Fly fishing as escape

troutunderground.com [1]

I don't know at what point putting on waders and heading to the river ceases to be a fishing trip and becomes an excuse for getting out of the house - the walls of which grow a little closer every winter day - but it's likely I passed that point today.

It was snowing, the Upper Sacramento flows were coming back up, and Wayne agreed on the phone that we wouldn't fish long or go far, none of which mattered.

I was getting out; not writing, computing or blogging.

I might have driven to Dunsmuir a little too fast. ...

We found ourselves fishing right in town, sharing a fly rod and a camera.

I missed the only bite of the day on a dry and dropper, which is a factually accurate summation of the trip, though it misses the point entirely.

There's something about fishing in the snow; it's a separate experience from fishing in sun or rain.

It's quiet, and - if you're dressed warmly enough - there's the sense of functioning as a self-contained, foul-weather, mobile fishing unit.

It's freezing outside, warm inside, and you're pretty sure you could do this most of the day.

Still, when the fishing is tough, a couple hours is plenty to prove you're a smart, tough fly fisher who fishes when the weather's bad and everyone else is holed up in front of a heater.

Some days you just need to get out and marvel at the concept of waterproofing.

As I'm writing this (the end of the day), it's snowing softly and steadily outside, and tomorrow will find me shoveling several inches of the fluffy white stuff off the driveway.

Snow is forecast for the next couple of days - good news for the ski industry - and I've got enough writing to do that I'll be back in my office.

Which, suddenly, is looking a little roomier.

Afterlife

fromthearchives.blogspot.com [2]

It is raining, which means I don't want to ride around on my fender-less bike. I do love walking in the rain, although not more than I love walking in general. Walking in the rain, however, is a slow process. I have to stop and put all the live worms back on the grass, and that can make me late.

The reason I have to put all the live worms back on the grass is that I believe that when you die, you re-live all the deaths you caused during your lifetime. It is a fairly strict doctrine, including both proximal neglect and but-for causation. You get some slack, though, because you only re-live those deaths at the level of awareness of the thing you killed. The deaths re-play back to back, from least traumatic to most traumatic. So I figure you spend a day or so smacking into windshields, then writhing in insect killer, and then it gets worse.

That's why I never have to nag meat-eaters. They don't need to be scolded now; they'll find out later what the costs were. I figure I'll be swooping 'round the Bardo, being a dragonfly or a cumulus cloud or a sun-warmed granite outcropping, for days before the meat-eaters show up, all haggard and worn. I'll show them the good parts then, maybe a beach where they can be phosphorescent plankton and fluoresce in warm gentle surf, and recover from some very rough deaths.

What's my dateline?

sacrag.com [3]

A little late in the day for this, but here's a little game, sure to be as wildly successful as Make Us Laugh. It's called "Where's that dateline?" I'll give you a news snippet and you pick the dateline. Ready? Of course not:

"A pregnant woman was shot in the back. A 17-year-old girl was shot in the head, rendered blind. A 20-year-old man was shot and killed behind the wheel of a moving car; his 15-year-old female passenger was shot as well."

So what's my dateline? (No fair guessing if you read the paper or any other local news source before 4:30 today.) Is it ...

A. Baghdad, Iraq

B. Sarajevo

C. wherever "Children of Men" takes place, or

D. a few hours in South Sacramento over the weekend?

Do I really have to answer? Bet the police chief is wishing he could have squashed that recent story about Sacramento having the lowest number of uniformed officers per capita.