Just Sitting:

I was sitting at the bottom of my dirt driveway waiting for my friend Mike to pick me up to get some coffee. Sometimes, I love these little segments of down time.

While I was waiting, I pulled out from the back of my truck a small fold away chair. I had a great view of my house and mountain. To say I was praying would be too much. I was just sitting and reflecting. Even calling it reflecting is saying too much. 

The only thing I was aware of was that I was at peace. Perhaps I was content. Being at peace and content are big things for me.  Perhaps for anyone.

I enjoy looking up at where I live. The forest up on the mountain marks the western edge of my property. The trail we built switch backs its way up the mountain. 

In a strange mysterious way these boundaries help me feel contained and secure. 

The same thing happens while fishing. However, sometimes it is not so easy to share the water or realize when we are crossing boundaries. Often we do not have clear cut boundaries on such matters.

   

 

As Fly Fishers We Have to Guard OurSelves From a Sense of Superority:

Back in the 80s when I really got into fly fishing for trout I had a sense of being on a mission. And that mission was to convert every bait and spin fisher to a fly fisher. This mission was real in that there was a religious component to it. I was good at selling the notion that fly fishing was superior to all other forms of fishing.

I did this while guiding and while I was a teacher at school and with folks at church and with family. I loved to tell people how much more rewarding and fun fly fishing was compared to the other forms of fishing. I grew to hate big lures with those stupid treble hooks and fish swallowing bait hooks. Yuck.

And of course like any good salesman I sometimes had to push it and beg. "Please let me teach you how to fly fish. Once you catch a fish on a fly you will never go back to picking up a spin casting rod again."  And usually I was right. 

But here is the catch, fly fishing can be so much fun, so rewarding and so productive that we end up hurting a lot of fish simply because we we catch a lot. We catch tons,  When we become good at something it is easy to become addicted. Part of the addiction is the sense of superiority that wells up inside of us knowing that we have mastered an art. Or at the very least, we figured it out. 

I remember wanting people to watch me. It was like I was wearing a sign on my hat or shirt, "Look at me."   

In my last years of guiding I shied away from that kind of thing. In fact I started to hate being noticed. I didn't want anyone to know I was guiding.

Ponds Upon Ponds

 

I remember in my masters counseling program I had one professor who said that when we get older, we return to the things that fascinated us when we were young. Well, I am getting older and I now find myself cycling back to little creeks and springs, wanting to build little dams and ponds, and hoping fish will find their way in those small impoundments where I can claim them as my own. I know as a kid I was often moving rocks around in creeks and I enjoyed watching the water back up in pools.

When I was in Highschool my biology teacher and wrestling coach took a group of us boys to his parents’ home out in Pa, on a fishing trip. We fished the Juniata which was a fine smallmouth bass river and yet what really held my attention was the little pond behind the house which was stocked with trout and that pond spilled into a smaller pond via a pipe. I can’t quite remember where the water went from the 2^nd smaller pool (only about 10 feet across). Perhaps it just drained out onto the grass.  I just know I could have played and fished in that pond system for days. There was one big trout of 20 inches in the smaller pond that made things interesting. My one friend hooked the rainbow and it charged back up into the pipe trying to find an escape path and broke him off.

I am at the point now where I have little interest in fishing the popular/famous rivers such as the South Platte in Colorado, or the Green River in Utah, or the San Juan in New Mexico. I know it is a cliché to say it but there are just too many people and no one goes there anymore. And those places are no longer mine. They belong to someone else; The maddening and growing crowds.

Call me a spoiled brat but I want to discover my own place, a place I can call my very own.

If I plan to fish or guide someone to one of my favorite holes and upon arriving, I see a guide who I know personally and they are there with his/her clients, or I see friends fishing in the hole, it already feels too crowded. It feels over run. It is no longer my place. Sure, I could speak up and say, “I was going to fish here, this is my spot, I was here first.” or, “My clients are fishing here.” But if I have to do that, if I have to speak up, it feels ruined already in some way, and the experience is no longer pure.

I need my own strip of water that is contained and pure but I am not sure if such places still exist.