Pleasure.

In the morning I walk a canyon two-track and hear a canyon wren for the first time outside of Arizona. Up the mountainside I see the long slender lines of the billowing smoke from the ditch fires, confused because the wren song is drawing me south to my winter life on the Mexican border. The ditches get choked with vegetation and they burn them out in the spring so the irrigation water can flow freely. I suddenly determine that the smell of spring is the smell of the rushing river plus the millions of buds on trees and bushes. Up in the home ground, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, when the loggers went to town one day a month they called getting drunk “burning out the grease.” In 1958 a friend in San Francisco burned out his veins shooting up hot paregoric, a cheap high. It’s safer for me to continue smoldering just below the temperature of actual flame wondering if there’s a distant land where life freely flows like a river. Years ago in a high green pasture near timberline I watched a small black bear on its back rolling back and forth and shimmying to scratch its back, pawing the air with pleasure, not likely wanting to be anywhere or anyone else.

- Jim Harrison, from "Burning the Ditches"