The Uses of Transit

Sometimes I feel guilty for the time I spend fishing, modest as that is. In academia there is always, always something else that you can do, should do, must do, and that some else surely is doing.  Failing to do that thing will (you just know) draw a swarm of grave professional repercussions that will lay waste to your productivity, your reputation, and your livelihood (and thus your fishing budget). Other occupations put similar stresses on their members, I'm sure.  But week in and week out, the number of challenges and obligations--some self imposed, some not--the scholar/teacher faces can be dizzying, and the "cans" and "shoulds" among them frequently have to make way for the "musts"--occasioning guilt, of course.

One of the things I have appreciated about duck hunting is that I can hunt for a morning and still have half a day to work. But the distance separating me from trout country raises the price of a day trip to one full day, and one third to one half of that will be spent in transit. There are times when driving to or from fishing, especially in the dark, can be wonderfully mind clearing.  Often, though, I drive with a tape loop of professional (or sometimes marital) self-recriminations swelling and fading against the music or audiobook I have on.

That loop was playing faintly during during my drive to Grayling for a one-day fling last month.  It was silent on the drive home.  I'd had a good day, of course.  But it was only while hurtling southward in the Subaru that I realized this.  Realized, actually, not so much the goodness of the day as the day itself.

It can take a while, maybe a day or two, to make the mental shift from the workaday world to the river world. To slow the mind and adjust to the surroundings, to let the senses revive.   This is most true when I haven't been out in a few weeks, or months.  On daytrips, the process may barely begin. That Saturday, not having fished or been north since September, I felt a bit alien while on the water and in the country around the river, despite fishing there for nearly twenty years.   I enjoyed myself, make no mistake.  The smell of pines, the pulse of the river against my waders, even the sight of the familiar weathered "Quality Fishing Area" signs began to draw me out from under the heap of obligations and frustrations the winter had laid on me; the sight of rising fish gave me that deep gut pang it always does, and holding the first trout of the year in my hands brought on the giddy, wordless joy it always does but which I somehow forget over each winter.

But most of these pleasures didn't take--whatever pleasant jolt they gave altered few of the circuits of my workaday mind.  They didn't draw me far into my surroundings or the pursuit of fish. I remained that afternoon and evening more or less in the place where I began and would all-too-soon end the day.   Since I wasn't really there, the place, and the act of fishing, seemed not entirely real, like pleasant illusions not to be taken seriously or trusted too much.

It was on the drive home that some of those illusions began to gain substance.  I was listening to a novel on CD, Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, but my mind slipped into replays of some catches that afternoon.  I lingered on the sight of the air buzzing with hendricksons, could almost feel, as I gripped the wheel, the fluid heft of the trout.   I stood against the headwind and plotted again how to defeat it by keeping my casts short and low.  After a while I turned off the CD to let these impressions soak in.   It was when I drew near home that I'd finally arrived at the river. 

I want to stress I wasn't inventing an experience, at least in the sense of creating an account of the day that didn't square with its particulars.   It was through the medium of the trip and the quiet hours in the car that those particulars made their full impression.  A stone tossed into troubled water makes few ripples; only a quiet surface can reveal its weight and force.  Corey Ford once wrote that "Fishing doesn't really happen.  It just goes on in your head," but I believe he overstated his case.  Fishing does happen, but never really unless the energies and events on both sides of the cranium intermingle.  This exchange should (and often does) occur in real time   But sometimes it requires a little more time in transit.