Spirituality & Health Magazine

"Kids love to wear bandage strips because they draw attention to pain," says artist Anita Walsh. Adults often prefer denial, even in the wake of traumas as horrific as 9/11. These Bandages Go More Than Skin DeepPenelope

Never having been to the Berkshires, I was thrilled when my friend Carol invited me for an extended winter weekend with her friend Denise, who was already waiting for us in a cabin in the woods.

Bob Butz was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Afflicted by an after-school obsession for catching the bottom-feeding fishes that lurked in a tiny, scum-covered suburban sewer pond he frequented as a boy, he entertained dreams throughout childhood one day becoming America’s first professional carp fisherman. Then, thro...ughout early adolescence and despite an inability to make fire without the aid of a box of matches and copious amounts of lighter fluid, he spent a brief period plotting to run away to become a mountain man. After avoiding a life of petty crime and prison by taking refuge in the woods, he managed to graduate from college with a creative writing degree. This set him up perfectly for a series of dead-end occupations—waiter, licensed movie projectionist, Indian Echo Caverns tour guide, retail clerk, and chief worm-packer for a Harrisburg-area bait and tackle shop—while he wrote a multitude of forgettable articles and stories for a number of regional and national outdoor magazines. Butz now writes on a host of diverse topics ranging from food to fatherhood, adventure travel, nature, personality profiles, and whacky outdoor news. A past contributing editor to Sports Afield and TRAVERSE: Northern Michigan’s magazine, Bob Butz is an award winning book author, essayist, and magazine writer whose byline has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Journal, Outdoor Life, National Wildlife, and numerous others. In 2006, his book Beast of Never, Cat of God: The Search for the Eastern Puma received a Michigan Notable Book Award from the Library of Michigan. He is also the author of An Uncrowded Place: Delights and dilemmas of a life Up North and a young man's search for home (Huron River Press, 2008). “All at once elegant and funny as hell,” his newest book—Going Out Green: One Man’s adventure planning his own natural burial—was released by Spirituality & Health Books in 2009.