Socrates- Heraclitus says you cannot step twice in the same stream.
Hermogenes- True
-Plato, Cratylus 402
We must make shift with things as they are…The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap.
-A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
I first read A Sand County Almanac more than thirty years ago. It was a library book so I did not mark the margin when I came upon a quote that made me stop short and start to daydream upon it. The quote stayed fresh in my mind for some days and then faded completely away. But all these years since I have not forgotten that somewhere in that book is a quote that might again stop me short…if I’m the same person now that I was then.
So I recently picked the book up again. The hunt was on. Leopold writes often about hunting, but not much about rehunting…if that means stalking the same game trails as he had last time, or tracking a deer he’d shot and wounded, or going after a gargantuan size lake trout he remembered, after his line broke, usually swam at 20 feet. I was rehunting in his old grouse cover, waiting in his old deer stand, hunkered in his old duck blind.
Nothing doing. Crickets. I came up dry. Not a word, not the words, could I find.
The best I could come up with was this thing about bathtubs. I like it now because I’d never before seen this idiom “to make shift”, but I doubt this was what first caught my eye. Maybe the makeshift was more familiar to me then. Hunters are supposed to stay unwashed when they go into the wild. Soap scares off game, so says my cousin who hunts for all kinds of things in his woods on the banks of the Missouri River. And we both hate to waste running water, so we turn off the tap.