Whenever I hear the refrain that follows: “It’s fishing, not catching,” I am struck by the lengths we as anglers go to deceive ourselves after a failed fishing excursion. In some ways, I should be able to take solace in the fact that I communed with the great outdoors in some meaningful way. The way the light shone through a maple tree in full autumnal vibrance, and hit the gin clear stream just so, refracting light to the bottom of the stoney stream bed, where stone flies live in troglodyte fashion under the slabs of limestone. A fish pulled on signals a successful adventure on the technological landscape of the meta verse, and the attendant likes, cue a waterfall of thumbs up, and dopamine flows that stimulate the synapses for whole seconds.
I don’t want to state the obvious but 2021 was harder than 2020 for a number of reasons, maybe for many, but in my life I am an expert, and so I say with a certain veracity that it was in fact harder for me. For one thing, I had to go back to online school and pay the licensure trolls who collude with the State to certify teachers. I received no advice going in on the question of “do full-time teachers take full loads of classes simultaneously?” So I took two mini-semester courses in addition to teaching at my 7A rural public high school. The mental gymnastics of emotional and radical empathy created me as a “soft” teacher, though I remained fair to the best of my abilities. In the last day or so I contracted bronchitis, and I was never so happy to have it. All last night I was tortured believing it was that other thing, here to ruin my Christmas as my wife and son’s bronchitis ruined Thanksgiving. I thought for a night I had Covid.
The world we exist in now is only rich in anxieties. If you are a liberal maybe you worry about Covid more than some conservatives who believe mask ordinances and vaccines are about control, or State rationalization of the population if you want to get all smart about it. If you are conservative maybe you worry about the ‘wussification’ of America in the face of Russian and Chinese aggression abroad, while liberals are more concerned about the threat of gun violence in schools. I know of two gun searches where I felt protected during my semester teaching in the big school, but the bomb threat was nerve racking to say the least. Somehow I managed to get all my grades completed except one final exam.
The student who failed to take the test was a Hispanic girl, and the day before I left the school early I asked my hall neighbor, a Spanish teacher, to call her home and leave a message in Spanish that this fifteen year old was not being very responsible. She needed to take her exam to avoid flunking. Who knows what kind of anxiety a fifteen year old hispanic girl has in the land of instagram bullying and poverty. I don’t know for certain that she is poor, but she did have her laptop stolen from her house which is why I was giving her a traditional exam, instead of a group assignment where students plan a fictional trip to four European countries, visiting historical sites along the way. This was a better assignment two years ago, and unfortunately today it is difficult to get jacked up on the future anymore. Sometimes hope comes from grace, and sometimes you lose grace and feel the darkness of a transitional period of history, where things settle out into a new normal.
The outdoor commodity isn’t shipped. There are no production and distribution problems unless you are looking for a new reel or a special UV chenille for fly tying. I guess what I am betraying is that I have my equipment pretty much, and I don’t care (as much) about Johnny- come- lately actors who crowd the rapidly diminishing public access holes. I learned long ago that someone always came first, so proprietary ownership of spots is to be guarded but not fretted too much about.
I wanted to go trout fishing after my family sold a compound on the Tennessee River to some investors and two professional bass anglers. Our cabins had been on this water that resembled a harbor because of the peninsular feature we owned. Now this place that I had always known would be someone else’s. It was fine. We were being compensated amply for the change in ownership, but they would forget its history that my father had amassed and stewarded for years with the help of his two sisters. My anxiety was that the new owners would forget about the trail of tears marker Larry Smith helped us acquire, or that it became the Henry Farm after the indigenous were removed, until 1936 when TVA dammed the river and created our beloved harbor.
I needed to catch some fish. Fishing was not enough at this point to relieve anxiety. I felt a real aggression and animus toward my quarry. But I knew this was misplaced rage at the world. Wild born browns on the South Holston could be caught with midge rigs and bobbers, but I needed the certitude of catching something epic if I was going to reward myself at Christmas time and leave the family when covid omicron and delta were allegedly soaring.
Closer to the time of the adventure I decided I would not chance mediocrity. I called my friend Nat, the Bloody Mary proprietor (from earlier “addiction on Easter Sunday” stories), His family were Atlanta based and so they enjoyed their vacations in Highlands, North Carolina. I asked Nat to set me up with a fellow named Dan for fishing tips in that area, but it escalated into a full-on guide trip on the Soque River. I was unaware of the Blackhawk fly fishing lodge, and Dan steered me away from the official Blackhawk. He knew the lady that ran it, and he knew her brother had about a mile of stream that could be easily waded, so I booked him by slipping him several hundred under the table.
On the way to North Georgia, we asked Dan where we could fish in public waters, and he found us a stream near Asheville that had been devastated by a recent hurricane. It appeared so polluted and nasty with rubbish, but the water was crystal clear. The banks were littered with tires and house siding. Its saving grace was that there had been a hatchery, according to Dan, upstream, that had washed into the stream. The fish were not giants, but they were healthy trout. Dan taught us to Czech nymph with ten foot two weights, and we had a ball catching these fish. The wind eventually made the errand futile, and we had driven all the way from Gadsden to Asheville for a few dinks, so I was concerned the whole time that my fishing partners were irritated by Dan’s idiosyncracies. The authentic bluegrass band we heard at the Ugly Dog in Highlands was pretty ramshackle chic and authentic, and was by far the best sounding bluegrass I had ever heard in person. Driving to our cabin was weird because I was pretty buzzed and my evangelical friends were likely quietly hating the adventure we were on. One had not fared as well at the Hurricane debris laden Pigeon River, and he seemed to be questioning whether he knew anything at all about trout fishing. The other guy was a former student of mine, and he had caught on rather quickly to the fishing side, but adult conversation was harder for this trout kid of the Covid generation. He was very helpful whenever tech issues arose, like getting the Waze app closed, or sending pics, but he seemed to be less confident when it came to his “wisdom” in the presence of “real” fishermen of faith.
My buddy that drove drank a moderate amount of booze at the Ugly Dog, and I was hammered in the best possible way, but then we had to negotiate the mountain driving back down to North Georgia. The whole time I felt a painful silence in the truck, because the driver had not caught enough fish. In fact, if he caught one it was a surprise. His doubt was creating the anxiety that I hoped to get away from on this trip. The trip lacked the levity of past trips I have taken where I swam foolishly into the middle of scenarios at bars and generally acted a fool. I was on my best behavior because I did not want to be a bad influence on the “Trout Kid” from Alexandria, Alabama, and the Mega Church spokesperson for stocking trout near Mentone, Alabama. My friend Scott was working with the City Council of Fort Payne to see about releasing trout into streams in North Alabama. I muffed a navigational duty when Waze failed to tell me to turn and when I dozed off it started recalculating. Scott was steaming mad, and the cabin we rented, to top it all off, only had one bedroom, which naturally I took, because I was the tiredest.
The next morning we caught fish in what Dan was calling the “Original Blackhawk” from the frozen shoelaces of the am to the pumpkin butter browns of the pm. Every single one of us lost count of how many giant twenty inch fish we caught high sticking through runs and seams. Flipping the mono triple nymph rigs under overhanging branches added just enough challenge to keep the day entertaining. After all, these river chickens had some spunk that made landing them more than a notion. The bows would jump their giant torpedo bodies out of the water multiple times in their efforts to spit the barbless hooks, and sometimes they would just swim right at you.
The guides were good, and they were on their best behaviors too. They did not ever stop cussing, but I liked that about it. Christmas or no, these fish were fucking pigs, and the reel was squealing up until the Jesse Duke archetype from Hazard County came rolling up in his beater Ford truck to feed the fish pellets. He made that water boil, and it tainted the time thirty minutes prior I got the giant brown to eat the hopper off the hopper dropper connection. Still, this trip was an anodyne for my alienation for so many reasons.
Not only did I need the excursion for my fishing bug, but it was one of those cinderella days where you break your personal best brown trout three different times, and then break your personal best rainbow as an afterthought. In a world of Covid-19 maybe Jurassic Lake is cost prohibitive from a financial and health perspective, as I am not traipsing off across the South American continent anytime soon. So, all things considered the cost of my day and a half trip to North Georgia was hundreds of dollars and a ruined fugazi Rolex watch. Maybe my students next semester will still appreciate me without the drip. "A Man of Constant Sorrow"