Life Lessons and Fishing

Life experience vs. Fishing  

(Based loosely on Jerry Wilber’s article  …there’s more to fishing than fishing)

 Have you heard the saying, “There is no such thing as a bad day of fishing?” I believe the premise to be nearly entirely true.  Even if in your grand aspirations, you suffer through an occasional broken rod trip, lost stringer, sunburned face, leg-filled horsefly bites, or grumpy outboard that won’t turn over.         

This however is basically a story about life and fly-fishing for smallmouth bass, that some, if not all can make a connection with, even if you have never layed hands on a fly rod.  It goes as follows.   

There are a pair of college buddies home for the summer.  They are football players by trade and the apples of many a 20 year old–something ladies eyes.  Handsome, muscular, confident… I believe the young folks today call it SWAG.   Well anyway, they catch my attention between games while umpiring a doubleheader at the Plum City Blues Tournament.  I hear them say that they would rather fly-fish for river run smallmouth than you know what.  

As Jerry Wilber once said, ‘Knowledge is the cement that holds ones life together,’ and I figure I know a thing or two about smallmouth bass and fly rods.  My knowledge of you know what, is likely behind the times, so I ask them to join me in the Green Lund the day after school gets out.  They giggle, but agree and shoot the question, “ Do you need us to bring you a fly rod?”

I scoff, trying to display my 40 something year old SWAG, “No thanks…I have three or four of my own.”   That is the truth by the way.

                                                                 

So I take the boys  6 or 7 miles up the Chippewa, to likely looking stretch of old riprap, undercut banks, and logjams that I know should hold some pudgy bronze backs.  I mostly keep the Green Lund pointed upstream while back drifting in the June breeze and sunshine.  The water is a bit stained from  the recent downpours, so the lures of choice are dark colored popping bugs and a combination of brown sinking streamers and purple and black leech imitations.  The boys land 3 fish each before I get on the board with a chunky 17 incher, who goes completely air-born to slam my popper.  We are having a grand old time and the college boys seemed impressed at my skills in boat handling, net minding, picture taking, and even bass bug casting.  They even invite me to join them on their home river the week after next.

   

                                                     

I figure it is then time to launch the second phase of my plan, so I ask them what they could tell me about you know what. The one in the front tilted his head to the east, much like a lab puppy does when he hears a strange whistling sound.  The fellow in the middle just shook his head and went silent for the last 3 miles of the drift. Apparently fishing tips on a river are fine to be shared, but when you know what is concerned, it’s every man for himself.    I am currently in the process of rebuilding my SWAG.

-TGI

Decisions

Decisions

I am all for self-improvement.  For years I have read articles, watched commercials and listened to ads that have brought ideas about a thousand and one ways to look better, feel better, make more money, plant better gardens, cook healthier meals and find better jobs.  There are self help groups and online sites that tell you how to organize your life, raise your kids, make homemade wine, make your yard fit for ‘fancy smancy’ magazine covers, and tell you what type of music to play for your plants.

   There is barely a need to form an opinion of your own, because you can find the answers to everything on Wikipedia.  Don’t worry about paying attention on those nice weekend drives because there are Groovy GPS Apps quite easily downloadable that tell you exactly where to turn and when to stop. 

 When I am not chasing my own two kids, carrying out orders from my lovely bride, or chasing fish and fowl around Western Wisconsin, I teach ten and eleven year-olds in a small public school.  It’s a fantastic job. Lately there have been drawbacks there as well.  The powers that be are worried about new standards, new curriculum, smarter balances, and common cores.  We are set on mainstreaming those with special needs and talents, toning down those that are too loud, and perking up those that are too quiet.  We have entry exams and exit plans.  We are teaching to the bell curve and trying not to send the parents to the bell tower. Everyone one is overworked, over taxed, underpaid, under appreciated, out manned, and outgunned, even if they are adequately qualified.  

Today’s 4^th graders need to know what the eighth graders of ten years ago did.  The first graders need to do the work that 5^th graders used to do.  My dear Amelia will turn 7 this year. We are looking at colleges to apply for this summer.

So if you are on of those folks all hip on technology and all of the modern conveniences that make us more like druids and less like real folks,   good for you!  But to be perfectly honest I really don’t need that stuff… At least not this fine morning in May.  

    You see, I am proudly yet quietly here in the country I love to call home.  My eyes, ears, and nostrils are all on high alert. I am hunkered down on the bottom of an open coulee next to a scraggly red oak. I’m at the junction of a sprouting first crop alfalfa field, a dry run of sandstone and pea gravel, and a freshly plowed 30 acres that will be chest high corn in 3 months. My mind is at the junction of weighing the sanity of waking at 3:30 a.m. to hunt turkeys.  

 My neighbors for the last hour have been a bobtailed boar coon, 17 red-bellied robins, 2 squawking sand hill cranes in the distance, and three yearling whitetails, nosing into my  decoys cautiously and proudly showing off velvet racks. The busy morning is backlit by the sun, steadily but slowly rising through a bank of  Plum Creek fog.  Drumming grouse, cackling rooster pheasants, and excited crows are providing the rhythm  to thundering four-tom melody, which plays out on the hardwood points above me.

The smell of lilacs, night crawlers and distant campfire smoke mingle with each other and stimulate my easily distracted mind.  I am down to deciding about important things for today.  Shall I take the green Lund out on Lake Pepin and drag floating jigs for walleyes, or hop in my flat bottom and try to snare bluegills and perch from the Tiffany Bottom backwater sloughs. 

After the dew burns off, shall I try to fill bread bags full of morel mushrooms, or try to fill a creel with wild run brook trout?  When it is time to break for lunch, shall I dive into a mushroom & swiss venison burger on the grill, or sizzle up some not totally crisp bacon in a pan and place it with roasted asparagus?  Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Life is a string of them I tell ya.  It is often hard to tell when we make the right ones.  Lots of folks seem to point out when we choose the wrong ones.  Are we keeping up with the Jones’?  Do we post enough pictures of our kids and our DIY projects like our Facebook Friends do?  Has the decision to put out 2 jake decoys and only one hen foiled my otherwise stellar set up? 

 

Decisions…decisions…Wait!  The time has come to set down my pen and steady my 870 on my right knee.  A full strut gobbler is waddling in with a look of bad intentions on his mind.  Now, 60 yards and closing, so you will have to decide how this story ends.

-TGI