Taking the Time...

  It's August 11, 2018. Another summer careens to it's end. No other season seems to speed by the way summer does. Winter drags on for what feels like an eternity. Spring, with it's endless rains and quirky temperature shifts, seems to last several weeks too long. Spring is tolerated only because we've grown so weary of winter that we'll endure yet another rain storm, because it means summer is just that much closer. Fall is confusing. It begins as nothing more than a date on the calendar. It's still warm and the insects still buzz about, and the days are still somewhat longer.

     Then, sometime around the third week of October, fall shows her self. One morning you wake up and you can see your breath again and the trees begin to turn colors. In the south, fall can be a very pleasant time of year. When I lived in Tennessee, fall was easily the best of the three seasons. The blistering summer heat was finally gone, and the chill of winter never really showed itself until Christmas. The fall months were full of warm sunny days and cool, but not cold, nights. Here in Virginia, it's similar, although the pleasant fall weather gives way to the cold of winter a few weeks earlier, and winter stays much longer.

     Back in the Delaware Valley, where I grew up, fall was a brief respite, a quick break between the sweltering dogs days of summer, and the seemingly eternal grey, cold of winter. By Halloween you needed a coat. Not your "big coat" reserved for the depth of winter, but a coat nonetheless. By November you woke to frost on the ground and had to scrape your windows -albeit lightly-- a few times each week.

By Christmas, it was cold. Mostly. There was always the inevitable warming trend around Christmas. Back home we dream of a White Christmas, every year the weather patterns tease us and give the impression that "this will be the year" ...and then it rains. It rains on Christmas Eve. Period.

     But today it's the middle of August. Technically five weeks of summer remain, but everyone knows that summer ends on that horrible Tuesday morning in September, the day after Labor Day, when all fun comes crashing to an end. It's August 11th, and I've fished once this year, so far. 

Once. 

     I live in a place where the choice between which of the four beautiful, pristine, productive rivers I want to fish is as hard to make as which new Corvette I'd want someone to give me. The answer is "yes." I dreamed of living in a place like this when I was a little boy. A place where no matter what direction I pointed my truck, I'd find a place to fish that was the stuff of dreams. And yet...I have fished once this year.  Part of that is because it has been a miserable, rainy, horrible-conditions summer. It has rained, and rained, and rained. And then it rained again. The James River, where I fish the most, has been out of it's banks all summer. In June, it looked like it does in March: high, and turbid and fast. Fish were holding anywhere but where you could fish for them. It probably affected the spawn and I'm worried what next spring will look like. 

     The plan now is to try my hand at fall / winter Smallies on the James. (And the Tye) I've wanted to for the four years I've been here, but never got around to it. This year, I will have to if I want to salvage anything of the fishing season of 2018. I plan on it...but I already doubt that I'll find the time.

     Finding the time is getting harder these days. I am a single dad, trying to put my daughter through college and help her put her life back together again after some very rough years. Her mom and I divorced when she was only 18 months old, and her mom married a man who terrorized them both. Divorce laws, and life's twists and turns prevented me from getting her out of there altogether. All I could do was remain active in her world, and let that jackass know that if he crossed the line, the hounds wouldn't even find his scent. Finally it got so bad that she moved with me here to Virginia. She was sixteen and allowed to make that decision for herself by that point. 

     Being a dad is my favorite thing. When she was little, we'd fish together at a little five acre pond near my house. She had a little "Barbie" spin casting set and she'd be thrilled with a bluegill now and then. Mostly she was just thrilled to be fishing with her daddy. Nowadays she has a boyfriend, and we're more roommates than father and daughter. But it's okay. She's with me and she's safe. But the arrangement doesn't allow for much free time. College is expensive, even for a guy who works for the school and gets her tuition for free. I have a side business. So fishing suffers.

     This fall I hope that will change. I've taken steps to minimize the demands on my weekends and I spent the summer getting my trusted, well-worn 1996 GMC Yukon roadworthy again. I will make the time somehow, because time, like real estate, isn't being made anymore. I wish I wasn't fishing or hunting alone, but that can't be helped. I've been here four years and a man in his mid fifties doesn't develop friendships like a boy of eleven does. When I hunt and fish I'm deathly quiet anyway, using the time and place to turn my thoughts inside and sort out the ball of yarn that fifty-five years has left me. This can be confusing for those who don't know me well. This silence of mine. So perhaps it's best to go it alone out there. But I do miss the conversations that would break the silence sometimes. The things we talked about when we were boys fishing "Nonesuch Creek" when I was just a child. Or the coming-of-age discussions my best friend Mark and I would have, between casts into the lilly pads on Lake Como, or Lum's pond. Or the wealth of knowledge I gained from Hank Teryzcak and Carl Ramsey when we would hunt deer on an old farm on the outskirts of Kent county in Delaware.         Hank and Carl were friends of my stepfather, who hunted this land with us each fall. My stepfather and I seldom spoke, but Hank and Carl befriended me and taught me how to track, and where to build my stand, and how to dress my first buck when I finally harvested him. There was only silence in the field, but back at the campsite there were jokes and laughter and stories and the transition into manhood. 

     That's what I miss now. I can fish alone in silence and not notice or care. In fact I prefer it. But the pre-dawn rides to the fishing hole or the end of day ride home, or the times sitting on the bank, eating a sandwich, and watching a massive freight train roll by and having no one there to talk with...those moments become glaring. There was something about setting up the evening campfire and one by one, seeing your hunting companions appear out of the lengthening shadows. When the last of us was in the fold, and the coffee pot was full and dinner was simmering, and the stories of the day would begin to be told...it was the best time in the life of that young outdoorsman. The one who hunts and fishes alone now.

    I wish I could have those days again. I wish I had friendship like that here in Virginia where I live. But I know full well that is not possible. Friendships like that are developed over many years. They take time. And time is a scarcity for me now. A precious commodity that the world seems to be in dire shortage of. That and the precious memories...of when there was plenty of time.