I know it’s a bit of a strange title, catchy though isn’t it?.  All of us have our own little fetish’s, some a little weirder than others and some just down right creepy.  Mine isn’t quite that creepy, weird maybe, but not creepy.  It happens every time I’m hiking whether it’s behind the house or somewhere new. I can’t escape it.  I try, I try really hard to get away but it’s such an overwhelming urge I only get a few feet before the voices start talking to me.

“Where you going? This could be the one.”

“You know you want to look at it, you know you do, do it, do it,  you know you do!!”

“Look, it’s a fetish, so your weird, live with it.  I’ll stop talking to you if you go look.”

Hi, my name is Jeff and I have a fetish for blow downs. Meetings are every Monday night at the community center in town.  I don’t know how it ever started, maybe it’s my interest in history that got me looking at the root ball of every blow down I find. It’s almost like Christmas with the anticipation of  what I might find that was literally “under the tree”.    Ya see, when a tree topples over from a wind storm or old age the roots that become exposed hold the history of what happened “x” amount of years ago, at least before the tree took root.  I haven’t found much over the years a few small bones and one broken piece of pottery but the possibilities of what could be there is what drives my fetish.  What might I find? A relic from the French & Indian War, perhaps a musket or powder horn dropped in a skirmish from the Revolutionary War, a bear skull, antler, Indian pottery, ……………  sorry, I started to fantasize again.

I think you get the point by now though.  You may not have ever even thought about it, but next time you’re in the woods and see a blow down stop and check it out. They’re like a window to the past of what ground they grew on and what may have been left, died, killed, abandoned or lost in that very spot hundreds of years ago.  Odds are after you do this once, even if you don’t find a thing, you’ll be hooked for life.   Welcome to my world, meetings are at 6pm, byob!!

Happy Hiking!!