…Now our casting, catching, releasing took on a new kind of intensity. We had set a goal, taken something non-enumerative, non-mathematical or competitive and placed a certain order on it, a target, a way to “win.” The minute we agreed to it, it didn’t seem right, but we both became obsessed—“possessed” is maybe a better word—with this self-imposed game.
At eighty, the sky turned purple, then green. Then the wind turned off, lightning turned on. Looking west was a black wall. From watching the heavy bottoms of these low clouds I noticed the whole sky was rotating slowly counter clockwise, the cloud mass sinking lower, lower. We each had a bass on.
We released and without speaking paddled like maniacs across the pond to the car. The air was thick, charged, full of something dangerous, volatile. Think a room filled with stove gas, a lit match in the next room. As we paddled, leaning as far forward as possible, lightning blasting down not one hundred yards away, I was convinced the fishing Gods were unleashing their fury, that we had violated some sacred trust.
At the car, the radio told the obvious, funnels starting to lower from the skies all around us, winds up-lifting trees, “get inside,” etc. We high-tailed it to the farmhouse and took refuge with the owners of the pond, watching the massive red and orange colors flashing across the map of Michigan on the television. We were ready at the first sign of trouble to move to the basement.
Soon, though, the skies brightened, and to the west there were far fewer ominous looking blotches of color on the radar map on the TV screen; the rain subsided to a warm trickle. We thanked the farmer and his wife and headed back to the pond to retrieve the canoe and gear. As we emptied the water from it and looked out across the still surface of the pond, a huge bass exploded not twenty feet away. Joe said, “eighty seven?”
At ninety four, things were looking bad again. The western sky was blacker than before. We moved close to the bank just as a bolt of lightning slammed down on the other side of the pond, thunder and lightning coming at the exact same instant. The hair on my body was standing on edge, my heart surging with electricity and the possibility of annihilation. Then the rain came, so hard that it hurt, some small hail mixing in. We made it to the car to wait. When it subsided, we each landed a small bass from shore. Ninety Six.
Ninety Seven came as we started to launch the canoe again, a small, sickly looking thing who gulped in my fly as it dangled over the gunwales. A blast came. It didn’t descend. It was just there, a streak of raw power going from ground to cloud as wide as a car.
“Ninety Seven bass," we said, over and over on the drive home, a kind of chant, awed, the rain and hail forcing me to a standstill again and again, my windshield wipers not fast enough even on high. We weren’t disappointed. It was as if we had awakened from a dream, or snapped out of a hypnotic state. Our desire to hit one hundred nearly got us killed. Craziness. Fishing.
That night, surrounded by boxes, laying in a sleeping bag in my bed thinking forward to whatever awaited me in my new life, thinking back through all the good times in that beautiful, solid old house from the thirties, bass and thunder and swirling clouds, rain hard as nails, deadly tornadoes, all joined in my dreams. Why impose an order where there is none? Did I want just one solid, encapsulated fragment of this landscape that held me in its palm for so long to take with me, to keep? There we sat in my small canoe, so vulnerable to the mighty sky, trying to conquer one infinitesimal corner of nature, wrestling with forces both far smaller than us and far more vast, which just as we released bass after bass, finally released us back into our lives.
I don’t think humans can resist such attempts to place order on the world. I guess it’s precisely because it is so vast and dangerous, all this mystery that surrounds us, and because ultimately we know so little about the nature of things that we feel the need to conquer—to dam the wild flooding river, cut down the endless spans of ancient trees, banish the wolves—to get our hands around it all, no matter the cost.
The next day I flew back east. Eventually we settled into our new home in the hills near several soon to be beloved trout streams, the ocean that would become a landscape shaping me further still into whom I would become. I have never again kept a tally of fish caught.
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Such a fun serial read! Insanity, obsession, risking death- there's nothing "simple pastime" about you and fishing...