my life in fishing
Since moving to Missouri, Ive taken up a number of different hobbies, oddball pursuits that make little to no sense in the context of who I was in Chicago. Thats not entirely true, because I had gotten somewhat enthralled with the concept of golf. As in driving range. This is about all I brought with me, and turned it into a mantra of frustration and catharsis every Friday afternoon after another week spent in my personal hell of Lawyertown. Knocking a little white ball 200 yards out is satisfying beyond words after a week of wasted effort suffering under micromanagement.
Golf maintained its luster, and then came guns. Rented guns and paper targets and the crude concrete bunker of a firing range, slicing my thumb open on the hammer, shooting sideways. Good times, all. Expensive, though, without much to show for it except an arm thrumming from recoil and a bunch of gutshot paper.
Then, from out of nowhere, fishing suddenly became something very very important. My weekends danced around the question of when I would start fishing. Big serene lakes and me in a motorboat, chuck barris hat slung over my eyes, my hand holding the line, waiting for a tug, lifejacket covered in cigarette ash and the rattle of tin cans and glass bottles.
The reality came in the form of Lake of the Woods, a lake only in the genteel, picturesque nomenclature of the parks department, knotting and re-knotting hooks and weights to an absurdly long pole, on which hung a reel that looked like some sort of perpetual motion machine. When everything was secured, I cocked my arm back, made sure the reel was in casting position, held a finger to the line and let fly.
All I could see was my line feeding out from the reel, in a big blur of monofilament. As the line started drifting down, I watched the surface of the lake for my rig to splash. The line hung there in midair. In the dropping sun, I follow the line across, up, up, up, until it disappears somewhere over a tree limb, 12 feet above us. Two of the three weights I had, a nice vicious hook and several yards of line were lost, and I still hadnt hit the water yet.
The problem with pursuing things from out of the blue is that youre often left standing all on your own, this zeal burning in your skull, and no one knows what to make of it. Much less take part in it. Fishing was like thatis like that. It took the intervention of high technology, in the form of Friendster, to come through for me.
Steve Sanders I know through my friend Matt. I sat next to him at a birthday party for Matts wife, Kelly Sue, and we talked about me buying some of his art and a book of prisoner inventions I couldnt remember the name to. So I dropped him a line the next day about the book, and he found me on Friendster, noticed that I had entered I would like to get into fishing in my interests and bam. Soon we were headed for Lake of the Woods, me with scented lures and him with a tub of cheese, ominously labeled Not for human consumption.
That first time out, after I got a new weight and hook on, speared my lure and actually made it into the water, we moved around a lot. I caught a trash bag off the shore, retardedly excited to have already caught something. When the bag slithered in on the end of my line, I thought for a moment I caught some demon sturgeon or a celocanth. Meanwhile, a little girl pulled a fish from the lake, remarking Awww, its too little and casually tossing it back.
Then, on the concrete dock, I was convinced I had a huge fish struggling against the strength of my line, the purity of my knots. I pulled and pulled and eventually realized I wouldnt pull anything out of the water, not even my hook or my other, remaining, weight. I had to cut my line, losing the last of my weights, which meant something bad, if I was to understand fishing dynamics correctly.
Sanders broke out the tub of cheese, which was brown, hairy and smelled like a sun drunk corpse, just moments from bursting apart. He fashioned it around his triple hook and cast it out without incident. He never snagged, his line never spontaneously unraveled, he didnt get caught on any underwater logs or corpses or whatever lurked under the surface.
We moved to the other side of the lake, casting into placid water that looked more like an anemic river. Sanders cheese seemed to draw more interest than the black rubbery spiral worms I was running my hook through, their special scent like some weird mixture of Halloween masks and gasoline. Again, my line seemed to lose its patience and suddenly a city block of ten pound line would spill out of my reel, a trail of severed line in my wake all over the shores of the lake.
We decided to pack it up, on the verge of sunburn, mosquito infestation and throwing equipment in the lake. Someone was screaming from across the lake, on the concrete dock, and I couldnt be sure, but I thought it was something about cutting a head off. I was in a hurry, so I didnt bother to actually untie the hook or secure the line in place. Somewhere inside me was a growing sense of idiot frustration, and I thought it better to get as much distance between me and it as possible. As we walked over to the car, from across the lake, it was a lot clearer. I had heard it right. Someone was yelling, over and over again, Cut its head off! Cut its head off!
Posted by xtop at August 11, 2003 10:46 PM
