The angler is always unnerved when holding a fly rod and simultaneously hearing a crack. Even when a hand or eye is on the branch being broken, the ear startles the mind into thinking the thing broken is the thing that shouldn’t be broken.
Sliding down the rock face, trying to keep himself upright and alive, there were a lot of cracks. Once he stopped bouncing through the limbs and roots, he checked his fly rod. Those cracks could have been ribs. For the majority of his life he had been self-conditioned to take inventory differently.
It wasn’t his first fall of the day. The first came in front of people. “If you’re going to fall,” he thought, “better to do it in front of people so they can laugh at you and offer help.”
This is part 2 of a semi-fictional narrative. Check out part 1 here.
Two women sat on the ledge of a plunge pool. They were hiking, but didn’t look like hikers. Regardless, he didn’t want to scare them by popping up behind them. But the pool below looked so appealing. Water that cannot be reached always has the lopsided, forbidden fruit appeal. Big trout lurk down long tunnels, thick and dangerous with roots. Large bass hole up right inside the barrel, and they know how to run line across it’s jagged edge. This situation was like that. But only so much as he didn’t want to cause anyone to scream and fall into the water. Or shoot him with pepper spray.
His plan was foolproof. Circumnavigate them and pop out far enough upstream so as to not appear threatening. Then, fish downstream until eye contact could be made. Then, work casually to the pool below them. Easy.
The first part of the plot was executed flawlessly. The only issue was the nagging feeling that his attempts to show cordiality bordered on insane paranoia. He comforted himself by saying out loud, “everything has the potential to seem a little ridiculous after hours by yourself in the mountains.”
As he worked his way downstream towards them, he realized that he was fishing downstream through holes that ought to be fished using an upstream technique. In that moment, the situation presented itself as an either/or proposition. Goal-oriented types might identify with this problem. To wit, those who have needless irrational anxiety while fly fishing might identify with this problem. Fishing this hole versus fishing that hole versus fishing both holes is the sort of problem solving that is not particularly difficult when you have time, opportunity, and aren’t hatching a harebrained plan high up in the mountains.
The choose-your-own adventure flowchart must have handicapped his motor skills. For just as they saw him and calmly called out “catching anything?” he tripped. Landing hard, half in the water and half on a large rock, two things occurred to him in this moment. 1) He might have just suffered a compound fracture of both his radius and ulna in an attempt to save his fly rod. 2) If they weren’t disturbed by his presence before, they most certainly were disturbed by him – in some way – now.
No fish were caught in that prized hole. Furthermore, the women, who were chatting and laughing and appearing to enjoy the day sat awkwardly as he passed by. If there ever was a time to walk five minutes more upstream, now was it.
That is where he found the deep, black, and aqua pool. That is where he declared that he was going to make one last cast. That is where he miscalculated the sheerness of the larger boulder he was perched upon, slid through brittle sun-bleached limbs, and got himself wedged between a rootball and a hard place.
But his rod, and the prospects of a productive last cast, had survived.
To be continued next week on Casting Across…