Lake Superior was three blocks from where I slept growing up. I learned to understand cold water before I learned long division.
My father owned a fourteen-foot aluminum Lund with a five-horse Evinrude. Saturday mornings, May through October, we were on the water before six. He never explained what he was doing when he scanned the surface before we launched. He just did it, and I watched, and eventually I understood that some things require your whole attention. That was the education. Everything else came later.
Forty years of writing about the outdoors. A small daily in the Upper Peninsula, a conservation magazine based in the Midwest, a long run with a literary quarterly for serious anglers and hunters that I consider the best stretch of my working life. Fifteen years as outdoors and golf editor at a regional magazine in Des Moines. National outlets for hunting, fishing, and golf along the way. I came to golf late, at thirty-five, and was wrong about it in a way that opened a door. I play to a seven handicap now. I have no interest in getting it lower.
I write about the same things I have always written about: mornings on the water when the light is still low, rounds played on courses that have never tried to impress anyone, the specific cold of pre-dawn air versus the cold that comes in when the wind shifts in the afternoon. The push cart I switched to when my knees made the case. The way a hole you have played forty times can still refuse to tell you how to play it.
I do not write about what nature taught me. I write about what I noticed. The lesson belongs to you.
Live outside Traverse City on twelve acres of maple and birch with my wife Patty, a plant ecologist. I write in a converted barn heated by a woodstove. No internet connection. I drive to the house when I need it. I consider this arrangement essential.