Looking back, 2024 was on odd year for me. I generally wasn’t outdoors as much as in all previous years, I hardly picked mushrooms and I feel like I hardly fished. I didn’t even explore a great deal. Yet, it’s also been a good year and I have much to be thankful for and I improved my own situation in many ways.
Among things I didn’t do this year was blogging. Somehow, I simply neglected the blogs I’ve enjoyed posting on so regularly in recent years. And maybe this too was because I wasn’t outside all that much. I lacked inspiration. I’ve generally been pretty quiet and those who do follow my activities and writing may have thought I’d simply disappeared, becoming even more of a recluse than I ordinarily am.
All this being said, I still got outside. Early in the year, the winter didn’t offer ice that I could really trust so there was no ice-fishing, which was certainly disappointing. There was no snow pack in the higher elevations either to provide meltwater to the streams of western Pennsylvania. Without ice, I fished a couple of times for steelhead trout and a couple of times for walleye, but not a lot, and didn’t experience a lot of success either.
The morel mushrooms showed up in the spring but it wasn’t exactly a bumper crop and seemed short lived. From here, the mushroom season just went downhill. Rains came in late May and early June but then came to a sudden end, ushering in a dry summer. Chicken of the woods mushroom was found but was never abundant. The normally reliable wide range of bolete mushrooms hardly made an appearance and the chanterelles that normally turn patches of our leafy turf bright gold never showed at all. There was an exceptional two weeks in September though when enough rain fell to turn on the fungi, just for a bit, and I was able to graze off the abundance of the forest and cash in a very small commercial harvest of hen of the woods.
It may sound like the year was a complete loss, like nature wasn’t at all cooperative and that I must be pretty depressed about the state of things. This isn’t really the truth though. There have been years like this before and there will be again. There have been years of more rain than I’d like, more cold, more heat, less mushrooms, and less fish at times – for whatever reason. But these things are generally cyclical, moving in both short and long cycles. And, though I’m closely tied to the natural world, there were other things for this human to work on this year.
Incidentally, things weren’t a complete loss in the natural world. Against all odds, Susan and I took in a record berry harvest (mostly Susan). I found blueberries, which I almost never do in Pennsylvania, and I found a nearly endless local field of red raspberries, something else I almost never find. The bulk of our berries though were blackberries and black raspberries, a crop that we’ll be grazing off of till next berry season.
But the big story this year was nothing ostentatious or adventurous. The big theme this year was self-improvement in subtle, ongoing, incremental ways. No big headlines here about how I increased muscle mass by 30% in two months or how I invested in tech start ups now worth millions. I remained very consistent with my odd whole-body exercise program throughout the year, probably more consistent than I’ve ever been with any exercise program. And until the worst of the midsummer heat, I also remained consistent with a great running program that incorporated speed work for the first time in years and also a weekly long run, ranging up to twenty miles. I feel more healthy now than I have in years.
Though I won’t go into much detail here, it was also a prosperous year for me. I’m not by any stretch a wealthy person but I made progress this year on some of these practical matters and simply made a lot of money and saved a lot of money (with the caveat that I’m simply comparing this to past years of my own life rather than to the earnings of Michael Bloomburg, Elon Musk or Bill Gates). I began investing in new ways and my credit score (the kind of thing I seldom even think about) apparently couldn’t be better.
I can also claim that I read an awful lot over the last year and I’m better educated now than I was at the end of 2023. I read on authoritarians in general and on the international “Great Reset” agenda being forced on us all. I read about the geology of the western U.S. and about agates in particular. I read on the history of political thought in the U.S. I read about fish and mushrooms and libertarian political theory – all the usual and a good bit more from diverse perspectives and in large doses.
But the best thing I did in 2024 was write. And this doesn’t mean blogging – this means that I’ve produced another book of over 500 pages. Just how long a read this will be has yet to be seen.
Many of you know that 2021 was a much different kind of year for me. During the Covid tyranny of that year, I walked across the United States, starting at the beginning of April and finishing in mid-December. I saw what lies west of the Mississippi for the first time and I walked myself from Fidalgo Head on the Washington coast to the mouth of the Potomac – Washington, D.C.
On June 15, 2023, while staying at Helvetia, West Virginia, I began writing a book on this sojourn and on American Liberty. The working title remains “The Long March of Liberty.” I worked through most of 2024 and finished a rough draft in August. There’s much work still to be done and I’ve got my sights set on August of 2025 for completion.
Yet, my year wasn’t truly without adventure. Having completed my rough draft, I treated myself (and Susan) to a month of hunting agates across the American northwest. Actually, it was a long-planned-for trip having to do with visiting good friends and tying up some loose ends with the book but, at the last minute, agate hunting was thrown in, a search that became dominant if not something of an obsession. This was very new for me, but every so often, since childhood, I’ve gone on one of these rock binges. I’ll get over it, now safely back in the land of boring rocks, but I do have 500 or so nice rocks to cut and ogle this winter.
Expect a bit more on this soon.
Woodrise 