Wiser Beasts & Borrowed Color

Small Stream Fishing in a Haunted Woods

It was so unseasonably warm the farm felt haunted. The late October maples and oaks, now barren, swayed in the warm wind like bone chimes. Limbs knocking into each other with hollow tones and pelting acorns down like mean kids throwing pennies off bridges.

The lack of color and fading daylight swirling with the 76°evening made upstate New York feel wrong. Walking down my mountain road was akin to strolling in the eye of a tundra hurricane; a humid, unsettling, calm surrounded by chaos you can’t understand in a place it doesn’t belong.

Which is also how I feel as a homesteader with 24/7 access to world news and politics witnessed from a life so small I rarely travel 10 miles from my doorstep, and yet I feel the anxiety of terrors and uncertainties across the world.

I don’t have to explain why things are so stressful. Why these last few weeks have felt like years, even to those of us not worried about money or politics. There is this low hum of “the just before” circling like vultures to anyone paying attention. And the fact I am in a tank top and sunglasses—walking down my mountain road with a fly rod like it’s July—is as existentially concerning as it is pleasant. It shouldn’t be like this a few days before Samhain, but it is.

So I am going fishing.