muddy water smalls

Well it's still up a foot maybe but not thick enough to plow any more. Right in the little pocket you can see in the one pic, out of the current, actually fairly shallow but close to deep water and very slow water. Actually caught the carp first which I figured spoiled the little spot but with no where better close to try I just sat for a spell and enjoyed watching the river for a bit. Then the smallie hit. Softly, actually more of just a heaviness on the line than a strike. A 1/8 ounce jighead and Vic's clear with gold flake grub fished as slow as possible.

window fishing

So tomorrows forecast is a beginning of snow then heavy rain thru the rest of the day. And more flood warnings. I've had enough flood warnings already! Well if I was going fishing it seemed that it was now or never. Well maybe not never but it can sure seem like during an extended period of high water. This evening the stream was just a bit up, maybe a foot but not terribly muddy. And holy canolis I even caught some smallmouth! No giants but here in the middle of the winter of floods it sure felt great. On a light jighead and a pearl with black backed curly shad fished as slow as I could.

Thoreau and the Kinder Mound

There it was, 48 acres for sale, vacant land. A wooden sign and a gate. I couldn't for life of me figure out which farm it actually belonged to. It seemed really to stand alone. Rather than get into trouble and possibly stuck in the muddy pullout I drove to the Walmart that seemed to butt up against the back side of the land. There I parked, rounded the corner past the service bays and up a grassy bank that adjoined an old field.
No less a heretic than old Thoreau himself talked of buying a farm. In his walks he traversed everyone remotely close to him. Surveying each in turn....

"At a certain season of our life we are accustomed to consider every spot as the possible site of a house. I have thus surveyed the country on every side within a dozen miles of where I live. In imagination I have bought all the farms in succession, for all were to be bought, and I knew their price. I walked over each farmer's premises tasted his wild apples, discoursed on husbandry with him, took his farm at his price, at any price, mortgaging it to him in my mind; even put a higher price on it, -- took everything but a deed of it"

"I have frequently seen a poet withdraw, having enjoyed the most valuable part of a farm, while the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild apples only. Why, the owner does not know it for many years when a poet has put his farm in rhyme, the most admirable kind of invisible fence, has fairly impounded it, milked it, skimmed it, and got all the cream, and left the farmer only the skimmed milk."

And so in vein I sauntered across and empty field. Snow scuttled between the long picked rows and a bitter wind blew. I crossed an old wire fence that was more up than down and struggled thru a thicket.
Deer sign was everywhere. Man sign was nowhere to be found. Finally quartering uphill on game trails I came out into another field. And there on the highest ground for miles there it was. The mound.
What a coincidence, here on back of this farm was a mound I've been longing to see for years. It was a pretty impressive structure tho heavily overgrown, I'm guessing over thirty feet high and from the top you could see for miles.
Which was what I found so intriguing about the place. I'd read that from the top of this mound you could see a light at night atop a mound over ten miles away up the river valley and that if you looked downstream you could see a light atop another mound 12 miles downstream atop another high ridge.
These other mounds were famous, one even had an elaborate park built around it. The theory was that the Adena could set a signal fire atop each mound  and thus communicate for thirty plus miles up and down the river valley. I do not have an opinion on whether or not this was the case. I mean many if not the majority of mounds and earthworks were located on high ridgetops and it might just be coincidence that these are within a line of sight of each other. I just don't know but it had made me aware that this mound existed, here on this ridgetop on the back of an old farm. Which just happens to be for sale. And yes, I'd love to own the place and like Thoreau gave it serious consideration. If I win the lottery anytime soon I'm definitely buying the place....

The Great Serpent Mound

The Great Serpent Mound...
The coolest possibly of all the mounds in Ohio. But I've been hesitant to post about it because, well because no place I know is filled with more conjecture, crazy theories, nutty science, real science, but still filled with spiritual peace and beauty.
The mound is thought to have been built by the Adena  but then in 1996 some scientists suggested that no it was built by the Fort Ancient Culture but nowadays it's thought again that it really was built by the Adena and that later cultures  probably repaired the mound at times thru history.
The mound is a whopping 1348 feet long and roughly waist high. Yeah 1348 feet. And it is located on the highest hilltop around. Which starts half the wild theories at least. See the photos I took were from the top of the steel tower erected to view the mound and even from the top of the tower it is so daggone big you cannot tell the mound looks like. Only by careful survey and redrawing that can you really make out it's shape. To view it as a complete effigy you would have to be hundreds of feet in the air. There are some youtube videos taken by drones that show it is clearly a serpent swallowing what might be a giant egg (or the sun, or earth, or the circle of life, or a comet, or on and on...depending on who is doing the interpreting).
So here's the weird part, the Adena built a giant 1/4 mile picture that you can only tell what it is from hundreds of feet in the air above it ????  As you can imagine there must be at least a thousand theories on why they would do this. The two that are probably the most popular are the kinda sensible one that whatever great spirits the Adena thought dwelt in the sky could see it or the theory that, well, space aliens could see it. And not just one person has suggested the mounds connection to space aliens but thousands and many of those see the mound as absolute proof of ancient alien visitation. I think it has been on several ancient alien TV shows.
But that is only maybe half of the weirdness surrounding the mound. There is a supposed old photograph of a giant skeleton excavated at the serpent mound. This is seen as proof  by many that the mound was built by an ancient race of giants that supposedly built many of the mounds across Ohio and nearby states. Dozens of websites attribute the mound to the Nephilim which were a race of giants that the bible says were on the earth but were destroyed by the great flood. In fact there were so many of these sites that I dug out my grandmothers old King James Bible and looked up Genisis 2 thru 6 which has to be the strangest part in the bible and at face value does hint at giants and space aliens. Further digging seems to suggest that the giant supposedly found at the serpent was a hoax as were many others. But the weirdness doesn't stop. The Smithsonian does have it seems at least 17 skeletons from ancient native American sites that were around seven feet tall or better! From what I understand, statistically the Smithsonian should have excavated 2.5 million skeletons to have found that many giant skeletons by chance. So yeah most of the giant stories associated with native American sites were hoaxes but there is some strange weird truth under it all. On top of all that weirdness is the astronomical alignments. Even at the site there are signs saying if you stand here in this open loop you can look over this coil in the serpent and see the sunrise on the solstice and stand here you can see the equinox and so on. Honestly this seems like some pretty shaky science to me. I think I could come up with astronomical alignments for my house or even the US interstate system that seem just as plausible. I know one alignment is that the snakes body as it joins the head and the head itself are aligned to the north star, never mind that the "egg" and the other 900 feet of the snake don't align, this one small portion does. Which of course is food for all the ancient alien people. Not only can you only see this thing from space but it's aligned with the heavens! To me it seems the whole alignment thing at this mound seems like a case of pretty sketchy science and even sketchier space alien logic. 
Uggh… so there's a mound you can only truly view from hundreds of feet in the air that wasn't built by giants after all but giants were really found at few other mounds and it may or may not be aligned to the heavens.
Oh yeah there's more. The serpent mound is set on a ridgetop that is actually the edge of a giant crater from an ancient asteroid strike. According to state geologists they are nearly certain that the area is a four mile wide crater from a primordial asteroid strike. Seems that the area is covered in Iridium which is rare everywhere but where asteroids have struck. Or sometimes where volcanoes have spewed it up from the Earths core in lava flows. But there are no lava flows in Ohio so the Iridium had to have came from space. Imagine what the space alien guys think of that.
So anyways go to Adams county sometime and visit the Great Serpent mound it is a beautiful place and you will be in awe of what native Americans could accomplish even if you aren't abducted by aliens while you are there....