Streamer Junkie

When things finally come together they feel like a fish pulling against you at the end of your line…

Patience. By definition it’s the capacity to accept or tolerate delay without getting angry or upset. My Grandmother used to tell me it was a virtue. As a high school kid in ripped jeans and a leather jacket it was the only hit song off the Guns-N-Roses “Lies” album, and today, twenty-eight years later, patience is something I seem to be in short supply of. Whatever it is I want done, I don’t want to screw around, I just want it done now. It needs to happen now. So that I can move on to more important things. Like fishing.

It was just good to finally be on my favorite stream again, and to see it in such a different way was almost refreshing. In the end on the drive home I thought about it in my head, wondering how I could put it into words that would get the true feelings across.

But this morning I came across some pictures from up on the towers, and it lead to me thinking about things that I took away from my short time in that industry. Mostly fly fishing, and a pair of old friends. In the picture I’m looking down past my boots at the featureless landscape four-hundred and fifty some odd feet below. But it wasn’t the height, and it wasn’t the memory of that specific job that made the picture special. It was my boots supporting me up on the narrow, cold steel up in the wind. They’re my wading boots.

I’ve never considered myself a sappy, emotional, or sensitive person. As a matter of fact I’m pretty sure I’ve done my best through a lot of my life to be just the opposite of those things. But alone by myself on a river or stream, I’ll admit that the water, and the fish, do bring out those qualities from somewhere inside me from time to time. That’s most likely the healing factor people talk about water having. Us fly anglers just happened to stumble upon the fact that a brightly colored fly line forming loops above the moving water happens to enhance the healing power somehow. I’m not going to try and analyze it. That’s a rabbit hole for another day. On a warm, sunny day like this, I’m happy to simply accept it for what it is, take it for granted, and enjoy it.

So I torture myself all the same, like most people do, reading about the places others go in search of fish and grand views of the wild. And I lie to myself, telling myself that if I’d just buckle down and save some money, that I could be on a plane next year, fly rod tubes in the overhead compartments, fly boxes tucked in between neatly folded clothes in a small suitcase. I tell myself this lie as I hear the wind flapping shingles on the roof overhead, knowing we’ll need a new roof this year. Roofs, if you don’t know, take money. At least as much as what I could spend on several plane tickets. My wife and neighbors see tar and stone glued together in a green shade that matches the house siding laying on the lawn after the wind takes its toll. As I’m on the roof nailing down new shingles that don’t match, I don’t see nails piercing shingles. I see myself nailing a ticket to South America down.

JP added me to a string of e-mails recently between him and a customer who lives on a tropical island. You know, one of those islands surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean…and my ideas of what fishing was like on one of those islands was all but destroyed. It’s not like I talk to fly fishermen every day who live on an island in the middle of an ocean, so most of my notions are actually nothing more than assumptions. Come to think about it, if you asked me what kind of fish you’d catch in a small fresh water stream on a tropical island five thousand miles from home, I wouldn’t have the first clue. So the only assumption I really made was thinking I might have an idea in the first place.

We never got run out, and I have to believe that whoever owned the property knew people fished there all the time by the beaten dirt path from the road down the steep incline leading into the bottom of a deep bowl full of water. I’d never do it today, because I now have a respect for other people’s property and an equal fear of being a father who would have to explain to my children after being picked up at the police station that they should do as I say, not as I do. It seems that I’ve grown responsible, dare I say slightly wiser as I’ve gotten older. All be it with an apparent lack of adventure that can accompany the two if allowed. I’m not saying I’m not adventurous anymore, just that when I choose my adventures, they’re more based on possible outcomes these days than they used to be.

At some point it becomes about you and the water, and everything else just falls into place. Fish only matter when they’re caught, but don’t ruin a day when they’re not, and life balances out for those brief times in between all other life.