Summertime, and the fishing is (not so) easy

It was a good summer.

I spent it fishing; more fishing than I've ever done in my life.

As I write this, rain is falling from a low, gray sky, the droplets expending the pent-up energy of their long freefall in a fireworks display of ripples on the surface of the puddle outside the window. It's late October. The trees have long since passed their peak of color. Lots of pumpkins and ghosts adorning household windows. This is the coldest it's been in a while; last night a northerly wind ripped most of the leaves off the trees. The world has become bare and a bit sullen. Soon wet will turn to white. Water will turn solid. Temperature will fall to nothing. Already whispers abound of the holidays to come.

But it was a damn good summer.

There are two rivers where I live. I fish both of them, below a certain dam usually, or at their confluence. Although one traverses my home state through seven counties and empties into the Mississippi, neither it nor its smaller tributary are all that mighty. They sport weak current at most spots, and in a dry summer such as this the water level is so low it's possible to wade almost all the way across, which is what a buddy and I have done over the summer. Most mornings, we could be found picking our way over rock ledges from the shore, some twenty feet out, gaining a tenuous footing and casting spinners into the current as the sun broke over the treeline.

I've always liked to fish, but until this year it was only an occasional indulgence. Time constraints and a lack of motivation (to get up and get out) always kept me from doing it, even though I have lived all of my life amidst water, and at times amidst some of the finest recreational fisheries in the country.

This summer, though, with a change in my schedule, a change in the very fabric of my life, I became gripped by compulsion. I began to crave the sense of Zen that comes from fishing; that is, the meditative mindfulness of daily experiences as part of the road to wisdom. Indeed, fishing is very Zen. From being in nature, in impossibly peaceful environs, to the mere repetition of casting out and reeling in, fishing is an effective means of clearing my thoughts, calming my anxieties, allowing myself to appreciate and accept that which I have and that which I am. Also, that which I am not.

At the same time, the ultimate goal is to catch something, catch lots of something ideally. To that end, this summer at least, I haven't had the best of luck. I'm new to this area, but have been fortunate to be taken out by a guy who not only knows all the best hot spots, but is also someone I don't feel sheepish firing questions at. I love to fish, and I know the basics, but I have never done it as extensively as I have this summer, so I quickly found there was much for me to learn. I wouldn't call this guy a professional angler, but he has an unmistakble instinct when it comes to fishing. He sees them under the water; the slightest below-the-surface movement as we're strolling along the riverside and he's pointing to a spot where I saw absolutely nothing, remarking, See that? They're down there. They're waitin' to be fed.

He has an uncanny knack for identifying species with only the slightest glimpse. The moment a fish breaks the surface at the end of his line - just a second's blur of spraying water and writhing tail or fin in my eyes - he knows what he's hooked. Perhaps this is not particular to him; I imagine most people who have been fishing all their lives have this ability. But it was new to me.
 

He also moves damn quick. For most of the summer we've used artificial bait, relentlessly casting out and reeling in spinners and jigheads with determined consistency, no matter how lousy the results. But recently we switched to live bait - rigging hooks with crawlers and minnows, casting out, propping our poles up on sticks drilled into the ground, sitting back and waiting for something to happen.

This is perhaps the more disciplined version of fishing. Without the constant activity of casting and reeling over and over, by just sitting there and watching the line and the water, it's much more difficult to stay vigilant. One must learn to discern between what is motion on the line caused by the current and what is the first nano-second stages of a fish's interest, at which time one must grab hold of the pole and attempt to set the hook before the fish takes the bait, gets spooked and flees or loses interest. My friend does this in a lightning fast, almost violent, motion. The slightest tremble of the line or jerk of the rod tip and he launches himself from whatever sitting or squatting position he may be in and has the pole in his hand before I realize what's going on.

Me...I'm a little clutzier. If there's no action for a few minutes, I tend to sink into the shore a little, sit back, drink some coffee, smoke a cigarette...start contemplating larger Zen thoughts, teetering on distraction. When the bite comes (and it does come; live bait is almost always superior), I don't lunge, I lumber. I've gotten better at it, better at staying vigilant, and I move quicker than I did at first, but I don't think I will ever move with crouching tiger intensity like my fishing buddy. (He's fifteen years my junior, and I have to accept the fact that this is largely a part of it.)

All in all, he's been a good fishing guide. He does occasionally gloat over the fact that, though we fish in the same places, often with the exact same bait, at the exact same time, he's managed to outfish me almost two to one over the last three months.

And yet, that really isn't saying much, because the fishing has been abysmal all around this year. We've gone at it hard all summer - in the early morning where the current is stronger for smallies. Late at night, hunting for walleye by moonlight (although summer is not prime walleye season). There are fish to be found in these two rivers. We can hear them jump, sometimes frequently, sometimes largely, displacing big portions of water in a reverberating glugging sound when they break the surface. But for reasons unknown - or not understood to us anyway - they have left our lures alone with an unusually high level of indifference. Of course, fishing is always challenging (otherwise everyone would be pulling up trophies all the time, and what fun would that be?), but he says it's not the same this year. Like the current economic mess our world seems to be in, he decries his fishing index as having taken hard hits of late. He doesn't know what could be the cause of this - low water levels, some more complex disruption of the ecosystem...who knows? He just knows they ain't bitin' as they have in the past.

There have been some high points - we've caught some sturgeon (I'd never seen one before; remarkably prehistoric looking), several smallies, some walleye, a musky even - although he was just a little shaver - some northern. I landed a really nice crappie one night in some rapids directly below a highway overpass. But mostly we've spent the time bullshitting, discussing in jest (mostly) how much fish really know, if they're up to something, and feeding the river our lures when it chomps its very snaggy teeth down on them. I honestly have never fished such a snag-filled body of water in my life.

One thing is certain, and this ties into the Zen of fishing: it doesn't matter how frequently it happens, every time I get a bite, every time I yank back on the pole and know through the sudden tension of the line that I have hooked something, I get a new rush of adrenalin. Every time. It never gets old, never gets taken for granted, and it matters not the size of the fish I eventually land. That sensation alone makes fishing worth my (and everyone's) time.

Eventually the rivers and lakes around here are going to freeze up and the snow will begin to fly. My friend ice fishes as religiously as he casts out in the summer; but I may retire for the season, draw inward, physically and metaphorically. But I will be back next year for the '09 opener, craving that adrenalin rush with a newly heightened potentcy.

It's been a good summer. With more to come.

My Close Encounter of the Bear Kind

The most amazing thing happened the other night; but first, some context:

I'm what could be called a serious walker. If I've got an hour to kill, nowhere to be and no one asking or expecting anything of me, I can think of few things I'd rather be doing than walking. As Forrest Gump found himself compelled to run, I've always felt compelled to walk.

When I was younger, before having a family and home life, I walked all the time; walked so much I became known amongst the local teenagers, or so it got back to me once, as 'that guy who walks around town at night.' Responsibilities, long work days and a multitude of other time constraints have curbed the habit. But I do what I can, when I can.

I walk the same route every time. There's no apparent reason for this, no deeply rooted psychological impulses at play that I can identify. I've simply been going the same way for years, and with few exceptions have never been inclined to try something new. I chalk it up to being a creature of habit, and anyway, my route is a pretty good way to see as much of what's going on as possible. I live in a small town, and my walk takes me through the community's various neighborhoods - downtown, through the park, along the lakeshore. This diversity has allowed me to witness a lot of things over the years, a veritable good, bad and ugly exhibit of my hometown - from drunks passed out on sidewalk steps to deer foraging in people's gardens, their necks extended giraffe-like to reach the low branches of crabapple or acorn trees, a crescent moon just dipping below the tree line behind them.

I've witnessed house fires while out walking, lightning strikes, bar fights, domestic squabbles, Little League baseball games, joggers, cyclists, ATV riders, jet skiers, wind surfers, horseback riders, drag racers and even someone who fell off his roof trying to rid the eaves of his house of a hornet's nest. That was a crazy scene for five or ten minutes: I actually saw him fall, and suddenly found myself in the hat trick attempt of a lifetime: untangling him from his ladder, dialing 9-1-1 on my cell, and swatting at agitated bees.

There have been plenty of animal encounters over the years. From angry bees to angry blue jays swooping out of the sky, to wood ticks lurking in the grassy areas of the park, waiting for me to come just a little too close, to house cats that routinely come out into the street and smile at me, to a gigantic rat I saw waddling down Main Street once late at night. No joke...this thing was the size of a small dog, and shaped like an engorged wood tick...the same anemic gray color. Before I realized fully what it was (that is, before I could shriek like a pre-teen girl), it slipped down a storm grate into the sewer; the last thing I saw was its unnaturally thick tail swish left and righ before vanishing down that grate. To this day its a little unsettling to know rats grow that large beneath the (mostly) quiet streets of my hometown.

And of course, I've endured numerous dog encounters over the years. What walker - from the casual evening stroller to the paper boy or mail carrier tending his appointed rounds - hasn't?

And so it was that I was out taking a walk last weekend. Just another night; the weather's getting warmer (finally), might as well take advantage of it, I thought. I'm always happy for company when I walk, but more often than not, especially lately, I go alone.

It was about 8:30. The sun had set, the last light of day situated somewhere between civil and nautical dusk. With each passing moment, objects were becoming less disginguisable, except for street lights and the glow coming through the living room windows of the homes I passed.
I reached the top of my avenue, a spot where it curves to the right and intersects another street. On one side is my very residential neighborhood. On the other side, woods that cross a ravine and go on for close to a mile.

As I was rounding this corner, hoofing along at a good pace and already dancing about inside my head (that is, hardly aware of what was going on around me), I heard a loud huffing sound.

Perhaps this requires a meatier description. Remember the movie Jurassic Park? The sound of the T-Rex? It wasn't just a roar, as countless similar creatures had been represented in movies past. The producers of Jurassic... took it to the next level; they recorded numerous wailing sounds, most notably a young elephant, mixed them, lowered them, amplified them, and in doing so created this rich, textured bellow that most movie goers will never forget.

That same phenomenon was present here. It wasn't a huff I heard, exactly, something more; a three-dimensional blast of air, a 20-ton lurching of sound in my ears, at a velocity I could almost see as well as hear.

I stopped dead in my tracks and looked up. 15 feet in front of me was the unmistakable side-view silhouette of a black bear standing in the middle of the road. Off to the right, still protected by arborvitae lining a neigbor's yard, were four cubs. They were nervously pacing about, falling over each other, wondering what they should do next. But the mother remained stock still, watching me.

Less than a second later she huffed again, with the same kind of freight-train volume and velocity. Then she took three or four steps toward me, each one a bit more of a lunge.

When I was a kid, I had the misfortune of being engulfed in flames for a number of seconds, and at the time I was very lucky that clear-thinking instinct kicked in - I did what I had always been told I should do by the fire marshall whenever he came and gave a safety speech at school.

Stop, drop and roll.
In the midst of panicked screaming over the fact that I was suddenly on fire, I actually had the presence of mind to remember this neatly packaged, kid-friendly protocol. And so I stopped, I dropped and I rolled several feet across the grass of my friend's front yard. The fire was extinguished, and my action likely prevented the flames from spreading. As it was, I received third degree burns on my chest; I cringe to this day thinking of the burn spreading to my face and hair.

But it didn't; and I walked away from that incident with a new appreciation for safety instructions.

Now I found myself in a similar situation: one of potential danger, a mother bear taking several aggressive steps toward me, and another much bandied-about protocol flashed in my head. Like 'stop, drop and roll', it was advice I'd heard many times in my life, in virtually every nature magazine I read as a kid, every Discovery Channel special I've ever watched on the subject, countless bear survival videos I've pulled up on YouTube - lauded as SOP (standard operating procedure) when confronted by any bear that appears hostile.

Like 'stop, drop and roll', I didn't quite realize I was doing it; it was mostly a knee-jerk reaction. I certainly held no conscious belief that it would actually work, but I instinctively raised my hands up and cried out, "Bear! Yo! Bear!"

90 percent of the time, black bear pose no threat. They are smaller than their grizzly or polar cousins, much shyer, and much less likely to consider human beings food. Nevertheless, they are bears, and I'd had the misfortune of unexpectedly running into a sow with four cubs. In the interest of protecting them, she was capable of becoming just as ferocious as any grizzly.

"Bear! Yo! Bear!"

Chanting this a second and third time, with arms raised, kept her bluff charge from turning into a real attack. She halted, but kept looking at me with this strange sideways tilt of her head as I backed away slowly.

"Bear! Yo! Bear!"

The cubs huddled up near the arborvitae, nervously pacing about, frightened of me but not about to stray too far from mama, even to flee. Only when I had backed up a suitable distance did she turn toward the woods and make her way across the road, the cubs following in an adorably loping manner behind her.

She kept her eyes locked on me until she had disappeared into the thicket on the opposite side. She waited until her cubs went in first.

I got to admit, it was an unnerving experience. But neither her hostility and distrust of me, nor the momentary threat to my safety she posed could squelch the magnificence of the moment.

I've seen a lot of things out walking, but this was my first close encounter with a bear. I can't say I would ever want this to happen again, but it's worth a moment or two of fright to be lucky enough to live in a community where the woods are never really out of sight, where nature is always close by.

Traveling to a 'higher plane' while searching for a trash can lid

We had high winds here the other night, gale-force blasts that buffeted walls, rattled window panes and swept up anything that was not tied down. One of the casualties in this big blow (imagine the twister scene from The Wizard of Oz - Miss Gulch riding her bicycle past my window, cackling evilly) was the lid to my garbage can. Pickup was Monday morning, the can was left sitting empty by the alley, and the wind storm hit before I had a chance to retrieve it. When I stepped outside the next day to survey the damage, I realized it had vanished. I found the can about a half block away, blown partially into a neighbor's open garage. The lid, however, remained M.I.A.

This caused no small amount of frenzy. The older and more domestic I get (read: lamer and middle aged), the more I bristle at petty annoyances. They say it's supposed to be the other way around; the older you get, the less you sweat the small stuff. But as I age, I find myself able to handle the big crises with a previously unknown valiance, while the everyday stresses - no milk for my cereal, dead batteries, computer crashes, trash can lids nowhere to be found - become more and more intolerable. I need everything just so, everything in its place. Any deviation from what's become - for better or worse - my routine, my way of doing things, becomes a little flickering flame of stress. I wanted to go looking for that damn lid (convinced the functionality of my garbage can would be diminished ten-fold without it), but was already late for work. I had no choice but resign myself to the fact that it would have to wait.

That evening, I conducted a more extensive search. I suspected, judging from what neighbors were saying about the severity of the storm (straight line winds with gusts upwards of 60 miles per hour were reported), the lid probably landed two towns over, but I was determined to make sure it wasn't somewhere I could find it, because a garbage can without a lid is like a deck of 50 playing cards.

Right...?

After completing a full sweep of the alley to no avail, I reluctantly returned to my back yard, and just as I was about to go inside an unusual movement in the darkening sky caught my attention.

I spotted a small white light crossing the southern heavens, where numerous stars had begun to twinkle their way out of the indigo. But this was much brighter than any star, more like Venus on a really good night. This alone made it hard to ignore (there are precious few things in the night sky that appear brighter or as-bright-as the beloved morning star); but what really caught my eye was its high rate of speed as it made its way across the sky toward the east.

This was no aircraft, I knew that much. There was no sound, no slightly delayed rumble of massive jet engines, no whine of a propellar decending in pitch, no evidence of a contrail darkly visible in the last light of day, no red beacons blinking distantly. Just a bright white point of light, and a swift, silent glide taking it across the entire sky in under three minutes. My eyes widened. For a moment I started thinking - daring to wonder if - I was witnessing a U.F.O.

Over the years I have occasionally 'seen things' in the sky that could not be easily explained, but I've never allowed myself to get swept up in any of it. I have always tried to view the world as practically and logically as possible. Doing so has made skepticism a natural discipline for me.

In a way, the term 'UFO' itself is a kind of automatic debunker. U.F.O. stands for 'Unidentified Flying Object', which implies that if you don't know what you're seeing, if anything in the sky is at any time unidentified, , it is technically a UFO, even if it turns out to be a weather balloon or a flock of birds. The acronym possesses no intrinsic connection to little green men or flying saucers or anything of the sort, and therefore really has no business taking on any of the mythology surrounding the flying saucer mania of the last 50 years. If everyone kept this in mind, I believe it would help keep knee-jerk reactions and the occasional hysteria in check whenever something strange - but ultimately explainable - is spotted.

But nobody thinks like that. People are, especially when it comes to space - that proverbial 'final frontier' - knee-jerk and hysterical. And the more we learn about the cosmos (and indeed, it seems we've learned more in the last ten years, certainly since the advent of the Hubble Telescope, then in the preceding fifty), the more obsessed we are with the possibility of alien life, probably because the more we learn the more likely it seems that we will discover it somewhere. It's no longer impossible to imagine life in other galaxies, nor are people who believe as quick to be marginalized. I'm not sheepish about it at all, really. When I look at a photograph of a galaxy far, far away, I see glittering cities of technology, complex societies. And I'd go so far as to suggest that sometime in the next fifty years - within my lifetime - 'first contact' of some kind will be made.

So when I first spotted this bright and clearly odd object moving across the sky at an incredible (impossible?) rate of speed, making no noise whatsoever, I admit for a moment, just for a moment, I was intrigued, even a little excited. What the hell was I seeing? It could not be easily explained. Were my eyes deceiving me? It couldn't be moving that fast could it? But there it was, clearly visible to my naked eye, shooting right overhead.

I wanted to call the kids out to have a look, or maybe dash inside to grab my video camera, believing in those few moments that what I was seeing might be history-making, the first genuine UFO encounter, but the object was moving so fast I knew it would be gone by the time I returned. Instead, I stood motionless in what had become a chilly evening, determined to scrutinize the thing, to discover through heavy gazing the answer to this sudden riddle. Like Bill Murray on Saturday Night Life once, I stood with head thrown back, mouth agape, and muttered, 'What the hell is that?!' until it had traveled the entire width of the sky and disappeared over the treeline to the east.

When it was out of sight, I went inside and did what anyone would do in the modern age: consult the Internet. Part of me wishes I'd left well enough alone, because it did not take me long to identify, beyond a reasonable doubt, my 'unidentified flying object.'

It was the International Space Station.

I felt disappointed, and a little sheepish for giving so much rein to my imagination. But as I read on, I became intrigued and excited once again. I knew about the space station, but never any real details; nor had I ever seen it, or any man-made object (outside of satellites) in the heavens at night. I know they're there of course, but never sought them out, and never had something jump out at me like this.

The International Space Station (ISS) is a joint project between 17 countries that began in 1998. It should be completed in 2010, and is expected to be in continual operation for most of the next decade.

In a low-Earth orbit 240 miles up, it is currently 191 feet long, 146 feet wide, and its speed truly is astonishing. The bright white light I saw cross the sky was traveling at approximately 17,000 miles per hour. It makes approximately 15 full orbits around our planet each day.

To that end, ISS flyovers are not all that unusual, but you must be in the right place at the right time, and conditions have to be just so. Like the moon, it does not emit its own light but is merely reflecting sunlight, which means its apparent position relative to the sun must be conducive to reflecting down to Earth. Likewise, the position of the sun relative to the space station must also be just right.

Therefore (and this is what makes my encounter so cool), I feel fortunate to have been granted such a chance viewing, and an unobstructed one at that. Not only did the ISS and the sun have to be in the right place at the right time, but I had to be in the right place at the right time. Any other night, I would likely have been inside when it passed (it's flown overhead many times before, without my ever knowing), cooking dinner or doing chores or playing with the kids or what have you. But there I happened to be, in that narrow three minute window of opportunity, with the sun positioned just right and moreover, the skies above me crystal clear.

There was something almost kismet about it, and it brightened my evening.

More than a decade ago, the Heaven's Gate cult committed mass suicide, believing they would be transported to a 'higher plane' of existence hiding in a spaceship in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet that was making an appearance in the spring of 1997.

Beyond the tragic senselessness of this act, lies a deeper and more important consideration. I said it at the time (to anyone I could get to listen), and it still holds true today, maybe more than ever: the incredible complexity and grandeur of our universe - be it that which is out amidst the cosmos we have yet to fully comprehend (comets shrieking through the inner solar system, galaxies dying and being reborn, supernovas exploding in an instant with more energy than can be found in all the creation around them) or the comfortably terrestrial pleasures we understand fully, that possess no speed, no power, no new enlightenment, but are no less fantastic (the deer that raid the apples in our back yard when no one's around, waking up to the moon smiling through my window, or to thunder, or to snowfall) - our place in it, and perhaps most importantly our ability to discover and enjoy it, IS the higher plane.

And we should all be endeavoring to travel to that higher plane whenever we can. Doing so makes the petty annoyances, including and especially lost trash can lids, pale by comparison.

Don't wait for a chance encounter, a trip to the 'higher plane': visit http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/index.html to find out when the ISS will be flying over your head.