Here's a poem by my old college friend Dennis Evans.  He and I fly-fished and camped across Canada from Montreal to Victoria Island, British Columbia after graduating from Yale.

It has always struck a chord with me (no pun intended), especially at times like these.  Dennis spent his high school summers with his dad, a forest ranger, in Oregon's Cascade mountain ranges. How I envied that.

Whoever has swung an axe

and endured the layers of skin

blistering and shredding away from his palms

knows that there are many skins

beneath our skin,

each not quite ready to be what we firmly insist.

Whoever has soapbox ankles

and a swollen throat

from standing and shouting to change men's ideas

ignores the deterring discovery,

sleeping near the river

of other natures at the raw threshold of the human.

Whoever feels the flames

from a raging pine campfire

drawing the air from the very bottom of his lungs

knows the pounding veins

below his ears

herald the gill slits of another life creeping open.

In verdurous canyons of fir,

empty of the old sun,

we begin nosing our way up the dark river of sleep

to the ancient stream beds,

the spawning grounds.

Dennis Evans

New Haven

1970