Fall and Fishing
In May of 2015 I told my boss that he had my help until August. Then I was quitting and moving home to Pennsylvania. I’d been living and working in Connecticut for two years, and neither was working for meanymore — the job or the location. That spring and summer were a blur of side hustles and little sleep as I banked money to offer myself some security amidst the chaos of impending unemployment. I managed to put enough zeroes in my bank account to make me feel safe, and on August thirty-first, I loaded my car and made the six-hour drive from New Haven, Connecticut to Mifflin County, Pennsylvania. With each mile closer to home, anxiety that had stood in my chest for months dissipated in direct proportion to my proximity to the river and ridges that raised me. As I finished the final few hours of driving, I thought clearly enough to set my priorities for the next few months. I’d relax while I sorted out my next moves, and I’d do a lot of fly fishing.
My dog Stella and I arrived to find my mom’s house empty. Mom was living with my sister in Virginia, so I commandeered her tiny home as my sabbatical shack. I’d pay rent and keep the place clean while she’d be gone. I’d also use it as headquarters for getting my shit together — which I needed to intently focus on. Although I felt better being among the flush, green ridges of late summer Central Pennsylvania, the largest part of me was still agitated and aimless. It’s easy to feel that way when you’re twenty-nine-years-old, unemployed, and most of your friends are settled into their lives. But the wisest part of me knew that it wasn’t time for me to settle — what would I even settle on? It was time to find the rhythm, that would set the time, for the man I wanted to become. I knew I’d find it thigh-deep in a stream and with my casting arm.
I took the first afternoon to get organized, but as soon as the sun laid its rays on the next morning, my feet were plunged into cool, moving waters. My fly rod was in my right hand. My friend Josh and I met at an abandoned mill along Kishacoquillas (Kish) Creek, planning to fish one of our favorite sections. It’s a wonderful stretch of water. There’s a deep riffle along the outside bank that always holds impressive wild brown trout, slack water that beckons to streamers, and eddies that swirl with the promise that a fish is tucked just behind a rock. We’d had good days there in the past, and it was the place where I’d taught myself to cast a fly rod as a teenager. How could my first day back there be anything but magic? Rusty casting, however, rarely leads to charmed fishing.
After we fished through the deep riffle and swung streamers through the slack water, a few fish finding their way from their hides into our hands, we worked up stream to shallower water canopied by overhanging trees. As I back casted a nymph, planning to drift it along a seam where a riffle met slower-moving water, my line tangled on a low-hanging branch behind me. Anyone that’s ever casted a fly rod can comment simply: it happens. Typically, you lose your fly, and some tippet. You re-tie go and on about your fishing. But frustration that I thought couldn’t find me in the middle of a trout stream, found me. As a child pulls too hard on a dog’s tail and is bitten, I tugged too aggressively on my rod and snapped off the tip. “You idiot,” my friend Josh chuckled from across the stream. I had to laugh along with him. It was an expensive lesson to learn, but a timely one, nonetheless.
“Relax, you ogre,” I thought to myself. We left the stream, I bought a new fly rod at the now out-of-business local outdoors shop, and then we went on fishing. That new rod found its way to the shimmering, warm waters of the Juniata River across from Josh’s family farm. Adjusting to the speed of the new rod took some time, but by the end of the evening it had put several nice bass in my hand — making it worth the effort. To this day, that rod is stashed between the headrests and the back window of my truck in the case that the opportunity rises to wet a line.
Late summer turned to fall. Our feet, our lines, and our flies found every type of water our county has to offer. Our little haven is an embarrassment of fishing riches. We fished streams small and big, catching nice trout from each. While the weather turned colder, we continued to wade the Juniata for smallmouth bass and walleye — catching both. One particular late October day — rainy and cold — stands out in my mind. It was enjoyable for all the reasons most people would find it miserable.
I’d spent the previous few days in Westchester, New York. To keep the cash flowing, I’d commute back and forth every other week to see some high-dollar clients. When I hit the George Washington Bridge in Manhattan on my way home, I called Josh and told him I’d be at the farm in four hours. The sky was as drab as the Manhattan concrete when I crossed the bridge, and the weather remained constant the entirety of the trip. As I hoped it would.
I was happy to see the mist covering the tops of the mountains and the drizzle collecting on my windshield as I made the right turn onto River Road. The river looked perfect as I watched it flow and did my best to keep my car between the lines. Perfect not only because of its water level, rate of flow, and color — but also because Josh and I would be the only idiots standing in the middle of it casting at fish.
Dense mist saturated our faces and our beards as we tread, with a bounce in our step and our rain jackets on, the quarter-mile gravel lane that leads from his farm house to the river. It was the kind of day that soaks a person through and leaves their skin wilted as raisins. But Josh and I were prepared to give the rest of the daylight hours to the river. We were electric with the possibility of catching fish and enjoying the aesthetic solitude that a bad weather day provides to folks willing to enjoy it.
It wasn’t only the hope of catching fish and the aesthetics of a mid-autumn rainy day. Beyond the electricity shared between two fisherman and the beauty of a gray afternoon there was elation. The feeling struck me as soon as I put my left foot down on Josh’s gravel driveway, intensified when I saw my friend dawning his river gear, and settled deeper into me with each drizzle-soaked cast. It was time and place. It was gratitude. It was freedom.
Most of my previous two years were lived in a place that I didn’t like in order to advance my career — and I was successful, at least in some respects of career advancement. Mostly, I learned that working for someone else doesn’t work for me and that I feel restrained by concrete-formed urban living. Learning, as one of my wise mentors put it to me, is butting up against your struggles. And there I struggled to find a complete sense of purpose, as well as the stillness I’ve always felt among the ridges and rivers of rural Pennsylvania. But I learned what each meant to me. That meaning surfaced as elation on a damp, autumn afternoon. I was home and I was grateful, in the deepest sense I’d ever felt, to be there. Maybe it was the contrast of being in the city where the drab gray sucks at the energy of life, even as the bustle of cars and people fight against the draining, and then in the presence of the stoic solemnity of a river and a ridgeline that have balanced each other for millennia — one moving, one unmoved.
There are those that say time and place don’t matter, that happiness and contentment are choices that you can make regardless of where your feet are stationed and what your eyes are witnessing. There’s truth in that philosophy that I can confirm with my own experience. But it’s an incomplete truth. Each person has places that put them at ease while bidding them to open their eyes and see the depth of the world. In that place, life makes sense. Darkness is balanced by light and clarity gives us the resources to accept the necessity of each. We can be with ourselves, completely, and respond to the voice in our head with directions to where we’d truly like to go.
During the two months leading up to my epiphany of gratitude, I’d spent my days as I pleased with complete autonomy over their form and direction. Some were a tangle of procrastination. Others were filled with productivity and growth. Most were a blend of each as I composed my day around fishing in view of ancient ridgelines and in the flow of steady water. It was that freedom that gave me the chance to show myself what would truly make me happy. Without it, I’d likely still be rambling around, seemingly happy but discontented under the surface, working a job I didn’t want in a place I didn’t want to be. I’d be normal. Normal is a curse word describing a slow, silently violent death. We’re wise to avoid it at all costs.
By winter, I had my rhythm. A musician could set time to the stops that let my loops straighten. The rhythm revealed to me that all life is time and timing; and that without counts to set our pacing, we are misled by dissonant rhythms. We believe that they are true when, in reality, they open our loops and steal the tension from our lines. Open loops lead our casts to unwanted places — just shy of that rock that’s sure to hold a trout; too far from the seam that’s sure to drift your fly to a bass that’s hungry and waiting. Attention and flow save the loops and keep the tension in the line. As much as our instincts drive us to force our way through, it’s attention and connection that set the rhythm. Then the cast comes from the center of you. Taking time to set the rhythm makes all the difference.
Connecticut was the dissonant rhythm that opened my loops. I believed that chasing a career, far from the solace of the landscape that shaped me, would carry my life forward and settle me into place. While parts of me grew, and I learned a great deal about the world while broadening my horizons, I also learned the most important lesson that anyone could learn — a career is nothing without a life. Without a life, there is no rhythm. Well, there is a rhythm, but it’s a monotonous pounding rather than a rich, complex, and compelling beat. Being modern and human, we are skewed toward the monotony of pounding on, of “grinding.” Which is just a vague working to exhaustion. So, we are led to believe, and we do indeed believe, that we are simply supposed to be busy for eight to twelve hours per day until we’re too tired to work anymore. Then we sit around and wait to die. It’s this sad reality that makes me want to put a fly rod in every hand I’ve ever shaken. While I know it’s impractical, for the base reasons that I could never find all those hands again, and that there are plenty of people that wouldn’t like fly fishing, I can’t help but believe it would make the world a better place.
More practically, although some would view it as impractical, is the serious importance of taking long periods away from work, or career, as an adult. It’s irresponsible to believe that it’s worth it to submit to any form of drudgery without a pause for examination. Maybe that would be true if life’s only goal was to create an unshakable material position — with plenty of savings and plenty of nice things to fill the tombs of your home. If that is someone’s highest value, and it truly supplies them with a contented life, then far be it from me to comment. I don’t, however, believe that supplies most people with true contentment.
The problem is that a life filled only by time clocks and paychecks creates a desperate longing that not only limits the shades and hues of life experienced, it also makes us worse at our work. Fulfilled people create more good than the unfulfilled. When fulfilled, you reveal to yourself exactly who you are, what you love, and why you love it. Without pause for examination, and pure enjoyment, you may never have the revelation.
The easy excuse for avoiding the pause, which is really a mask for fear, is time. We think we don’t have the time. It’s probably better stated that we are led to believe that we don’t have time. But that’s all we really have — save for its necessary counterpart, attention. To get the time, however, we have to take it. No one is going to magically grant it; there is no point in which your schedule miraculously opens up and gives you the opportunity to pause. You have to save the money so that the time clock doesn’t own you. You have to be honest about the place that puts you at ease — and you have to go there. Then, as your heart begins to settle and your eyes begin to clear, you have to cast and cast until you find your rhythm.
