It was a week from his 68th birthday when we spoke and artist Peter Corbin of Millbrook, New York, shared how he first held a shotgun at age 6 and first cast a fly rod at age 7. Shotgun shells came at age 9. “I’ve had 60 years of fly fishing and wingshooting,” he said. “In a painting, I want to capture the feeling of the whole day and why we do this.”

At home on Cape Cod, late November is a time for reflection. That might be because the Pilgrims explored what is now our town center a few months before landing in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As such, Thanksgiving has always carried a significant weight, much more so than many other holidays, save for Easter.

…After Thanksgiving, our Northern New England uplands and the lowlands quiet down for the winter. Leaves from the mountain ash, alders, white birch, maples, and beech have all dropped to the ground allowing the cold wind to whip off of the mountains and down through the valleys. Woodcock season ended weeks ago, but now and then we’ll find a few tardy stragglers in a seep. Skim ice forms in the calmer water of the pools along the shores of the river, and the trout seldom rise any more.

Irish booze has deeper historic connections than any whiskey category. Some legends indicate St. Patrick introduced distillation of grains around 5 AD, making Ireland the true origins of whiskey.

But there has been no scholarly evidence to support this. We do know for fact that the Irish were making whiskey in 1405, when the Irish Annals tell us some bloke died from drinking too much.

And we thought we had bad memories from drinking Irish whiskey! Shakespeare even discussed an Irish man drinking “aqua vitae,” Latin for water of life, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, leading to many scholars wondering if this was Irish whiskey or brandy. My money is on whiskey. So, the next time you’re camping and you want a historic dram near the campfire, consider packing Irish whiskey.