There’s a two-track road that winds into a woods of pine and poplar, and oak, and ends beside a pristine river. The first green grasses of spring grow all along that road, attracting whitetail does and their newborn fawns. And I am attached to a tradition that goes with the place, a tradition of mushrooms and trout.

By about the end of the first week of May, warming showers have usually awakened the land and the residents of the stream. Clear, moonlit nights are still chilly in the woods and the dew still changes to frost on occasion. But along the south sides of the hills, enough warmth from the day has remained. And in places where sunbeams have looked down on decaying logs and where the spores of last season’s fungi have ridden in on a gentle breeze, mushrooms begin to push up through damp leaves. And in the river trout begin to feed.

A week or so back, a friend of mine approached me with an excited—“I think I saw an eagle—maybe two or three of them soaring overhead just north of town.”

Not wishing to contradict him or make him think I was a know-it-all, I just asked him what it looked like and whether it was an adult or an immature bird. I was pretty sure he knew about the white head and tail on an adult and how an immature eagle would not yet have had the white head and tail but would have looked to be mostly brown with a speckled breast.

When stiffness first leaves the ground and the sky decides on rain instead of snow, the season is official. Some change in water temperature too subtle for a human finger to detect, reaches into chilly river currents and beckons to the giant rainbow trout known as steelhead.

Far downstream in the waters of Lakes Michigan and Huron and the rest, the great fish sense instead of see, the arriving change. They stir and move to the first sources of the difference, the river mouths, and put their blue-gray noses into the current and swim.

I have always felt that experiences in Nature go a long ways toward shaping the character of young people. The strengthening of family ties is another result of such activities. Let me explain.

Only about a century ago we were mostly an agricultural nation. If we didn’t actually live on farms or in small towns ourselves, someone in the family did. And when we visited these rural family members it was to touch a more natural way of life, where eggs were gathered, cows were milked and quite a bit of our food was grown. And just a step away from those activities were the hunting of rabbits and pheasants on the back forty and fishing in the neighboring streams and lakes. Almost always it was the family members that did these together, sharing the work, fun and accomplishments of their activities.