I’ve had a friend shoot and kill a five-foot rattlesnake I didn’t see after I must have walked right over it. I’ve gotten my butt chewed out for shooting birdshot too close to a stock tank with people fishing. I’ve been stuck in a canoe during a tornado warning. Some of them I learned the hard way or the getting lucky way. I learned a lot of lessons about how to not get yourself killed. My kids still tell that story at my expense, laughing.Īs beautiful as the Hill Country is, it taught me a lot about life and death. I have a “snake reflex.” One evening, a mouse ran through some dry brush and sent me jumping ten feet into the air. But even after all these years, I have not recovered from learning how to move through brush and grass and water in Texas. Instead of a snake-bite kit, people here carry bear spray. Up here in Canada, there are not many snakes and almost none of the few around are poisonous.
Every evening, my kids and I went to gather firewood. This past summer we took a family vacation to a trout lake in the Okanagan. I’ve seen a lot of country and I live in a natural paradise, but I still dream of the Hill Country. When the San Saba River is swollen with fresh water and the Bluebonnets and Indian Paintbrush are in full bloom, just before the summer heat sets in - there is nothing more glorious to me than this. Dove and deer season, hunting for rabbits on Sunday afternoons, spotlighting at night, fishing creeks, rivers, stock tanks, and lakes, I did it all.
It was glorious.īut, truth be told, nothing speaks to me like the Texas Hill Country. I studied in a small town nestled in the Austrian Alps for a semester, with fat delicious trout in every pool of every stream that ran through town (I may have caught a few of them by moonlight). In the summers of my youth, I spent a lot of time in Southwest Colorado, fishing rivers and lakes and running through meadows. All of this, mind you, is visible within a single view on a clear day. I am a short walk away from vistas of not-so-distant snow-capped mountain ranges, the Salish Sea and gulf islands, and beach shorelines that run into temperate rain forest with giant trees and ancient ferns. Every morning, I drink coffee as bald eagles fly outside my apartment window, symbols of freedom in my American imagination. I am writing from Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” Benjamin Franklin, Constitutional Convention, 1787
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