F
Field Ethos
Guest
By Craig Springer
So long as I have a mind that thinks, I will remember my brother Gary and the little creek valley that bore our footsteps when we were young. We were transients moving from one epoch in life to another, but the little stream and the fields it drained live larger than one can imagine.
Mystic chords tug on me from a period so long ago. My family moved from New Mexico to Ohio in the 1970s; I came of age near the Indiana line where the till plains flat as a pan meets the hilly glacial moraines. Cornfields and woodlots checker-boarded the gentle hills piled up by mile-thick glaciers. Indian Creek, named for the ancient Adena mounds along its course, cut sinuously through the straight-line right-angles of fence rows and farm roads laid over section lines. The creek purled into Ohio and then beneath the steel rib cage of a truss bridge. Friendly farmers afforded us trespass to fish.
Gary and I landed hogsuckers with their curious indented forehead. Longear sunfish sported more colors than Crayola. Creek chubs croaked as they slipped through my hands. We wrangled red-eyed rock bass from the roots of pale sycamores. A smallmouth bass leaping out the water in cork-screw fashion with a spinner on its lip was really something.
Wending through the gray matter behind my eyes, I arrive at a cold spring afternoon. Action was slow and my attention turned to Ordovician bi-valve fossils entombed in creek stones. Gary ambled on with resolve.
He pushed his glasses up as he looked down, threading his line onto yet one more lure. Anglers are the consummate optimists. He laid a jig in a run beneath overhanging bony box-elder branches. He felt a slow take, set the hook, then tripped on an open aluminum tackle box that put him on the ground. To save face, I was to blame for the spill. We exchanged jocular jabs. He wrinkled the tackle box back into shape with a pair of pliers.
In retrospect, our time together along Indian Creek and the hills that hemmed it were rather short-lived. The intersection of time and place permitted a little stream to make outsized impressions.
All things come to us in seasons — and so they go.
My next season found me at Hocking College where I first endeavored to become a fish biologist. The old brick house where I rented a room was an artifact of the former coal mining industry in Ohio’s Appalachian Piedmont. What had housed a family in the early 20th century now kept rain off college kids.
That March 41 years ago was exceedingly rainy. Flat raindrops splattered the portico outside window like nails splitting tin. In the pre-dawn dark a police officer came to the house to alert me there had been a death in the family, and that I needed to call home.
Backlit by a distant streetlamp, rain poured down my neighbor’s kitchen window like thin drams of mercury. The dial on her dirty-yellow rotary wall phone spun torturously slow. All of eternity compressed in the moment. My dad, the man with a spine of steel, told me in a quivering voice that my brother was dead.
March is the cruelest month, neither winter nor spring. April will leaven the pallor of that in-between time. The hills along Indian Creek made by a Pleistocene winter will be spattered colors akin to a candy box.
Here’s what I see. Thin, sooty morning clouds filter an orange eastern horizon. Yellow-breasted chats ceaselessly sing. The sun warms my face, and the air is close with dew. Ancient sycamores lean over the pools as if they have a yen to see who’s fishing upstream. And there I am on a hill just this side of Indiana, looking down the valley to see my own teenage self. There’s the two of us. A smile is fixed on Gary’s face and there’s wet sunshine in his hazel eyes.
Gary ended his own life at a time when there’s still a lot of boy in a man. I tried to get inside his head. Beneath the blue lines left by his hand is an answer that I have never found. I am resigned to say that some things are simply unknowable.
Here’s what I do know. Nature and humanity are not bifurcated. Nature makes me human. And the past is not dead. That creek and its chubs and chats transcend time and space — the living and the dead. Those waters still provide counsel. My brother’s death swamped the lives of those who cared about him, but love endures. His memory deserves perfect grace.
Gary lies at rest on the brow of a glacial moraine beneath muscular oaks where forest birds fill the air with bright spring music. I still have the tackle box; it rests on my bookshelf with the keepsake bite marks from his pliers made that sacred day.
The post March is the Cruelest Month appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
So long as I have a mind that thinks, I will remember my brother Gary and the little creek valley that bore our footsteps when we were young. We were transients moving from one epoch in life to another, but the little stream and the fields it drained live larger than one can imagine.
Mystic chords tug on me from a period so long ago. My family moved from New Mexico to Ohio in the 1970s; I came of age near the Indiana line where the till plains flat as a pan meets the hilly glacial moraines. Cornfields and woodlots checker-boarded the gentle hills piled up by mile-thick glaciers. Indian Creek, named for the ancient Adena mounds along its course, cut sinuously through the straight-line right-angles of fence rows and farm roads laid over section lines. The creek purled into Ohio and then beneath the steel rib cage of a truss bridge. Friendly farmers afforded us trespass to fish.
Gary and I landed hogsuckers with their curious indented forehead. Longear sunfish sported more colors than Crayola. Creek chubs croaked as they slipped through my hands. We wrangled red-eyed rock bass from the roots of pale sycamores. A smallmouth bass leaping out the water in cork-screw fashion with a spinner on its lip was really something.
Wending through the gray matter behind my eyes, I arrive at a cold spring afternoon. Action was slow and my attention turned to Ordovician bi-valve fossils entombed in creek stones. Gary ambled on with resolve.
He pushed his glasses up as he looked down, threading his line onto yet one more lure. Anglers are the consummate optimists. He laid a jig in a run beneath overhanging bony box-elder branches. He felt a slow take, set the hook, then tripped on an open aluminum tackle box that put him on the ground. To save face, I was to blame for the spill. We exchanged jocular jabs. He wrinkled the tackle box back into shape with a pair of pliers.
The Ides of March Betray
In retrospect, our time together along Indian Creek and the hills that hemmed it were rather short-lived. The intersection of time and place permitted a little stream to make outsized impressions.
All things come to us in seasons — and so they go.
My next season found me at Hocking College where I first endeavored to become a fish biologist. The old brick house where I rented a room was an artifact of the former coal mining industry in Ohio’s Appalachian Piedmont. What had housed a family in the early 20th century now kept rain off college kids.
That March 41 years ago was exceedingly rainy. Flat raindrops splattered the portico outside window like nails splitting tin. In the pre-dawn dark a police officer came to the house to alert me there had been a death in the family, and that I needed to call home.
Backlit by a distant streetlamp, rain poured down my neighbor’s kitchen window like thin drams of mercury. The dial on her dirty-yellow rotary wall phone spun torturously slow. All of eternity compressed in the moment. My dad, the man with a spine of steel, told me in a quivering voice that my brother was dead.
March is the cruelest month, neither winter nor spring. April will leaven the pallor of that in-between time. The hills along Indian Creek made by a Pleistocene winter will be spattered colors akin to a candy box.
The In-between Time is the Cruelest
Here’s what I see. Thin, sooty morning clouds filter an orange eastern horizon. Yellow-breasted chats ceaselessly sing. The sun warms my face, and the air is close with dew. Ancient sycamores lean over the pools as if they have a yen to see who’s fishing upstream. And there I am on a hill just this side of Indiana, looking down the valley to see my own teenage self. There’s the two of us. A smile is fixed on Gary’s face and there’s wet sunshine in his hazel eyes.
Gary ended his own life at a time when there’s still a lot of boy in a man. I tried to get inside his head. Beneath the blue lines left by his hand is an answer that I have never found. I am resigned to say that some things are simply unknowable.
Here’s what I do know. Nature and humanity are not bifurcated. Nature makes me human. And the past is not dead. That creek and its chubs and chats transcend time and space — the living and the dead. Those waters still provide counsel. My brother’s death swamped the lives of those who cared about him, but love endures. His memory deserves perfect grace.
Gary lies at rest on the brow of a glacial moraine beneath muscular oaks where forest birds fill the air with bright spring music. I still have the tackle box; it rests on my bookshelf with the keepsake bite marks from his pliers made that sacred day.
The post March is the Cruelest Month appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
