Back in the cabin after five wet days camping
five and a half miles back in these wildlands—

beside the long shifting beaver meadow kept open
since the loggers left their flooded “flowed land”

and its rotted log dam gave out soon afterward
—the pungency of wet wool drifts to the corners

of the front room as the fresh fire kicks up
when someone picks up your wet pack

whose surprising weight pulls them off balance
to tell us how what we don’t know while walking

can always come clear later like the brook trout’s
—you hope—first tentative tugs on your fly line

ground-truth the atavism of the limbic brain
to send you back to the city renewed

like Antaeus as maybe your father once said
while he taught you backpacking’s rudiments.

Read More Poems From The Adirondack Almanack HERE.

Edward Zahniser

Ed Zahniser retired as the senior writer and editor with the National Park Service Publications Group in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. He writes and lectures frequently about wilderness, wildlands, and conservation history topics. He is the youngest child of Alice (1918-2014) and Howard Zahniser (1906–1964). Ed’s father was the principal author and chief lobbyist for the National Wilderness Preservation System Act of 1964. Ed edited his father’s Adirondack writings in Where Wilderness Preservation Began: Adirondack Writings of Howard Zahniser, and also edited Daisy Mavis Dalaba Allen’s Ranger Bowback: An Adirondack farmer - a memoir of Hillmount Farms (Bakers Mills).

View all posts by →