July, 1974
A Paragraph
You know what a walleye is? It’s a fish. It’s a snaky bronze dragon-like fanged Satanic fish with quilled bony fins and a deep, cool way about it. It lives in the lakes and rivers of Minnesota, in the currents, in the oxygenated flows. You trawl for it with bright outlandish lures, silver spinners, glowing plastic worms, facsimile minnows that buck and dive and wag. You never witness the moment when it bites. You’re never there for the catastrophe. You imagine it, though, in your open summer mind, on the wide popcorn screen behind your sunset eyes. The calamitous jaws of its prehistoric mouth, the slipstreams along its sides as it drives forward, the rip, the snap, the grab, the gulp, then its moment of comprehension as it’s hooked. That boy again. That kid with his long line. Which is true, and I’m not ashamed of it. I have him. I can feel how the hook is rooted — it won’t slide out — it’s a part of him now all the way to his wild tail. I truly hate to do this. I pull way up. I command the whole weight of him with my bending rod tip, responsible now, responsible and old. Because I am above him, this is the arrangement, and this is how we both inhabit water. I’m tired of it sometimes. I wonder why it’s so. And in summer it sends me out fishing, this thinking sickness. Running my motor up and down the world.
The Zen master once called obsessive thinking "the sickness of the mind," just as you describe it, "this thinking sickness," but the paradox is when the thinking process produces beautiful writing like July, 1974, it tends to heal itself, sort of like formal meditation practice often does, and just as my own gone-fly-fishing days do too, especially in my "open summer mind", out there alone on the wild, scenic river. Thanks for that gift of summer on this cold, winter morning, Walter. Tight Lines!
Fishing and thinking go hand in hand. Beautifully thoughtful and reads like poetry. Thanks.