These hot days are all blurring together, but last Friday afternoon we ventured out during one of the hottest spells to fish for an hour or so. I wanted to feel cool water on my feet and find some shade. Do some casting, do some bobber watching and worm swimming. Just to find a place with a bit of a breeze and enjoy that breeze coming up off the water. To stand with Jen in a little bit of current and imagine that I was a kid again and that this time I knew her and she knew me.
Sometimes I do dream of the two of us sharing those early teen years together. I feel like we should have and that would have made a lot of things easier for both of us than the reality that separated us by a good 100 miles for much of our young lives. Twenty-one years and more.
Anyway, sometimes you can close your eyes and time travel. I’ve discovered that time travel like this allows for all the changes you wanna make.
You can’t mess up anything. That’s just a tale that’s told to keep people from expanding their imagination. All it takes is the right location and the right amount of water, the right time of day, the right contrast of shadow and sunlight or moonlight and, most importantly, the right partner.
We happened to choose somewhere that we haven’t been since the kids or at least since Simon was very little. So, it is hard to believe, but we haven’t gone back to fish under the Garden Lake Bridge for probably 26 years. Friday was the day.
The bobbers still drifted the same, the top water casts did too. We had some fishing partners this time. Fork tailed barn swallows were fishing and feeding off the top of water on the left side of the bride. Dipping down to catch insects that were hovering on the surface, perhaps minnows, I couldn’t be sure. They’d swoop in like jet fighters pause a micro second on the surface to grab their catch in their beak and swoop up in arcs to feed their young who were in nests on the steel undercarriage of the bridge.
It was mesmerizing, like swinging a yo-yo. It was like watching a physical representation of music being played.
Music that moves you. Music that you remember playing live.
As expected, there were cooler breezes dancing under the bridge.
In fact, it was substantially cooler in the shade standing in the water than it was on the path down to the water or the parking lot after we’d finished.
Cars drove overhead with crescendos that combined wind tunnel sounds with a roaring train. So, what. It was still great. I’m not a purist. Light was bouncing off Garden Lake onto the bottom of the bridge and casting a golden net over the heart of summer.
We were caught.
I could’ve been 12 or 13 and this could’ve been Honey Creek with bullheads and catfish on the line. My pockets could’ve been filled with interesting looking rocks. I could’ve been reaching for her hand. Time travel. Smile. Instead, our date was interrupted by an unexpected guest.
A little smiley muskrat in all his wet-furry glory came paddling around the big rocks and looked up at me before swimming into the shadowed protection of a hollow in the bank.
This “cooled me off” even more than the shade, because I’ve never seen a muskrat in the summer before, only swimming up to investigate my ice house during the dead of winter.
They reach up the sides of my ice hole with their little “hands” and pull themselves up to see if they’d like to hole up here too. Ironically, that’s when it is time to move, cause they’ll likely be back with mud and weeds and stick and muck up that house.
Even if they just swim around your decoy for a bit they tend to scare off the pike. Anyway, that little feller made me think of ice underneath my feet and walking on water instead of on the sand on the bottom. Snowflakes in the air and the cold that settles in when the sun goes down before five at night. Brrr.
Oh, yeah, no… I didn’t catch any fish. Had some bites. My daughter and her boyfriend were doing all the catching on another lake. So, I would have fish to clean and eat. I did catch plenty of what I went looking for under that bridge, though. Including the surprising sense, once again, that we should do this more often. Just a pole and some bait and the right partner.
Why is this so easy to forget when the formula for success is so simple? We’ll go back again some time.
Sometime sooner than this trip took. I think someone out there named Nick or Nate or even Doug know what I’m talking about.
