Flyfishing

Water weaves it's way through my mind.  Like a coke addiction or a fabulous woman, its unendingly fascinating.  The way two currents meet, create a seam and I know that a fish is there amazes me.  It is meeting with nature on it's own level.  In part a dream, in part a reality, it evokes spirits of intuitive memory that swirl about me as mists on an early morning spring.  It's as if the water speaks in silence and through osmosis tells me it's secrets.  And I understand.  The knowledge infuses me with a sense of wonder, like learning from a book but much more like learning from life as it comes in rushes and waves.  It is a secret I long to let out, and I already have.  My hope is that the water does not become overrun with those who jumped on the bandwagon.  Internet movies and how to books inform much action while I just try to understand by looking and learning as the current teaches.  Experiential learning evokes spectors of wonder that surround and console me as the river flows by.  If only I could communicate it I would feel satisfied with my work but there is so much behind each words I long to expound.  The fish are champpion athletes and the river their feild, they were the beginings of hip hop when I was twelve, Eric B and Rakim and cheers at the Palladium.  The words echo like some ancient memory that goes beyond lived life.  Something in tune with the genes and my ancestors.  It speaks and it inspires me to take a cast.  When I was a child my energy was unending.  Now through lack of activity it is flagging yet I still find time to fish.   That heavy weight when a fish hits and I strike, feeling the impulses of life struggling, I am alive.  More than dope, more than diesel, more than pills but somehow less than a cigarette..  I fight throught he harsh cold days, my skin stiffening against the breeze.  Yet my world is so small.  Comparing time in the Big Sky versus a Beantown suburb.  Twenty miles versus  a quarter.  There is no comparison.  It is the difference between life and death, love and emptiness.  In some ways the water is never to real though the cold stings.  It is my soul that is connected to it like family though even family can fail you.  But water never has.  It has rights but no intent.  It pushes me to quit yet wants me to stay, casting and looking and learning from that which is basic yet in its basicness, complex.  It is like learning the rudiments of Latin, off of which all is based yet it being more complex that my native tongue it leaves me more confused than ever.  I think it is known since it has been a friend so long; it speaks without doubt or me knowing its speeking as if I was remembering a conversation of old, it is heard without speech becoming so much like a interaction understood without explanation.  I like the idea.  The thought of something so comfortable it fits like sleep in the morning and work in the evening.  The memory is ancient appearing witin the present from before the past.  It is of the ancients, people of character and drive, of will and truth, who laid the basic tenets apon which society is based.  In that time fishiing was part of society.  And they graduated from gorge to hook to fly.  This was before people proliferated as cities do now.  Before industrialized nations and gang warfare.  Before a rising murder rates and police brutality.  Sure there was corruption, for as long as man has been cogent there has been, yet it was not so deep as to effect an entire population.  There were rich ands poor yet because of their approximation to nature there was peace and love and romance and hope.  And there still is; it just hides behind the tenets of the ruling class.   Water proves this; it's constancy, it's evereadyness.  As it gives up fish, it impresses apon one the value of mastery and skill, two values for which there are no substitute.  It teaches with each cast as we whittle away at the end of our ability, refining and sharpening it until we are ready to feel the flow.  It is unlike school as so much value is placed on so little learning.  It takes a lifetime and more to become a fishermen and yet men try regardless.  That is why I think our desire for fish comes from something ancient and deep inside.  Knowing you have no end yet surging forward seems near to the definition of idiocy yet it is so satisfying as to be the reason for some men's existence.  It becomes life itself, or the reason for it, and the reason some travel to the society's end and others dream of it.  Even without reason fishing makes sense.  It inspires to action moreso than money or property or even, in some cases, sex.  Within the realm of fishing nothig else matters; not politics, or career, not family.  It is an eternal drive engaged by millions across the globe some more or less, in close proximity to great water.  Water is the way, of that I am sure.  It's essence while sullied by civilization, is untampered with and who can say that even of our closest relationships.  Man has existence and I beleive it is the reason for it.  And that will be true come summer spring winter or fall.  And water, the truth, that unending being.  Forever will I dally with water on my mind and, as I hope, it to will always be so.