The fishing was good this morning, though we never made it to the
Mississippi. The Apple is a lovely tributary; once I almost drowned
in its green, but that was a long time ago, and I didn't because I guess
life still needed something there. Anyway, as I told Brooks, who is a
painter, if you are going to put your life into painting, make sure you stay
low, walk slow, and lay the fly right along the velocity changes, around
rocks, in the seams of runs, or at eddy edges. Sometimes, in the evening,
the biggest bass hold at the tails of the pools, and that's the time to
swing a surface bug downstream, slow, mending as you go. But these were
things I'd told him before, very fatherly, just like in the movie by Robert
Redford, the one that made Orvis a Fortune 500 corporation. So we both moved
slowly together against the push of the water, knee deep, not talking. The
sun was just starting to burn-off the fog, and a doe walked across the
riffle right upstream from us and didn't startle. A herron stood in the next
pool, shimmering. Is this a metaphor, he said, because you seem sort of
elsewhere today, as if you were thinking about something else or something
sad, which, you know, is what I tried to put into that painting of you when
I was a junior, actually, the one Lindsay still has above the stove, for
some reason, which always pisses me off whenever I see it-- I mean not
because it's you [his nervous burst of laughter], but because of where it
is. Well, at least she has the St. Augustine with the city in his chest in
the living room. No, don't be silly, I said, I'm not thinking about
anything, really. Let's just fish, and make the best of this morning
together. And I watched him fish, covered in an actual gold, his back to the
sun.
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
|