Bueller

I walked to the water tonight to start the season. I stood in a light rain being driven into my face and studied the water. I had low expectations. The water temperature was still a little low, the sky had rained more often than not for what seemed like weeks leaving the water in front of me the color of iced tea and I had about an hour left of the incoming tide. Not the most favorable conditions but every season needs a starting point and all day long I had that gnawing feeling that if I didn’t go, I’d be missing something.

I paused at the water’s edge before stepping in and watched the rain drops leave little marks on the surface before being almost instantly absorbed. Like the rain drops, this place has absorbed my history. I smiled in the irony. For twenty years I’ve come to this same spot for the first attempt at “getting on the board.” That first fish of the season, what we all think about during the off-season. Sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn’t. It’s the experience that matters, the knowledge gained each time out, history written by volume of sought experience, not volume of created content.

Out of habit, one which I’m trying to break, I reached to my jacket pocket to make sure my phone was there.  In the back of my mind an argument began with the Id demanding that if a fish were to be caught that it be “photographed and immediately posted”, the Ego proclaiming “it’s just fishing” and the Super-ego chirping something about buying in and selling my soul.

It’s just fishing. I stepped into the water thinking about that as I threw line. In fly fishing we try to entice a fish, in this case a striped bass, to eat a cluster (sometimes a Cluster-F.*#) of natural or synthetic materials tied to a sharp piece of metal that we cast at speeds somewhere around 400 to 600 feet per second into water that can be moving, in this instance, about 4 miles per hour, on a planet that rotates on its axis at 1040 miles per hour while circling the sun at just under 67,000 miles per hour. On top of that, while fishing, we can upload images of our catches to social media from our phones nearly instantly at speeds measured by Mbps. I have no idea what that is but it sounds fast. I’m not smart enough to understand the physics of it all, it just seems clear that the world is already moving fast before we try to influence it.

As I continued to stare out at the water and work the rust out of my already marginal casting, I thought of a notable quote from F. Bueller, the preeminent American philosopher of the 1980’s:

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."

More looking around. Less uploading. Copy that, Ferris.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did go tight to the first stripe of the season and I did take a photo of it before I released it.

And I did post (upload) it as a voice in my head chirped something about buying in and selling out.

From the water

28 April 2019