This morning a chiding email popped up from an unhappy family member (CS, non-fisher living a big hat, no cattle existence down south) asking why, among other failures, I continue to waste so much time fly fishing.
I told him that (ironically) just yesterday I’d had an email exchange with a friend (Guide Jim to CW readers) who spends several months every summer guiding to, as Guide Jim puts it, ‘redeem my soul after being locked in the ivory tower all year’ (as a professor of architecture).
Jim is working on a university project in rural China and we’ve been lately chatting about how much we both dearly miss the cavernous maw of potential that is the dawn of the Northern Rockies’ summer season.
Though he (CS) surely won’t have understood, I shared something from Jim –
…some days it’s simply not about the fishing. Dammit, I miss just watching the sun on the water, summer afternoon storm clouds and the big Western sunsets with ridgelines rippling off the horizon.
I pity the fisherman who never takes the time to sit on a bankside rock and soak it all in. Counting heads is great and I’m into big fish as much as anybody around, though more and more those aren’t the real drivers for me, it’s more about engaging with the tactile world squishing up between my toes.
While some of my behavioralist colleagues scoff and laugh, what some are calling Nature Deficit Disorder is a real thing. Man is happiest with dirt under his fingernails, fish slime on his hands, lungs full of fresh air and sun-kissed cheeks (facial or butt cheeks work here by the way)…
Some days it’s simply not about the fishing.
