Amy Jane Beer

The change of season always makes me tired. I don’t know if it’s some sort of primordial downshifting, or I’m grinding my gears. I slept really deep last night, and late in the morning. My body is preparing for hibernation like it once grew gills briefly and tail. I don’t have a tail or gills, but the body goes through the evolution of the species, and there’s a great ancestral imagination that tells me faintly to hibernate, it’s getting cooler, it’s fall.

I started Rick Bass' memoir, read about his car coming off the truck hitch and taking a different route in Santa Fe, but switched to an adventure book about kayaking called The Flow. The woman writer is a badass, she's had a C-Section and she's waiting for her abdominal muscles to reconnect before she starts running again, but she can still kayak. Amy Jane Beer seems pretty cool on the back flap and the beginning keeps me reading unlike the Bass book, which isn't a putdown, it's just a putdown literally. I have a stack of books and I rotate through them and play the hot hand. Yesterday I read about sex addiction, the day before about the history of Barcelona FC, and the day before that about Titus Andronicus and race. Injecting a literary feel into my walking down to Willow Lake, injecting my spirituality and love of Green Tara into the man made body of water is perhaps a weirdness and affection, but I've become focused on a deity that works remove obstacles. It's all connected, compassion, wisdom, fearlessness. I meditate and it's both boring and a wild whitewater rafting trip. I've mostly done canoe stuff on rivers, the Sequatchie, the Potomac. I've done white water rafting the Nantahala and Ochoe, and a river in Ecuador. My friend bought an ocean kayak and I've done that on the sound. Kayaking is something I just never got to. It makes me feel like a piker. Her friend dies, and she keeps doing it, she keeps doing it after having a child, waiting for her abdominal muscles to reconnect.

Nature writing will always have to deal with jealousy. I wish I could take a caretaker job like Rick Bass that led him to the Yaak Valley Montana. I wish I could chase the flow. I'll join in on the adventure by reading the book, much more tame and perhaps lame, but admiring the great is what it's all about, I want to say, not really sure if I've ever had that thought before. 

I go to her twitter and like everything she's tweeted. I've only read a few pages, but I'm grateful to her. I used to read my sons Hatchet, they seemed to like that one. They stopped me from reading The Hobbit, because they were just too old. My father read it to me when I was really young, before I could really understand it. I've read and reread that one.

I watch the video of her getting the prize that's only existed for 10 years for nature writing. She lost her friend Kate, and I think about how Thoreau lost his brother, and how that got him writing a lot.

Showed Anandi my spot, and she pointed out the flowers were aster. The dog in the Thin Man movies with Myrna Loy is named Asta, not aster. I associate new names to help me remember.

Here's a kayak video I showed my daughter when she picked up The Flow, and said, "what's this?"