August 10th—Saturday—the last one of 2019 and until the end of February next year when there is no hunting season open, so we can view it as the final weekend of languishing. A week hence and squirrels will open another period of going to woods, fields, and waters to seek various game animals and birds.

I am strolling in my Rows Grove in a mood as mellow as I can muster these days. The Rows Grove is an environment of my making, a manicured woodland that was once open cropland where we grew tobacco in a long gone age. It amazes me—even disconcerts—to gaze upward into the walnuts and oaks and realize that I once held them in my hands as seeds—nuts and acorns. Their growth has consumed my best years and brought me into my life’s decline and twilight.

Canopies are thinning because of drought and I can see that the crop of walnuts is light, but there are more greenish globes among the leaflets than I had thought. It is good to see walnuts hanging against blue sky. The Rows is a place that inspires contemplation in the quiet mid-morning stretch and in most any time of day I walk here.

Earlier today I fished for bass. It was the sixth consecutive day that I fished. I caught fish every day. I began the week with a four-pound catch, had a three-plus Wednesday, and another three-pounder this morning along with five other keeper-size largemouths. This morning’s fish, a full 18 inches, was the biggest I have taken from that lake, and I have caught many from it, even during the winter months. It has been a great year for my angling, and it is ongoing. In my current mood I can taste the sweet just a mite more strongly than the bitter. The bitter never goes away but sometimes it is less astringent.

I feel the first subtle hint of fall, a barely perceptible sense that the seasonal equilibrium has shifted a mite, that summer, though having time left in its rule, saw a few gray hairs with the sunrise and has begun to walk with halting steps when its days rise later from rest under the eastern horizon. Liberation is coming, for anon age and cold will strip from the woods the foliage that suppresses vision and vistas, and I almost feel my old spirit reviving as my memory goes into a spontaneous scan of fifty-something Augusts and flash-runs uncountable images of hickory-nut trees gone to time and storms and too many scenes lost to the hands of strangers, but the drive behind that old spirit lacks force enough to be as I would wish it.

In this my fourth afterword season beyond the fifty additional ones my father predicted as he was dying in 1965 that I would walk these hills, I have loved my rod and reel better than my rifle, but will not forsake the rifle when the dawn comes in a week. I will enter the dripping woods of the East Country where heat will be my constant tormenter. Spiders will have webs across my uncharted paths and I will not see them until I feel their wet stickiness across my face. I will scan the shadowy canopy with diminished eyes for betraying limb movement; ears that too many season of gunfire have dulled will filter woods sounds for breaks in the cadence of falling dew and the sharp click and grind of teeth on green hickory-nut hulls. The gentle shorelines of ponds and small lakes are more comfortable venues in which to search for satisfaction and meaning, but I must step away from them for a while, or lose the person I have always been beyond recovery.

I will walk once more in wild familiar places, knowing and grieving for so many others where I will never walk again. I stroll to search for solace in this pleasant grove that is one of my last bastions. I do not know what I will find in the woods. I treat them as a green-wrapped surprise gift and each hunt as a ritual of package opening. Next Saturday is an event that begins for me a long process that stretches through three seasons that are all different in savor. It will take me from the search for subtle cutting in dark tree shades to the color of October and shuffling in fallen leaves to the bare winter timber and the tree-barks of companion dogs.

Another Saturday will bring the beginning of those days and they will pass inexorably in determined parade, giving and withholding whatever they will. Much of what is in store for me is difficult, involving hard upward treks into places no one else goes anymore until November deer season. On this Saturday forenoon with the new memory of bass’s fighting vibrations fresh in my hands, I can welcome what’s coming with a gladsome heart.

Sam Bevard
https://maysville-online.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/web1_Sam-Bevard_2-2.jpgSam Bevard

Sam Bevard