Occasionally, I hallucinate. About fly fishing. Well, not really. I guess I just forget about everything else.
(image courtesy [name redacted])
This weekend, I play Ride Director for the Shasta Summit Century bike ride. In addition to all the money the 700 riders spend in hotels and restaurants, we raise better than $26,000 - most of which goes to support a lot of severely underfunded youth sports in the area.
So the ride’s a good thing for this rural community - especially in a year when tourism isn’t exactly booming.
And yet - despite the massive goodness visited upon the community, and despite the fact I volunteer to run the ride, and despite the fact I just spent 2.5 weeks fly fishing in Maine and Montana - I feel cheated because I can’t walk back into the mountains and fly fish for brookies this weekend.
Several times this week, I forgot about the ride entirely, and planned a hike into the backcountry.
It sounds awful. I mean, I feel awful just saying it.
But there it is. Doing Good Deeds vs fly fishing is not exactly good vs evil, but it’s definitely good vs a far lesser good.
And guess what; I’m not alone. Pretty much every week, I get emails from people who - by any measure - live healthy, productive lives.
They’ve been blessed with good jobs, families who love them, excellent health (maybe even good hair, which is important)… and they’re still idly noodling with the idea of chucking it all and living in a shack in the mountains.
So what’s wrong with fly fishermen?
It would be easy to point a tippet-scarred finger at John Gierach’s Trout Bum, which opened the door to an alternative, fin-driven lifestyle.
Or perhaps fly fishermen are simply society’s low-level malcontents; we’re not quite strong enough to simply be content, but we know better than to grab a carbine and climb a tower.
Of course, this is part of the narrative where I start dispensing wisdom, but it’s Saturday morning, and I just don’t have time (I’ve got about 30 hours of ride-directing to do).
Instead, the Undergrounders get the floor.
The question isn’t “Why do we fly fish?”
It’s “Would we still dream about fly fishing if that’s all we did, or is a fulltime fly fishing lifestyle/paradise simply a mirage that fades away once we’ve arrived?”
Discuss.
{ 14 comments… read them below or add one }
kbarton10 08.02.08 at 1:33 pm
For the Guide Lunch, Silly!
Ed 08.02.08 at 2:39 pm
or…perhaps…we know better than to be content but aren’t quite strong enough to climb a tower with a carbine…
Honestly…I don’t think you can ever fully “arrive”…there will always be more to strive for. Regardless of the lifestyle, contentedness is the myth. It has nothing to do with fly-fishing.
Reed 08.02.08 at 2:56 pm
Question I don’t want answered:
What do brownliners provide their clients for lunch?
Jean-Paul Lipton 08.02.08 at 6:22 pm
Reed: a can of smoked herring fillets (kipper snacks) and a warm brown ale.
Tom, if I achieve the fly fishing lifestyle and stopp day dreaming about fishing, it would be time to give up the long rod and take up… GULP…. golf.
Megan 08.02.08 at 7:42 pm
Okay,Chandler. I think that you may just be a bit of a big whiner in this post. Ten bucks says L&T agrees. Buck up cowboy, it’s missing those days that make the days you are out THAT MUCH SWEETER.
You’re still a whiner. Just sayin’.
Peter Spirito 08.03.08 at 9:22 am
I long for more frequently. Here is a link to my last trip.
http://www.peterspirito.com/DRO_fishing.htm
blueklister 08.03.08 at 10:35 am
The grass isn’t always greener on the other side of the fence, but sometimes there is more of it. Humans, by our very nature, are always unsatisfied. It’s why we’ve come to build airplanes that fly at 30,000 feet and use napkin rings. We’re always looker for the better thing. And in that regard, golf’s no weirder than fly fishing.
Dave 08.03.08 at 2:18 pm
Blue: Golf IS weirder than fly fishing. Look at the clothes they wear.
Fishing satisfies a primal instinct…one that may benefit the village.
Golf benefits…the village real estate agents.
justme 08.03.08 at 6:17 pm
“Would we still dream about fly fishing if that’s all we did, or is a fulltime fly fishing lifestyle/paradise simply a mirage that fades away once we’ve arrived?”
When that day comes, that is a fulltime flyfishing lifestyle/paradise, I will let you know. Until that day, it is a pleasant ambition to be sure. I always thought that a good lifestyle would be to walk down to the water in the morning for a few casts, then do whatever else is needed and repeat in the evening. A simple ambition that I hope can be fulfilled sooner rather than later. My homewaters are the Gunnison and there-abouts. Everyone has to have a dream and simple ones work for me.
harry 08.04.08 at 4:47 am
Tom-I gotta kind of agree with Megan on this one. After the great trips you have had this summer to miss a couple of days to do a charity event?
Although after the Maine “food fest” you were forced to endure-you could make a good case for a back county trip as your new “personal exercise program to lose a few unwanted lbs” Int the interest of your personal well-being of course
Daydreaming about a fly fishing lifestyle? It provides a break from the humdrum daily grind and we all need our dreams. When you stop dreaming-it’s already too late.
Margaret 08.04.08 at 10:01 am
Whatcha talkin’ about, Ed? I’m content. Well, except for that thing I want to get…and those things I want to get done…and I was hoping…
Scott Linden 08.04.08 at 3:46 pm
I’m surprised someone who’s been around more than one or two bicyclists could imagine anglers as “spoiled.”
Peter Spirito 08.04.08 at 3:50 pm
Harry, this is just too profound of a thought.
When you stop dreaming-it’s already too late.
Garnet 08.05.08 at 7:11 am
I had to think about this one for a bit. The real problem is that simply fishing all day comes with too many strings attached. Unless you’re fabulously wealthy, you can’t just move to a shack and fish; you need to work somehow (for money or otherwise) to survive. If, in turn, you make fishing a job (guiding, writing, etc.), it’s easy to lose sight of the peace and sanity it brought you in the first place.
It’s fitting to discuss cyclists here; they are as spoiled as we are (I should know, I have dual citizenship in the cycling and fishing worlds). Still, they would cycle all the time if they could. And some of them do; the pros. Sometimes the competition alone ruins it for them. For those who still enjoy the competition, there’s money to think about, training, the phantom of doping, the sponsorships, the press, the threat of injury, the time restraints. All that can cloud your love of the sport, and many cyclists have admitted that it has.
How can you possibly fish all day (or cycle, for that matter) without that extra baggage, without the dream fading? I don’t think you can. The reason we can always dream about fishing is because we’ll never quite arrive at that ideal. That’s beauty of it. It’s the pursuit and not the attainment that makes us happy. I’ll never be able to fish all day, but the more I try, the more time I get in on the water without the excitement fading. My two cents, anyway.