Today marks one of the last days of Winter 2025/26. On Saturday as many of you read this, it is supposed to climb up to 75 degrees down in Northfield where Juliet will be and close to that in the cities. We’ll have four or five days of melt here, just to give us another taste of Spring and then, calendar or no, it’ll get cold again. That’s my bet. I’m ready for some soft water fishing.
I like the feel of floating, the up and down, the rock-you-to-sleep feel of comfort that comes from fishing in the sunshine in a canoe. That feeling of peace can only really be interrupted by the tug, tug on the line that rests on your index finger. The walleye nudge, the crappie pull, the bluegill swallow, the pike hammer, the punkinseed plunge.
Those will jar me out of my mindswirl and solidify my liquid daydreams. That pull of the line, the disappearance of my bobber under the surface of the blue water. I even missed getting pushed off my anchor by the wind and having to find my spot again.
I don’t usually do the fish finder thing. Just like I don’t really do the outline/spreadsheet thing when I’m writing. Put it this way, I like to see what comes out of the surprise of it all more than I like to know what the possibilities are. You do you, I can respect that.
Graphing fish just doesn’t do it for me. Imagining the structure around and underneath the water and getting a feel for it with my jig and my knowledge of the shoreline is part of what makes fishing interesting to me. Remembering where the bite was this time last year or several years ago certainly doesn’t help as much as radar or underwater cameras, but it does keep me engaged.
Perhaps with more planning, I’d be more efficient. Perhaps I’ve missed out on any number of limits that went unachieved. I don’t know. In my mind I haven’t limited myself by depending on technology. I don’t respect the constraints of a plan as much as I respect the possibilities of spontaneity.
In other words, the ideas, sentences, character choices and plot lines only materialize in my world at the whim and creation of my fingertips.
These being obviously connected to my mind “on the run” as it were.
Otherwise, nothing happens.
As long as there’s spark, the fire keeps burning and when I run out of fuel, the flames die down. In the canoe or boat, I will sit in one place, probably far too long, but no bites don’t necessarily mean I’m not catching something that I’m out there fishing for.
Ideas and good choices and plot devices and overall themes, etc., find themselves into my notebooks. Some of those sticky notes get stuck on the wall. Visual representations of said ideas can reach the wall too. Notebooks with handwritten pages are also stacked around and referenced now and again. I’ve got a couple of general documents with names, dates and placenames as well as key reference links that I turn to whenever I’m writing. However, for the most part, I’m fishing by feel, by instinct. Waiting for the tug on the end of the line.
Just like fishing that way, when you let go of the line and let go, let the fish take it a little while, for just the shortest time before you set the hook, I ease into the keyboard. I let the ideas pull my fingers into the words that come naturally, first. I try very, very hard to translate whatever comes into my head at that very moment to the blank, white page. I try to be an open vessel. This is how I write poetry and prose, but this is definitely how I write poetry on demand at the Farmer’s Market.
I write even if I think at the time that those words, those sentences, that turn off the path, doesn’t lead to where I thought I was supposed to go.
Why? Because, I haven’t hooked up the battery to the finder and lowered the transponder. I don’t exactly know what the possibilities are and therefore, I don’t know what isn’t possible either. Anything can happen.
Getting out on the water will have to wait. What lies underneath will still be there.
