Wildcat Creek Journal

My favorite stories are the ones that give the author depth and serve as a window of insight into a writer's mind. Within the first few pages, it is important for me to develop a connection with the author, less I will quickly lose interest. I don't mean to sound like some type of literary elitist by any stretch– it's just me being honest.  Reading the first chapter in Paul Cañada's new book, The Promise , I felt that connection immediately. Paul tells of his childhood growing up in a military family, having a father in the Air Force, and the moves and re-adjustments that had to be made each time his father received new orders to relocate. I did not grow up in a military family, nor did my family move from place to place, but the relationship between Paul and his dad gripped me from the beginning. For me, this laid the groundwork for what was to come.  As his bio states, Paul Cañada is an award-winning writer and photographer with bylines in dozens of magazi...

Early morning sun catches my eye as it peeks over the horizon. It seems I am at odds with the world this morning. Already a crow has found my hideout in the tree branches, and pointed me out to his comrades as a spy for the human kind among the oaks. Only minutes later, the squirrel that emerged from the ball of dried leaves in a high fork betrays my location with a series of shrill barks, and I’m sure that every deer within twelve miles knows of my plan and will steer clear of this patch of woods from now until two hours after sunset this evening.  Once the alarm calls fade, all is quiet again, too quiet. It is always coldest after daylight, and I sit shivering, without so much as a wren or finch scratching around in the leaves, or hopping from branch to branch to entertain me. For two hours I sit with nothing but thoughts of a warm bed to occupy my time. Forlorn and desperate for some sort of action, I lower my bow to the ground and climb down from the tree. I need to...

Standing midstream, I peer down at the rocky bottom through strands of broken light, calculating my next step across the slick stones toward a deep run of swift water in the bend flowing around a gravel bar downstream. A six foot length of stranded log, at knee-height, is obstructing my path, so I choose my route accordingly, navigating my way through water barely shin-deep.  The juxtaposition of light and shadow, early morning sun beaming through the trees, glinting off water and stone alike, and the dark pockets where current seams merge, gives a false sense of assuredness of a path laid out before me. Allowing my feet to feel their way as they carry me along, I take my eyes off the bottom for a moment and examine the edge of the run, just as I reach the head of the captured log.  Before I have the chance to retrain my line of sight to the riverbed beneath my soles, my foot finds no hold on an oblong stone, sloped just enough to let my shoe slide the length of it...

I wake this morning, to find your scent still lingering on my skin. With sleep in my eyes, I try to shake the heady buzz from the hours of being entwined with you the day before. I feel your residual energy flowing all around me. I step into the shower just to feel the rivulets of water wash over my body. You are all I can think about this morning, and I know that I will not find peace until I return to your side. I am completely, utterly, and desperately obsessed with you. When I look upon you, I am captivated. I am enamored by your beauty, by your natural sensuous movements. I follow every curve, trace all of your soft edges with my eyes, immerse myself in the rise and fall of your breath. You whisper mysteries known only to the deepest parts of my consciousness, and the narrative you speak to my heart is as old as the earth. I have watched you suffer mistreatment at the hands of so many before. You have been taken advantage of, used and abused, stripped of your purity. I...

I finished the last of my coffee and read through some notes on scraps of paper in a shoebox by my chair. These scraps of paper I would empty out of my pockets when I got home from work most days. On these scraps of paper, I would jot down notes; sometimes single words that I would snatch out of the air to use at a later time, poems, entire stories, notes to people that I never intended to share with them.  Someday, I hope to either put some of these odds and ends together, or add them to a burn pile just so I can fill the box again. I read through things like this when I can't bring myself to write. Sometimes it helps to clear the fog, to lift my mood. Sometimes not. It comes and it goes. After a couple of hours moping around in a melancholic fog, I decide I need to get out of the house. It was 40 degrees and overcast, not the conditions I normally consider good fishing weather, but I could care less. It had been so long, I wasn't sure of what condition my fly boxe...

This morning a thick frost covers the ground, and wild geese echo through the hollow with a resounding cadence, ushering in daylight and what warmth it will bring with it as they spiral downward into the slough among the standing dead of flooded timber. Up on higher ground, robins and warblers and sparrows fuss and scratch in the leaf litter beneath the beeches, red cedars, and buckthorns. A bright male cardinal scales the branches of a holly tree, plucking selectively the bright red fruit that nearly matches the bird's own scarlet plumage. High in the top of a white oak on the hillside, a pair of gray squirrels chase and tumble up and down limbs and tree trunks, launching their weightless bodies from tree to tree, running a maze of intertwined branches, until another one joins in, and yet another. Alas, the struggle ends in a deadlock, and each returns to their business, digging in the deep leaves on the side of the hill and grinding teeth on the steel hulls of hickory...