Daybreak on the Perdido

The moon made its waning appearance overnight.

Though waning, it was still bright enough to clearly illuminate the reflective white sandbar that we made our twenty-four home.

The words, as they often do, returned to hauntingly ring in my head.

“For brick and mortar breed filth and crime,

With a pulse of evil that throbs and beats;

And men are withered before their prime

By the curse paved in with lanes and streets.

And lungs are poisoned and shoulders bowed,

In the smothering reek of mill and mine;

And death stalks in on the struggling crowd –

But he shuns the shadow of the oak and pine.”

-        George W. Sears (Nessmuk), Woodcraft and Camping

Out here where everything reminds me of how insignificant I am in the great scheme of manmade things and agendas ... I can be myself with nothing to diminish who I am.

I first met the Perdido back in the late 70’s when large tracts of the land on this side of the river were owned by one of the paper companies.

That company closed down and something to the tune of 17,000 acres is now held by the State and used as a Wildlife Management Area. Blocks of it have been purchased by Forever Wild. Forever Wild land is just what the name implies. The hand of man, for perpetuity, ceases to interfere with the order of nature. The native habitat, and the wildlife supported by it, will have a chance to recover for future generations to see and enjoy. https://www.alabamaforeverwild.com/   

It is a smidge less than a three-mile drive from the paved highway to where Shirli dropped us off. The hike in from there is a short one. Maybe a quarter of a mile on an eroded and closed woods road. There was one spot in the eroded road where we had to work our way around a deep hole of water then walk through near ankle deep water.

It is wild woods … beautiful woods … along the tannin stained Perdido with its average water temperature that ranges between 53 and 56 degrees. 

A sandbar on the Perdido is about as remote as one can get in this county without trespassing on private property.

The remoteness of a sandbar on the Perdido tends to create the illusion that one is far deeper in the wilderness than they actually are. The illusion will likely unsettle pavement and concrete pounders. It is, however, a pleasant illusion for a woods wanderer with a lust for wandering the woods.

There were a few signs that others use the sandbar but not nearly what I expected to see. We saw only one other person during our stay … a lone kayaker making his way down the river. https://www.alabamacanoetrails.com/perdido  

The chilly water of the Perdido creates an interesting micro-environment.

This micro-environment isn’t particularly noticeable during the day. It makes itself known at night. It cools down significantly at night along the banks of the Perdido. The micro-environment, where the river cooled air meets the warmer surrounding air, generates an unavoidable heavy saturating dew. Plan for that. Take along an extra layer of warmth in the cooler season. A warm blanket during the summer is advisable.

A lot has changed since the day when Nessmuk wandered the Northwoods.

The spaces for wandering the woods freely have greatly diminished. 

Yet, despite the losses, there are still pockets where we can escape the grips of modern times. There are still spaces where we can wander, relax, recover, and experience at least the illusion of something that existed long before our time.

I took along my camera and a GoPro to capture the trip. There is a link below to the Perdido River Overnight video on my David Kralik Outdoors YouTube channel.

Also, you can subscribe by email to receive notifications when new articles are posted here on the David Kralik Outdoors blog. The subscribe feature is in the right hand column. Fear not, folks. I do not generate spam mail.

Enjoy the adventure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw8FE63gTr0

Just Passing Through

They showed up early Friday morning.

I saw them when they arrived.

I was sitting in my camp chair drinking coffee and watching a lone Cormorant swimming around on the end of the pond where we were camped for the weekend with a group of friends that we often refer to as Tribe. It is called a pond. A thirty-acre pond, in my mind, is more akin to a small lake.

The morning warmed up quickly once the sun broke the horizon. Not the first hint of a breeze was stirring. The surface of the pond was smooth as glass.

They came from the North, circled once before lowering their landing gear, then touched down near the middle of the pond. That is where they stayed throughout the day. At times they would swim in tight circles. Clockwise. Counter-clockwise. At times they would swim in a straight line in one direction for fifty yards or so before turning about and then, in single-file fashion, retrace the duck paddled distance.

The Cormorant stayed close to our camp until late in the morning. I don’t know if it was some kind of longing for company or if it was out of curiosity. Regardless of the cause, it took the Cormorant half an hour to paddle its way to the small plump of ducks in the middle of the pond. It stayed with the ducks during the middle of the day. Slightly outside their circle-swimming. Always a short distance from them in their single-file paddling forth and back. 

Then, after mid-afternoon, the Cormorant returned to the end of the pond where we were camped.

Wallace Stegner, historian and novelist, makes a lot of sense in The Wilderness Letter (1960). He wrote, “we need wild places because they remind us of a world beyond the human.” It is in the wild places that we “have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.” Without wild places we would be “committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life.” Stegner concluded, “We simply need wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

Almost sixty years have passed since Stegner typed those words on what long ago became an obsolete typewriter. A lot has changed in sixty years. The termite-life has become tremendously more advanced and complicated over these near sixty years.

I pleasantly found myself both entertained and amused by the Cormorant and the ducks. I also found myself a little surprised by what seemed to be an irresistible attraction to watching them … something a little akin to a child’s interest in watching a fuzzy caterpillar for the first time crawling up their shirt sleeve. I felt that I belonged there in that day-long moment that would have bored most people to tears.

It was not only where I belonged. It was where I needed to be.

What happened to the ducks?

I looked for them Saturday morning and glanced out over the pond several times during the day. 

They were gone … apparently just passing through. A lot of migratory birds are passing through on their way to places farther South for the winter.

Just passing through.

That is all any of us are doing. We are all just passing through.

Enjoy the adventure.

Why I Am On Public Platforms

I was not afforded the pleasure of knowing either of my grandfathers. My maternal grandfather died when I was still in diapers. My paternal grandfather divorced my paternal grandmother in 1953 and moved to Florida where he was run down and killed in a very suspicious hit and run incident. I was a grown man, about eight years ago, when I first saw a picture of my paternal grandfather.

I have only a vague memory of my maternal grandmother. I was barely out of the toddler stage when she died. There are pictures of her. My mom, aunts, and uncles told stories about her and their father. Hardscrabble farmers … sharecroppers in the upper part of the State before moving to the lower part … where they managed to pull things together and purchase their own hardscrabble forty acres.

My paternal grandmother?

She lived next door to us in a little house that my dad built for her. I was a young kid in elementary school when she died. I walked over to see her quite often. She cared for me like a grandmother cares for a grandchild. I remember that much about her, and that our conversations … if you can call them that … were little more than a mess of pointing and grunting. She, and her husband, had immigrated from Czechoslovakia. She never learned to speak more than a few words of English. My dad was born in Minnesota and grew up bi-lingual. He saw no value in teaching us to speak the language, though when he and his siblings were together they carried on their conversations in what sounded like jibber-talk to me.

So here I am, all these years later, myself a grandparent. Shirli and I have eight blood-related grandchildren and another ten step-grandchildren. I never wanted to be called grandpa. I opted for the grand-title of Poppy. Maybe it is my futile attempt at escaping this age-related reality. Poppy, in my head anyway, doesn’t sound as old as grandpa or its other life-spectrum counterparts.

People use these modern self-publishing platforms for an assortment of reasons … blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and the like. Some uploaded keystroking and video footage and, in an instant, the world sees you and knows your business. On the one hand it is a good thing. On the other hand, it is scary considering the enormity and diversity of what can be found with a few keystrokes.

Why am I on these platforms carving out my own little corner in cyberspace?

The answer is basically three-fold.

I am a solitary hermit-type that thrives on solitude. I am not anti-social. I have grown, however, quite selective-social. It would be extremely easy for me to pull the plugs, drown my smart-phone, and disappear from view altogether except for the occasional wander into town to pick up supplies. These platforms keep me from becoming a total recluse and offer me a needed outlet for personal creative expression.

The encouragement factor figures into the three-fold answer. I want to encourage others to explore and adventure outdoors. All of us may not be able to hump a forty-pound pack deep into remote areas for days on end. All of us can discover and develop an interest in activities that take us at least to the edge of deep woodlands, mountains, and flowing streams where nature’s medicine can be absorbed by our senses. I personally need a lot of nature’s medicine. David Kralik Outdoors reflects my pursuit to satisfy my personal need.

The third part of the answer has to do with legacy. Those old black and white photos of my grandparents are merely cold and lifeless images of them. The stories told of them by their children will be forgotten with the passing of time. These modern printing and recording tools offer me a way to leave something of my living-self behind as a gift for my grandchildren … a lot more than a box of cold and lifeless photographs.

Note: I have added a subscribe feature in the right-hand blog column. By subscribing you will be sent an email notifying you when blogs are uploaded.

I also want to make a few keystrokes to express my appreciation and say thank you for including David Kralik Outdoors in your reading and YouTube viewing material. Your comments are always appreciated.

The adventure continues. Enjoy the Adventure!

Curing My Nature Anemia

I do not know quite what to think about this crossroad.

Maybe it is a normal part of the process. Maybe it is simply part of my personal born a Pisces personality complex that is coming into full-bloom. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that life has arrived at a point where I can allow myself the luxury of allowing it to accompany me. Maybe it is a combination of the three with a dash of this and a shake of that thrown in.

At times I find the crossroad a pleasant place to be.

At times it evokes a sadness that pulls me into a passing state of melancholy.

I never know which direction it will take me, and I have learned to simply go along for the ride.

The simple reality that I reckon with is that I am becoming quite nostalgic as I go through this aging process. It is odd how good memories unexpectedly float to the surface of life’s experiences and drift around in the flotsam that is always present. I cannot help but to notice and pay attention to the good memories.

Important stuff becomes more important and there is now time to focus on the things that are most important.

Important? More important? Most important?

Relative terms of measurement that mean something different in the lives of everyone.

We all set our priorities. The tragic thing about priorities is that all too often our personal priorities can turn into pits of despair. As Robert Burns put it, “The best laid schemes o mice an’ men gang aft a-gley.”

What I do outdoors is more than a hobby that has made its way onto my personal priorities list. It is, for me, more of a lifestyle choice.

I spent a large part of my adult life looking forward to my next occasional outdoor adventure. Other important life-matters seemed to always take priority over outdoor adventuring. Those outdoor adventuring occasions were few, short, and often far between. I shorted and deprived myself of something that I needed. I think, in retrospect, that by shorting and depriving myself of something that I needed, I also shorted and deprived others of a better part of me that was left neglected and malnourished.

Those days of neglected malnourishment are behind me. I no longer suffer from N.D.D. (Nature Deficiency Disorder).

Autumn is here. 

Trees are losing their leaves. The autumn wildflowers are really showing their colors and our crazy L.A. (Lower Alabama) heat and humidity has finally let up. It’s time to pull the Kodiak tent out of the shed and get our Fall Camping Tour on!

Shirli and I are headed to a group camp this coming weekend. We’ll be camping and making more good memories at the Open Pond Recreation Area in the Conecuh National Forest.

I consider myself a fortunate man. Part of the fortune is that I share life with someone that not only feels my need for the outdoors but also shares in my need for it.

Note: For those of you that enjoy YouTube, here's a link to my most recent video.

Payne Lake Overnight

Once A Man, Twice A Child

I stepped out of it a long time ago.

I grew weary of it.

All the wrangling. All the taking sides. All the hard and harsh feelings. All the name-calling and accusations. All the never ending struggling for prominence and dominance in the Right versus Left, Liberal versus Conservative, Religious versus Anti-Religious. All the divisive inter-religious bickering and all the finger-pointing issues that seemingly have no end. All the constantly having my innards in a turmoil. All of the doping frenzy fueling frenzy that keeps people emotionally intoxicated and stirred up.

I concluded that there is pitifully little that I can do about any of it. So why let the mess consume me and keep constantly wrecking my personal peace and serenity?

The conclusion was liberating and life-changing.

It was, thinking back to those earlier years, the generous spans of interest, time, and involvement that I invested in studying several Eastern and Western monastic traditions that began moving me out of the frenetic fray. Their practice of disassociation from the events of the world allowed them to more fully embrace and focus more intently and objectively on life and its most essential elements.

I still cling tightly to several of the monastic puzzle pieces. This particular disassociation piece is a jewel to never be parted with.

It was this piece of the puzzle that helped me rediscover and reconnect with that almost lost interior part of me that was, as a child and youth, cultivated and groomed by the familiar woods, creeks, overgrown fencerows, and meandering cow paths where I spent enormous amounts of time during my formative years. This piece of me, like the jewel mentioned above, is a piece that will never be parted with now that it has been rediscovered and reclaimed from beneath the assorted layers of life that kept it hidden for so much of my adult life.

I am approaching my 65^th Birthday. I am, at this point in my trip from start to finish, simply an older version of that young kid and I am still out roaming the woods, creeks, and other natural wild places that feed my sense of peace and serenity.

There is something that my mom would say of my dad once his mind began to go.

“Once a man, twice a child.”

I watched the development of his senility. It was sad to watch.

I think the sadder thing to watch, particularly in retrospect and now that I have joined the ranks of the Retirement Club, was all the years he spent from the time he quit farming and up to the time the senility began to take him.

He did very little.

He did not know what to do with himself, so he became immobile. His days were spent eating and napping in his chair before turning in to sleep all night. That was his daily routine for close to two decades. Perhaps he never rediscovered and reconnected with his inner kid. Perhaps his formative years, as the last-born son of Czech immigrants, were so traumatic that he didn’t want to reconnect with his inner kid. I can surmise but I cannot say with any certainty what was going on in my dad’s head. He kept a closed latch on a lot of things.

I can say what is going on in my head, though, and one of them is that I have better things to do in retirement than waste away in a recliner waiting on senility to take my mind. There are entirely too many fun and interesting things for us two oldering kids to do.

Our miserable summer heat and humidity is about behind us and our Fall Camping Tour is about to begin. There are places to go, sights to see, backroads to travel, trails to blaze, and campfires to be kindled.

Where will we be off to first on our Fall Camping Tour?

We are thinking about Arkansas.

There are a lot of roads. 

Just pick one and go.

The Lure of the Woods

I grew up wandering the woods.

Getting out there wasn’t an occasional thing.  It wasn’t a weekend, seasonal, or occasional thing. It wasn’t a thing to pass time away. It was a lifestyle thing. A walk through the woods was a daily thing.

Daily walks through the woods were mostly on account of some kind of work that needed doing … checking on fences … moving cows from day pasture to overnight corrals … closing gates … bringing the Jersey milk cow home for the night. 

Those normal daily chores always took a lot longer than necessary on account of all the woods exploring that somehow arose as part of the normal course of life for a boy that wasn’t more than 8 or 9 years old when he started wandering the woods solo.

It was, too, around that age that I graduated from a BB gun and began toting along that old .22 single shot or a .410 shotgun when out doing my woods chores. The scope and range of my woods wandering found itself largely expanded with that graduation.

I have the impression, looking back, that a lot of my peers and teachers in school believed I was maladjusted and deprived of the better things in life.

I wasn’t good at organized sports and was always one of the last ones picked for teams by peers in the schoolyard picks. That was embarrassing at first but I learned to accept and expect it as a matter of course. It was also an early on education in how the system works to reward and to punish based on some imagined preferential performance prescription. I’ve never been a fan of systems … regardless of their name or intention.

Systems create system-dependency and do nothing to promote self-reliance. Systems, in fact, depend upon this dependency to maintain their existence. The more self-reliant we become the more we jeopardize the health and welfare of systems.

School work didn’t interest me. It wasn’t that I didn’t have the intelligence to do it. It was boring. I was also surrounded by kids and teachers that I shared little in common with on a personal level. I spent a lot of time staring out the window thinking about things that were more interesting than reading, writing, arithmetic, and measuring up to and fitting into all the extracurricular amusements and games that quantified the lives of the townies I found myself forced to mingle with.

 Intelligence?

I was smart enough to figure out in a hurry just how much I needed to do to make good enough grades to keep my woods exploring, hunting, and fishing privileges from being restricted when the report cards were sent home to be signed and returned!

If, looking back, those childhood peers and teachers were right in believing I was maladjusted and socially deprived, I’m glad of it. Those maladjusted and socially deprived years laid down something deep in the fabric of my being that I’ve never been able to shake loose from.

I tried to put those roots behind me as a young adult and well into my adult years … tried to fit into the social scheme of things … and marry myself to the ideals and standards for success set forth by society. That may work for a lot of people, but it just never worked out for me. I was, for way too many years, miserable in a suit and tie and wing tip shoes. I was also gone from my woodsy outdoor roots for so long … so long on pavement and concrete sidewalks … that getting back out there away from campgrounds and campground amenities and deep into the deep woods with its natural inhabitants for a camp with minimal gear was more than kind of scary at first.

The truth is, though, that the deeper you get the deeper you want to get. The lure of the wild, and the deep peace and solitude it affords, is captivating if we will allow it to capture us. There is something in every clearing, valley, creek, and grove that stimulates the senses, offers different natural views, and opens wilderness windows of perspective that heightens the strength and enhances the aroma of the captivating lure.

I am of the opinion that it is this lure, and all that is inherently related to it, that is the real heart, frame, and meaty muscle that gives meaning to woodcraft or bushcraft or whatever else folks choose to call this thing that comes with a certain set of skills and tools surrounding it. However, every item in the toolbox … without the carrier being a captive of this lure … is merely infatuation that fast grows cold and is regularly replaced with the newest item brought to us by slick marketing.

 Skills? I can teach skills.

Tools? I can recommend appropriate tools that will stand up to the task without breaking the bank.

The lure?

We are surrounded by its curriculum. Its scent hangs heavy all around us. It reveals itself in every morning dew, in every sunrise and sunset, its aroma permeates every breeze, and crackles in every kindled campfire. Its effects are intoxicating and addicting.

I can talk about it. I can lead people into its arena. But that’s about all I can do.

The D.I.Y. Six Dollar Bush Pot

Hydration is an important health issue.

We do not give it a lot of thought as long as we are close to a faucet or can grab a bottle out of the cooler at the grab it and go store. Get away from the settlements and established parks and drinking water has to be either hauled in or processed from whatever sources you happen upon.

We need water to stay hydrated. We need water to flush toxins and other junk out of our systems. Without water we can be dried-out dead in 72 hours. We become debilitated and unable to function before we become dead.

My canteen holds a quart of water.

On a normal day I need to drink at least three canteens to keep hydrated. Let the summer heat come on like it does, along with sweat running out my pores like water through a sieve, and I need to increase that amount. That is easy to do when I can turn on a faucet. It is not so easy to do when there are no faucets and every source of water needs to be considered potentially suspicious.

I really like the Stanley cook pots. They are great for stewing up a small meal or boiling some water for tea or coffee. 20 ounces though is way short of the quart that it takes to fill my canteen. It is also a bit small for boiling a grown squirrel that would be too tough to chew if cooked on a spit over an open fire.

I pondered the cook-pot dilemma for some time and looked at some of the popular bush pot offerings that are be had. They are nice pots but the thrifty side of me balked like a mule at the price they go for.

I was in Walmart a few years ago picking up some things and found what I considered to be the perfect pot for my purpose. Stainless steel with a lid and holds a little shy of half a gallon. It was not in the pots and pans section. It was in, of all places, the pet section and made to hold dog treats.

The pot cost me a whopping $6.00.

My thrifty side latched onto it and brought it home.

The lid had a soft rubber gasket on it that I pulled off and threw away as soon as the pot entered the house. Two little holes were drilled, and a piece of metal coat hanger was attached as a bail.

A stainless cup with folding handles sits in the bottom of the dog biscuit pot. The Stanley pot sits inside the cup leaving room for stuff like a dish rag or pot holder.

The pot comes with some stamped embossing around it. Dog tracks.

I told Shirli that I thought about hammering out the embossing. She told me those were bear tracks and to leave them alone.

Yep.

Bear tracks.

That’s what they are.

This pot has accompanied me on a good many trips over the years. It is still serving its repurposed purpose. Sadly, though, I have never seen another one like it in the pet section of that chain store.