The Voice of the Thinking Man - 4/23
It’s almost time to go fishing. Mind you, it’s always time to go fishing here. As long as there’s water in the state and something that swims in it, you’ll find some hooligan in waders trying to hook it out.
But Paul, there’s something that happens to you when you start to write about fly fishing. You unlock a tier of folksy spirituality so thick that even Wendell Berry would choke between rips off his corn cob pipe. People can’t help but write with a breathless reverence about the fish, they flutter through endless passageways decorated with the symbiotic struggle of man versus nature versus himself versus nothingness. Whatever it is Paul, I hate it.
I am man, the predestined dominator of everything he sees. They are but fish, they can’t even drive a prius. Why should they get all the prime waterfront real estate? We don’t even need the whole fish, Paul, just the sticks.
Where is the writing for people like me? I see their wiley beauty and their freedom and I hate them for it and I want to take it from them and possess it because I fear those are two things that I do not have on my own and never will and the only way I can get them is to steal them from another living thing.
When it’s time to go fishing, I spend the whole day casting in the river. When I miss the first trout of the season and watch its shadow slip away, I remember just how clearly that I wish for nothing more than to yank them free from the water because of some abstract application of revenge. Outsmarted by a fish, as if. I work up and down the river, through the grasses and the mud, just for the one sweet moment where I hook something, when the fish truly surrenders to my superiority. The ire has built in me all day. The fish tries to fight me. I will inevitably prevail.
But then something breaks in me when I haul them up out of the water and I see their little faces and their entire body fighting me and gasping for air and I feel I’m at the brink of stealing something from the world that can never be replaced. The ones who cash the checks of war will never pay their price, after all. And for a moment I understand why those people write just how they write and I feel all the hate drain out from me from a small valve in the side of my abdomen, leaving emptiness in its place. I behold the entirety of the indescribable universe all condensing to a single point of now, I and the moment become inseparable. The fish becomes some sort of extension of my spirit - two are one are nothing and everything. I set the fish back in the water and watch it swim out as long as I can, then I just look down and take a small joy that I have much in common with all the rocks in the stream. Eventually I pack my gear and myself back into my car and make the drive back home. I think I will always feel that spike of hate strike out from me until I finally die. I don’t want to believe the hate and the ire is something that springs uniquely from me but instead just something terminal driven deep into my heart fighting it’s way out because it knows it does not belong there. It doesn’t matter how it got there, I suppose, and I’m happy that right now it feels so far away and I hope I get better at recognizing it when it comes back to greet me again and again in all its red and petulant ooze.
At home at the end of my day, I think how great nature is strictly because I am reminded of how much I hate the city and its noise and all the jags who can’t figure out a zipper merge. Sure, Minneapolis and St. Paul are very nice places, but really that feels to me about the same as saying the guillotine is a nice way to be publicly executed. Because all things considered, this all is probably one of the nicest ways it can possibly be.
