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Opinions, musings, ideas, pearls of wisdom

Book: The Earth is Enough
Author: Henry Middleton

I am along the banks of Snowbird Creek, not far from Sassafras Falls and Burntrock Ridge. Snowbird Creek is on the eastern flank of the Great Smoky Mountains and is full of wild trout, not people, which is why I am here. I enjoy trout. They are never disappointing company. They like the things I like - clean mountain streams, swift- moving water, wilderness. There's not much of it left.
Just a few minutes ago I let a fine brook trout go. The gorgeous and tenacious little brookies are the only native trout of these mountains. Spooky as a blind horse. Suspicious, intolerant, elusive, malingering. Fine, noble qualities. I am sitting on a massive slab of gray stone lodged near the creek's edge and enjoying the morning's rich silence. Another benefit of seeking out mountain streams and trout. The brook trout I released has disappeared into the creek's deeper waters. It slipped from my hand like a shadow moving across flat stones. Sunlight refracts off the water in layers as distinct as the strata deposited in stone. Yet the light is fluid, moving easily over the creak's surface, changing endlessly as it falls upon the side of the ridge, in the deep woods, on the galleries of stone.
Layers of light and wild trout and these mountains. Enough to fill a man's mornings, you'd think, and yet here I sit on this warm chunk of ancient rock thinking of that last little knot of umbilicus that is my navel. I worry about it from time to time, worry that the knot won't hold. I feel as if I'm leaking.