The author reflects on her lack of fishing mojo during the election
Some things are more important than fishing. Blasphemy, you say? I don’t know. For the past two weeks, getting on the water has been last on my mind. This is unusual. Normally being in the river is like air, like life itself, but now I feel a weight that is heavier than anything I’ve ever carried. That may speak in part to my relatively easy life, but it isn’t only that. Things have happened that I did not think were possible, things I almost cannot bear to see. The last few years have been an education, and not a good one, though in hindsight necessary.
Even now I sit on my couch not knowing what to do with myself, not knowing where or how to get started. I try to imagine what it would feel like to catch and release a trout again, an activity that has been the greatest pleasure of my life. But today when I think about a fish gliding away from my hand, its tail slowly swinging back and forth, I feel only sadness and a sense of irrelevance. What I feel is grief, and in the face of this grief a trout is, well, only a trout — beautiful, sleek, and magical yes, but still just a fish.
Today I will let the fish have their river, and I’ll feel some sense of gratitude that fish do not know or understand the struggles of man. They have their own struggles, of course. Let them be. I once thought that the life of a fish and the sound of the river was the one true thing and the only thing that really made any sense. Maybe it still is, but today I do not want to lose myself in that perfect moment of catch and release. The idea is almost abhorrent. This is not a time for joy. All I want right now is peace.
-EH, November 2020