Again

It is always very disappointing to spend hours writing something that you feel is important, only to have it vanish into the ether. I have no idea how it happened, but I know now that all my posts will go to Word before they come here. At least, there is no way I'm not saving a backup anymore.

Also, because I thought I'd work on it through Isaac's iPad, I wonder if that wasn't the source of my torture - as it has proven to be so many times before. Slow, unresponsive, incompatible with seemingly endless applications and websites, the iPad doesn't do well with Blogger. It may very well be that it accidentally blanked out the post when I tried - in vain - to access it with the device.

Anyway, when you love fishing

as much as so many of us do, all that time on the water lends itself to thought. And being individuals, our thoughts meander, like the rivers we so often stalk, through the same course, more often than not, and they only change after some cataclysmic event. We come to the same conclusions and re-enforce them with our experience, until the day when something big happens – or a conglomeration of small things – and we change our minds. But this is rare – as rare as changing something as insignificant as one’s blog venue.

However, something significant will do the trick, such as when you have children and one of them, like my son, is born with Fragile X. This is the equivalent of an earthquake, or of the foundering of a great cliff or, better yet, the opening up of a great chasm that sucks the river up and leaves the downstream riverbed dry. Things that you used to take for granted just don’t apply anymore; and things you might have hoped to expect will now never come to pass.

I can go into a long discourse, with examples, of all the challenges that exist in a life like this – or I can tell you simply that I have a 6 month old baby of 6 years. Speech is not yet a reality, independence is unrealistic, and there is a hefty diaper bill (and load) at the end of every week. This is not a complaint. My baby is very charming and usually quite a lot of fun; but he creates a reality that few other parents – and maybe none who read this – can truly understand. And unfortunately for this fisherman, part of that reality translates into watching fishing opportunities from afar, reading other people’s blogs and emails, watching TV shows…

But I do still get to go. It would be foolish, in my opinion, to give up on all the things that bring you joy, for any reason – especially the things that constitute a main tenet in your life. From the river that slipped into the crevice, there is still water and it can still flow somewhere. With luck, that somewhere leads to fish; and sometimes I do get lucky. Sometimes I end up on a real river somewhere, with a real rod in my hands, and I sound the seams and depths for my scintillating and favourite quarry, the charming and beguiling rainbow trout.

I do it with friends or acquaintances, alone with strangers or by myself. Sometimes I watch as others catch fish, and sometimes they watch me. I may stop fishing a while and look around, at the world as it moves on regardless, sun rising, sun setting; watching the surface of the moving, breathing stream and the foamy wisps of confidence that shred themselves apart in its turmoil. How the questions can rise Will I catch any fish today? Am I doing something wrong? Should I fish here or further down? Am I fishing deep enough? Is this the wrong colour? Is this the wrong day? Has my skill wholly left me?

Exacerbated by the rarity of the occasion, my fishing is always caught in the same grand ebb and flow, meandering and twisting through winters and springs of confidence; anxiety rises and falls, and the questions come and go. New things come up sometimes by accident; and then sometimes because I acted on a hunch they happen as I wanted them to, as I’d hoped they would, and they re-ignite me and quell the doubts for a while. There is no better feeling, especially after a dull morning, than to happen upon a section of stream, full of hungry “chromers” who are only too willing to take on the challenge of my offerings. And then there are good questions: “how long will this last?” “Is today THE day?”

And always in the back of the mind, how are things at home? I hope Isaac isn’t driving anybody crazy. Fat chance!

But it is only recently that I’ve come to the full cognisance of the fact that the insecurity of the angler doesn’t belong only to me. Just as success itself is shared and passed around like a bottle of wine, failure and the insecurity it brings almost inevitably follows – like a morning in the doldrums.

I don’t know how I came to this realisation, because I don’t remember a single event that could account for it. Rather, I think a conglomeration of smaller events took place that helped turn on the light. I finally listened enough to fellow anglers, watched them succeed and fail – and the effect this has on them – and then compared to my own successes and failures (trips to the Salmon river, where I can still dream of catching a steelhead vs. odd-chance exploratory visits to nearby rivers that produce surprisingly well). And I can see, now, that we are all as enthralled by the mystery of the fish, we all fear fishlessness in the same fashion. That little red dot at the crest of every float holds so much promise. When, at the urging of a fish, it vanishes beneath the surface – great glory ensues. When it meanders aimlessly over the surface for hours and hours – “drifting, drifting, endlessly drifting” – it’s like watching your own heart slowly crystallising in a freezer.

That little phrase – “…endlessly drifting,” is something that Mike said to me once when we fished the Cattaraugus together, long before I picked up a centrepin reel or even a decent float rod. At first and for many years thereafter, my insecurity took it as “aimlessly” drifting and a comment about my skill (or lack thereof). I was a little bit irked, but went along with what he obviously thought was funny. Now, years later, I know my obloquy was quite out of place as Mike’s words were just the mirthful bubblings of a happy subconscious, at work on what it knows best. I've now gone so far the other way as to acknowledge that, if he had really said "aimlessly," then it wouldn't have been totally uncalled for.

And it was Mike who introduced me to the line of thinking that many who claim that a day fishing is better than a day at work – or who go by the old saying that the gods do not deduct from a man’s allotment those hours spent fishing – are merely trying to squeeze even an ounce of silver lining out of an empty day. His quixotic belief in this has relaxed over the years, even as I’ve witness his skill and – shall I say it? – “supremacy” on the rivers wax and flourish. He emails and calls out of the blue, to see if I will go with him because in truth a day spent fishing successfully does take a back seat to something, which is a day spent fishing successfully - with a friend.

All of which has now become my refrain, especially if you look at the posts I’ve written over the past year – another proof that the epiphany didn’t take place in a moment but was sculpted by many events, not the least of which was fishing with my son, Samuel and a recent winter’s trip to Pulaski with my friend Oliver.  I caught nada on both occasions, but I wasn’t overly disappointed in either case. Both times, I was fishing with someone for whom I have high regard; spending time with them, seeing how they worked out the day, and what it is that makes them tick. Although my object was not achieved, both days were fishlessly successful, and I not only knew it but could feel it.

There was a little quivering voice that whispered to me that I am getting complacent. And, though this may yet bear itself out, recent successes have quelled that voice completely. There is no reason to worry about your lack of success today, because there is always tomorrow and if you keep watching and learning, expectation of success is not only reasonable but inevitable. You WILL succeed. Keep at it. Keep enjoying your time out there on the river. Find all the reasons you need that make you want to return, including catching fish. Make it a positive place to be, a quiet place; and eventually, the fish will reward you for your patience and tenacity - as with anything else in life that's worthwhile.

Worry about catching fish?

Such minute fretting is nothing compared to the genuine anguish I sometimes feel about Samuel’s twin’s future. Poor Isaac!

Poor Isaac! Everything is golden now, and lovely statements from friends, family and acquaintances alike – that he is lucky to have such good parents – deck his path through life. It all works today. But the fingers that animate this space will not always be here to do so. What then? Nobody knows.

All the better reason, then, to make my periodic pilgrimages to the swift shores of the rivers that will give me trout. Lining my own life with worry will not benefit anyone, and – here’s a good and realistic hope – he will grow to be ready to come with me, and there is still a chance that he will be my best fishing buddy someday. But until then, there’s no excuse for letting myself go soft and losing touch with the beating heart of one of my most compelling passions. Continue, I must, to keep it all in balance; never lean too much on Laura, but always keep the equipment ready. Because you never know when the next chance will come, and –

Oh when the float slips under the surface, and the returning hook hits true – what a moment! Joy!

Well worth the wait, the worry, the work!

p.-

Mystery Post X

Well, after having worked my posterior extremities to the max for several hours the other evening, only to see the effort completely wasted by some apparent glitch in the Blogger apparatus, I have two things to say.

One - keep the old template if you still have it. That one seemed to work. At least, it never tried to perform literary sodomy on me in any form that I could recognize. Therefore, it is probably more reliable.

Two - use Word, or LibreOffice, or Notepad, or an actual notepad rather than this space to prepare anything. It is totally unreliable. 

Disappearing posts are not fun, especially when they were getting long, and still in the creation stage. This really sucks. I'm completely and utterly disappointed and enraged.

Don't be surprised if this entire space gets moved in the very near future!!!!!!!!!!!
...not to mention the fact that I have to edit the HTML in order to prevent this idiot thing from entering double spacing between each paragraph, so that any potential reader eventually needs to use stilts in order to get from paragraph to long-distance paragraph.
If it acts like le caca, then thus must it be!
Caca!
*%^#%*&#%*&*&(!

p.-

Minolta Z1 Resurrection

Back in May of 2007, I dropped my old Minolta Z1 camera into the Credit river. Miraculously, after a week or two on top of the fridge, it still worked. Then, two falls ago, I went into the drink with it on its second accidental sub-aquatic misadventure. Again, a long stay atop the fridge seemed to resuscitate it, but the result was the deposit of some nasty water spots, which showed up in pictures any time direct light got into the lens or I tried to take pictures at less than 3X zoom.

The answer to this problem, initially, was the purchase of a new camera. Laura and I chose the Canon SX120 which was small enough, but with enough zoom to seemingly satisfy most of our requirements. It had a 10x zoom, like the Minolta, but had 10.1 megapixels (instead of 3.2) a really great macro, bigger video, and only needed 2 AA batteries to function (whereas the Z1 needed 4). 

But the Canon, as good as it was, lacked a little something. For one thing, it wasn't as fast as the Z1 - but it wasn't much slower. That wasn't it. The colours seemed ok, and the focus - the sheer clarity - was much better. But finally the problem was with light. Of all the things I didn't expect, it was that an old beat up relic, from a defunct manufacturer (Minolta long ago sold their digicam division to Sony), should beat a camera easily 8 years its junior in this most mundane of areas. Simply put, where the new Canon had a tendency to over expose, the Z1 had not; and where the Canon returned something as black, the Z1 usually had returned some kind of detail. The dinosaur, despite its status as a relic (in technological terms), could handle a much wider range of light, in the same shot. There was a magic in the old piece which simply didn't exist in the new.

When we recently bought yet another new camera - this time a DSLR (which by the way is not allowed to go fishing...) - the time had come to risk taking the venerable Z1 apart, to see if I could get those water spots out and restore some of its former excellence. I had nothing to lose, and only an almost perfect fishing camera to gain. 

So, after finding a site that gave me a slight clue, I got to work. You can see the steps I took in the pictures on the right. It was a little bit painstaking and I nearly lost one of the screws, as well as two of the copper fittings you can see in the fourth picture. Laura's tweezers really came in handy, when the time came to put those pieces back in. You can also see that I had to pry the two lenses apart, once I had got them out - but I later accidentally found out that they were probably loose when originally manufactured and that it was likely that it was having fallen in the water a couple of times that had caused them to stick. By the same accident (dropping the camera in a parking lot) I also made the discovery that the little black, plastic ring (picture 2) needs to be put back properly, and you have to ensure that it really clicks back in.

All in all, it was a successful operation and for the time being I have my favourite camera back. And already thanks to our mild winter - possibly the mildest on record, I've had a few opportunities to snap pictures with it. It felt like taking a walk with an old friend. With old friends, there are few surprises, and it never takes long to get reacquainted no matter how long we've been apart.;Already, the opportunities have yielded good material. But I look forward to some early spring or late winter forays to put her through her paces again and see what new sights we can come up with again. 


Stay tuned!

Fooling around with my template

So I'm fiddling around with my blog template. For a little while now, the Blogger service has been politely telling me that there's a new interface and new design options available, including how the blog looks. Mostly, I've ignored this because I've been more intent on contributing written content - and in fact finding time to do so.

Anyway, I've finally decided to make time to try the re-design, and so far so good.

I like the new design, but I've got a good base in xhtml, css and the like, so I can read the actual code - and since Blogger is so obliging, by offering access to the code, I will keep playing around with that until I have something more individualised. For example, the standard background pic was the same for everyone who uses this template. It was the first to go! 


Currently, the background is a pic from the Elk in December. 

Stay tuned!

p.-

The Tao of the Average Steelheader

In this strange sport that some of us call steelheading, given the passion it inspires, it is even stranger that there are days that make us want to quit.

I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because of the amazingly disparate possibilities that it can provide. You may be knee deep in chromers for five minutes or half an hour, but then find yourself empty handed for a whole day. And there is such an excitement in seeing the float go down, such exultation when it happens – and in the initial pull of the fish – that it sweetens the experience to have it take place over and over and over again. Conversely, it is dreadful to gaze feebly on the painfully wasted potential of a peaceful, buoyant float, a numbing pain that doubles and triples by the hour.

And it’s always after a few hours have passed, that thoughts of quitting start to surface. At first they’re not really all that serious. But with the addition of another few hours, maybe a bird’s nest and a blown rig or two, a stubbed toe and cold hands; then they start to get serious. Why am I doing this? What's the point? What the...?

Then like a giant wind-shield wiper dispelling the fog of doubt, there is a sudden strike - sometimes incredibly vicious - and we're as good as new. The fish jabs up in anger, splits the surface of the water in a white fury of foam, and the rod bends almost gleefully under the awesome pressure of a speeding chrome bullet. The heart fills with laughter and song. Out of all the doubt, the word "yes!" comes like a sudden ray of sunlight. Everything is alright with the world, as the fish struggles on. When it is landed, it is like the fulfillment of a prayer; if it gets off then somehow, when the Leafs were down 4-1 in the third period, they scored two quick goals and are now back into it, with 10 minutes left to go! The nerves re-engage and we are on the tips of our toes, eager for the next drift, the next shot at getting another serious hit - waiting breathlessly for the tying goal.

There is no better way to describe my morning, today, than this. With the promise of the previous day torn out by what seemed to me mostly dead water, I was unexpectedly delivered five minutes of glory this morning. And though I still lost the game, having to leave the waters for work, I know the tying goal hit the post; and that was enough.

There is a little lie here, of course, because I am being selfish in my description. This is the story teller's license: I get to tell it to you from my point of view, or - if you will - from my fisherman's point of view. And from that point of view, of course, yesterday was far less than what I had expected it to be, and this morning was a redemption; though only by the barest margin. The full story is quite different.

Enter Oliver and Richard, who meet me in the early morning at the designated spot. Richard, you may recall from my earlier posts, is my brother in-law (brewer supreme) who has fished steelhead with me many times (and by the way, who could ask for a better brother in-law than that? Here is a man who shares my passion for steelhead and brews some absolutely delicious beer - always from the best ingredients - of which full kegs often find their way to my fridge! Truly: a toast to my sister, for her impeccable taste in men, and in playmates for her brothers!). Oliver is a new friend, a real gentleman that I've met through this blog. Though he lives a little far from our eastern rivers, he gladly accepted my invitation to fish them with me on this day.

For these men, there is not a wasted minute to our day together. Maybe part of my lamentation was that I'd hoped to put them both onto more fish than I did; and yet they both equalled or surpassed my total - so maybe I can relax! Anyway, despite the rains that had promised throngs of hungry steelhead, we had the typical eastern Lake Ontario experience: early morning bite followed by mid-morning shut down. And yet, Oliver caught easily the biggest fish we saw all day, and Richard capped the day by catching the second biggest one almost right at sunset. Sandwiched in between was a fish of excellent proportions, which I fought for almost five minutes, before it pulled the hook.

At the end of the day, however, I receive such a collection of pictures of the Average Steelheader fishing, fighting fish and releasing fish that two things are driven home: first, we had a good (though not great) day; second, I'm usually the one taking all the pictures! Oliver had brought his DSLR, had taken shots and sent me such a great variety of pictures that I am truly grateful for the gift that they represent. Ha! Not that I cut such a striking figure, but one sometimes wonders "hey, what does it look like when I'M at the helm?" So, though you usually see pictures I took on this blog - or pictures taken with one of my cameras - this time, if you see a picture of me, it is courtesy of Oliver. Thanks again, Oliver!

Still, the entire day left me tired and somewhat weary of the sport. I'd have enjoyed the day just as much if we'd spent it at a bar, watching Hockey Day in Canada, as fishing. For me, the only saving grace for the day was the excellent company of my brother in-law and my new friend. So, hitting potentially barren water on my own this morning, before my late shift at work, did not really enthuse.

Thus, I woke up later than I would normally have, and assisted Laura with the kids, got them dressed, fed them, did some clearing of dishes from the machine and dropped Samuel off at school.

I then went to the nearest river and committed my first error. I mis-read the colour of the water from the road, deemed it too dirty, and decided to return to yesterday's destination, without stopping to have a proper look. It's an honest mistake, really, in view of the fact that it was raining at the time; I assumed that there'd been enough to raise all the rivers again. Unfortunately, I was wrong. So the culmination of mistake one was mistake two: opting to untangle a wicked birdsnest instead of just cutting it off and re-rigging.

But yesterday Oliver, who had brought some tricks of his own, had said something that stuck. He had said it casually, about a different way of tying roe that he was showing me; and now, on a morning when I had considered first my comfort zone and the easy decision to make, it wafted back into memory: "try something different." Try something different I did, and so on to my third mistake.

Mistake number three? You can't fault me for this one: having a job. Yes, the mundane things in life often outweigh our passions in importance. Though fishing brings me infinitely more joy than commuting back and forth to Toronto, the latter is far more important and in fact enables the former. If I didn't work, I couldn't even afford to go fishing. So there.

And the only reason my job is a mistake, today, is that my five minutes of vindication occurred 10 minutes before I had to purposely commit that mistake! Two hits in five minutes. One, unexpected and which I thought was a snag, produced the surfacing of what I guess must have been a 5 or 6 lb hen, which spit the hook instantly. You see? "Try something different." That was the 4-3 score. Still down one and with 10 minutes to go, I re-tied my hook and set to drifting the same spot; no go but there was better water just behind this, at the end of an arc, in the tail-out, just after that pack of brush - and the float literally whipped sideways when the Monster took the bait.

I've fished the Nottawasaga river and I know what "berserk psychotic" looks like at the end of your rod, when it's a steelhead and it's about 5 lbs; but this was "berserk psychotic" chrome-bright and ultra-fresh 10lbs from lake Ontario. I can't even describe the first few seconds of this fight. But eventually the fish came crashing to my side of the river, turned and literally shot across; too quickly, because it found itself riding right up on the other shore, clear out of the water! In one motion, though, and still under the impetus of his flight he (by now I'd seen the kype) swirled mid-air and dove back into the froth. We fought for a bit, give and take, only a few feet beneath me in the pool and, being nowhere near spent, he dashed under the thicket. For a while, I applied the Michigan Dirty to him. I thrust my rod right down into the depths and used the water's force combined with the rod's flex against him. He swept up. I pulled him down. But something was wrong. I was caught up in the bush.

Finally, all indication of motion ceased. The knot that held my tippet to my mainline had finally reached the last ounce of its strength, and it had given up. I pulled it out of the mess of branches, thankful for the behemoth manifestation of that awesome fish.

I vacillated for a few seconds, torn between the need to leave and the wish to re-rig and try one last drift... But I took apart the rod and stepped out of the stream, and I coolly walked away from what was probably the best water I've seen in weeks - big mistake, but needful mistake.

No regrets. And I look forward, now, to the next outing. "Quit"? What does that mean, anyway?

No idea!

p.-

Adventures in a Dream

Several years ago, in his own way, Mike told me that if I was to take vacation time to fish for Steelhead, then it would be infinitely more intelligent to do so in the Fall rather than during the Spring trout opener. The argument ran like this: autumn fish are fresher and more energetic than beat-up drop-backs and fewer people fish for them in November than in May.

It took me years to apply this wisdom to my ways, and if anyone who reads this has also read prior episodes on this blog, then you will know that the catalyst for my metamorphosis came two Springs ago during that wicked drought. Unable to stomach the slaughter that I witnessed on gin-clear May-time rivers, I finally made the fateful choice to spend more time fishing at the opposite end of the calendar, and I put this into practice this November.

So it was that after many weeks of nervous anticipation, my Fall fishing vacation had arrived. In fact, I had almost re-booked it due to lack of rain - a familiar refrain - but in hindsight I'm glad I didn't. I needed a rest from work, to replenish my patience with certain things and ease out the stress. It was like programming, as if a subroutine was added where let "stress" = "force of the fish pulling on the line" and let "pressure" = "force exerted by angler on rod, in response to stress." I knew that to delay the time would not do anyone any good, and that a healthy dose of pure steelhead chromium was exactly what I needed. Not only that, but it rained on the my first day out - on November 9th - and it didn't rain for more than two weeks afterwards.

Being constrained hourly, whether by responsibility to family or to work, one forgets what it's like to spend whole days in the pursuit of one's favourite quarry. There is no time-watching, no nervous retying of hooks and leads in an attempt to shave off minutes in order to have time for one more cast. The feeling at the pit of the stomach, the helplessness before the inevitability of the early termination of a foray - successful or otherwise - does not take hold. Wading through this glut of time, one unexpectedly finds one's self not only at times wholly engrossed in the acute surveillance of one's float, but in the sounds of the water and of birds nearby, of the freshness of the air, of the feeling of the wind against one's face; the rigid focus of the daily militaristic routine and attention to pragmatic detail falls away like a doffed uniform. The little family bubble, the sole acceptable refuge of diurnal life from the mundane and the formulaic, is suddenly joined to this wide river filled with fish and every atom that fills it and surround it.

Isaac giggles in the splash of water as it spills over a boulder; Samuel plays everywhere around me in the wind; Laura gazes at me from the river's flow. Over and through the eye's focus on the bright cap of the float, as it glides over the surface of dark, inscrutable pools, images of these beloved faces appear, great smiles of childhood, clear eyes of most pristine innocence. Vanish suddenly; when the float scythes beneath the flow, and the rod swings up, and the pulse and pull of the fish begin.

Thus, many hours are spent as if in a dream; a passage through a collection of vibrant, moving photographs, where everything - or almost everything - that one loves moves and beats around me. What do I care that my legs are leaden, or that my arms are tired? In the activity of the prehistoric struggle for survival - taking fish - I have found a respite from the modern one, and I have separated myself from the oppressive, mitigated serfdom of the wage earner - transplanted on shores of light, a witness to the extraordinary bounty available to everyone, if only they try.

The first day is spent mostly in admiration, not only of those things that have brought such sweet meditation, but of the gift of piscatorial mastery with which the gods have blessed my friend. Mike catches fish under everyone's noses. He catches them every which way, with lures, under a float... While, mostly, I fish to empty water, and I feel like a novice who stepped onto the ice with a veteran from the NHL. His talent is that obvious.

Eventually, he hands me some of his roe and indicates the seam over which it should be swung out into the big river. Feeling sorry for me, doubtless because I haven't caught anything yet, he has stepped away from the best spot to stand, on one of the best pools on the river, and relinquished it to me. The float spikes down. I set the hook. Nothing. Well, not really nothing. When I reel in my rig and inspect the bait, I see that the bag has been shredded. I look up river to see if I have Mike's attention. When he looks, I sign: three fingers. "Three missed fish so far," and that in less than five minutes.

I get almost a dozen hits in this run, hook and miss a titan, and land two beautiful steelhead - and that's it for me on day one. To the pragmatist, intent only on catching, it is an irrevocable disaster. But, though I am disappointed with my luck, I feel only, at the end of the day, something that has been just out of reach lately, always seemingly close by but not quite within my grasp: peace. It was a good day, spent with a good friend (and superlative fisherman), on a good river.

And anyway, some days are a pre-payment for good things to come, and we should never lament them - especially when the price was easy to pay.

On day two, my passion for success is re-ignited, and I wake from an uneasy sleep - not feeling the slightest bit tired. I am fishing brand new water with Bill and Dave today, and my "get up and go" gets me up and gets me going.

We meet at the designated bridge, among the country side maze, which I studied several times before going. Dave is our guide, and he decides that we should start elsewhere. Back through the knot of roads we go. I follow them, finally to come to a stop on the side of a road, surrounded by tall pine and birch. Early morning birdsong wafts in as soon as I open the car door. We get dressed quickly, and my guides set off almost at a dead run.

And I am plunged into another surprise. Here is a thick wood, cloven by interwoven deer paths, growing on the steep sides of a valley - at the bottom of which the river gleams emerald lover's eyes to anyone seeking her copious gifts. Such as we three. And I am confronted by time; not yet the running out of it, but that I have had more of it in this world than my two companions for the day. They seem to skip effortlessly through the thickets and over the fallen great trunks of bygone Lords among maples and pines, oak and birch; while I trudge and struggle. Then I am no longer racing with them but rather strolling through the quiet woods. Distinctly, I think of my father. He would love this place. No other fishermen, other than we three, are within sight or hearing; here we enjoy the mellifluous combining of the peace of the beautiful forest and the chaos of the pristine fish, come from so far that their power seems nothing short of miraculous.

My count on this day is much better than that of the previous day, but don't ask me what it was. I don't remember, and I honestly don't really care. There were no extremely long stretches of inactivity, and while we fished together, there were only short intervals during which none of the three rods were active in some way. None of the fish were very big, and of the ones I landed only a couple of them grazed the lower reach of about 4lbs - but they might as well have been twice or thrice as large, for the battle that they gave. And, together with the deep green of the forest that surrounds them, they imparted a love of that place in me that I will never try to escape, but that I will now and then take the opportunity to requite.

Day three is like the slow return to reality, the waking from the blessedness of dreams. Everywhere, fishermen lined the shores of the little rivers close to home. I could not strike far afield on this day. There was business to look after, surrounding Isaac, in the morning and I couldn't - wouldn't - miss it. So I stayed close to home.

And yet, though the concrete shores of the first place I stopped didn't produce for me; the muddy confines of the second spot were surprisingly prolific. Somehow, a fresh run of fish had come in and, free to harass them until the day's end, I gave into the glee of catching them. I happily endured the other fishermen who shared the place with me, as we all had in success. Eventually, my two best fish came to me, after everyone else had left - two brutes in and around the 10 and 12 lbs range. The second one felt as though he might have already had a fight that day, but the first gave me a display of power that I will not soon forget.

At day's end, I walked down to the lake, and rinsed the mud from my boots by wading out into the clear out-flow. I calmly and happily got changed, once back at the car, and turned for home.

Just in time for dinner, and for the newest parade of photographs, of smiles and laughter, awake and living, love flowing over me as from the gentle flame dancing on the hearth.

p.-

The Chrome-pilgrim's Progress

With two small children at home, one of whom has special needs, and a busy job in the City - with a daily commute of about 3 hours - there are not as many opportunities to chase after Steelhead as there used to be, for this tired "old man."

Often, it seems that I am losing my touch.

I go out for an hour or two, three if I can steal that much, and I try my luck. Sometimes I am successful, often I am not.

I map out my time and my attempts, though, not to cover places and conditions that I know; but to cover new conditions in nearby places. So I expect a measure of failure. With my ever shrinking timetable, I angle closer to home and therefore need to apply myself to learning the wheres and hows of those streams, how to glean from low, clear waters the quarry that I seek.

But this slowly turns me into a local, and memories of bigger, faster, meaner waters fade. More often than not, these days, my feet step off into the smaller trickles or motionless waters of eastern Lake Ontario tributaries. Even the Credit River, which is not that big but has a decent gradient, is on the other side of Toronto and therefore might as well be on the other side of the world. I can't even squeeze in the time to drive that far, let a lone fish. No: these days, I live and die by the 15 minute drive.

Every now and then, though, I get a chance to slough the mouse-like attention to schedule, the timid and fleeting outings on frisky local waters, and head for the larger streams further north. Rain comes, an invitation from Mike, and I throw myself a bone: "ok, count me in!"

And then, I measure myself. I measure myself against Mike and against my peers and against myself. I watch, I adapt, I learn. I know that this full day of fishing will not soon be repeated, so I apply what I've learned - focus. Focus on the conditions, on the river; look for the seams, feel around for the pockets; that snag may have been a boulder, cast 2 feet up from it, now 3, now 4 - fish on! The bright, brand new chrome fish fly out of the water and sprint downstream. I follow, filled with glee. Some get off, but only a few; nowadays, the focus of the father steelheader demands brand new, and therefore sharp, hooks, new line, and the patience to select opportunities to re-tie and re-rig properly. Presentation and preparedness are key.

On this past day, there is all kinds of water in the rivers, but not so many fish. Maybe we missed the big wave, or maybe it hasn't come. We amble from river to river, from lower stretches to upper stretches and pick a few fish off here and there. I am not without action anywhere, but the astronomical numbers that we had hoped to get into do not materialize. Patient as prospectors, we sift through the swift waters for the silver creatures we covet, knowing that there are some there but that we are required to work for them.

I do not equal my friend on this day, but I do better than most. Much of this is thanks to Mike, who is like a lightning rod; if there is any way that a fish can be caught, he will manage it - and one need only follow his lead to have a chance at success. Switch the focus to your tackle as it rides the current, feel for the bottom, be patient. And take the time to breathe; the other lesson of experience which draws attention to this most primal act, of capturing the pristine beautiful rainbow trout, far away from temporal, monetary, or other existential concerns.

The old cliché: it's not just about catching fish.

Charging the batteries, so to speak.

p.-