The fishing wasn't fabulous, but I did catch half a dozen or so brookies, enough to salve the irritations incurred on the trip up. The next morning, I breakfasted on two trout I caught shortly after leaving my tent at six. For the rest of the day I wandered up and down the Fox mainstream, taking an occasional trout on worms and letting the emptiness of the scrubby woods north of Seney make me full.
Early in the afternoon a strong wind began blowing. It took off my hat a few times, blew some casts back toward me--minor inconveniences. By evening though, it inflicted a minor catastrophe. When I returned to my camp at nightfall I found my tent collapsed and limp. The stakes had fortunately held, keeping it from swirling around the campground like a castoff grocery bag.
I knelt to find the poles the held up the tent at both ends and reset them. But when I picked up the first pole, it was bent at a right angle: the flimsy, hollow steel had snapped at one of the joints. When I tried to straighten it it broke cleanly in two.
The other pole was intact, but useless without its mate.
The first solution to this problem that came to mind was to find a stick that could replace the pole. With my flashlight I searched along the edge of the woods for a long ways both up and down from my tent but found none that were both long and stout enough. I thought next to run a rope between the grommet that would have held the broken pole and a nearby tree, but I didn't have enough spare rope, and unless the bar was selling it, I wouldn't find any store open in Seney where I could buy more.
The wind still howled through the pines. A thunderstorm was coming, the radio said.
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