A Walk Down the River

On those cool gray days that have a threat of rain in the air, I don’t bother looking around for things to photograph. There’s no color, no contrast or depth. Instead I focus on fishing, on picking apart tiny spots in areas no bigger than you’re average bedroom.

Today that worked out all right. Was able to land 24 fish and miss another 11. This all happened in a short amount of time. I think I was on the river around 6 A.M and the bite had pretty much died by 8:30.

It was an odd one though. Normally the Fox River doesn’t really have what you would call backwaters, there’ s usually current pretty much everywhere all the time. The drought and low water changed that a bit.

Behind one island the current had all but died. I expected nothing. Instead, I got a mixed bag of smallies and largemouth. The largemouth I could understand, sort of. Catching them on the river doesn’t always happen, but this water was just stagnant enough to attract them and half the fish caught for the day were the smallies bastard cousins.

All pretty small, it’s rare to get bigger ones in the stretches I fish, but nobody told them they were small. Odd part was catching the smallies in this same stretch. It wasn’t the type of water you associate with them and yet, they too were cruising the area.

Further down, behind the next two islands, was water that would be considered classic smallie water. Hardly caught anything, not even the occasional tap.

Because I fish alone 99 percent of the time the bulk of the fish I catch wind up in an arms length photograph. Boring, I know, but I do it anyway. For this one smallie I’ll have to go look through my other photos. I recognize the tail. I know I’ve caught this same fish from this same area in the past.

One of the things I’ve noticed as I’ve gotten older is that my tolerance levels for certain things has got pretty narrow. For the most part, my patience level has disappeared. When you have numerous friends drop dead on you in a heart beat, some of them a few years younger than you, you’re tolerance of bullshit tends to disappear. You quickly determine if someone is wasting some of your last precious minutes on this earth.

And you eliminate them from your life. A wave of the hand will do. You’re wasting my time.

On the other hand, I’m very tolerant of how I’ve turned out, at least physically. When younger you tend to fuss a bit over how you present yourself to others. Now, I look in the mirror in the morning and I see myself looking back. It’s going to be a good day after all and everything else looking back at me, whether in the right place or not, just doesn’t matter.

I knew my bones would be hurting by this age, it was inevitable and I put up with it. Skin isn’t as clear and smooth as it used to be, but you get used to it. I’m kind of proud of the fact that I can look down at my feet and not lean forward to see them. I may not win any prizes for how I look, but at times I see this 56 year old guy looking back at me and think, that ain’t that bad considering the age and all.

Now and then while out fishing I catch a fish that I feel is worth the effort to get my mug up along with it. Not sure why I do this or why it’s important. Maybe to give the fish a sense of scale.

Then I get the picture downloaded, take a good look at it and think, man, I look like shit.

But that fish don’t look half bad.

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While wandering down the river casting, a bluegill came dancing across the top of the water. As a friend of mine once said, they don’t do that for fun you know. So I cast to where the blue gill was dancing.

I guess the fish above also had a taste for something that looked like a minnow.