By next Saturday the trout fishing season will have ended.  Often I will meet a couple of friends to go fly fishing on the last weekend of the season.  It has become a bit of a tradition.  We expect  that the fishing will be difficult or even grim.  Cold gray skies.  Big fronts moving in.  Few insects hatching and few fish rising.  We go anyway.  We justify it by saying that the big ones are feeding heavily as they get ready for winter and that if we catch a fish it will be a big one.  Two years ago we fished for eight hours and caught nothing.  Last Saturday we fished for 8 hours and caught two tiddlers between the three of us.  Of course, even when the fishing is grim we still have the day and each other.   That is what saves the day.  We like being together.  Of course, our togetherness is pretty subtle.  Usually we find ourselves fishing at least 25 yards apart on the river.  When you’re the only three guys on the river there is no use in everybody trying to catch the same fish.

When you watch television, have you ever noticed how much everyone talks?  In real life, most people don’t talk nearly so much.  They talk a lot on television because drama proceeds mostly through dialogue.  If you just show pictures people think there must be something wrong with the sound system.  On television there has to be some sort of resolution after a half hour or, at most, an hour.  Therefore there has to be lots of explication, lots of dialogue and lots of pace.  In actual fact, people, especially guys (the guys I hang around with anyway) are pretty happy not to be saying very much at all.  What makes us happy is just sort of being there … together.  The fishing gives us an excuse not to talk except in short intervals punctuated by hours of silence.  It is having those long silences together that frees us to devote what talking time we do have to talk about the things we care about.  If it were not that way it would be all chit chat and sports trivia like you hear from the guys on TV.  But we’re not on TV and life is a mystery not a drama.  In life we’re not really looking for the resolution so much as hoping that there is going to be another episode.

Anyway, last Saturday was our last trip of the season.  We walked far down the river together.  We helped each other scramble up a couple of steep embankments and pointed out likely looking spots for each other.  As I was fishing, I saw a mink on the opposite shore.  Its coat was thick and beautiful.  Another time, as I stood down around the bend from my friends I heard the impossibly loud call of a kingfisher in the trees somewhere above me as it echoed down the gorge.  In the silence by the river it made me think of pterodactyls and time ... and eternity.  Later we stopped a couple of times and met up at the car.  We cut my friend K's cheese and onion on Calabrese bread sandwich into three pieces with my jacknife and shared it around.  We washed it down with water.  We all agreed that K makes the best sandwiches ever.  We probably spent a total of about forty minutes of the whole eight hours actually conversing.  The fishing was lousy.  We had a great day.

I hope we can all meet together at the river again next year.