A few videos I stumbled across recently all ended up circling the same theme: books, reading, and what first inspired people to write or follow a creative passion. Watching them sent me back to my own beginning, to the question of where my love of reading and writing actually started.
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment. There are photos of me asleep with a book in my hand. I once had a paper folder stuffed with handwritten pages, a never-ending story about a young boy on an adventure that I kept adding to for reasons I cannot fully explain now. What I can tell you is the book that started it all.
Where the Red Fern Grows and Why It Mattered
Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls. I read that book more times than I can count, enough times to wear down the spine and soften the pages. If you have not read it, the story follows a man looking back on his childhood, specifically on how he earned enough money to buy two hunting dog puppies, raised them from nothing, and taught them to hunt. There is more to it than that, but telling the rest would take away the experience of reading it yourself.
What Rawls did with that story was paint a picture vivid enough that you felt like you were standing right next to the main character. For an imaginative kid who spent most of his time outdoors, that was a powerful thing. Any boy who grew up in rural America had some version of the dream of having his own dog, of days spent outside with no particular schedule and no ceiling overhead. That connection between my own childhood and the one on the page made the decades between us disappear. We lived in very different times, but youth has a way of simplifying that gap.
The Copy I Had to Find Again
I read Where the Red Fern Grows in an elementary English and reading class, fourth grade if I am remembering correctly. We read from a hardback edition in class. Years later I found the same hardback edition and had to have it. I already owned a paperback copy that had moved with me multiple times by that point. Now both copies sit on a shelf together.
Other books come and go. They end up in boxes during moves, donated, passed along. These two always find room on the shelf. There is something about holding a book you have carried through different versions of your life that makes it feel like more than just a book.
What Reading Opened Up
Reading made me want to write. Not immediately and not in any formal way, but in the way that a good story makes you want to try making one yourself. The folder of handwritten pages was my version of that. A young boy on an adventure that never quite ended because I kept finding reasons to add to it.
Writing, for me, has always been about capturing something before it disappears. A trip, a conversation, a moment at a campsite when the light did something worth remembering. The same instinct that kept adding pages to that childhood folder is the same one that sits down to write about a fishing trip in Missouri or a hike above Salt Lake City or a quiet morning at a campground in winter. The setting changes. The impulse does not.
The teachers who first put books like Where the Red Fern Grows in front of me deserve real credit for that. Sharing a love of reading is one of the more durable things a person can pass on. It does not wear out. It does not go out of style. It just keeps opening doors long after the class is over and the grades are forgotten.
That is why I write and share stories here. Not because every trip is extraordinary or every observation is profound, but because paying attention to things and putting them into words is a way of holding onto them a little longer. And occasionally someone reads one and recognizes something in it that belongs to them too.
That part never gets old.
If you want to see where some of these stories have gone, the adventures archive is a good place to start, or take a look at the My Take posts for more of this kind of reflection.
If you want more of this kind of writing, the Stories section has more personal reflections. The Adventures section is where a lot of those stories play out on the trail and on the road. The newsletter is where I share the extra stuff that does not always make it to the blog. Subscribe on Substack if you want to follow along.
