(image credit: neoconstant)
Envious, I am, of my friend Erik's recent vacation in Montana.
Words can't possibly describe such beauty.
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- Eowyn
- Pennsylvania, United States
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10 comments:
You're dead-on with that! I was speechless a number of times. I live in a dry state, so being around so much water, so many forests, rivers...breathtaking!
What a wonderful vacation you must have had :o)
In th e Spring and till the late Fall my dad would come home and I'd be waiting with the fishing rods and our army surplus gas-mask bags full of tackle, and after he'd had some dinner we'd head off to the lake and walk down the path through the woods to the shore and stand on boulders and go fishing for a few hours, hauling in some trout, an occasional bass, or maybe nothing at all but a fine evening of pine scent and blue sky and sun-set and wind off the water.
I loved the fly fishing over other forms of the art because it takes a certain skill to hit the aim, to jig the fly to entice the fish, to romance the world below into coming to try me out and engage me and allow me the privilege of matching my self against the universe of fish. One must know fish like friends and lovers to have them come up like that. To know the food of the day, the bugs on the water, the confluence of the creeks and the lake, the temperature of the water and the depths of the pools and the likelihood of the fish wanting to eat rather than not. There's that moment when the fish hits the fly and just checks it out, not making any real commitment, and if one is hasty, thinking that hit is the end of the dance, that all is in the basket, then one walks home alone. But there is that electric energy of fish and boy and the direct current between him and he, the fish running like a wolf and returning like a pup. At the net, the fish tired and gasping, one needs slide it under gently, the body enclosed from below to capture the fish without terrifying him into acrobatics that could send him off the hook for good. The silver, the blue, the rainbow of trout, and the cut-throat, his red gill and golden sheen flashing in the water and the dim light of dusk, one's hand must be gentle to grasp the body and thumb the gill to release the hook and submerge the sleek swimmer till his clarity returns and he is able again to resume his prior life free till perhaps next time-- should he escape the pan. Not all do. Some are rightly eaten.
I loved it back home, a place of deep beauty and intense mysteries of the woods and water. But the world is large, and there is much to do here for men. Yes, some are lured from home and captured by the forces outside Reason, and some of those are eaten, right or wrong. Still a life of the boy, when I think of it.
Ah, dag ... the absolute joys of fly-fishing. You frame it most masterfully.
My ex-husband -- whom I will always love, and with whom I am better friends now than ever when we were together -- introduced me to those joys. He was so very into it he made his own rods, flys, etc. It was a Zen exercise for him to fine-tune the exact conditions, food, mood, etc. in which to find the best fish.
It is an art. And you framed it so well.
I was, to my embarrassment, never much of a fisherman. Coming from Montana, people expect you to be a hunter, fisherman, horse-back riding outdoorsman.
However, my parents were the intellectual types, and we generally stuck to hiking and camping.
If I ever move back, though, I'm buying myself a gun and a rod.
This isn't to say I never made it out to fish, etc. I just never made it much a part of my life. I do regret that, though I left MT as a boy...
Well, Erik, not sure where you live now, but it's never too late to start fly-fishing. It does cost a bit to start up -- but you don't have to buy the "best" rod. According to Mark (ex-husband), any cheap rod will do -- it's making sure you have the right gauge line and fairly good-quality line and reel. Some research into which fish bite during which times of day and year in certain bodies of water may be in order, so as to buy the right flies -- and you may want waders -- but after that, it's learning the knack of jigging and twitching. Even if you don't catch anything (and you will, eventually), it's well worth the time.
It's you, a quiet pond (or rushing stream) and Zen exercise. Immensely satisfying :o) Of course, many people say that about golf -- but, well, another cup of tea, I guess.
When I find myself kicking a stone along the path as I walk I think of my father explaining that gold was probably invented by an old Scotsman hitting a stone with his walking stick. He as part of a small but influential "intelligentsia" in my old hometown. He liked playing golf, it being a competitive and social activity. He never went hunting, to my knowledge. In that, I think we can see the difference between gold and fishing.
Golf is goal oriented and determined from the start. It's about force and skill directed at the outside for a specific end. It's linear. It's cooperative-competitive. I like it well enough, but I prefer trout fishing.
Fly fishing is an approach to being in the world that literally puts one in the world, in the rushing water itself, under the carefully considered sky, in the noticed airs. All that goes into fly-fishing comes to its culmination when the fish lands in the net. It lands because the man has made it so. But even then, the passive construction is true. One cannot actively dance against ones partner, nor can one actively fish against ones prey. It requires a harmony of struggle and a delicacy of understanding the nature of the one toward the other. One must care deeply about the fish, random though he might be in his personal being. It's a hunting and often a killing. It's not a murder but a celebration of the living who die.
Nietzsche mentions the obvious difference between the warrior and the soldier, and such is the difference between the fisherman and the golfer. It's the old struggle between Cain and Abel. Fortunate are we who can play out these dramas in peace and security.
dag ...
You're standing, alone, in a stream.
Perhaps you'll land a fish, perhaps not. It doesn't matter.
The point is you're in the stream. Yes?
The point is the almost unmediated experience of the life-force and the being. It' as close as one can get, in my experience, to being as being in the world. Perhaps, as you put it above, zen-like. It is beauty.
I looked for a poem to refer to to illustrate a golf swing, a poem by, I don't know who, maybe Philip Larkin or Wallace Stevens. Couldn't find it and can't recall. The point is in the beauty of the being in th world. Lots of ways of being less mediated, more "authentically" in the being as being. As a substitute, I can ask via Yeats, "Who can know the dancer from the dance?"
You;re all making me home-sick with this. And I have miles to go before I sleep.
Yes, I understand ... just being.
Had a lengthy discussion on this with karmasurfer just this evening. It started with my mentioning two episodes of "Northern Exposure"; one in which Leonard the shaman (? or perhaps Ed?) gets Fleischmann to go golfing on a completely hostile landscape (rocks, etc.); and the other, toward the end of the show's run, in which Fleischmann takes the new doctor out golfing at the same place, with Fleischmann using only a shillelagh.
When the discussion moved on to golf, the K-man pointed out that here you have a slap in the face of physics -- how can you possibly get a tiny ball to land in, or near, a tiny cup, from 300 yards using a metal stick? Wind shear alone should automatically reduce your chances to near zero. But people do it.
Perhaps they become the ball. Perhaps fly fishermen become the fly. But however you look at it -- it is only you in the moment.
With both golf and fly-fishing, you're not separated from nature. Golf courses demand too much manicure of nature for my liking (as opposed to fishing). But you're outdoors in the world as it is, and you're of that world, and all things come together.
What a rush.
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