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In the days of high summer, in the tourist times, the fishing times, I instructed people in the rather odd, really difficult techniques of fly-casting, the casting of a fly in order to catch fish.
I always started off the instructions on grass. Meaning we learned to cast on sod or as near to it as we could get that time of summer, before going up to the woods and creeks and rivers, or up in the lakes in boats or float tubes.
The best places to cast freely and to move easily for my methods of instruction were the softball fields. There is the field behind the community center up from downtown with Lake Superior off below us, and if the wind was too strong at that field, there was the hidden field down beyond the RV park and tucked in the trees.
At either one, parking is on the third base side, and you entered the field at the gate that is on that side where the on-deck circle would be. Since the infield gravel would scratch a fly line if it were laid on it, or pulled across it or ripped off it, my clients and I would take the hallowed walk across the infield to the shortstop position, then step just off the dirt onto the dried green of short left field and begin the business of fly-fishing. History, equipment, physics. The footing of reel to rod, stringing line to rod, and casting. The roll cast, up-and-down, side-to-side, and ultimately the overhead forward cast.
When I was 21 and 22 and 23, a university student and cafeteria worker, I was not much of an outdoorsman. There were trips out to Wyoming fly-fishing, and some duck hunting in the fall, and a garden in the backyard of our party house (nine students at one time, including my brother and one or two girls).
I was a sportsman though. Broomball in the winter and softball the rest of the seasons.
I played for three softball teams. The first was intra-mural at the university, very short-lived, unremarkable, disappointing. That was with my dormmates from the previous couple of years. I remember some of their names, but not positions. I played shortstop. They were almost all future engineers, studying at the Institute of Technology. I was not and studying to be a freethinker at the College of Liberal Arts.
The second team was with my old high school friends, and we had been all good students from stable middle-class homes and none of us ever got much sexual experience. We were clean-cut, high-potential and nerds, and our team’s name was Harpos, because our tallest player, a third baseman named Benson, had curly blonde hair like Larry Bird or Harpo Marx. We were a joke for a while, but we improved quickly. Our pitcher was Mike and catcher was Tim. The infield was Dean (1st), Dave (2nd), Benny and me.
The third team never improved until long after I retired from it. We did take it seriously and invested in team shirts (purple) with a Gothic letter “S” over the heart, which we claimed stood for “Schlitz,” but of course Schlitz didn’t sponsor us. It was just that we were loyal to malt liquor. That team, the S Team, was my younger brother’s high school friends and me, and they were longhairs and losers and heads and very unathletic. Jim was the pitcher and Nate (who died) the catcher, and years later I referred to the infield (Steve [1B], Mick [2B], Eric [3B], and myself [short]) as the Second Greatest Working- Class Infield in History, behind the ‘82 Brewers (Cooper, Gantner, Molitor and Yount).
When I guided people in fly-fishing and taught fly-casting, I had to implement a minimum age for participation – 13, I think – and sometimes a family or a mother or father had a child younger than that and they wanted me to make an exception. I had to explain to them the unique demands of the sport of fly-fishing, how much body control, dexterity and hand-eye coordination was required for casting.
“Can your child,” I’d ask for comparison, “take a ground ball off the infield and get it to first?” And the answer was always “No.”
That was funny, because I always led my teams in errors, anyway. But maybe that’s because I was playing shortstop. Maybe one should start playing shortstop earlier. And maybe there should be no minimum age to try to learn to fly-fish.
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