It's good to have a nurse when you are up here in Tweaker's Paradise stalking the elusive, wily, sexy and wise Trombonefish. First, at it's most mundane, it is way too fucking cold to be fishing. The water temperature alone, despite layers upon layers underneath my new waders, and neoprene booties covering ultrathick wool $25 fishing socks, is such that you don't want it to come in contact with bare skin. Or, perhaps better put, you don't want to wade past crotch depth lest there be irreversible shrinkage. The air temperature in the shade hovers around 40 all day long, even when the temps in the sun might be in the mid-fifties. The Trombonefish generally avoid hanging out in sunny water, so you freeze unless you're standing in a sunny spot and casting into a shady spot. I did this for several hours on Saturday, knowing that chances of hooking a sleek, silvery and shiny Trombonefish were slim but profoundly enjoying the warmth of the sun and the meditative routine of roll casting, mending, drifting, stripping and retrieving over and over and over. After such a stressful day standing in the frigid waters wondering what happened to the feeling in the extremities, having a nurse like Sweaty Betty to lovingly tend to my bodily needs is a blessing indeed.
There are much more important reasons to have a nurse nearby when on the trail of the tricky Trombonefish. Probably more important than extremity warming is basic psychotherapy, and I am thankful that this is the kind of shrinkage Sweaty Betty excels in. Many people believe that the object of fishing is to catch fish.These would be the same people that argue that the object of playing golf is to shoot a low score, or to best your opponent's score, whether it be in aggregate or hole-by-hole. I guess if you equate "catching fish" with "winning", which would be the expected perception in our culture, then a day spent on the river simply casting and, in the case of Trombonefish, rarely seeing a fish much less hooking one, would be classified as "losing". Others might say that many, many hours of losing are required before one can expect to start winning, which is probably more true of flyfishing than other fishing techniques. Still others like to comfort the inveterate loser with such platitudes as "there's a reason it's called fishing and not catching", which a pretty empty comfort when the guy sitting next to you in the drift boat fishing with the exact same rig is yanking Trombonefish out of the water by the dozen while you can't even get one to holler "fuck you, loser!"
Betty says that, as with golf, the career losing fisherman either quits or lowers his sights. I have walked off the river at the end of the day many, many times calling it quits, maybe almost as many times as I have walked off the golf course with the same sentiments. And, as with golf, the fickle and cruel Gods of Sport don't like quitters. So during most rounds of golf, and during most days on the river, a glimmer of hope is served up like a carrot on the stick and The Gods know you will be back. With golf it may be a wickedly straight and long drive on the 18th hole that whispers the elusive "whoosh click". On the river it could be anything from a slight tug to a full blown grab that gives you just enough of that "fish on" mojo that you simply can't wait to get out there and give it another try. Betty knows this all too well and frequently warns me about the seductive powers that fleeting delusions of grandeur may wield over the weak and tremulous mind of the career loser. Or in another way of saying, hope springs eternal regardless of how ill-informed or irrational such springing may be.
Fortunately I have Sweaty Betty to remind me of these simple yet powerful truths after posting another goose egg to the fisherman's scoreboard, or a "1" followed by a couple of goose eggs on the golf scorecard. In golf, the loser frequently reminds himself, as Shivas Irons so eloquently pointed out in "Golf in the Kingdom", that "it's all in the walk". Which is just another way of saying that walking around the golf course is ultimately what the game is all about. Jim Harrison, novelist and great believer in the healing power of walking, would likely agree though I doubt the great writer has ever picked up a golf club except perhaps to decapitate a rattlesnake. The other Harrison often writes of the purifying power of small stream fishing, which by definition requires a healthy bit of walking.
If walking is the tonic that makes the game of golf bearable for the loser, then casting is most likely to be the fisherman's mantra, for, like meditation, if requires doing the same exact thing over and over and over again. Others might say that casting is more like the golf swing itself, which if successfully executed is so repetitive that golfer's ultimately transcend thinking about the motion and enter "the zone", where the body goes on autopilot and the mind is as empty as a bag of wind (not to be confused with a windbag which may be equally empty of meaning but is full of noise nonetheless). If there are no fish to interrupt the casting process then it takes on the mantra-like quality of hitting practice balls on the driving range. Combine with this the hypnotic sound of river water gurgling over rocks and whooshing down riffles, and flyfishing in a river for several hours can have the same therapeutic cleansing qualities as sitting on a pillow at Spirit Rock and as boring as this blog has become. But then again both would be an accurate reflection of my most recent quest for the stealthy and surreptitious Trombonefish. Were it not for the tender ministrations of Sweaty Betty, former left tackle for the Weaverville professional women's flag football team, we might as well be talking about something as inherently meaningless as crunchy roasted nibs (yeah!).
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