Several months ago I wrote about anticipation, about how fly fishing is filled with moments of waiting and hoping for things to happen. Recently, I’ve been absent from Chi Wulff for a host of boring reasons, not the least of which is that I find myself worrying perhaps a bit too much about the goings on at my day job. This is a rut that I fall into occasionally. And it’s something, I think, that is easy to do when things begin to change and great unknowns begin to lurk. Such feelings are the opposite of anticipation, I think. The best word to describe such fear is: dread. And dread sucks. It is not a particularly fun way to exist.
Luckily, I have managed to fish a bit lately as well. Almost a month ago now I caught a brown trout that was larger than any I have ever taken with a fly rod. After years of swinging and pulling streamers, I was finally rewarded with a fish worthy of all the effort. On the same trip I caught several nice cutts on my friend the Chubby Chernobyl.
A week or so later I fished with my Dad and brother. My dad is over 70 now and though my brother and I try plan trips that we hope will allow my father to hook up early and often, sometimes he just doesn’t catch very many fish. As his sons, we don’t like this. So when he began catching fish on nymphs one morning on a local river and didn’t stop for the entire day, we were pretty psyched. At one point I caught him grinning like a teenager. “I haven’t had this much fun in years,” he said.
That day I realized something new that fly fishing does for me—it makes dread go away.
In a couple of days I will fish again. And a few days later, again. I am trying to squeeze every ounce of dread-repellant out of this late fall. This fish are biting and the winter is hovering, waiting to pounce. Today we got two inches of the white stuff. Usually I see that first snow as the symbolic end of the season—next year’s trout streams are falling from the sky, putting this year’s fishing to bed. Not this time. This year I am fishing through. I refuse to let it end until I am so cold and tired I can’t feel my feet in the icy water. I don’t want to think about anything except the next drift, the next fish, the next trip to the river.
Sure, I know that at some point I will be forced to resurface and face those things I dread. But I don’t have to be in any hurry about it.
