SubscribeThe 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.