Wilderness Blues- Ramblings from the Great Land

When I was growing up in Ohio, almost every Sunday for a number of years, my dad would load up the family and we'd go for a Sunday drive. At the time gas was fairly cheap- less than thirty cents a gallon. I remember my grandmother once pulled into a Sohio filling station and when she saw that gas was going to cost almost twenty five cents a gallon, she sped off in a huff. She'd pass a blue brick if she saw gas prices now. I paid $5.09 a gallon last week. Anyway, as I was saying, we went on quite a few Sunday drives. The most memorable would be to places like Mohican State Park near Mansfield, or Kingwood Center to look at the acres of flowers. When I was younger I kind of liked the short jaunts, as long as we were able to stop and look around. Without fail though I would have to pee about ten minutes after I stepped into the car. It didn't matter that I went before we ever left the house. I would stand over the toilet almost breaking out in a sweat trying to squeeze every ...

We finally made it back home to Alaska after almost three weeks of visiting family and friends. Dorothy had it right when she said, "There's no place like home." Even so, we still had a good time. I had the chance to visit some of the places I hadn't seen for over thirty years and it was comforting to know that some things don't change. A case in point is the Mohican State Forest in eastern Ohio. It's a land of rolling hills and clean water and the trees were in all of their Autumn glory. I took my wife and mom with me and even bought a three day out of state license to try a little fishing in the Mohican River- or maybe it's the Clear Fork- I'm not sure. In any event it's clean and supports a population of trout and smallmouth bass as well as rock bass. There may be other fish there as well, I can't remember. On this particular October day the weather was uncommonly cold and it almost felt like it could snow. We had brought along some food f...