Jensen Afield: All things must pass

On the front porch one day, perhaps a year ago, with a light snow falling and a brisk wind, my eyes were suddenly focused on the swaying branches of a hemlock tree, just beyond the lawn. For a brief moment, I thought the tree appeared more than alive, its movement to and fro, an image that said the tree was more than a tree, that it could have some hint of intelligence, that it senses it is alive, is knowing. That thought, of course, was swept from my imagination because, as we all know, trees cannot think or feel or know. We know that, right?

So, this is what I have, then, this 2:21 a.m. after awakening from a very bad dream one night earlier this week, one of impending doom, of evil people breaking in and looting the place where I once worked. So, here I am, in my study, pounding out these words and the computer clock at 3:11 a.m. I have never written at this hour but there is an urgency here that will not be satisfied until this piece is tucked away and sleep again comes to me.

Like so many of my dreams, much of the let’s-call-it-what-it-was, a nightmare, details are very muddled while some are frighteningly clear. But it most certainly took place at the Rutland Herald, where I worked on a full-time basis for 33 years. That dream, and I might be reaching here a bit, was probably based on the disappointing decision I made the day before.

Adding the 12 years after retirement and still writing for the paper as a freelance writer, that comes down to 45 years of writing for a place that will always mean so much for me.

But times change. And not always for the good. Maybe 25 years ago, I was tasked, along with other specialists in the field of outdoor writing (book authors, TV people, radio folks, magazine writers and newspaper columnists) at an annual meeting of the New England Outdoor Writers Association, to talk to the membership about the future. I was selected to be the newspaper guy and, if memory serves me right, my talk was the only downer. I called my short speech, “I Work for a Dinosaur,” for even back then, things began to change in my business, for a variety of reasons. I said then that newspapers, at least most of them, were doomed. Meanwhile, I truly hope the Herald and The Times Argus continue to publish.

If you don’t get the paper delivered or pick a copy up every day at a newsstand, you know why. This is not to chastise those people who do not read newspapers or gave up reading them at some point. They surely have their reasons, but I suspect far too many people have all but given up on reading, of all sorts, and to me, that is both sad and troublesome.

Anyway, the drill is the same every day (well, not on Sunday and Monday any longer). For me, after waking and making a pot of coffee, there is a walk down the driveway and pulling the Herald from that blue tube out there, just off the road.

I read “Man and His Symbols” many years ago and found the book in my bookshelf recently, a slip of paper marking the page where the quote above appeared. It is startling to think that Jung, writing back in 1964, could see man’s predicament so clearly back then. He had touched on something that has become a big topic for this writer: that many of us, particularly younger adults and young kids, have lost touch with nature, that nature was something that was looked at, admired from afar, not something that was a vibrant part of our lives.

Nature has been a vibrant part of this man’s life for most of his 75 years. And for more than 50 of those years (I wrote an outdoor column at the first paper I worked at), I have written about what I saw, experienced, felt and loved about the outdoors.

My column, Jensen Afield, ran once a week for years. Because the paper, like so many papers across this great country, is struggling, I was told to cut my work to every other week a while back. OK, I get it. Production costs, a decline in revenue and other factors were in play here. Then, a few weeks ago, I was told the column would be reduced to once a month.

I want to be honest here, with myself and my readers, and hope these words remain intact. I think the Herald, to its own peril, has drifted away from those readers who are passionate about hunting and fishing. While it manages multiple pages every day to local high school sports (for good reasons) and devotes an entire section to the arts every Saturday, the devotion to hunters (one estimate has it that 15% of the Vermont population hunts) and fishermen, whose numbers probably approach 100,000, has dwindled. There is no way the news of the outdoors can be covered, in the manner it should be, in just one day a month.

I have been blessed with having a readership, over the years, that has been both supportive and adversarial. One interesting thing about Jensen Afield, and this really blows my mind, is the number of readers who have contacted me over the years and, admitting they neither hunted nor went fishing, said (and I am paraphrasing here), “You know what, I like your stuff because you always take me out there with you, in your copy.”

Not anymore. It is time to say goodbye. With regrets. But, hey, I had a really good run, you know?

Dennis Jensen is a freelance writer. Contact him at d.jensen62@yahoo.com