Riches New and Old…

Posted on June 10, 2013 by waterhigh

Something Old

We just celebrated a 90th birthday in the family. One of the “Fennster’s” has a newborn. Treasures all.

Get a new hat, custom fit.

If you head west in search of the chest this summer, remember to enjoy the sights along the way—just in case you don’t go home with the gold or bronze. Find some other nuggets or gems to share.

At least take some pictures so when you approach 90, you’ll have something to jog your memory.

Old barn in an ancient valley

Meadowlarks and “Flutterbys”

Posted on May 31, 2013 by waterhigh

The most beautiful birdsong is that of the meadowlark. I miss them. I’m a hundred plus miles distant from where I grew up. Even twenty-five miles away from the farm, and twenty years later, the song was not the same. It was truncated, not as sweet somehow.

I can’t imagine they’d make very good eating, but I won’t judge what hunger necessitates. (See the TTOTC book and One of These Things is Not Like the Other.)

Lewis and Clark, other early explorers, traders, and the emigrants that followed, even contemporary travelers, have found themselves in dire straights in cold mountains and hot deserts.

This image was selected as a picture of the week on the Malay Wikipedia for the 1st week, 2010. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I know a woman who didn’t learn until she was nearing fifty that her father had spent a year in Stateville for stealing a chicken. Four kids to feed. Had lost a farm and home due to fire before the Depression hit. Even so.

She remembers at four or five overhearing adults discussing an eviction. One of them saying, “Well, I can’t kick them out in the cold.”

Purple Prairie Coneflower

Summer always returns. Here we have Indigo buntings, hummingbirds, cardinals and vultures. Prairie flowers and butterflies galore. (At least, until the chemicals and transgenics get them.)

I’ve never known hunger. Not like that. And I hope our children never do. It’s so much nicer when they can enjoy and observe the “flutterbys”.

“If Robert Redford had ever written anything….” Forrest Fenn

Posted on May 30, 2013 by waterhigh

Robert Redford in 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) ( Sorry I missed this event. I love Madison.)

When I returned my armload of TheThrill of the Chase-related library books yesterday, I thought I’d check the history section again. It’s about 4 1/2 feet long, but has had an amazing amount of titles I could use in the chase.

After a minor delay (they’d rearranged their shelves), I found 5 more books to check out that I hadn’t seen before. I suspect someone else in this county is also on the TOTC hunt and had just returned them.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when they landed on a young Robert Redford. Serendipity strikes again. Important Literature. I won’t mention the title, but it was sub-titled A Journey Through Time. Does that not resonate, fellow Fennsters?

The book is full of photos of a trip on horseback that Redford took in the Rocky Mountains (more than 300 miles west of Toledo) and some fascinating anecdotes, historical and otherwise.

English: U.S. Postage: Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1954 Issue-3c. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Currently, I’m thumbing through a book, a 1979 publication by the National Geographic Society, and taking copious notes. And then there’s one on Lewis and Clark.

Another of the books on that same history shelf is on fly fishing. I should probably study that before I head west.

My husband/fiance/boyfriend at the time tried to teach me how to fly fish.

Putting In

One of the problems was that we were in a canoe on a lake in Wisconsin. (A friend dubbed the plastic orange-ish Coleman “a barge with points.” It did have stability in its favor.)

We’ve since bought fly rods. I’ve got waders, needed for another purpose. I picked up an assortment of flies. I watched my Dad fly fish. Am I ready for a chalk stream in the Rockies? I just hope no one will be video-taping.

Serendipity

Posted on May 21, 2013 by waterhigh

The morels and asparagas already gone, I wandered a washed field on Mother’s Day afternoon and found a trove of arrowheads, mostly pieces. Like gold and fish, they are where you find them. I think luck plays a part, but also some logic and imagination. To find Forrest Fenn’s The Thrill of the Chase treasure, it will take all of the above. And research. He says the lucky finder will be able to walk right to it, deliberately.

And so, we seekers continue our research and refine our plans. A simple Venn diagram (see Wikipedia) is a series of overlapping circles yielding useful data. A Fenn diagram is going to look more like a flow chart

Flowchart (Photo credit: BWJones)

branching off each time a clue has more than one solution. There are so many diagrams because no one knows where to begin. Well, we might think we do.

I thought at first it would be a simple fill-in-the-blank game. Decide where the warm waters halt, where to put in, and what the blaze is. Okay. But ‘halt’ has many meanings, likewise ‘warm waters’, even ‘warm’. And then you start to wonder, what does ‘it’ even mean!

A couple weeks ago, I came up with an utterly unique answer for “where warm waters halt”. This week, I even found a butterfly connection.

So, maybe the Chase isn’t keeping me away from the internet, but it has gotten me into the library, especially the history section. Here’s to all your discoveries made along the way. Enjoy.