“The craft of angling is the catching of fish, but the art of angling is receptiveness to those connections, the art of letting one thing lead to another until, if only locally and momentarily, you realized some small completeness.”
Ted Leeson’s The Habit of Rivers (1994)
I have a preconceived notion that anything I write for this blog or other outdoor publications should be a mix of two parts, Jim Harrison, one part of either Norman Maclean or Ernest Hemingway and a splash of Thoreau. I should convey the near religious experience that allows men to transcend the self and experience nature a way only understood by light and wind. Yet, when I go fishing, I laugh with friends, relax in the scenery and partake in malted barley and hops.
Whether wading up or down a small creek or kayaking from deep hole to deep hole on larger rivers, I enjoy my time outdoors, but I feel guilty for not having the forthright religious experience of my heroes. Instead, I am just some poor schlub swinging a stick and string trying to get a bronze to bite a few feathers while wearing a big hat and sunscreen.
I am not watching a trout magically rise to sip a size 28 dry fly and run through pristine mountain streams, nor am I fly fishing in the mountain passes of Burguete, Spain in order to leave the stinkand stench of Paris and its false gods behind, nor have I rearranged my entire life to move to a small Montana town where I can spend my days a writer of words and fisher of browns. But, is what I do any less pleasurable? Is it any less important to me? Should I not be proud of the Ozark streams and strong Smallmouth they hold?
I enjoy my outings as much or more than others. I am not so addicted that I have to catch fish to have a good day. Sometimes just staying on top of my kayak makes a day a success, on others it is only catching one fish more than anyone else, even if that is only one fish. On other days I simply float along, occasionally casting and feeling put-out when a fish interrupts my day by taking my hook.
While this does not sound like something a seasoned fly fisherman would say, it is, at last, the truth. While several of my friends are there for the thrill of the catch, I seem to be out there simply be out there. Not to find something that is missing in my life, and not to recharge, but to find something worth wasting my life doing. After all, isn’t that the point of time? Some would argue time should be spent, but I think wasting it, like money, is much more fun.
If you are still reading this, then you can easily tell the difference in me and those fore-mentioned four. They made a career - no, a life, - of writing. And they did a damn fine job at it, while I sit attempting stream-of-conscience that appears more as poorly
punctuated prose trying to pass as something more akin to poetry than bad writing. But, does that make their experiences any greater or mine any lesser than mine? Are we not all doing the same thing? Are we not all spending a large portion of our days and nights in the pursuit of catching fish on a fly rod?
While I do not believe in the New Year - New Me, I am resolved in looking beyond the romance of Thoreau and seeking life’s marrow; and, instead, look toward the final chapter of the book. Instead of searching for life, I intend to go meet life. My life. The life I enjoy of spending time with a few good friends, trying to trick a fish to bite a bit of feather I tied in my basement, and the partaking of malted barley and hops while taking comfort in the knowledge that great men will surely write and tell me what I missed.
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