News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
It's spring break here at Grove City College, so I got out for one last jaunt in search of steelhead before the warming weather sends them back to Lake Erie. I discovered that it's quite a challenge to cast when each guide on a fly rod is neatly stoppered with its own ice plug. A day on the creek is never wasted, but it did feel rather cold for "spring" break.
- In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays about poetry, parking, and electricity.
- Nadya Williams looks to sheep for some lessons regarding how to be a good follower: "A chief virtue of sheep is, indeed, that they are content with remarkably little, and—this is key—they are rooted and aware citizens of their locale."
- Ryan Davis enters a shed and contemplates the value of silence: "Here, in this shed’s unremarkable pool of silence, I am reminded of other places where silence stretched like an ocean. I happened upon one of those waning shores the previous year when I resided in the mountains of the high desert."
- John Klar cautions that many of those enthusiastic about lab-grown meat aren't addressing the root problems of our food system: "Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the 'right side of history' are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence on the corporations that have long damaged ecosystem and human health."
- Matt Miller reviews Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s In Thought, Word, and Seed and considers how we might read well in place: "If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives and reads in place, bringing my reading and my other work in the world closer together in the most literal, physical sense. For encouragement in my pursuit of that home field, I have Tiffany Eberle Kriner to thank."
A friend recently recommended Thomas McGuane's The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing. It is indeed a delightful book. Consider as evidence that the man who recommended it to me can't stand fishing and yet still finds it a wonderful collection of essays:
I was standing with my fly rod in the middle of a bunch of loose horses, looking off a bank into a deep, green-black pool where swam a number of hog rainbows. I had been there before, of course, and you couldn't approach this spot except to stand below where the slow-moving pool tailed out rather rapidly. The trouble was you had to stay far enough away from the pool that it was hard to keep your line off the tailwater, which otherwise produced instantaneous drag. You needed a seven-foot rod to make the cast and a twenty-foot rod to handle the slack. They hadn't built this model yet; it would need to be a two-piece rod with a spring-loaded hinge driven by a cartridge in the handle, further equipped with a flash suppressor. Many of us had been to this pool to learn why the rainbows had grown to be hogs who would never be dragged onto a gravel bar. They were going to stay where they were, with their backs up and their bellies down,eating whenever they felt like it. I had to try it anyway and floated one up onto the pool. I got a drag-free drift of around three-eighths of an inch and then went looking for another spot.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro