I took Gloria Jean to the river for her birthday.

She just loves being out there in October to see the river and the fall colors and watch me catch fish. Gloria is a nature lover, not an outdoorsman. She has, miraculously (and primarily because I am about the best guide you ever imagined), caught some really impressive fish and lots of them over the years, but she doesn’t hunt.

She killed a few wild gobblers years back, one of them so far out of range I know he died of a heart attack. She missed two or three deer at close range and because she just couldn’t bear to shoot one. She has done all kinds of hunting with me, but she carries a camera, not a gun.

We had the camera along last week and it came up a little downpour, so I pulled to the bank and took her up to a giant hollowed out sycamore. We got inside it and stayed dry and she carried on about what a great place it was, and the ambience and that kind of thing. There was a hole in the trunk about the size of a pie plate, and I got to thinking how a squirrel might feel, inside a hollow tree.

So I took a picture of her outside, with my shotgun, wanting to show what a squirrel might see as a hunter approaches.

Back in the boat after the rain, we watched a big otter foraging along the bank, and I caught a nice bass. Then I heard a familiar whistle and search out an osprey, or fish hawk, in the high limbs over the river, upset because I had such a nice fish and he didn’t. I’ve seen them there in that spot for several years now, each summer. There aren’t a lot of them nesting in the Ozarks, so you don’t see many. It is about time for him to move on.

There was a really unusual large bearded mushroom growing out of a knothole in a maple tree leaning out over the river, and Gloria took some pictures of it. As I feared, she didn’t catch a fish. But she seemed so happy that it made me re-evaluate things.

Maybe I too often measure a trip by what I catch?

Maybe in being so conscious of getting in the right place to make a perfect cast, or get the right shot at game, I miss something? Maybe after all, it is being there rather than getting what you are after?

Naw!! I came to my senses and realized that if I was like Gloria Jean I’d have thousands of pictures and we’d eat hamburger and noodles and lunch meat all the time and I wouldn’t need that great big freezer. I wouldn’t have any antlers or turkey beards or fishing lures.

A grizzled old outdoor veteran’s true value has to be measured in pictures of big fish, dead turkeys and limits of ducks and pheasants with hunting dogs, not butterflies and flowers and mushrooms. But it doesn’t hurt, when your wife has a birthday or anniversary or something of that sort, to take her out there and carry on about how pretty the clouds are! It shows you have a sensitive side, and it saves money on flowers and candy and that sort of thing.

Well, I am going to vote next week; not so much that I figure it is going to make any difference. I don’t see things the way the majority of folks do most of the time. I was in St. Louis for a day last week stocking books, and I realized that it is nice that they are confined by the millions up there in that mess they have created, worrying about time clocks and schedules and traffic jams.

The economy is of great importance to city people. It isn’t to me. ... I don’t have any stocks, and not much of a bank account, and I have found that the worse the economy is, the more solitary the woods and waters become. But I feel sorry for them, and what they have created for themselves, because they are good people, the majority of them.

I doubt I’d feel that way in New York or California however. In those places, I’d bet some disastrous consequences are on the way, and I am thinking it is nice the Ozarks is so far away from them, because from what I see and hear, good people there are in the minority.

Country people seem very worried about a new liberal president and congress and senate, but take heart in knowing the pendulum swings both ways. If the liberal agenda is a bad one, nothing will capsize it quicker than having complete control for a while. It is difficult knowing that soon we might have to deal with a supreme court which has a legislative agenda, and such a court might make it tough to own firearms and pray in public and pursue the kind of conservative life us country folks are use to. You might soon be able to marry your horse!

My old Arkansas friends Bill and Hillary Clinton, who might have been presidents again in four years if Mr. McCain were destined to win, probably aren’t too happy. And how in the world would us masculiminists deal with having a lady vice president, even if she did kill a moose!

Whoever becomes president, I am for him, and I hope God helps him to do what is best for our country, and give him the wisdom to see what that is, and make the right decisions when he needs to.

But I won’t be voting because I believe in a party, or a person. I am going to the polls for those men who fought in the wars past to make this a free country where we all can vote. Remember them, and go vote, even if you don’t have much faith in the process any more.

Like most of you, I don’t much like today’s politicians, not any of them. I can’t see any resemblance of any of them to honest men like Davy Crockett and Abe Lincoln. But I will be there for those men who lost their lives fighting to ensure we have the freedoms and rights we have as Americans. I think they are watching from somewhere, and that together with the founders of our country, men like Jefferson, Franklin, Adams and Washington, they will keep us on the right track, even when we veer off the right path every now and then.

Some people believe that if millions of people fervently pray that our country gets back on the right track, God will, in his own time, make things work out right, as he so often has in the last two hundred plus years. Some country people have even hinted around that God is more powerful than the big city newspapers and the television networks that so vehemently oppose what He has so long told us is right. I think maybe they are right, and like I said, when the pendulum swings far enough one way, it gets swung back the other direction in time.

Go vote, get a good night’s sleep and let a greater power take care of things. And be thankful you aren’t living in those huge cities where so many millions can’t escape what they are creating.

Address correspondence to Larry Dablemont, Box 22, Bolivar, Mo., 65613. Send e-mail to lightninridge@alltel.net, check the Web site www.larrydablemont.com, or call (417) 777-5227.