Girls in bikinis pick wild blueberries

We went hunting for some wild blueberries the other day and found a ton near the Blue Ridge Parkway. (That's as close as I will come to giving the location away). As we picked away, people would slow down to see what we were doing since we were still visible from the road. My reaction was to turn my back, to give the impression I was doing something more private than picking blueberries. Folks have been known to slam on the brakes and rush up the hills to get the berries you had intended to pick yourself. The ruse works. Nobody stopped.
I had meant to include some blueberry health tips in my outdoors column Saturday but got to writing about fishing and forgot about writing abut the blueberries.
We had intended to make a pie with about 3 cups of the berries, sugar and cornstarch but Mrs. Koontz could not find a piecrust that did not include lard (pig fat), so she got this little tart shells, which are cute but as I left Tuesday to come back to work they had still not been filled with blueberries and cooked in the oven and cooled and covered with whipped cream.
You think there are any left at the cabin?
Well, you gotta have faith...
Oh, yeah, we chased those girls in bikinis away.

Wild song about fishin' blues

Thought I would try to add this to the web site since it is about fishing and I love to fish, especially for wild trout in the wildest of places.

Hope this works.

The Wild One as a Simpson character

Well, how do I look as a guest on the Simpsons? I only had room for one of my dogs and one of my cats (the others were watching another show).

They have this neat Web site where you take a photo of yourself and change it into a Simpsons' figure.

Just google simpsonizeme.com and have it. It's fun.

But I have my doubts about the importance of a good photo or even a photo of yourself.

I made three, including two co-workers, with just my photo. You do all the work putting the pieces together until you get the hair, glasses, turtleneck shirt or whatever and so on.

It's good clean fun (is that an oxymoron?)

The scary thing is I pretty much resemble this guy, though I did clip the ragged part of my beard this morning.

Go ahead, give it a try.

Bear walks on the wild side

Last week while coming down route 276 off the Blue Ridge Parkway, I looked up to see the funniest looking dog I've ever seen loping across the road about 200 feet ahead. He really did have a funny gait, kinda clumsy but cute. When he looked up my way, I realized it was no doggie. It was a black bear, which of course is not that unusual in the Pisgah National Forest, and he just kept on getting on, quickly disappearing up the bank and into the forest.

My friends in the city of Asheville have spotted more bear in their backyard than I have in the National Forest, but then where I live there are more trees for the bears to hide behind than in the city.

Well, I did not get a photo of Mr. Bear. He would not stand still long enough. Plus, I didn't have the camera.

But I did want to put something wild on the site, so I put in this photo of a falcon taken just over the hill near Courthouse Falls. He knew how to sit still for a photographer.

I got the trout fishing eagle photo from a friend via e-mail and just can't resist showing it all. Wish I could fish like that. All I have is a fly rod.

Birds on the wild side

While taking photos of the mountains from the Blue Ridge Parkway, I notice a pretty blue flower down the bank from where I was standing. I zoomed in with the camera and snapped a couple of shots. I then went on with my usual routine and looked for a place to fish.

When I got home and downloaded the photos of the day, I noticed that my blue flower was in fact an Indigo Bunting, a brightly-colored bird.

It is not so much that the bird is unusual or rarely sighted, it is not. They are everywhere.

It's just that it fooled me so well while I was snapping the pictures.

He didn't even try to blend in, like most other wild things, to survive. In fact, he stood out.

Red lizard walks on the wild side

Say hello to Larry the Lizard, a little scarlet colored reptile I found the other day in my yard. Cute, huh?

I let him go in the high grass, hoping that would be enough to keep him safe from the cats. I thought about putting him in a terrariam, but the cats would get into that too.

Walking on the wild side of ideas

A fishing column with little to do with fish.....

With thoughts of rivers in my mind and a bottle of water in my hand, I decided to take the Blue Ridge Parkway Monday afternoon.

It’s usually a beautiful drive to the cabin, and the sky was full of cottonball clouds puffed up against a cerulean background, a perfect day for taking photographs.

I had a few hours to kill.

Why not sail along with the dips and rolls of the two-lane scenic roller-coaster highway, drink in the sweet summer air and catch a few brook trout at Graveyard Fields?These are things I take for granted.

The higher into the clouds I drove, the darker the clouds became. A light mist sprinkled the car’s windshield.

My photogenic clouds began to lose their luster and by the time I hit above 3,000 feet, the sky was gray as a dull rock. The clouds kept spitting on my car with a steady, indifferent drizzle.I gulped some of the bottled water. I expected the rain to get worse so the day’s flyfishing, which included a fair hike into the valley where the trout were, would be ruined.

I like comfort.Where I was headed is rainforest wet, with 70 inches or more precipitation a year. Riding high into the clouds, I was as surrounded by water as if in a pool.

Everything was wet.These also is something I tend to expect and take for granted.It’s not like this everywhere, though. There are places, I had been reminded Sunday, where life’s most precious requirement is rapidly dwindling or gone. There are once mighty rivers in this world that have all the depth of spit on a rock.

So what? What can one person do about it?This has nothing to do with flyfishing and everything about caring about others. The story of Ryan Hreljac is inspiring: As a first grade student in Canada about 10 years ago, Ryan learned from his teacher that there were children dying in Africa because there was no clean water to drink.

Ryan did not think that was right.So, the little boy in Canada saved his money. After four months, he had $70. Ryan kept doing household chores to help support nonprofits like WaterCan and Free the Children.Ryan never stopped.

Today, his little effort has swollen to a million-dollar organization — Ryan’s Well Foundation. (www.ryanswell.ca/)To date, the foundation has helped pay for 266 wells in 12 countries serving 435,343 people in Africa.That’s nearly a half-million human beings.

That’s awesome.That’s the difference one person can make.I feel puny.

I thought about Ryan as I gulped the last of my bottled water. I climbed higher into the clouds while the insolent drizzle washed over the mountains.

Water is just one battle in the war against world suffering. The United Nations calculated that if the developed nations’ population spent just 0.7 percent of their incomes, more than 500 million people could be lifted out of poverty and 300 million would no longer suffer from hunger.

The lives of more than 30 million children under the age of five would be saved. The Millennium Development Goals www.erd.org/mdg include eradicating poverty and hunger, fighting diseases like malaria and AIDS, reducing child mortality and promoting primary education.

That seems like a big piece of pie to bite into. This was all too much to swallow at once as I searched for a break in the clouds, a tiny slice of blue with perhaps a ray of sun peeking through.

I was ready to catch trout. I finally caught a couple, lost a couple and then left my fly in the trees as the light went out. Life is good in the mountains of western North Carolina.

And then I paused. It is not this good in some other places, I thought, but I am just one person.

And what can just one person do?