Daniel's GRS Blog

“One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am – a reluctant enthusiast….a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.”

-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Words to live by. Enjoy yourself. It’s Christmas time.

The above passage is from the essay “Etiquette and Freedom” by Gary Snyder.  Pick up some of his stuff. He’s a wise man.

Lunch Poems

I’ve had a lot of concepts for this blog. One of the ones that I put the most time and effort into developing was a blog from the point of view of a dog that got a hold of my computer, logged into my GRS blog, and fell in love with blogging. I would imagine the life of a blogging dog would be quite difficult. How is a dog to enjoy playing catch, or chewing on his bone, if he just sees these things as potential blog posts? How does a dog blog? With his paws? With a stick? Does he use voice to text software? Clair Nyrose’s dog was going to be the subject of my dog blogs.

I am kind of dissapointed that I didn’t create a better concept for this blog. All I came up with was 1 self conscious blog post about the time I wanted to blog from the point of view of a dog.

“I swear that we saw some winter chanterelles earlier. They were just on the side of the road.”

“Well, roll the windows down and we’ll drive really slow. Maybe we can spot them.”

There are winter chanterelles somewhere in this picture. Can you spot them?

It’s amazing what you’ll try to save an unsuccessful foray. Last week I went out with my Dad for what will, probably, be the last foray of the mushroom hunting season.  We were, as some mushroom hunters might phrase it, skunked. We found a few interesting fungi, but none of them were edible.

It wasn’t until the end of the day that we noticed that a strange mushroom that we had picked earlier in the morning was a winter chanterelle. Winter chanterelles look slightly different from your normal everyday chanterelle. You can identify them by a a small hole on the top of their caps. I have never tasted one, but according to All the the Rain Promises and More (undoubtedly the best mushroom book ever, and maybe the greatest book ever) they are quite tasty. We tried to find the spot where we had picked them, but the day was getting dark and we had to get back home.

Despite not finding anything, we had a good time. Sometimes there is nothing half so much worth doing as simply rummaging around in the woods. And, I am sure that we will never miss out on picking a patch of winter chanterelles ever again.

Last week my Dad and I spent a morning picking apples for Salem Harvest.

apple dad

Salem Harvest is an organization based out of my hometown in Salem Oregon.  Usually, a farm will only be harvested a handful of times during the harvesting season.  At the end of the season, what hasn’t been picked is left in the fields.  Salem harvest organizes harvesting parties to get people out to pick produce that would otherwise be wasted and donates the harvest to the food bank.  The best part is that you get to keep half of what you pick. We must of picked over a hundred pounds of apples. We managed to fill up our car and we donated a lot of food to the food bank.

The challenge once we got home was to find creative ways to eat apples.  We ate pies, dried apples, and made sauce.

Hello.  I do not know who you are, but you somehow ended up on my GRS blog.  Welcome.  If you found your way here, I would guess that you clicked on my name on the GRS site, or you were googling my name for some reason and it took you here. I am interested in why you did either of those things. If you see me in real life you should tell me the story of how you came upon my GRS blog. I would be interested to hear it.  Well, here I am in my cyber form.

Here is a picture of me, right now, blogging in my living room: