Charlie Patton, who was born in 1891, recorded some of the very first blues. In 'Pony Blues' and 'Peavine Blues,' he manages to pile dense layers of rhythms one upon the other.

Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis.

The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.

Right whales, for all their size, are surprisingly athletic. They roll, they slap their flukes, they lift their heads out of the water in a move known as a spy hop. They find playthings and are particularly fond of swimming repeatedly through clumps of seaweed, which slides over them like a feathered boa.

I see many people trying to write well about the wilderness, and essentially failing. To me there are basically two aspects of a failed outdoor story. One is the phony epiphany on the mountain top.

It was Muddy Waters who took the Delta blues north to Chicago, electrified the sound, and changed the course of popular music as we know it. That's pretty much the judgment of history, and it is mine as well.

Healthier, perhaps, to find beauty in life and feel it expand inside of us.