A Little Cold Water on Election Day

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. :-)