One year ago, when COVID 19 became and caused all the rage, like everyone else I spent the first few weeks huddled in my home scanning the internet to learn about all the ways the virus could hunt me down and kill me and my loved ones. By late March it became clear that as long as I kept my distance, I should be pretty safe, particularly if I was outdoors. By April conventional wisdom was that the virus was most dangerous to the elderly and people with respiratory or other serious conditions. I was neither, although “elderly” looms on the horizon.
It was somewhere in the early spring when I realized, “I’ve been training for this moment my entire life.” As a red-headed, pasty white kid growing up minutes from the beach in Southern California, joining my friends in the sun and surf was not really an option. So I went with my family to the High Sierra and learned to fish. As my father learned to backpack, he took me along. Backpacking was not really my thing but, being astute, my father grasped that I would accompany him over any number of grueling mountain passes if there was the promise of trout on the other side. I was a spin fisherboy in those days. My fishing “finishing” was completed when Stan Spangler put a fly rod in my hand when I was a young lawyer.
So, my Dad and Stan were the building blocks of my passion for fishing. Other than a few lost years in law school in Wyoming and some skimpy years when I lived in London, I have always fished. Why I wasn’t fishing in Wyoming during law school and sampling the famous trout streams in the UK I can only ascribe to a temporary bout of insanity.
Before I retired, I admit to spending a lot of time daydreaming about all the fishing I would do when my working days were through. I have realized that dream over the last five years. But, unexpectedly, COVID appeared and made fishing not just one of several activities I enjoy, but the most socially responsible activity I could do. For the first time in my life, fishing was not just something I could do to escape work stress or kill some free time, it was the only thing to do.
I was not alone in my realization. Many of my usual haunts were suddenly occupied with people who clearly said to their bosses, “You mean I can work from anywhere as long as I stay away from the office?”
I laughed at a Jason Gay column in the Wall Street Journal late last year when he said,
“This was a year of family fishing. I’d resisted it all my life—my late father loved to fish, and I couldn’t be bothered. But now my seven year old son is crazy for it, and my father is up there somewhere laughing. I grew to love the chase, and the disconnect of the natural world. Fish don’t know it’s 2020. I don’t even think fish watch cable news.”
Even with all the new weekday fishermen and fisherwomen, I have a ready store of “secret fishing spots” so, with a bit of creativity, I started fishing last spring and fished hard though the summer and fall. The only time I tempted fate was a trip to Alaska in September. Otherwise, I fished in Wyoming and South Dakota, exploring new water and pursuing a PhD in waters close to home. And I got good. Really good. I began to notice that I was catching “the fish of a lifetime” almost every time I went out. At some point in the early fall I realized that I was, incredibly, becoming blasé about fishing.
This was troubling because I have a long history of working at jobs, hobbies, knowledge, etc. to the point where I can claim competence but then move on to the next thing. Fishing has always been the impervious exception to my pattern of pulling up short of mastery. There is something about the problem solving involved in catching a fish coupled with the beautiful places that trout and salmon hang out that has never failed to fascinate and leave me wanting more.
In short, I was very concerned about not needing to fish.
My father-in-law was a dedicated smoker for most of his life. For the first several years that I knew him, I do not recall him going for longer than a half hour without a cigar (or occasionally a cigarette) in his mouth. Quitting smoking was brusquely dismissed whenever it came up. One New Year’s Eve, however, after a long-time colleague and fellow smoker died at a young age of a heart attack, my father-in-law quit smoking “cold turkey” (he did puff away on a cigar right up to the stroke of midnight). He never touched another cigar or cigarette. It was one of most amazing feats of willpower I have ever witnessed.
I don’t know what the opposite of cold turkey is but I became anxious that my addiction to fishing had abated due to my COVID-induced fishing binge and my suspicion that I had, unwittingly, mastered fly fishing. Rather than going without, I may have overdosed.
Then, one day in late October, I went to one of my favorite stretches of water. The creek is reliably uninhabited by anything other than me and a lot of large, healthy trout. I fished all day. I switched flies a couple dozen times. I dredged nymphs. I chunked streamers. I floated dries. I flung dries with droppers. Despite the water almost boiling with rising trout, I did not catch a thing.
I was filled with joy and gratitude. Once again, I was hopelessly obsessed with trout, how to catch them and reveling in my mediocrity.
Other than politicians and the media, I think it’s safe to say most of us are not going to miss COVID. We will miss the discoveries we have shared such as our appreciation for just what extraordinary people most health care workers are and how much we admire their courage; how “technology” became a real thing rather than just a “market sector” as we watched big, bad, evil corporations like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson save our lives with vaccines in a timeframe that has left even the most cynical blinking in disbelief; and how much the simple act of a hug became one of our most coveted dreams.
These are big things for which we should be thankful. They are things that get me misty when I contemplate them and how God can take anything, even COVID, and help us understand what is good about our lives.
For me, there will probably never be a year where I will fish as much as I did in 2020. But, it won’t be for a lack of desire. That’s a small thing I will give thanks for when I remember COVID.
A 2020 Trout