Something
from the tackle box:
Don’t let anyone fool you. Many will come and claim to be me. They say they will be the Messiah, and
they will fool many people…. Many will give up and will betray and hate each other. Many false prophets will come and fool
a lot of people. Evil will spread
and cause many people to stop loving others. But if you keep on being faithful right to the end, you will
be saved. (Matthew 24:4-5,10-13
CEV)
I got up
very early yesterday to vote in the election. My wife Kathy wanted to get her ballot cast before heading
off to her job at the community college in the first big town to the south of the
small town where we live. We
figured that it would be a lot easier than waiting to vote in the evening after
she got home. So we were in line,
along with a friend who had asked for a ride to the polls the day before, a
good twenty minutes before the doors opened. There was already a bit of a line when we got there, and by
the time the doors opened the line stretched out into the parking lot. I did not see a smile on anyone’s
face.
The local
election officials were expecting a good turnout and were prepared. Things moved at a good pace and we had
soon marked our ballots and fed them into the counting machine, just like many
millions of others across the country were doing at the time. We walked out
past an even larger crowd of waiting voters than before. I still did not see any smiling faces,
unless you counted one enthusiastically bouncing preschooler in tow with her
mother. Thank you God for the
little things.
Kathy
dropped our friend Tomi Jo and I off at the local diner for breakfast before
heading off to work herself. Tuesday
morning breakfast with a half dozen or so of my parishioners, along with a
couple of other community wags whom we allow to enjoy our company, is my usual
habit. The big round table at the
C&R is already spoken for by the old duffers club, so we always pull a
couple of the smaller square tables together, as far away from the old duffers
as we can possibly get. Which, as
far as my opinion matters, is a good thing on a day like this election
day. Sometimes it’s bad enough
having to put up with the talk of my own parishioners concerning the hot topics
of the day, without the added layers of horse manure bravado that the old
duffers can bring to any conversation.
You see,
even though I am a genuine rural, small-town born and bred,
hick-from-the-sticks boy myself, both related to and at home with red-necks,
hayseeds, shop rats, duck commanders, catfish noodlers, and every other stripe
of Midwestern country folk you can think of, somewhere along the line I got
past and grew out of the political attitudes that dominate my native culture.
And
dominate they do! At least on a local level.
I’m always amused by the ballots in small rural community
elections.
Sure, we get the same
choices that everyone else does for the National and State level races, but
better than ninety percent of the time all of the local offices are uncontested,
with only one candidate to vote for, and that candidate is affiliated with one
certain party every time.
Those rare
times when the man or woman from that party does have an opponent for an
office, that contester will almost always run as an “independent,” rather than
doom his run to certain failure by having it affiliated with that “other”
party.
 |
| a catch! |
This is
the truth far more often than not in the rural small-town America that I’ve
called home for sixty years. In
some ways it’s amusingly quaint, but in other ways it makes life very difficult
for those of us who don’t think that the entrenched grand old party getting its
way on every little thing, with everybody living outside of the big city, is necessarily
good for the life of our grand old country as a whole. I’ve felt that way for a long time now
and have voted according to that conviction most of my adult life. The results are that I’ve been on the
losing side of almost every election that I’ve voted in over the last forty
years, as far as the tally for my local
precinct goes. The upside of
this situation is that, even though I’m often not smiling on election day, most
folks are.
But not yesterday. Even at my usual table, a hotbed of
conviviality on most Tuesday mornings, the mood was glum. And at the old duffer’s table, where
they are in one hundred percent agreement with the social political norm of
small town America, and ought to have been engaged in hearty back-slapping
yesterday, not a happy face was to be seen. I walked home from the diner under a grey, cold and sprinkle
spitting sky as cheerless as the mood of the country, and that’s when I decided,
I need to go fishing.
 |
| still feeling pretty glum |
So I got
home, threw my insulated chest waders, along my best fly rod, into the back of
the VW and headed for the Coldwater river through the drizzle. It looked like a horrible day for
fishing, and I sure wasn’t expecting to see a thing in the way of fish, but it
had to be better than sitting home and moping about this God forsaken election
day.
I had to
drive a bit further than usual to fish, as by November the Coldwater is closed
to trout fishing above the Freeport dam, where I like to fish, until next April
when the season opens back up. Below
the dam is year-round fishing, so I set out for Coldwater Park in southeast
Kent County where the access is easy.
Unfortunately, I’ve never done that well below the dam on the Coldwater
River any time of the year, and didn’t really expect to this day, for that
matter. I just needed to get into
the river and get my head on straight for an hour or two. Fishing will do that for me like
nothing else I know of, and I needed it bad.
The water
was higher and faster than I had expected, which made wading below the rapids,
the better section of the park waters to fish, harder than I really liked. After a half hour of fighting to stay
upright in the current while negotiating the big rocks underfoot, I got out and
moved to much calmer waters and less challenging footing above the rapids. And here I found some peace, - thank
God.
 |
| looking down towards the rapids |
I did not
work hard at the fishing yesterday.
Instead of playing out a lot of line and making long casts through the
hazards of overhanging tree branches to likely looking eddys in the rocky
rapids, I just waded out to the middle of the stream, well above the rushing water, and made gentle roll
casts to the banks on both sides, letting my little bead-head, wire wrapped bug
drift along the bottom with the current until I decided to haul her in and do
it again.
 |
| a couple of low hanging trophies |
Not even
the hint of a fish to tantalize me was in the offing, although I did snag and
draw up sunken leaves and small branches from the bottom now and then. It was enough. All I really needed. In an hour I was feeling better about
life in general, if not about the future of our nation.
I noticed
that, with almost all of the leaves down from the trees along the banks now,
the hung-up and broken off lures of my less accurate, crank-bait fishing
cousins, now decorated the trees like Christmas ornaments. It was actually very pretty and amusing
to see. While most of these trophies
were well out of reach I did wade over and brake off a couple of low hanging
specimens. If I wasn’t going to
catch any fish I might as well collect some lures to take home. It felt good to do that. I felt better. In fact, I felt much better.
Something to take home in your creel:
By one o’clock I was
getting cold, despite my insulated waders. The Coldwater River is aptly named. I was hungry too. So I got out, de-geared, and pointed
the old VW back east. Halfway home
I stopped in the town of Freeport to get lunch at the Shamrock Tavern, not too
far from the old dam site that separates fishable waters from unfishable waters
on the Coldwater from October through April. They serve one of the best olive burgers you can find at the
Shamrock, in quarter or half-pound varieties. I had an appetite for one after fishing. They have good craft beer on tap,
too. Getting there well after the
lunch hour, there were only four other customers in the place when I sat down,
all at the bar. I guessed that
they had just voted, or were on their way to vote and thinking about the
prospect, as none of them were smiling. –
But I was. :-)
