Backwater Flats: Images

I was asked the other day where I have been all summer.

I’d like to say I’ve been fishing like a mad man since the season began and tell some epic story of hero casts and double digit days.

But I can’t.

I wish I could post up pictures of the thousands of flies I’ve tied since the spring.

But I haven’t.

Life gets busy. As much as you want to and try to stay on a certain course, falling off the rhumb line happens quickly in unsettled weather. Course correction is influenced by things you can’t necessarily control. Destinations change. It is a constant juggling act living one life posing as a happy idiot in the struggle for the legal tender and the other as a happy idiot waste deep in a backwater creek seeking adventure. Someday I’ll get it right.

But for now other things and other people can wait. My daughter moved home in June after a year away. She will begin high school in two weeks, back in her hometown, back with her friends. The summer has been spent making up for lost time and preparing for the start of a new journey, a new adventure. For both of us.

Abby’s talent in art has led her to photography, an interest we both share and something she has suggested on her own that might fit well with the fly-water side of our lives. During our travels this summer she has brought her camera gear along to capture whatever might be encountered. It has been fascinating not just watching her as she photographs different things but more so in listening to her explain what she saw or what she was thinking when she took each shot. These thoughts are as interesting to me as the actual photograph.

We’ve worked on a couple of photograph projects since she came home. One of which was submitting some of her pictures in the photography contest at the Marshfield Fair. It’s not Nat Geo, I know, but it is a start. Abby spent a week going through all her shots and chose four to submit. She was gone last weekend when the fair opened so I went down by myself to see how she had done. I have to say I was a very proud father as I walked through the exhibit.