It’s a journey of HOW many steps?

Conventional “wisdom” discusses, among many, many other things of course, how the longest journey begins with but a single step, yes? Well, yes, but then it doesn’t go on to discuss how long that journey may be, does it? And well it shouldn’t as every journey has a different number of steps. Every fly-fishing season, for instance, Irene believes she has regressed back to beginning-caster level and it takes her some number of hours or even outings before she again feels comfortable and is demonstrating why she is what’s happening among female fly-casters. I, on the other hand, and here it’s probably because I’ve been fly-fishing for over 50 years, believe I could pull out a fly-rod after a year’s absence and within a few minutes I c0uld be casting like I had been on the stream yesterday, not to say my casting is perfect ‘cuz it certainly isn’t but functionality isn’t that far away for me. The length of my fly-fishing  journey seems to be in the areas of mending line and matching hatches, which most experienced fly-fishers would probably rate as two of the top skill areas in terms of importance, certainly each more important than how far you can cast, usually, so it’s appropriate but disheartening that I can’t claim full-on expert-level across the board even after all this time.

That said, pickleball appears for me to be an even longer journey. When we arrived at St. George, Utah a few days ago for the warm-up week before the pickleball tournament within the Huntsman World Senior Games (aka Senior Olympics) I was totally jazzed and looking forward to showing everybody how good I’d become since last year, which you know right away was a major no-no. It wasn’t so much that “they” showed me different but more that my anxiety to show somebody something made my doing virtually anything correctly somewhere between difficult and impossible. It was only after we (Irene and I) had lost our first four or six games that I settled down and began to hit one shot at a time…at which point my game slowly re-appeared from wherever it had been off hiding.

This was all very disheartening until I was, today, playing against and later watching a few of the “big boys”, no names mentioned, who had come in from various parts of the country and arrived at the courts for their first outing of the season today. I was now playing adequately, as was partner Steve, and although we got beat fairly handily by the big boys it wasn’t as handy as it had been last year, and by golly they were missing a few shots that they would most always have made, simple down-the-line forhands for instance, or hitting lobs into the net, or serving long, or dinking shots six feet on the wrong side of the in-line, or whatever…just like Steve and I. And they were obviously pissed about it, too…just like we have been. But, over the course of watching them play for about two hours, they very quickly were regaining form and were suddently were hitting the shots they had missed just those few minutes before, and looking, once again, like the top-flight players they are.

What’s the point? I could make many points out of this simplistic set of observations but what this certainly has to bring home is that pickleball is not a 50-year sport for me, while it may be a 20-year sport for some of the so-called big-boys, and that, for me, I will have to simply give myself some time, each year, to get back into the game…head and body, assuming I’m allowed to keep playing for awhile. But all that said, I am a better player than I was at this time last year. And, even when I don’t show it, I know it’s in there and can be re-discovered, while last year it wasn’t yet there at all. And, God willing, there may be other improvements still available to me, and perhaps I will discover them….one step at a time, one step at a time, one step at a time.

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October 7, 2009 by aj in Flyfishing, Meaning of Life, People We've Met, Pickleball, Places We've Been, Thoughts

The Difference is a Bald Eagle.

In RV-land, many of the parks where we stay begin to seem similar. This is, of course, a matter of design….true RV parks will consistently have certain features that we’ve come to depend upon. Among them are sewer hook-ups, 50-AMP electrical power, good water pressure, aisles wide enough to drive a big-rig without forcing walking passers-by to leap for safety, long-enough sites to allow you to tow your toad into it without unhooking if you are leaving the next day and are feeling lazy (or are  just exhausted after a 300-400-mile pull through a consistent construction zone, say), enough distance from the nearest highway or busy road that you won’t try to sleep feeling like you’re still driving, no blazing searchlights blaring in through your privacy screens, Wi-Fi that works, and a pet policy that makes sense are just a few of the things that Irene goes through on her checklist as she and I are traveling down the road and she’s selecting our next destination. But these “necessities” also physically define the look and feel of the park, and it’s natural that they would.

This excepts State Parks, naturally. State Parks very wildly, so much that it’s almost comical. You can have parks that have nothing at all in facilities, parks whose most attractive feature is that they are there and nothing more. And you can have places like the one we went to last year in West Virginia that had terraced sites a million miles apart from each other, sites so long you could land jets in them, so level they could have been pool tables, high above a lake pretty as a postcard, across from a golf course as green as the fruit of a ripe Kiwi. A beautiful park, if somewhat orderly in its beauty.

Soaring high above even that nice park is this one, Henry’s Lake near Last Chance, Idaho. Not that it’s the fanciest ornament on the tree; it’s not. It’s rather plain and on a plain as well, a high-desert plain with a mountain range over 10,000 feet rising behind it. The sites are large and well-spaced and level enough for government work, but what this park has is surprises of the natural kind. Last time we were here, a year ago I think, I almost feel over a cow moose and we released at least six magnificent Cut-Bows, an unusual hybrid between a Cutthroat and a Rainbow Trout that can reproduce and grow like crazy…the six we caught were at all at least 20 and mostly 22-23 inches, making them all between 3 + and 5 pounds, good fish for any fly-fisher and the highlight of last year’s Western States swing. But so far our visit here has equaled last year by the simple unexpected arrival of two magnificent bald eagles….one of which was promptly chased and scared away by two very aggresive seaguls; the second of which cruised our site repeatedly looking for something….a dead rabbit? A small Cairn Terrier?….and in the doing making us feel as if we were, just for a moment, part of his life, and it’s a nice feeling, being part of the life of an eagle.

I’ll trade off full-hookups for an eagle any time.

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September 26, 2009 by aj in Flyfishing, Meaning of Life, Places We've Been, RVing and Motorhomes, Thoughts

Missoula Real Estate, Examined

As is now ordinary for us, having done virtually the same thing two years ago, we came last Sunday to Missoula, became re-captivated by this area’s many charms and subsequently spent all of one day (today, in fact) racking up over 100 miles driving the city from one end to the other, two increasingly car-sick but still-patient mutts in the way-back, careening down one real-estate-signed street, side-street, alley and crosswalk after another. I don’t care for this approach to examining a potential real-estate market because I come home end-0f-day grouchy and exhausted but the benefit is that we can eliminate whole areas;  I know, for example, that I do NOT want to live in the (advertised as desireable) Patti Canyon area, as it appears to mostly feature 25-year-old side-of-mountain homes that probably would have been moderate subdivision properties at best if they were on the flat. The fact that they have views for miles is supposed to make people overlook their multitude of other shortcomings, I suppose, but they didn’t get past Irene and I who just kept on driving. The Target area, on the other hand, is a potential. This area, named not for the somewhat-nearby Target Store as you probably suspected, being as shallow as you are, but instead for the fact that, many moons ago, this area was a military target range, is eclectic at best, but at best is truly charming, backing onto the Clark’s Fork common areas in many places, home to mucho wildlife, great views, trees, and, of course, running water in the form of braided channels from this, Montana’s largest river (albeit a bit further downstream). When I call this couple-of-square-miles area eclectic I ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie…it is world-class Eclectic with a purposeful capital E. For instance, at one point we did a quick turnaround in a for-sale property that consisted of a tiny, fifty-year-old house on a dirt road. Next to it was a jumble-house of innovatively used apparently not-new materials…one side a mass of tiny paint-peeled windows, another side literally corrugated tin. On the other side was a wreck of a place with a tiny, completely rusted-out travel trailer sitting square in its gravel driveway where a car should be and with laundry hanging out on a pole off the back porch. But around the corner was a brand-new spec house that, the owner being outside and insisting on giving us a tour, obviously affluent ready-to-buy-ers that we are, seemed if not worth the $2M price tag, was at least close. This beautiful beast was 6,000 sq. feet of granite, marble, stone, semi-precious woods, and even the world’s nicest RV garage with antiqued cement floors and a total gourmet kitchen and full bathroom….just in case your visitors get tired being in their rig, I suppose. He regaled us with stories of sitting in the afternoon sun on the all-rock patio, watching a red-tailed hawk attack a magpie and capturing the whole fight on his massive telephoto lens. In fact the whole conversation felt like a “bigger than yours” kind of thing, if you get my drift, but on the other hand it was and is a quality piece of work. At the end he asked me what WE were looking for in a home. I was honest and told him; something about 1/3 the size on about an acre instead of the five acres. Graciously he pointed out another Target-area home location and suggested we check it out….it would only be 2,000 square feet “although it does have a finished basement”, as if that would be a negative. And, even though the price would be much, much less, you still have the same great views, you are still in the same superior neighborhood, you still are less than fifteen minutes from the many services Missoula offers and that attract us.

I have to say, though, that at the end of the day I am often glad I am still an RVer. We, too, have the same backyards as these guys, the same sunsets, the same access to superior Missoula services. And if our neighbors get pesty or that red-tailed hawk is too noisy eating his magpie dinner, we can change our backyard by the next day. I’d like to see Steve (the bigger-than-yours guy) try that trick.

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September 16, 2009 by aj in Meaning of Life, People We've Met, Places We've Been, RVing and Motorhomes, Thoughts

I’m Totally In Control, Baby!

The title was meant as a joke. I have come to believe I control less and less as I get older. Well, that’s probably true but what I really meant is that I BELIEVE less and less that I’m in control of anything much. Let me give you one example.

Fishing in Montana has never been a slam-dunk and this year has been consistently difficult, with only one or two little fish showing up at netting time to be oh-so-carefully released, and they being here and there, not in big numbers, in numbers, in fact, every bit as small as they are. So when we arrived at Mountain Meadow RV Park outside the west portal of Glacier National Park this early afternoon and found they have a pretty little pond stocked with rainbow trout and restricted to catch-and-release fly-fishing, why, that was just my huckleberry, as it were. Not that I’m big on fishing for stocked trout at any time but hey, I haven’t caught any good fish this season and I could see rising fish from the coach as we pulled in front of the office. While Irene went inside to register and I was supposed to be unhooking the toad I instead walked over to check the pond out more carefully and son-0f-a-gun if there weren’t BIG fish cruising the surface slurping bugs, and from the dorsal fins no question they were biggish trout…probably 16-20 inches, from what I could see from shore. I couldn’t see, exactly, that they were feeding on any particular insects, there were a couple of random mayflies rising and dragonflies…the latter more often harbingers of mosquitoes than, of say, trout-calling caddis…were working the edges of the pond. Grasshoppers, cute little bite-sized ones, kicked up with every step I took and for all I knew the trout were merely eating the errant hoppers dropping in near the edges and off as not swimming towards the center of the pool rather than safety on the edges. (Apparently grasshoppers as a breed really don’t swim in any directed sense.) Anyway, how difficult could fishing to stocked fish in a little pond that obviously didn’t get fished much? At last, after a season of difficult, out-of-control fishing situations that showed themselves as blown-out, silt-filled rivers, temperature shifts of 30 degrees in a day and back again, effectively putting down any insect hatches and gluing shut the mouths of every trout, and rain, rain, rain….muddying the waters as said above but more important putting down the fish, who will feed in some conditions and definitely not in others, like for instance when we are there and it is raining.

But this one…this was easy. I was in control, or would be, as soon as we went and got set up and I could break away and sneak back.

Turned out I didn’t need to sneak; Irene was as interested in the little pond and its big ol’ fish as I was. Less than an hour later, dogs walked, coach set up, I was back at the pond and ready to cast to the still-rising trout.

And about 90 minutes later we left. I pounded the water, cast to slurp after slurp,  never touched a fish, never had a rise, never saw a fish following…but they did continue to rise around me right up until the moment I left, demonstrating clearly as if it really needed it that I am not in control, and you could take the fish out the pond and put them in a barrel and ask me to shoot them and I’d still miss, because that’s the kind of fishing year we’re having thus far.

But it’s still a beautiful place, this Glacier, isn’t it? In fact, I can’t think of any place I’ve been that’s prettier. So, so what if we aren’t catching fish? Life isn’t about fish. It’s about whatever it brings on whatever day it brings it, and if I’ve ever made a statement that clearly articulates more LACK of control  than this, well, I can’t remember making  it.

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August 30, 2009 by aj in Thoughts

In favor of taking a stand….

At the risk of bringing to mind images of Richard Nixon jowling at us with his fingers in “V”’s up in the air, let me be perfectly clear about this….

I favor Obama. It’s been years since I’ve really felt that any president was working as hard as I’d like them to, plus displaying the ability to be articulate about what he’s doing at the same time. These are the best of times for me, with a communicator in office better than anybody since perhaps Regan, and I like THIS guy’s politics OH-so-much-more, so what could make the day even brighter?

Well, since you asked, he COULD be just a little more definite about this health-care mess, which concerns me personally, since Irene and I haven’t had GOOD health care insurance since perhaps last September or so. I was the happiest of the faithful when he uncovered, re-adopted and started to prosletize the public option…..an idea that’s been around since Jimmy Carter at least and has been brought up and discarded under fire at least four times that I can think of.

I’m somewhat LESS happy now that he is re-defining it as “only one of the slivers of the program” and not mandatory. Oh, of course, I understand why he’s saying what he’s saying….he’s truly a compromiser, he’s trying to work both sides of the aisle even though the haters are clear they want to sink his administration on this program and won’t compromise on anything, and…and this surprises me…even though, if you count the “blue dogs”, he’s already got the votes to jam through reform if he wants to.

But my impatience is ill-founded, and even I know that. Why? Because, simply stated, no worthwhile national program has been enacted without the eventual cooperation of a wide variety of highly unlikely bed-partners. For instance, bot Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security required the active involvement of both the Republican party AND the ultra-conservative deep-south Democrats who really are more Republican for the most part than most Repubs short of Newt Gingrich. It’s startlingly clear, if you go back and read up on it a bit, that compromise is ALWAYS necessary to get this legislation enacted and to have it last. ALWAYS.

So…do I think that O’s program, which so obviously consists of NOT insisting on specific planks in favor of making the HofR and the Senate take some ownership, will eventually result in the enactment of legislation that will enable Irene and I to then go out and buy meaningful health care insurance? Yes, I do. I wish I could also say that the Public Option will be right there as the plank of gold in the platform, but I can’t go that far. That, I don’t know about. It could get negotiated out, when all is said and done, and I think it’s a crying shame. There was a report today that one of the Chairmen of one of the major health insurance company is earning, right now, $106,000….per hour. I think this is outrageous greed, especially in the face of every other challenge in our economy, and speaks reams for why we CANNOT trust the insurance companies to keep their rates down no matter how much they say that, yessiree-bob, we’re sittin’ at the negotiating table with you. They are, but they aren’t worried about the same things that you and I care about.

Finally, and this is a point made clearly by the excellent and beautifully-researched book just published entitled The Healing of America by T. R. Reid, (albeit a point that Obama seems to have only recently discovered), we have a moral responsibility here to provide health insurance to EVERYONE…..yes, illegal aliens, or if you draw the line there, at LEAST all of our citizens, irrespective of pre-existing conditions or ability to pay. WHY? Very simple. We’re a wealthy nation. One of the wealthiest. All wealthy nations have an obligation to provide health care. And you know what? ALL THE REST OF THEM DO! We are the ONLY so-called wealthy nation that does NOT provide health care to everybody. You don’t believe it? Hey…back to my new phrase…do the work! Start with Reid’s book. And, if you want to make it fiscally responsible to provide this at the same time, drive health-care costs down and make the CEO of that insurance company take a little bit of a cut to, say, $1,000 an hour. I could live on that, couldn’t you?

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August 24, 2009 by aj in Meaning of Life, Politics

In favor of doing the work….

I’ve been chastized lately for a lack of sincerity in my search for the meaning of life, and if you want to get caught up on the discussion you need go no further than my last post. Irrespective of the opinions of the haters and naysayers, however, I am most sincere, and just because I tend to trivialize the whole activity when I occasionally write about it (equating it to a Jimmy Buffet song in one case and appearing to expect God to appear on a chariot from on high in another), it doesn’t reflect on the depth of my sincerity. Or does it?

Getting complacent about things isn’t acceptable when one is searching for truth, any truth. For instance, a good friend, albeit a bit misguided, told me recently that it doesn’t matter what economists I quoted to reinforce the obvious truth that Obama’s economic polices are working and are rapidly bringing us back from the economic slide-to-suicide begun with Reganomics and carried blithfully forward even into “W”’s ignorance-as-a-virtue day, he could quote a different, more conservative economist that thinks the big O’s policies are akin to devil worshop.

He may be right, of course, but can we both we equally right? It doesn’t mean that these opposite points of view can co-exist, does it? It seems there has to be ONE truth in there somewhere, especially when the two points of view are fundamentally so different.

One risk is that we, as Americans, seem to be inculcated in believing that ALL viewpoints are healthy, that there is NO absolute truth, that everything should be considered a respectful shade of gray, that things that are labeled theories are therefore still devoid of fact and are unproven (while the scientific meaning of theory has nothing to do whatsoever with whether anything is based on fact or PROVEN or not, it’s just more ignorance making it’s way into the maintstream). This is wrong, and it brings me around to the real point I’m making here, which is really about a definition of pimping that I think is really beneficial for society at large.

Ignoring the classic or even Wikepedian definitions of pimping, that the word has mostly to do with the act of soliciting women into prostitution, either on the street or in a brothel, and managing them for profit, an activity that may have social good in it somewhere but I wouldn’t know about that, having only been in a brothel once in my life and that time only to see if Al Kalgren and Frank Marino could really trade trout for sex, a classic entreprenurial endeavor if I had ever seen one set up and something I wanted to see play out, although as it turned out it didn’t. Pimping as I’m using it doesn’t even have to do with adding a third or fourth TV set to your recently renovated 1987 Cadillac Hearse, although I applaud the activity generally.

No, the definition of pimping I’m refering to here has to do with the activity of trolling things by people in the hopes of stirring them up, knocking the complacent pins from under their tired feet and making them think differently about something, ANYTHING. I believe in pimping in this sense because I believe there ARE absolute truths out there…not ALL points of view are created equal, we do NOT have to give equal weight to all silliness, and we would be far better off as individuals and by extension as a society if we DO THE MATH (a nifty colloquialism I’m using here as a metaphor for “Do The Work”…whether math is involved in the research or not).

I love pimping people out of complacency and into the light, and once they finally get moving I love it when people do the work. That’s why when 0ur financial advisor, Kevin Hatch, calls and we discuss our portfolio for two hours and I question him about everything I inevitably take his recommendations almost without question across the board because he has DONE THE WORK. It’s when Jack and Diana Reynolds call and say, hey, there is a start-up that we want you to invest it, we say “where’s the checkbook?”, because they(and their own advisors) have DONE THE WORK. It’s why, when I go back and read Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and understand from that how he came up with the remarkably fully-featured philosophy of evolution that tends to explain our world’s existence better than the thousands of years of sacrificing virgins (assuming that’s what they really were), or the reading of chicken entrails, or the placement of the pillars at Stonehenge by (assumably) the Druids or somebody like them, ever did…it isn’t because his shit is newer, it’s belycause Darwin, bless his soul, DID THE WORK.

However, and admittedly, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t somebody out there on the other side of the equation that isn’t doing an equal and opposite amount of work, is there? No, I suppose it doesn’t…..

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August 21, 2009 by aj in Meaning of Life, People We've Met

Everybody’s Lookin’ for Somethin’….although admittedly sometimes in the wrong places….

Like you, I have long been searching for the meaning of life. Sometimes in the wrong places, of course…the bottom of a wine bottle, the feel of an accelerator pedal of a very fast car, the rush of sexy new things to own, the possibility in relationships to experience, on occasion places to be. Over time, when none of these satisfy, we begin to hope that there is something else and hopefully it’s something more, something bigger than what so obviously is lacking in our physical world. Call it God, for a word…but my search for a belief in God has taken me in all kinds of different directions, although on the surface I might still appear to be a practicing Catholic.

Out here in RV-land many of the folks I run into are either (a) very settled in their beliefs and generally are fundamentally true to a Christian God (and generally don’t want to hear about any different possibilities), or are (b) not searching at all and don’t think even about a god, much less God. In between these two points there are people who are sure of themsleves in many different religions, including, in our brief wanderings, commited aetheists (stretching the definition of religion) as well as Jews, Muslims, Amish, and Muslims, plus some real hell-fire Baptists and other interesting Christians. All interesting folks and I keep waiting for lightening to strike and to tell me something that will save my own soul. So far it hasn’t, although occasionally it seems that Somebody IS trying to tell me something, and as example let me share with you an experience I had at a gas station in Wisconsin just a couple of days ago.

The older fellah that stepped gingerly out of a newish green pickup truck, other than being bigger than most guys and a little more crippled up, walking with aid of a cane, seemed pretty ordinary, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans like most folks in this cool wooded area, but his truck carried a neatly-printed sign saying “Lay Catholic Apostle for Christ” , or some such. I asked him what that meant, if he was, for instance, an ordained Deacon in the church, a position that’s always interested me for its level of commitment and one that I had explored, briefly, for myself.

“Nope,” he said. “I’m strictly a lay apostle. But I’ve been out here doin’ this for 25 years!”. Doing what, I asked? “Preachin’ to the sinners,” he said with a smile. “I’ve got 1.68 million miles on my cars doin’ this!” Man, I said, that is a LOT of miles! Where do you go? “I go where the sinnin’ is,” he replied. “Wherever the tough ones are! Here,” he said, “let me give you a present!”

I nodded amiably…thinking I would get another brochure or something, followed by a request for a donation, of course. Instead, he handed me two professionally-published books and two accompanying CDs. “One for you, one for a friend!” he smiled, clapping me on the back as he turned to go into the gas station to pay for his purchase.

Well, I thought, here it is at last…the meaning of life, coming to me unexpectedly, as I somehow knew it would, in this most banal of all places, a Wisconsin gas station….Paul being struck down from his horse by God on his way to war…that kind of unexpected visitation, albeit a trifle less dramatic. Nice….the meaning of life, in a book and a CD.  I placed a $20 bill on his seat while he was still inside, tossed the stuff into our car and took off.

I wish I could tell you that they did contain the meaning of life. I mean, entitled as they are “God Speaks, Will You Listen?”, clearly they were directed exactly towards my search…how could they be wrong?

Well, the publishing is certainly the high point of their existence. The content is trivial…simple readings with no explanations done by a fellah whos ounds like he might be still in his teens, a monotone recantation of the same things I’ve read for myself in the New Testament, not that there’s anything wrong with the readings, there isn’t, but it doesn’t go any further, doesn’t tell me a thing, just sorta pissed me off that it doesn’t INFORM me or inspire my belief or anything at all.

Well, I can take hope in the fact that, although it appears I’m still looking in the wrong places, the places I’m looking are beginning to appear to be more like the right places. And, maybe like Paul, I will be struck with belief at some point. Or, maybe like Jimmy Buffet says, it’ll just turn out that the Hokey-Pokey really IS all it’s all about, after all. In any event, it’s nice being out here, and I can still look around…we’re in Minnesota now…and it’s still all green and lovely and all, and while it doesn’t NECESSARILY prove the existence of a god, it doesn’t say there isn’t one, either. And it’s a nice place to hang out, this world, isn’t it?

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August 20, 2009 by aj in People We've Met, Places We've Been, Thoughts

In Passing, A Word about Wisconsin

We have traveled through the Upper Michigan Peninsula, where we stayed in the self-proclaimed moose capital of the U.S., albeit a place where the owner of the RV park admitted she had never seen a moose in the 17 years she had been there, “although we have seen EVIDENCE of moose, if you know what I mean.”

Yes, I know what she means, hard to miss her meaning accompanied as it were by hand-gestures signifying, if not mountains, then at least large mounds. But seeing big steaming piles of moose evidence is not the same as seeing a moose. When I was last in Alaska I had been out running (outside of Anchorage if I remember correctly) and was on a dirt road pretty far outside the city limits, doing a run of maybe ten miles. I was more or less at the end of the run as dictated by my stop watch and was thinking about turning. I decided “just a bit further”, went up and over a rise, and came within five feet of running broadside into a cow moose, thankfully without calf (or otherwise I might not be here talking about the story), and she simply looked at me disdainfully, put her nose back into the underbrush and continued filling her belly. I back-pedaled as fast as I could, reversing nearly in mid-stride as I did so, perhaps looking more like Michael Jackson doing a moon-walk than the middle-aged jogger I was, and beat my time out by ten minutes getting back.

Wisconsin, our current stop, doesn’t have the same claim to fame as the town in Michigan (in fact we’re told you’d need to go to Canada from here to see a moose) but it, too, has its attractions. For instance, Woodruff, the place right around the bend from the Hiawatha RV Park where we are staying, claims to have the World’s Biggest Penny. This was a strange enough fame-claim to inspire Irene and I to go looking for it. Turns out it is simply a painting of a big penny, although all the banners in town proclaim “world’s largest penny” and why they think that seeing a PAINTING of a big penny is the same as seeing a big ‘ol COPPER penny is beyond me, any more than I understood, in Michigan, how seeing the evidence of a moose can be considered the same as a moose or how you can have the U.S. Moose Capital without having a visible moose.  Heck, I don’t know…I just go where we are pointed half the time, looking for something to write home to mother about, or in the advent of her not being available, I gladly settle for you, especially in that your expectations are so low, knowing us as you do.

That may be all the word on Wisconsin I have to share at the moment. We have not fished here at all, alth0ugh the small-mouth bass water nearby looks invitingly rocky albeit a bit low. Also we have NOT eaten a Pastie (Pass-tee), the famous meat pot pie. We have not eaten any fried cheese curds, nor have we attended any of the many Friday all-you-can-eat fish fries sponsored by everyone from Elk’s Lodges to boy scout trouts, generally, it seems, followed by blackout bingo. St. Germaine, down the street from us about ten miles, also has a Monday flea market of some size and fame, which we missed coming in, and a very large farmer’s market on Wednesdays, which interests us Local-vores quite a bit although we will miss that as well on the flip-side as we drivers say, leaving at oh-dark-thirty tomorrow morning as we are to visit good friends Tom and Jean in Minnesota, where I intend to beat Tom’s butt in pickleball….once again, and this time with the expectation he will bawl like the baby he is.

In the meantime, I need to get us ready, so I’d better get on it. I have a drawer face that’s pulled off, a toilet seat that’s loose, a sewer tank that needs to be flushed, etc. etc. It’s hard to roll when pieces are falling off here and there, personally and otherwise, but a screwdriver can take care of the coach. Actually, overall it’s tough out here but it’d be tougher anywhere else in these perilous times and we are making the best of it. No sense your feeling sorry for us, if you were.

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August 18, 2009 by aj in Flyfishing, People We've Met, Pickleball, Places We've Been, RVing and Motorhomes

Carp and the Meaning of Life

Today we left Connecticut, leaving behind Shelton, which is a nice old town, a bedroom community of New York, and Irene’s nice family, now mine. The Sullivans have been there forever and will remain there forever, no doubt. Steve can’t go anywhere in town without knowing somebody, where I can’t go anywhere where I DO know somebody, so we’re even although different.

When Irene asked Steve what he would do if he suddenly had a couple of million tax-free, he said he would give a lot of it to his kids, and with the rest he would tear his house down and rebuild it right there, because he likes it there, and who can blame him? He’s Steve Sullivan, uncrowned King of Sullivan Avenue, and there are only three houses on the Street, and his daughter is in another of the other two, and probably if we wait long enough one of them will buy the third and there he’ll be again, King of Sullivan Avenue where I, on the other hand, am not even King of the Road, although I’m trying.

I have to say the extended Sullivan family (including Jack and Karen and Stevie and Danielle and Matthew and Jim and Jean and….did I forget anyone? Probably….) are a wonderful group of folks. What they have they share with us…food, time, love…and want to wait on us, which is rare for us as usually we only have each other to wait on or to be waited on by. The waiting on us part is largely unnecessary, but they don’t know that, and I won’t disallusion them, because, who knows, they might stop if I did.

Once we left we headed roughly West across 84, through New York and into Pennsylvania, then on 81 and at last on the big boy, Interstate 80, into Bloomington. Because we almost never reserve places in advance we of course had no park in mind when we started, and stopping where we could dump our black- and grey-water tanks, after dry-camping in Steve’s driveway for a week, wasn’t an option, it was a necessity. Eventually, Irene, on the air-card and cell as we traveled, found a place outside Bloomington, right off 80, and so about 5 PM we arrived at Indian Head campground, on the banks of the Susquahana River, and we immediately ran into Pauline, who had a spinning rod in the back of her golf cart, and she shared with us that earlier this year she had caught a 39″ Carp that weighed nearly 25 pounds, which is a lot of Carp. She said her picture was up in the office with the Carp. She said that her husband, who is disabled, hooked one that may have been bigger than hers but it broke off when they were trying to land it, but he’s still ahead of her in terms of total fish caught this year.

I went inside the office later, after we were set up and the dogs had been walked, because I wanted to see what a 25-lb Carp looks like. The answer is, it looks like a very big fish. Some people don’t consider the German Carp to be a game fish, categorizing it instead as a “rough fish”, and I can guarantee that when you supersize them like that they do look rough, and Pauline said it treated her rough, running all the way across the large river into the brush at the edge of the far side before she coud turn it around and eventually walk it up the bank, measure and photograph it, and release it. She said he’s still there, now bigger, no doubt, but alive and kicking. She seemed very pleased with herself and who can blame her? She’s getting an award from the State and is ahead of her husband for biggest fish of the year, a contest they always run between themselves, although he is still ahead by five fish in the “most fish” category.

What do Carp tell us about the meaning of life? I don’t know, not exactly. I do know that they were a very desireable food fish in Germany at the turn of the 20th century when someone imported them here. They found they liked it but somewhere along the way captured this “rough fish” designation and were subsequently disdained by “purists” who wanted the cleaner-looking, albeit much smaller, trout, bass, pike, pickeral, muscelunge, salmon and so on. The poor Carp…brought here to be something special and then ignored…at least until now.

I noticed in a fly fishing magazine that Carp are now a target fish for fly fisherman. I have never caught one on a fly but I could see it…they are a smart, opportunistic and talented fish quite capable of tearing a fly-rod in half and, along the way, scaring the wholy heck out of any poor and largely unsuspecting trout they may pass. The Carp is Back.

Their relationship to the meaning of life, again? Oh, I could make something up easily enough. I could talk about how everything comes full-circle. How we should throw nothing away as it will be back in fashion. About how perception colors reality….and how, when Carp were well-regarded, Pauline’s catch would have been considered the prize of all time, where now it’s marginal if, ten years ago, if anybody would have even admitted to catching one, and now we are here in times where it’s not fashionable to be exclusive, and ol’ Mr. Carp can certainly put a bend in any fly rod, and, now that I think about it, I wonder where she caught that one? I mean, I know it’s here in the river, but which hole, and what did she use? We may have an hour or two to spare in the morning, after all.

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August 8, 2009 by aj in Thoughts

Books in Antique Stores vs. Books in Antiquarian Bookstores

I don’t know any serious book collector who could ever mistake the stock in an antique shop for that in an antiquarian bookstore. Based on having been in perhaps thousands of the former and hundreds of the latter, I know I never could. Hey, antique shops for the most part don’t even sell antiques these days, (much less true antiquarian books) unless you realistically consider Carnival Glass to be an antique. Of course the various definitions of “antique” vary, but in the past the old standby of “over 100 years old” was at least instructive. Now “antique” is synonymous with “collectable” and in today’s economy that’s probably overly enthusiastic and it’s probably more like “anything that somebody might buy for some unknown reason.” For instance, yesterday Irene, her sister Jeanne and I spent a couple of hours trolling through the “antique district” in downtown Seymour, a small bedroom community of New York nearby Shelton, where Jeanne and Steve, her husband, have always lived. Granted Seymour isn’t yet as upscale as Shelton is getting to be but the antique shops, while cute, have truly awful books…the most useless trash imaginable….but by far the worst, because they were ALMOST something of interest, were three small books that were each bound in leather and were about 50 years old. Fine bindings by themselves are a catagory of book collecting and as such were of some small interest to me as a dealer/collector, but they weren’t very fine at all, being badly rubbed and stained and with otherwise obvious damage on a lot of people, but worse than that they were written in what I believe was Lithuanian or at best Polish and appeared to be reprints of sermons of some obscure Protestant minister. Not that this makes them bad by itself, as I suppose that somebody, someplace wants marginal-quality leather-bound books written in a foreign language and featuring people nobody has heard of lecturing about something nobody cares about but hey, who am I to judge, and if I was, I would also be judging the nearly $200 price-tage each one of the three volumes carried. So let’s see…no earthly purpose for anybody wanting these things but because they are somewhat cute let’s charge a million dollars for them just in case. Real value, as determined by me, because I do have some expertise in this subject? More like $10-15, with their only purpose being to fill a shelf of other, better-bound volumes for some decorator who needs to plug a hole of maybe five inches.

Let’s compare that with three volumes that a true Antiquarian bookseller has just offered me. Granted, Ron operates a bookstore that, for monetary purposes has to double as a collector’s book store and a used bookstore, two other things that are not being an antiquarian shop, but in addition to that he’s a true antiquarian dealer. He and I got off to a rocky start as I made the mistake of talking about a relatively rare book I own (a first edition, first state of The Emerald City, a follow-on book writtin in the early 1900s by L. Frank Baum, who in 1899 made history by writing the first definitivly classic American children’s book, the Wizard of Oz) out loud to a collector in Ron’s store who was looking for L. Frank Baum. Ron was right to bring me up short…dealers should always go THROUGH the dealer in his own shop, not around him…and after he graciously accepted my apology (and I promised to send him a better description of the book so HE could contact the L. Frank collector aforementioned) he and I turned to other matters and it in turn turned out that he owns three leather-bound and VERY early books on fly-fishing, either my first- or sometimes (after early poker books) second-love in the book-collecting world. Now these are in his own personal collection and weren’t in the store, but the next day he brought them in, called me and I trotted right down. These three books are spectacular, treasures, works of art. They are all about fly-fishing, one of the most desireable subjects among serious book collectors, although there are literally thousands of works in the field. They are all VERY Early….two of them very early 1800s and one of them, amazing, early 1700s, putting it right around the time of some of the Compleate Angler stuff, this one written by Grey, who was a contemporary of Isaak Walton who of course wrote the C.A. along with Cotton. These three books are all rebound in the most high-quality leather, beautifully done indeed, which protects that very paper of the earlier pieces. They absolutely shine in the half-light of Ron’s shop and after I buy them, which I intend to do, they will shine in the coach as well. Something like this will not leave my personal collection until Irene and I someday need the money, but they are as guaranteed to increase in value as anything could be, especially since Ron has them priced at…wait for it….about the same prices as the three scruffy books in the junk…I mean antique…shop mentioned before.

What does all this say? Nothing much. But it does point out why so many antique shops fail, and why, over time, stores like Ron’s survive. I wonder if there is a lesson here, about value and so on, that we could learn in other areas of business…for instance, in the financial industry, where they persist in producing worthless financial products that don’t bring any value to anyone? Or am I, once again, over-harping on the obvious?

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August 2, 2009 by aj in Thoughts

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