Moby Dicking Around

Ahab was an amateur. If you want real obsession, you need to cast farther. You need to climb down root-ladders and weave through briar bushes to the river just as spring melt is ebbing, then low-crawl under massive logs and scamper over wet river- stones more slippery than a candidate’s promise.

You need to fall and gash your shins to the bone, blood flowing freely then cleansed by the cold clear water that trout love. How bad does an infection need to be for you to actually quit fishing? Is gangrene even a thing anymore? You need to promise just one more cast for five hours, then just one more fish, then the internal one-sided negotiation, all thesis, no antithesis: “Just one more, well, maybe two, OK, three.” And on and on it goes.

You should be at the trailhead in the heat of summer with all your gear crammed into a small backpack, then hike six miles in and a lifetime up to the alpine lakes. Nobody else there and probably for good reason. All alone in the backcountry, Garmin In-Reach safely forgotten on the shelf at home but fully charged from pre-planning the night before because the wilderness can be dangerous and the wife worries.

You’re out on the water in your inflatable packraft as the wind picks up and the sky darkens over the treetops, thunder rolling in and was that really lightning and is that due west or is the system passing south of us? Then the inner negotiation again: “One more fish, well maybe two. That storm’s probably headed south.”

The river looks awfully deep to cross here but damn this run would fish better from the other side so you march on in and the current is stronger than it looks and soon your feet lose bottom and it’s too late to turn back now but you somehow stay upright and soon you’re fishing where you wanted to be fishing but with no clue how you’ll get back across in the dark.

As fall turns to winter you follow thin blue lines into the forest with a three-weight and size-18 nymphs on 7X tippet. In a trickle of water two inches deep you hunt for five-inch brookies, brightly colored with white-tipped fins. You lose your flies not under rocks, not in the tall grasses, not under sunken logs, but in the high branches of fir trees. You can hear your heartbeat as a God’s-honest-truth twelve-inch brookie spots you and slides safely under a root ball beneath the conspiratorial snag in the fir tree. Was that the wind whispering, “Just one more?”

Ahab? Gimme a break. That guy never even got outta the boat.

 PETER SHORTALL is happily retired in Columbia Falls, Montana.