A vacation is a time to vacate. Like the emptying of a trash can, a kit bag of troubles, a cluttered mind or a careworn soul crowded with unchanging ways of perceiving reality: all these and more can be lightened and enlightened by a journey on a small skiff to a sunny, summer kissed bay where an off shore zephyr of clean, salty air envelops one and helps forgetfulness remind us how simple and quickly sweet daydreaming can thrive. And all the while nature, so thoroughly, is at the helm while we trick ourselves into supposing that we are masterful sailors or captains of our fate. The thrill really comes as we begin to understand, consciously or not, that something or Someone else is in charge. Sure, we may open the throttle on our outboard with a simple twist of our wrist and we may adroitly zig or zag to avoid a "school" of kelp or negotiate a path safely between pilings under a causeway bridge, but what we have done at root, is to have hitched our maritime "wagon to a star", one that is in truth, some immutable beacon, greater than the lights of all the lighthouses beaming their aid to seafaring men since near the dawn of our time here on this planet, an orb that's three fifths covered by the briny expanse that beckons and repels us with strangely competing powers.
As a child, the joke was never appreciated or even understood. One understood it intellectually as pubescence came and went. But it was not really until the backside of fifty, that the old bromide ("Gee this is great, a beautiful sunny day, water like glass, gentle breezes, my favorite fishing pole, favorite beer, favorite pipe, comfortably padded life preservers and delicious sandwiches….am just going to lay back, maybe sleep, and if the fish don't bite, why things'll be simply perfect!") was comprehended at that "gut" level and that only an old soul could concur with via chuckles aplenty and cries of "amen." And yet, the pulsating drama of the hunt and the call of the unknown (if not the wild) are things never quite dispensed with even when one is an old man. We're ever restless, hard wired to perform and innately inclined toward conquest. Plumbing those depths, whether five feet below the bottom of one's dory or sixty feet down on a deep sea jaunt with diesel fuel, a pitching deck and the added edginess of competing fishermen aboard an inboard party boat, all threatening nausea, well, the tension and mystery of what piscatorial monsters await one's provocations is forever a theatrical phenomenon that only a dead man ignores. There is life under those swells, creatures that do not philosophize, but that kill or are killed in an endless battle royale called survival. The removal of the actual demands placed upon a hunter who is not threatened by hunger (as the last nearly one hundred years have granted Western men), does little to blunt the craving to subdue a fish, to ensnare and thwart his unfettered wriggling and writhing. Others may deride this sport as not worthy of the name, but these are fish, not men that we are catching, unlike the Fisherman from Nazareth. Does a fish feel? May as well ask if it has a soul.
The sense of the universal is upon one while sitting under a broiling sun and open to all of the elements. And it is there, while seeing as far as the eye can, where gray blue water meets azure sky with enshrouding mists or crystal clarity, and where other kaleidoscopic combinations of color and varying visibilities work their magic. And yet, what is more intimate than being confined to a fragile bark with a fishing buddy and then experiencing the sudden visit from a thrashing beast fighting for its freedom as no other man or beast can hear or see the battle save for a batch of killies trapped in a floating wooden box alongside and attached to our craft with a short, stout knotted rope and perhaps a marauding salt water fly who sinks his "teeth" into one's ankle right through a sweat sock. He seems a kind of miniature fighter plane literally nipping at one's heels and an ally of the finny foe trying desperately to quit one's hated hook.
But feeding frenzies exploited by deceiving anglers always abate sooner or later as time and tides change the environment both above and below the ever changing waters. That aging fisherman's not so secret prayer for no action is encouraged by a becalmed sea, a sun just beginning, almost imperceptibly, to set and a cyclical yearning for peace in his psyche, or is it simply a function of his weariness?
No comments:
Post a Comment