I remember when my blogs used to get more traffic. Heck, I remember getting all sorts of comments on the blog I used to have back in the early 2000's. When I first attended college, I had chosen Journalism and Broadcasting as my major. I hadn't published a thing until my second semester at college for the school paper and yearbook. I loved watching and reading about sports and somehow that would end up in some form of work turned in to my high school teachers.
Before that, I used to write about the outdoors. I'm sure the teachers got a kick out of my survivalist or hunting stories. I read a number of survivalist stories of Canadians or Americans that ended up in harms way such as a nasty badger, bear or mountain lion. Before moving to Arkansas, I lived in British Columbia (Louisiana born though). Bears were usually the beast in the back of everyone's mind when setting out for a hike, bike, camping or trek of some sort. Rarely it happened but there were all sorts of books and publications with survival stories, whether it be beast or mother nature.
And we sure lived in a great place, we did. Kamloops, B.C.. Full of lakes, trails, ski resorts, camp grounds, good hunting and so on and so on. I lived right at the edge of Lac Du Bois Provincial Park. I guess the previous owners of our home had blazed a trail from the backyard up the steep hill to a plateau to meet up with old cattle trails on an old homestead. You could access these trails by a utility road at the top of our neighborhood that led to a water tower. We used to ride our bikes on this road to the trails to access a lake about 1/2 mile directly behind my house but about a mile's hike from the top of the neighborhood. And man, was it a hike up to that lake in what is an alpine meadow - grasslands - Lac Du Bois Grasslands as it has become known. And the trails didn't end there and nor the adventures of fishing in that lake in the meadow.
My father and I used to watch Wild America with Marty Stouffer. Funny thing, we moved to Arkansas and my best friend's place was in the same neighborhood as Marty's home in Fort Smith. When writing, I would think of how Marty would narrate the shows.
My family spent a lot of time out camping but my father and I did a lot of other outdoor activities ourselves. Like, hunting bear, calling in coyotes, marmot hunting, trout fishing. And he went moose hunting for several weeks a year with his buddies. And they did bring home moose every year. When we moved to Arkansas, I started coon hunting and deer hunting but never ever saw a deer - mostly because I didn't spend enough time out nor enough research on good spots. We went quail hunting, bass fishing and catfishing too.
But I also played some soccer, baseball and seven years of football - not in college though. My father coached football for years. I collected sports cards and subscribed to sport magazines and watched Sports Center all the time. I figured by being a sports writer, it would make me happy and give me a sense of direction. I hated writing for and editor and I hated deadlines. Several semesters later, I switched my major to business. I stopped hunting, fishing and football. I took up soccer in a rec league during my college years and continued watching sports with friends.
Moving to the Ozarks, I took up fishing again. With my friends living about an hour away and me being close to a few Smallmouth creeks, I decided to do something that would help me to relax from my 60 hour weeks of riding a desk. At the time, this place was still small and not on the verge of being in the top 100 metropolitan areas as it is now. I rarely bumped into anyone else on these small warmwater streams. As a matter of fact, this place has grown so much that access to these streams has become very difficult due to folks littering/dumping or land being turned into private neighborhoods or golf courses.
There wasn't a soul at the company I worked for that fly fished. Several hundred employees and no fly-fishermen! I'm not one for clubs - though, I have made just a few outings with the local club over the past several decades, LOL. So, I went online and found a few messageboards and web sites and found other warmwater fly fisher folks. It was so interesting to me to do fly swaps and see how other folks tied flies or the patterns they used. We used to post images and instructions for tying our flies. That's when I decided to blog about my patterns. Blogging was relatively knew and folks couldn't access things like you tube or instagram. Before social media, it seemed that folks would flock to blogs.
Through blogging, I figured it possible to be an outdoor "writer". But I don't really write stories nor record memorable trips. I just post to keep in touch or to help folks with what little knowledge I have to chase those warmwater species. I mostly post on instagram and "Like" other photos. Sometimes, comments or questions are left be my Followers. It seems that most of my online communication comes through Instagram but I do get to share my patterns and give some sort of guidance on how to locate Smallmouth. Outdoor bloggers are deleting blogs or are no longer posting or just post ever so often. And I hang on, hoping to at least become a mediocre blog and give it just enough attention - just as I did my college publications - ha ha. But now, instead of everyone wanting to be an outdoor writer, we all want to be social media Influencers.
We want to pose a certain lifestyle that will somehow influence our followers into a brand or something we like or just to get attention. And where is the soul in that? We can find it in writing but in social media, I think all we find is some sort of gratification - just as I do with this blog. The "stories" are now seen and rarely read - or, these outdoor lifestyles become videos which get passed around on social media. Print is not really dead but it was hurt by the internet and social media. And I'll still write or blog. Pretending that I somehow have an importance but yet a small voice in the niche of outdoor writers.
