A Retiring Fellow

Some years back I got a friend request on Facebook that surprised me. It was from a well known movie producer. Now, this had nothing whatsoever to do with my movie deal with Warner Brothers at that time (for my novel, THE FLOCK). At least I don't think it did. It was never mentioned.

I enjoyed corresponding with him from time to time, and I always got a kick out of his posts about has fascinating career and how he ended up producing movies. And he had great stories about famous writers, directors, and actors who had created the movies he produced. He was the kind of interesting and famous friend you never think you are going to make on Facebook.

After a couple of years, though, he began to complain that he had too many Facebook friends and that he was going to start paring down the list. I seem to recall he had a couple of thousand at the time which actually isn't all that many in the scheme of things. What he said he wanted was a few hundred people that he felt made his experience on Facebook fun, and with whom he could actually exchange ideas and stories.

He was one of the very few people on the platform that I worried about not seeing anymore. But he would text me from time to time to assure me that I'd made the cut. This went on for about a year as he shed friends.

One day he started up a conversation about work. Retirement came up. I was still several years away from retirement. Close enough that I could taste it and wanted the day to come so that I wouldn't have to punch a clock and stress myself out by keeping myself from punching managers or supervisors. I mentioned to him that I thought everyone should be given the opportunity and pension to retire by age 50. I thought that was a reasonable amount of time to toil away for the capitalist system and then kick back and enjoy twenty to thirty-something years of fun.

This idea upset him. I mean...he actually got angry. I never would have figured it, coming as he did from the counter-culture of the 60s and early 70s. But it did piss him off.

A few days later I noticed that I was no longer on his friends list. I suppose at that point he must have been actively looking for reasons to shed anyone and everyone to get down to his magic number of Facebook friends of 400 or so. In the end, I didn't make the cut, as he had put it. I must admit that I missed his stories. He was pretty cool.

I finally did retire. Being retired is glorious. Fuck working. If you don't have to work you shouldn't do it if it's making you miserable and you have the means to give up your job. I worked from my teens until I was 62 years old. That was freaking long enough. I know lazy bastards who do things like leech off of their parents and make their wives support them. I've always worked. For the past ten years that I did work all I could think of was making sure that I could retire at 62. I was freaking finished.

And I think of my old Facebook friend and I wonder what it was about the idea of people being able to retire on a government pension at 50 that pissed him off so much. Maybe he was just a right wing curmudgeon with the aura of the counterculture about him that was totally false. I'll never know. Not only did he cease to be friendly with me via Facebook, he subsequently died.

No, don't ask who he was. It doesn't matter, now, and I'm not going to mention it. If his name wouldn't be familiar to you, the films that he produced almost certainly would have.

As for me, I freaking love being retired. I have time to have fun. I don't stress out over getting up before light unless Carole and I are going on a trip, or I'm going to drive to a park to go hiking or camping or kayaking. I can stay up half the night working on a new novel. I can plan out an ad campaign for my novels. For years I talked about planting a garden and never did. Now I have and we harvest vegetables from it almost every day.

Fuck it. That famous producer was wrong. I was right. Retirement is amazing. You don't have to sit on your ass and wither away or become stupid in front of the television.

In fact, I wish I'd been able to do this at 50 instead of 62. Or earlier.

Fuck working. I hiked ten miles, saw three waterfalls, a mountaintop, deer, a wild turkey hen with eight chicks, and rhododendron in full bloom everywhere along the waterways. I didn't punch a clock. It was a weekday. There was no schedule. I did whatever the heck I wanted to do at the pace I wanted to take.

My favorite view of Stone Mountain while being on Stone Mountain.

Seven of the eight wild turkey chicks I saw.

The mother hen.

One of thousands of rhododendron blossoms today.

A small cascade above a larger waterfall.

Birds.

When I go hiking and backpacking it is always a thrill to see classic megafauna. That is, very large animals--the types of which are going extinct or being threatened in the wild. Here in the South, outside of places like Florida, the list of big animals is very small. Florida has manatees, alligators, bobcats, panthers, bears, deer, and a few other big critters. But in the southern Appalachians the list is much shorter. Basically the big animals you can hope to see are the black bear, the whitetail deer, bobcats, and in a very abbreviate area, the elk.

Recently I went on a day trip to the Smokies where I was looking forward to seeing black bears and elk. I chose to visit the Cataloochee area of the Park where I have not failed to see large numbers of elk since they were reintroduced a couple of decades back. And I can generally count on seeing at least one bear when I'm in the Great Smoky Mountains. Alas, this was not the case. I saw no elk at all and only one bear that had been darted and trapped by the Park Service and who was being released from its cage (that hardly counts).

But one thing that I did see in the Park that day was wild turkey flocks. Lots of them. Scores of them. When I was a kid backpacking the Park I was always told they were present in the ecosystem, but I never saw one. Never. These days the Park--and indeed most of the southeastern US--is packed with huge numbers of wild turkey. All due, I have been told, to reintroduction efforts and strict laws on poaching of wild turkey and heavy enforcement of those laws.

So I saw a lot of turkey that day. A couple of days later I went kayaking on Mountain Island Lake which is located about two miles from my house. And I again saw a number of impressive bird species. No turkey, but Great blue herons, Great egrets, and osprey.

I'm not sure of the exact definition of megafauna, but maybe birds like turkey, osprey, herons and egrets should be included. More and more they're about the largest animals that I encounter when I go hiking and kayaking.

Great egret, Mountain Island Lake.

Great blue heron.

Osprey, Gulf Shores National Seashore.

Tom turkey trying to woo the hens.

Mountain Bridge Wilderness

Andy, Carole and I took a brief trip to Jones Gap State Park. We had a picnic, played in the creek, and I went for a short walk in the woods, exploring the Mountain Bridge Wilderness. It's not that far from home and relatively isolated. As soon as I walked into the forest I left all of the people behind. I am not exaggerating when I say that there were no other people in the woods and I seemed to have the whole place to myself. I saw wildlife (a whitetail doe and a wild turkey hen). I got one fair photo of the doe but the turkey would not cooperate and I was unable to get a photo.

It was my second trip to the park. I'd like to go back when I can hike into the wilderness and spend a night and a couple of days exploring the place.

We found a nice picnic table by the creek.

The park office and store. Very nice!

Sunlight through the trees.

Not a very good picture, but the best one I could manage. I always am pleased when I see any animal in a wilderness where they are not accustomed to rubbing elbows with humans.

I liked the weird geometry of this tree and boulder.

A vast slide on the very steep slopes of the mountain.

Tomorrow I will have video of the park.

Megafauna East.

If you want to see lots of wildlife and lots of large animals, the American West has that championship tied up. The selection of large creatures and vast numbers of animals here on the eastern side of the USA is rather limited by comparison. Unless or until efforts are made to repatriate species that are now vanished from our landscape, there are few places where you can be guaranteed to see such animals.

I've mentioned before that Florida and other parts of the American deep south are great for large animals and species diversity. But if you're not in that part of the country and you want to look elsewhere, then the best option for you would be the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

For species diversity in general, there are few places on the entire planet as solid as the Great Smokies. You could spend an entire lifetime exploring the slopes of those mountains searching out and identifying the dizzying array of flora. In fact, some botanists indeed spend their careers there doing just that.

The animal life there is also impressive. It's one of the few places in southern Appalachia where I can generally depend on being able to view lots of wildlife and lots of larger animals. Because of the elk reintroduction a visitor to the Park can now see these huge deer in various parts of the Smokies. One section of the area was chosen for reintroduction and now they have spread out into other parts of the Park. On visiting Cataloochee you can pretty much guarantee being  able to spot them in the fields and meandering in the deep  forests.

The west has both brown and black bears. We don't have Griz here, but we do have plenty of black bears and if there is one place you can see them, it's inside the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In fact, it's hard to make an extended trip to the Park and not see bears.

While mountain lions have yet to repopulate this part of the country, you can sometimes spot bobcats inside the Smokies protected boundaries. Until the puma is repatriated, bobcats are the biggest wild feline you'll spot here. Also sometimes seen in the woods here are both gray and red foxes. And, while they may not have been historically part of the ecosystem, coyotes have populated the mountains in good numbers and have filled the niche formerly occupied by Timber wolves and Red wolves. Contrary to negative propaganda inspired by gun owners, the presence of coyotes is a great sign for the Smokies.

One can sometimes get tired of seeing white-tailed deer in the forests, farmlands, and  even citiscapes of the east. But I still get a kick out of seeing them in the Smokies. They're actually not as common inside the Park as they are outside of it, since they have adapted so well to living alongside humans. To me, white-tailed deer in the Park are still a sign of wilderness.

One animal that is not welcome in the Park but which has firmly established itself is the Wild hog. These are largely descendants of European boars brought into the area to supply nearby hunting preserves before and shortly after the Park was formed. These are non-native animals and have created many of the problems one associates with invasive species. Still, it can sometimes be a thrill to spot one of these alien creatures in the deep forests.

A couple of other large animals that have been reintroduced to the Smokies are Northern river otters and beavers. Both of these were hunted relentlessly until they were gone from most of the southern Appalachians, but have now been encouraged to return. Neither are common in the Park, but you can spy them from time to time if you know where to go and are careful and quiet.

I'm hoping that at some time there will be an effort to reintroduce the American bison to the Great Smoky Mountains. They, too, were exterminated and should be allowed to return. But the Park is now closed tightly in by communities with lots of people and lots of development. This is a severe and ongoing problem for the Park. The people who now live so close to the boundaries in large numbers would likely balk at the idea of returning North America's largest land animal to the forests and fields here. But maybe it can happen.

Also, I feel certain that the Mountain lion will--on its own--come back to this part of eastern North America. If that happens before I die, I'd love to see one stalking through our southern Appalachian forests.

For a complete list of the mammals of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you can look here.

It's not a Red wolf, but close enough. Coyotes have colonized the Park.

This is why big animals can come back here...plenty of wild habitat.

A bull elk I photographed in the Park.

A herd of elk at rest in a field in Cataloochee.

I still find it sometimes hard to believe that the elk have returned.

Turkey were hard to see when I was a kid visiting the Park. Now they're very, very common. These I photographed while at the Sugarlands Visitor Center.

Turkey flock in Cataloochee. They browse side by side with the elk.

I cheated a little here. I photographed this black bear in Virginia, but even as grainy as this photo turned out (both the bear and I were surprised to see one another), it's better than any of my bear photos taken in the Smokies.

I got this photo of this regal buck in Cades Cove.

White-tailed deer in the snow in Cades Cove two winters ago.

Bison bull in South Dakota. I hope to see these creatures repatriated to the southern Appalachians some day.

T-Day!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! We're going to go eat dinner, now.

Two of my favorite bird species. The wild turkey, and its close relative, the Turkey vulture.

Wild turkeys in the Cataloochee area of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Turkey vulture in Stone Mountain State Park in NC.