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In the late afternoon – too early, in fact, for my conventional fishing wisdom – I waded out in my chest waders and wading boots into the lake on the rocks and pebbles and occasional boulders up to my crotch.
The sun was at 5:30 on the horizon and I had to turn just away from the glare on the water. The waders leaked a little in a few places, but that didn’t matter. I used to explain to my friends or fishing clients that the waders are not fool-proof; that is, not leakproof, not always waterproof. I would joke with them, looking up, that I’ve been wet since I was seven years old. Wading in shorts or jeans with tennis shoes, and handed-down hip boots, cheap thin waders, and then even expensive waiters. I’m always more or less wet. You get used to it. Some people don’t want to get used to it. But the places I go are no place for nylon or poly or neoprene or whatever the new technologies have become.
Every minute or so feeding trout – or maybe perch – would ripple the water’s surface, often within casting distance.
Daphne swam back-and-forth behind me, and Foxy was out in the water well up the shore from me.
I casted and retrieved over and over and had four very light hits, and when I swung the rod and line alongside me to see the action of the fly in the water, I could see small perch trailing the fly, and they would dive at it and strike at it, but they were small – 5” to 7” – and noncommittal.
In the summers up at the lakes and at the cabins we were very active, and that came from my great-grandfather, and grandmother and aunt and grandfather and father and brother and friends. We would waterski, swim, play king of the hill on a swamped boat, snorkel. My grandmother would have me weed the flowerbeds and pick strawberries and raspberries. Often, they found work to do, and I helped tend the garden and the fruit trees. Eventually we would pick blueberries and chokecherries and elderberries and make sun tea from the sumac. Of course, we would fish. Fish walleye in the evening and early dark. Trout fish if I could.
Everything we did we did together, and we never stopped talking except if it was my grandfather and me alone. Or if someone was in a bad mood, which we were all susceptible to except my grandfather who never had an emotion.
When I am alone now, I don’t need to fear anyone’s mood but my own. But that is truly something to fear. And sometimes I feel about back then that I had a lifetime of talking enough.
I fished a short time, and later we went for an early evening walk.
It is good to walk the long, green two-track under the high trees in the greenest part of summer with no destination in mind, no time to keep, no intentions other than to start and committing that you will think about what comes to mind and smell what there is to smell and feel your heart rate and breathing increase and, warming up and loosening, loosen your reins and have it all soften.
Two things – by serendipity or by force of will – might happen for the writer on the walk.
Either the walk itself is inspiration for and subject of the writer – think of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods,” four stanzas of four lines each, describing his horse ride on the evening of the Winter Solstice.
Or the walk as a thing is totally out of mind, and in its place are different things entirely, and the walk is the free movement that makes time and room for the free flow of ideas. Like when Hemingway would walk the empty wet cobble streets of Paris in the early morning to the café, and then write a story about up in Michigan (one fertile morning after walking to the café and over coffee, then breakfast, then absinthe, he wrote three of his greatest stories).
We turned back before too long because – and this was always in and out of my mind – the way forward on the two-track tended downhill, meaning the way back was always a task.
Some very few of you will have read any E.B. White (Charlotte’s Web). Even fewer of you will have read any of his columns for the New York periodicals from the middle of the last century. No one could understand how much the simple reading of some of his collected essays, 30 and more years ago (when I was in college), influenced my approach to this column, or my approach to writing at all. It was one essay in particular. The form and structure I’ve carried with me, although the title and meaning and content I haven’t remembered. Ol’ E.B. goes out for an evening walk in the daffodil-white New England countryside, and gets sentimental, and comes up with some witty sentence to round out the piece.
Yes. That’s it.
As a teenaged John Lennon said of Elvis, sitting in the cinema when Elvis with his guitar first appears on screen, and all the girls in the place start going mad for him:
“Now that’s a good job.”
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