If you\u2019re like me, when familiar and unfamiliar intersect, nonsense occurs.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m driving with my brother from North Carolina to California. He\u2019s a general practice physician in the Navy and his new orders required the move. His wife and kids flew and it\u2019s up to us to get the two family vehicles to the west coast.<\/p>\n
So of course I want to fish as much as possible. And while the journey has been filled with sightseeing \u2013 mountains, rivers, scenery, shirtless dudes in Arkansas driving combines down the highway \u2013 it\u2019s been the wildlife that has arrested most of my attention.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve seen dozens of deer, a couple really cute fawns, armadillos and of course trout. In an area of the Blue Ridge Mountains where a 10-inch trout is considered large, I caught a rainbow just under that. In the Smoky Mountain National Park, I hooked into a brown trout that would have cracked doubled digits, but I lost it. (My brother documented my despair from shore.) But it\u2019s the snakes and ticks that have the most attention.<\/p>\n
I find myself walking through the woods utilizing my bear tactics.<\/p>\n
\u201cHey snake, hey snake.\u201d<\/p>\n
It sounds stupid, but it\u2019s what I know. If you\u2019re in the wild and you don\u2019t want to sneak up on something you don\u2019t want to eat you, you make your presence known.<\/p>\n
Yeah it\u2019s for bears, but I don\u2019t want to provoke anything. I don\u2019t want anything to eat me, so I\u2019m making my presence known so I don\u2019t stumble upon a snake and her cubs or a pack of ticks.<\/p>\n
The rocky shores of these rivers are not at all dissimilar to my rivers of Southeast, but so much more lurks in the cracks and hidden in the grass. I am not a hypochondriac or a chronic worrier but I\u2019m totally wondering if that sensation running down my leg is a bead of water now that I\u2019m not wading as deep, or if it\u2019s a critter.<\/p>\n
I think, \u201cWhy would a snake swim over and bite a human who was doing nothing but minding his own business and catching brown trout?\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the same thing we tell Lower 48ers about black bear being more scared of us than we are of them, to which some of them reply, \u201cWell, how do you know?\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s scarier for ticks though. If you\u2019ve been set upon by a pack of ticks, you don\u2019t even know until your brother calmly says, \u201cHey look at that\u201d as if he\u2019s pointing out an innocuous cloud shaped like a smiley face. He\u2019s extracted ticks from humans. I haven\u2019t. As far as I am concerned, all ticks have Lyme Disease and the thought of a tick \u201cthrowing up into my blood stream\u201d if I try to burn it off once it\u2019s burrowed into my skin makes me want to get back to my Alaska rivers, where the only thing I have to worry about is a 500-pound bear.<\/p>\n
In the meantime, my mental column writing has been interrupted by the 18 inches of brown trout that just took my fly.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Jeff Lund lives and writes in Ketchikan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re like me, when familiar and unfamiliar intersect, nonsense occurs. I\u2019m driving with my brother from North Carolina to California. He\u2019s a general practice physician in the Navy and his new orders required the move. His wife and kids flew and it\u2019s up to us to get the two family vehicles to the west […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":7,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-10030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-arts-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10030","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10030"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10030\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10030"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=10030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}