My right index finger has several healing shallow cuts and calluses on my thumb side. My left leg and part of my face are more sunburned than other parts where I managed to get the sunscreen coverage on properly. My hips ache a bit from sitting with my legs folded under me in the same position for hours. This is how I know that I’ve been fishing. I’m broken in and there are plenty of tiny red puncture marks from bluegill spines on my palm.
Everyone is fishing for something. I took a couple of days off early this week and went fishing. Even when I wasn’t on the water, I was fishing. It was a good time to catch some peace, some of what Ely really means to all of us, some of why we’re here, some of my lawn, my dog, cats, hobbies, favorite books and some flames from the fire pit. A couple of extra days to center, to grasp at enough perspective to wear for a little while even if it goes on like a sunburn and tends to peel back away as the weeks slip by.
On the lake, the sounds of big frogs deep in the weeds, lily pads and wild rice rise up like prehistoric echoes off the surface. I’m not sure what they sound like, but it isn’t a picture of a frog that comes to mind at the grumpy, growly annoyed belch that always surprises me when you get too close to them. There was also the reflection of the sun to catch, skimmed off the surface like flashes of brilliant diamonds slipping through the net. The familiar calls of red-winged blackbirds. There were silent explosive appearances of a great blue heron gliding inches above the water and the smoky black cloud of a cormorant materializing out of the dusk. The sound of the wind pushing through reeds is quite similar to the clickity-clackity cacophony that empty plastic clothes hangers make as you carry an armful to the car from your kid’s college dorm room or rather carry them back home after you’ve left the kid behind.
While I like to sit on a shore on a good old rock and fish a river, or plant my butt on a bench and fish off a dock, I do love the peaceful perch of a canoe seat. Anchored or just adrift, rigged up or just sitting still and listening, one isn’t any more satisfying than the other. There’s a lot to catch. My thoughts, my sanity, my concentration, my inspiration and my guidance. All are waiting, under the familiar shape of the red and white bobber that symbolizes so much more. It isn’t about how many went in the basket or the one that managed to escape from the bottom that I’ve looked at a dozen times and thought I should wire closed because it was old and the spring was too springy. It isn’t about my famous northern pike dip although, it is, a bit.
As Jen says, “I could do this all day, every day.” Just like the smell of cut summer grass and the sight of BMX bikes laying by the Little League field remind me of playing cards stuck in the spokes of my purple Western Flyer banana seat bike and sliding sideways in my gravel driveway with dust rising off the smooth, slicked back tire; fishing transports me to a hundred different locations all at once. A cane pole, dug out from the rafters of my Grandma’s garage and a coffee tin of nightcrawlers. A too-hot afternoon with the horse flies buzzing and the frogspawn thick with fallen pollen on the surface of Mud Creek. A chilled Sunday afternoon fishing the lily pads by a campsite on Twin Lakes while Dad stocked a campfire and watched.
Fishing for new words and enough strength and increased faith under that bobber and the soaring anticipation that never, never, never gets old when one of those or some other unknown pulls it under and I set the hook on promises that I somehow know I can trust.
Fish on.

