lawson's fork

I crave contact with the basic elements. I need mud on my boots, sun on my skin, rain on a jacket, or, better yet, water moving under a boat. Thermodynamics is fine, but gravity's the one natural law I can't seem to go too long without acknowledging.

Out here our house is turned to the linear wildness along the creek like a big ear. We listen for what happens in the timber and thick undergrowth below us with the fascination of someone sampling a new CD. If I hear a bird I don't know, I try to track it down for identification, adding its name to our "play list" of what this place might spin in our direction. I scribble the name in the back of an old field guide, a note as to what is passing by.

I'm a Wofford College English professor, and most of my classes are traditional, me in the front of the room, or at the head of a seminar table, writing on a blackboard, with students in rows of desks taking notes. The discussion is about books, and the issues rise from reading sentences, paragraphs, pages.