Emily II

     Woke up this morning dreaming about Groucho Marx.  Before that it was squirrels.  I've long thought dreams provide balance and guidance; but Groucho and rodents?  There's a problem there.  Either with me or the Great Beyond.  I'm leaning towards the Great Beyond.
     Laid there musing about Emily Dickinson for a few minutes.  Next thing I knew Mr. Miagi from "The Karate Kid" wandered in to give the poet advice, "Wax on, wax off."  Showed her the proper motions.  Anyhow, they struck up a relationship and now live on a fly-in lake in Alaska running a trapline in the winter and placer mining gold with a D-9 Cat in the summer.  Emily no longer waxes poetic about mosquitoes.  Finds animals are both to be admired and eaten.  Thinks her buddy Thoreau is a lazy no-goodnik who didn't have enough gumption to finish hoeing his bean field.
     Doesn't have much to do with wilderness canoe fishing, does it?  Neither does cleaning the cabin or moving leaves off the cleared half acre surrounding the cabin.  Then again, both do.  A clean, well maintained cabin adds pleasure to the experience of the woods.  Cleared land keeps the bugs down and the ticks off.  And looks so civilized having a clear patch among the trees and brush.  From the road passers-by see woods with a pair of red roofs peeking through.  Should they wander a hundred feet up the drive, a little Eden opens up.  Even has snakes, but no apple trees.  Had God left out that tree back in Eden, we'd still be living in the Middle East.  Good thing the tree was there, eh?
     Short story shorter, I didn't do anything remotely wilderness-y over the three days.  Did read a lot; Willa Cather and "Writing Blue Highways" by William Least Heat-Moon.  Cather's one heckuva story teller from the first half of last century.  Should you have read "Blue Highways" and enjoyed it, Least Heat-Moon's remembrance of the work and pain going into getting it in print is worth the time.
     Would have written a lot more this time but am stuck in the dark ages of pen and paper. I find scratching out the words uncomfortably slow.  And illegible.  Out of practice.  Can't say that's a good or bad thing.  I'm still trying to figure out how to write and am running out of time and brain.  Also a matter of correcting mistakes.  I make a lot of them.  So much easier cleaning things up electronically.
     At the moment I'm waiting on two things to write about and hoping for an unseen third.  There's a Boundary Waters trip in early June and me and Uncle Emil has a lot left to talk about when I get back from Vietnam.  The unseen third way's always been there.  Always will be.  And always comes as a surprise that I'd missed something so obvious.