It was a long trip.
A thousand miles and 4o some years.
Describing a smell in words is tough. I wonder if you could paint a smell or present it as a musical composition easier.
I'll try the words.
I love to fish. More accurately I should say I love to fish and all the things that surround fishing. People may think of fishing as just sitting in a boat, by a lake or river but that's just a small piece of it. Fishing can involve all sorts of other activities as well. Planning, looking at shiny lures, organizing tackle boxes, studying maps, tying flies, reading books and magazine to learn about fish and fishing, perusing catalogs for tackle/gear/clothes/more shiny lures, bait boxes, magic bait scents and other things you may need.
That's all fun. Then you can throw in telling stories, listening to stories, and dreaming about fishing, the fun of fishing with a child, old or new friend. Relaxing by or on the water, or walking and hiking along streams and rivers. Ahhhh yes I love it all.
Like most fisherman I have a million stories.
My fishing days began on the Yellowstone river of Montana when I was 4 years old. My Gram, a school teacher, took me to a fellow teacher's place on the river to fish. Gram was worried about letting me use a sharp hook so she convinced me it would be best if I fished with a button tied on my line. That brings us to a key characteristic of fishermen and women - "eternal optimism".
No matter what the circumstances, inevitably a fisherperson will think the best is going to happen. Going on a fishing trip? Better get a bigger cooler to carry home the big one(s). What's the limit? We need to know so we don't catch too many.
Back to the scent I followed a 1000 miles and 40 some years...
Montana rivers that I love, like the Gallatin or Yellowstone, tend to overflow in the Spring and cut new channels. The end result being you have a big main river and then a lot of little channels that you can wade across and in, when the water is lower in the summer and fall.
Those channels can be a great place to walk and explore, looking for fishy water and looking at birds, trees, flowers, animals, the sky, sun, smelling the air.
The smell of those areas has some unique components of water, decaying wood, trees, leaves and moss and I'm sure a million other molecules carrying scent. Something in the wind yesterday brought that back.
It was loverly.
I was a bait salesman for awhile. Set up my stand down on main street with paper cups of worms I'd dug. Hugh my adopted father/fisherman/pilot encouraged that job. I thought it was great. I was too young to go out on the river for opening day but I got to hang around with the fishermen and make a few pennies.
I once caught: a rock (reeled it in), a fish with a hook inside of it's belly, a sea bird, a 26 pound salmon on 8 pound test and my leg (took awhile to get the hook out).
Subtracting those 4 anecdotes, I now have 999,999,996 other stories to tell about fishing.
Did I ever tell you about the monk who handcuffed himself with a double hooked lure? A good friend of ours was fishing on the Missouri near Bismark North Dakota. She was with a group of Catholic Brothers in a boat. One of them accidentally hooked his thumb on a lure. He was startled and grabbed at the lure. In doing that he managed to hook his other thumb to the hook on the other end of the lure, effectively handcuffing himself. They had to drive him to the emergency room to get the hooks out (he couldn't do much of anything with his accidental handcuffs on).
999,999,995
One of the best fishing writers of all time was a fellow that lived first in England where he was born and then later North of where I live now.
"Roderick Haig-Brown was a writer, a magistrate, and a pioneer conservationist, but he is most often thought of as a fisherman. He sometimes bridled at that reputation. "I am a writer who happens to fish, not a fisherman who happens to write," he would say. Yet without his deep love for fishing, Haig-Brown's writing, his principles of justice, and his environmental ideals might not have developed."
Source Canadiana | Library | Roderick Haig-Brown
I highly recommend reading a bit of his work if you are interested in fish, rivers, and beautiful writing.
Books By Roderick Haig-Brown
One of the nice things about being a fisherman is that it gives you a "sense of place". If you study and walk/drive the watershed for an area you start to understand a little more about where you are. You can locate yourself in relationship to rivers, river valleys, tributaries. I'm afraid as we insulate ourselves from the real world we lose touch with that sense of place. What rivers are near you? Do you know their source? Where they end up?
Check it out sometime. It can be fascinating. Rivers are also great metaphors and good for just watching. You never dip your toe in the same river twice as they say. This book looks like it might have some interesting essays on that sort of thing -
Here's five fishing related pictures that have some wonderful memories associated with them in my little world -
5
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The children's fishing book, "A Good Day's Fishing" by James Prosek showed up in our house recently. It's a good one. Nice illustrations. Good for a beginning fisherperson.
Fishing Books For Children
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Wishing you fishers of men, fishermen, fisherwomen, and eternal optimists a good day fishing or thinking about fishing as the case may be. Somewhere there's some blue water, bright skies and calm days...you just have to look.
