.  The parasites will die won’t they?”

“Katie we’re not eating these fish.” And we didn’t.  It’s funny how black spots in fish can change everything.

We thought we were in a pristine environment, fishing in immaculate water. Water we could

BLACK SPOT PARASITES ON FISH PERFECTLY NATURAL

BLACK SPOT PARASITES ON FISH PERFECTLY NATURAL

drink, water cleaner than we’d ever seen.  But now that notion was dashed.  Our small mouth bass had little black spots all through them.  We imagined the worst and blamed man, acid rain, and pollution. We made grilled chicken instead and sipped our wine wondering how this lake in the middle of no where could have  become contaminated with parasites.

Ironically, we were all wrong.  Humans didn’t cause the parasites. After our trip, we found out from a local Adirondack fisherman and the Michigan Department of Natural Resource’s web site that Black Spot is not man made.  Black spot is a  naturally occurring parasite that is commonly found in earthen bottomed lakes and ponds.  It has nothing to do with pollution. The parasites only infest fish with certain diets, not humans swimming in their waters. Even when a fish is heavily infested, he is no danger of dying or becoming sick.  These parasites are not harmful to humans and die when the fish is cooked.  So we could have eaten the fish, even though they looked pretty unappetizing with all those hundreds of tiny black parasites imbedded in their flesh.

Has our postmodern culture  conditioned us to believe that we are the cause of everything that seems harmful because we see the havoc we have caused in more populated places?  Well, we’re not always the cause of harm, and parasites are a natural  part of the natural world.

BRANDRETH PROPERTY

BRANDRETH PROPERTY

If being in the wilderness for a few days taught us anything about our place in the natural world, it taught us that we are a part of the whole.  We’re not the center or the biggest part or the most important part.  We’re just a part.  We don’t affect everything.  In the wilderness, we affect very little unless we bring along dynamite and heavy equipment.  Without any props, we fit right in — we aren’t too loud or too rough.  We eat and sleep and make love like everything else in the woods.  And that is what we’d come for after all– to fit in and to be a part of the wild with or without parasites.

Freedom, Space, and Women Out of Doors

adventure, freedom, hiking, motherhood, sense of place, Uncategorized, wild places, women and nature, , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Freedom, Space, and Women Out of Doors

Outside I can see in a way I can’t indoors.  Outside I’m brought back to another rhythm, primordial and familiar.  Wind rustling across acres of dry corn stalks grounds and rejuvenates me. When children and work bear down too hard, I yearn for the freedom of space and the possibility of adventure.  I yearn for the freedom to breathe fresh air.  My breath moving in and out, my chest rising up and down purges the stress and clutter I’ve collected indoors.  I yearn for freedom from piles of laundry, noisy children, ringing phones, and unmade beds.  Outside those things don’t exist.  Looking out over miles of rolling hills gives me the illusion of escape.  Escape from routine, escape from the mother, writer, teacher, homemaker part of me.  I become what I think of as myself.  All the others fall away. The only voice I hear is my own and if I’m lucky, the honks of snow geese flying overhead.

Last Tuesday I walked my three-mile loop in southeast Pennsylvania. Up Hickory Road, down Kefauver Road to Cross Mill where I stop and stand by the mill stream in cold weather and sit in the cooling water when it’s hot.  It’s halfway.  Peaceful weeping willows sway on the ripples; minnows scatter when I step off of the bank.  I listen to the water’s gurgles and chuckles as it flows towards the village of Crossroads.  I walk around the restored mill, painted milky red.  The dimples in the original glass panes act as a prism reflecting mauve light. It’s nice bored teenagers didn’t break all of them years ago before this place became a tiny park.  A framed sign stating opening dates, demonstrations and times is attached to the wall beside the front door.  Cross Mill, donated by its last owner Harry E. Cross, ran continuously from 1826 until the 1980’s.   An undiscovered treasure of a place, it is on both the National and Pennsylvania Registers of Historic Places.  And although it is one of the York County Parks, it is lovingly operated and meticulously tended by a local volunteer group called, Friends of Cross Mill.

I walk on — up the steep hill to Pheasant Hill Farm where they breed pheasants and quail for hunting.  The two hundred acre farm rolls out along a wide ridge and down to shrubby hollows thick with deer.  People come here to hunt and shoot these birds, bred solely for this purpose.  One wonders the sport of releasing birds born in captivity, hand fed, and then let go in the nearby fields of dry Amaranth only to be chased by dogs and shot.  The hunters do wait a bit after the birds are released. Then they use dogs to flush the disoriented birds into the air so they can be shot in flight.

Paullina Brandreth would be outraged.

Brandreth grew up in the late 1800’s where she spent much time on her family’s 24,000 acres in the Adirondack Mountains.  There she hunted pheasants, bear, and deer. From the age of nine she wrote hunting and fishing articles under the alias, Paul Brandreth and as an adult in the early twentieth century, she waged an editorial campaign for still-hunting when it wasn’t popular.  Still-hunters stalk their prey alone, waiting motionless in places where deer, or birds travel or rest.  They do not shoot their prey until they have a clear kill shot.  Brandreth decried hunting deer with dogs, or driving deer with groups of men toward the gunners.  She was successful.  Today still-hunting is the most popular way to hunt deer in many states.  However, on private hunting camps and farms where the animals are bred, the rules do not apply.  I wonder how much it costs to kill a semi-tame pheasant.

As I walk by the farm I hear the pop of a gun close by.  I marvel that people can march around fields and woods with rifles and shotguns slung over their shoulders or across their torsos posed to shoot if anything suddenly appears.  Bullets from a rifle can travel up to one mile. Shot from the shotguns these pheasant hunters are carrying can travel more than one hundred yards, and I’m only fifty yards away. The hunters look at me and keep walking, thankfully, in the opposite direction, their dogs sniffing along the ground searching with their noses for those terrified birds.  I think about freedom, the hunters’ freedom to hunt and to have an adventure.  I wonder who am I to dictate how they shoot those birds.   I’m not opposed to hunting per se, just the sort of hunting that resembles a trap shoot.

I don’t always walk on the road; many times I walk in the woods or in the fields.  My decision is often based on whether it is hunting season or not.  I don’t like getting shot at. Hunting season begins here in November and ends in early March.  Then I waken to gun shots most Saturday mornings.  I resent the inability to walk up through the woods behind my house and down the other side to the stream during those months. When hunters are about, I may be mistaken for a deer.

And since I’m a woman, my sense of freedom has to do also with my ability to feel secure from harm by men.  In the city or suburbs I’m aware of those around me, those that might do me harm.  In the city I may become their prey.  At least in the country when it’s not hunting season and I’m bushwhacking in the woods or across fields this is not a concern.  The possibility, the reality of freedom exists there. And that nagging awareness of possible danger, which all women experience whenever they’re outside, vanishes.  I’m free and completely safe.  I’ve spent entire afternoons lying, relaxed and unafraid, on an ensolite pad in the middle of the woods reading a book and snoozing.   I’ve always felt safer off the trail in the woods than anywhere else outside.

I suppose Gretel Ehrlich, who wrote The Solace of Open Spaces, felt safe from men, at any rate, when she was a shepherd in Wyoming. Being thirty miles away in any direction from another human being would provide that security at least.  But then she had other concerns.  No phone, no contact with anyone for two weeks at a time.  That is a sort of freedom and a sort of confinement. Freedom to roam wide open spaces, setting one’s own pace and thinking what one will and the confinement of being isolated and unable to leave. Ehrlich loved the wide openness of Wyoming writing, “Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us.”  Yet she felt the duality of such freedom: “There’s too much of everything here. I can’t pace myself to it.”   She spent her days outside looking over one hundred mile views and hoping she’d find the next water hole for her thousand sheep and the small trailer filled with food and water for herself.  She was afraid she wouldn’t find them.  But she or the sheep always did.

Space represents freedom and adventure, but also danger and its sister fear.  When we’re outside there’s no shelter from predators imagined or real.  Alone outside we recognize our vulnerability, but we also recognize our willingness, our trenchant desire to be where the action is.  We want to attend the show, see what’s going to happen next. We know we’re vulnerable to the physical elements of weather, people and animals.   But we also know we’ll be present to hear wind playing music on 100 acres of dried corn stalks, to see trout lilies’ and spring beauties’ first blooms, to break ice thin as sheets of rice paper edging a stream with our boot. That is what draws me — this yin and yang of my recognized vulnerability and my willingness to be vulnerable at the same time.  It’s a trade off.  If I want to be outside then I have to take some chances.  Will I be cold, hot? Will I chance upon a fox trotting by pretending he doesn’t see me?  Will I see a hawk snagging a rodent, or will there be men with guns? We go outside to be surprised.

Last week I decided to take a different route when I came to Pheasant Hill      Farm.  I walked up Rock Jim Road to a place where I couldn’t be seen from the farmhouse, barns, and pen.  Then I struck out across their fields, aiming for the woods and stream behind my house – a short cut of sorts. I was trespassing, but I didn’t care.  I wanted something new, something daring. I got down to the stream and realized that finding a place to cross wasn’t going to be easy.  The water was deep and rushing after rain the previous day.  I walked up and down the bank thinking how foolish I was not to have considered this possibility.  My feet were going to get wet; the water everywhere was over a foot deep.  I found an old log light enough to push into a shallow section of the stream.  It only went half way.  I crossed on the log, stepped off and sloshed across.  Suddenly as I stepped onto the bank, a gunshot pop popped up the steep hill to my left.   How foolish of me – all for a change and a thrill.  I walked quickly to the right staying low along the stream bank aiming for the open fields adjacent to the woods.  That field I knew was posted and safe, even though it took me completely off course and made my original short cut a long cut. As I squished in my boots up through the breaks in the dry corn I felt exhilarated.  I had had an adventure of sorts, albeit a very small one.  I reached McCleary Road; home was around the corner.  The neighbor with the green Ford truck waved as he drove by.  I was back in civilization, feeling as though I’d just come back from a stint in the wilderness.