It’s 7:15 on the morning of October 19th, and there’s frost on the hood of my truck at the gate of an old logging job off Route 171 in Ossipee. The gate’s been chained since the loggers pulled out in 2021, which suits me fine. What they left is five or six years grown now:…

There’s a brook four miles from my house that I’ve fished maybe two hundred times. It’s small enough to step across in most places, it holds nine-inch brook trout and a lot of alder brush, and I could tell you where most of its pools are with my eyes closed. I have driven past it…

I sold smoked trout and wild grape jelly at the Wolfeboro farmers market for four summers, and the first year I lost money and told everyone it went great. The second year I did the arithmetic in March instead of October and it went much better. Here’s the arithmetic. Photo by Surya Travel on Pexels…

Every August there’s a week when the river gets down to a trickle and half the anglers in the state declare the season over. The fish are still in there. They’re just in a bad mood and living in a third of the water they had in June. Low water is a puzzle with a…

I’ve been emptying my pack onto the kitchen counter on Sunday nights for twenty years, which is a habit my wife finds funny and I find necessary. The pile has gotten smaller. What’s left has earned it. This is a day kit, the one that goes with me whether I’m trout fishing the Pemi, cutting…

The first time I hiked the Ammonoosuc Ravine trail in early November, the parking lot at the base was 45 degrees and sunny. At Lakes of the Clouds, an hour and a half later, it was 19 with a 40-mile-an-hour wind coming across the ridge. Same day, same mountain, twenty-six degrees of difference. That’s shoulder…

The woodstove has been running since the last week of September and by the middle of February I have made every mistake possible at least twice. That’s what this is: what I’ve learned from twenty-two winters of heating with wood in a drafty New Hampshire farmhouse, written down so my kids can ignore it after…

There is no such thing as a three-person canoe. There are two-person canoes that a marketing department counted differently. I say this with feeling because I own one. It’s a 17-foot aluminum, the old Grumman style, and the catalog when I bought it said three adults. The sticker on the hull said three adults. What…

The alarm goes off at 3:40 and I lie there for a minute wondering whose idea this was. Mine, apparently. I wrote it on the kitchen calendar back in February, when forty degrees sounded like a gift instead of a chore. By 5:15 I’m standing on the gravel bar below the Route 153 bridge on…