Yesterday was quite a day tho it sagged badly in the middle. Got up early after too little sleep (have been doing this for weeks anyway) to go fishing with Jake in a farm pond outside town.
After less than five minutes of waiting with both pulled in fish nearly simultaneously & went on to catch, I'd say, about 25 altogether. One of the first fish Jake caught was a largemouth bass that got mangled so badly by the hook that we decided we'd better kill it. Not having a knife, we took a rock and smashed the thing, but it took several blows & by the end we were so horrified of ourselves we almost got sick. We then tossed his dead body back in the lake--Jake assuring me it would get eaten--where it floated, a big belly-up accusation we had to look at for the rest of the morning.
Reminded me a little too much of the opening scenes of Spring, Summer... wherein the boy ties rocks to animals & laughs at their tortured state, and ends up paying for it in full later in his life. All life sacred? Maybe.
Anyhow the impetus for this little excursion: Jake is going to try to teach my to fly fish before our trip next month to Glacier Mt. National Park. I think I'm going to like fly fishing for a number of reasons. It involves skill--you don't just sit there waiting for a lucky bite as in bait fishing, but must cast & recast constantly with considerable technique. And you don't have to kill anything at all if you don't want to, not even something for bait.
Afterwards smelly muddy & sunburned we laid out on Jake's car in an unfinished suburb somewhere, eating burgers and listening to our beer bottles whistle at each other in the wind, a half-step off. Jake told me about how he used to come down here with his dog when there was still nothing, and how he would cut down plants with a wooden sword. (I too spent countless hours doing the same.) There is a certain kind of plant back home in Missouri that shoots up so fast that its trunk is the consistency of worthless styrofoam. It's like slicing through butter; there's a delay after your stick has passed through, and then the plant falls apart in two pieces, cartoon-style.
(The relentless advance of the suburbs all around us, styrofoam houses which sprung up only yesterday.)
Posted by Alan at July 11, 2004 01:18 PMI tried flyfishing for the first time last month. Being inordinately bad at controlling the flailing of my limbs, I was terrible. No matter. I instantly understood the appeal, and all that super contemplative, philosophy-slathered flyfishing lit (A River Runs Through It, The River Why, My Story as Told by Water, etc.) began to seem much less like fantasy. I will definitely do it again.
In this part of Nebraska at least, there are these tall skinny hollow plants. Probably the same ones you describe. I too used to assault them with a wooden sword, because I spent hours constructing elaborately detailed wooden swords in my dad's shop and no one would ever fight me with them. (I wanted full-on take-no-prisoners thrashing about. The Fight Club impulse as filtered through too many pre-adolescent quest novels.) Eventually I discovered a corn knife in a toolshed and spent many a happy, sweat drenched afternoon channeling all my violence into the slaughter of weeds.
Posted by: Brennen at July 11, 2004 03:25 PMRun! Brennen has finally discovered the corn knife in the toolshed & cannot control the flailing of his limbs!
Posted by: Alan at July 14, 2004 02:06 PM