A wish for "tight lines" to all, whatever you're trying to catch

It has, for the past 48 hours or so, been snowing off and on. More on than off. When it hasn't been snowing it's been blowing, or sleeting, or snizzling, or all of the above. Recently bare ground is again buried under a few inches of heavy, very wet snow. The phrase "this, too, shall pass" keeps looping through my mind.

Tomorrow is the opening of Minnesota's regular trout season. Years ago, when we were younger and more ardent in our outdoor pursuits, we would have been looking forward to tromping through snow-covered fields on our way to a trout stream, slowly developing stilts underfoot as the snow compacted itself into more and more layers on the bottoms of our felt soled wading boots.

This year we'll forego opening day rituals and await a more pleasing ambiance before we sally forth, but, some time in the near future, sally forth we shall, god willing and the river don't rise, as they say. We'd like to believe we may have finally reached Stage Five of the five stages of fly fishing. We know that we've caught 1) first fish, 2) many fish, 3) large fish, 4) some difficult fish, and, 5) over the years, have come more and more to appreciate the wisdom John Voelker (pen name Robert Traver) expressed in his Testament of A Fisherman.

John Voelker: TESTAMENT OF A FISHERMAN

Since we are still in National Poetry Month, we're going to exercise a bit of poetic license and declare, for our purposes today, Voelker's TESTAMENT to be a prose poem without the typical format, and further, because it can be hard to read the version above, we'll include it again here as today's poem.

I fish because I love to;

Because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly;

Because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape;

Because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion;

Because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience;

Because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don’t want to waste the trip; because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters;

Because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness;

Because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there;

Because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid; 

And, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant – and not nearly so much fun.

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