“Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names
of a dozen friends who have died in recent years,
names now as incomprehensible as the mountains
across the river, far behind me.
I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.
Perhaps when we die our names are taken
from us by a divine magnet and are free 
to flutter here and there within the bodies
of birds. I’ll be a simple crow
who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.”
-Jim Harrison “Hard Times”, In Search of Small Gods, Copper Canyon Press; 2009

Dove season began a few days ago. Normally, this event is preceded by the obligatory stamp purchase, a fresh case or two of shells, a cleaning and maintenance session with the shotgun and maybe shaking the vest out over the front yard’s gravel.  Those smaller rituals occurred, although standing on the berm this fall, what really marked the start of this season is all that happened since last year’s. Two more relatives’ portraits joined the household gods above the mantel, marking the end of one generation. They had been alive when last I stood here. My latest niece hadn’t been born yet, although she is damn near crawling now. I needed new field pants this year; not because I wore the old pair out, but because this brush with mortality changed my own trajectory. I quit smoking, got healthy and in the words of Nofoolin, I’m “doing stuff now”. I dropped enough weight that cinching the belt up on my pants gave me a distinct hobo appearance, not altogether a bad thing.

This was the first time in a while that the cycle of year looked this distinct.Maybe I’m getting older, or at least more sentimental, but this dove season seems to have marked an end of last year’s grief. The passing of a year measured not by a calendar, but by a cycle of game and weather, has clarified things. Those who where here last season are not and those who were not here, are. For this year, at least, that has marked a new beginning.

I gathered my accoutrement under the watchful eyes of the household gods, men and women who lived close to the bone in Quebec and Northern Maine. I don’t know what they would have thought of hunting or fishing for recreation. I think that they maybe puzzled by it, or maybe they’d throw in with abandon. Standing on the berm, watching the dawn break east along the Dragoons, I waited for the whitewings and mourning doves to arrive. I think about all that has happened and what this season may hold. Fly them.

I find myself asking this question when faced with any major life junction.  Considering that I’ve put off most “serious” life decisions for the past decade in the interest of wearing wet waders and not worrying abut the condition of my beard, they’re starting to stack up.

I’ve been fired from exactly one job in my life. I was once the lowest tier manager at a reasonably successful restaurant, they fired me on my 25th birthday because I missed too many meetings. I missed the final meeting due to a 48 hour stint on the Snake that was only supposed to last 24. While the meeting came to order in a musty basement office, I shivered slightly beside the resting embers of an early morning firepit, trying to rekindle the flame of the previous night. When I finally returned to work my next shift (in my defense, I only missed meetings, I never missed work) I was told that I was no longer needed. Instead of looking for more work, I spent the next week camped beside the Missouri with my dog and a marginally employed buddy. Happy Birthday motherfuckers.

Now into the fourth decade of this whole breathing business, I’ve come to realize that the channel I’ve chosen to take has it’s drawbacks, despite what current fishing media would have you believe. I’m tired of being broke, single and odoriferous. I’ve started to take steps, work on finding some balance. I put graduate school applications out into the ether of academia, but only to schools in VERY close proximity to favorite rivers. The woman I moved in with a few years back, when I was a part-time boyfriend, absent four months of the year, has started making less-than-subtle references to a marriage that I should be smart enough to propose. I sold my truck and bought a Subaru for the savings in gas consumption, but made sure to get one that could still easily tow my boat.

Of my close group of high school friends (maybe a dozen people), four are now attorneys (ONE THIRD! holy shit, do you think there are too many lawyers out there?). Two remain unmarried, and  half have spawned multiple times. There are three of us who don’t already own homes. As for my dirtbag fishing buddies? We’re all stagnated in a state of intermittant contentment puncuated by stretches of abstract melancholy. None are married. We’re all broke and without equity (except for the ones with trust funds), and have chosen employment based on flexible schedules and low commitment rather than personal fulfillment. We toil in custom seat-cover factories, restaurants, fly-shops, bronze foundaries, or night-shift sex-shops and never because we give two shits about the job but because the job allows us the flexibility to take off when the call comes in saying “The chrome is in the bucket, I repeat the CHROME IS IN THE BUCKET”.

There has been a lot written lately about the “fishing bum” moniker. There have been movies and stories and articles glorifying the grand lifestyle of the bum. There have been counter-points made to mention that true “bums” push shopping carts full of bartered or cast-off goods that they treasure, and are often homeless and mentally unstable. I would argue that I have spent a good deal of time with fishermen who nearly fit that profile. No one has made any movies about these guys. Guys who honestly live in their cars through rocky mountain winters so that saved rent money can purchase gas, hooks, feathers, tippit, and gas station burritos. Guys who have bartered their way into top quality gear without spending the sort of money one pays for Hodgeman brand neoprene. I can also tell you that it is not nearly as glorious as it has been made out to be. It’s a lonely, uncomfortable and smelly existence. That said, those friends of mine who followed the mainstem flow make sure to tell me how covetous they are of my back-braid shenanigans. How can I tell them I spent the last evening in fuzzy slippers on a soft couch eating homemade soup, holding hands beneath a blanket and watching Olympic ice dancing? Even more difficult: how can I tell them that I ENJOYED it?

I don’t know if it’s possible to walk a line between these two seemingly opposed modes of existence, but I’ve decided to give it my best shot. Doubtlessly, there will be sacrifices on both sides. I won’t be able to drop everything and chase that Skwala hatch on six hours notice. But neither will I have to lay in my tent in the rain (or snow or hail) listening to the vastness of the air around me and spooning with a damp golden retriever wondering how I’m going to make rent when I get back to my crumbling bachelor pad and bare mattress. I can’t help the fact that I view the world from beneath the brim of a battered fishing cap and wouldn’t change that perspective if I could. But I hope that way of looking at things can extend beyond the reaches of rainy-day rivers and skanky Gore-Tex.

They’re digging up Shackleton’s Whisky!!

Since it’s some sort of unofficial last hurrah for summer’s mad knees-bent running about behavior, and also because part of the joy of this weird pursuit is in the characters you meet.

“We had just been invited to join an all day golf scramble and drinking bash hosted by a whole medly of fraternal lodge organizations. Elks, Moose, and Eagles strolled about the first tee. Most of the people were meeting for the first time; our identities seemed secure, but since you can’t be too careful we traded our fishing hats for the fezzes of three staggering-drunk Shriners from Anaconda, then filled out our name cards as Methyl, Ethyl, and Nitrate Blitz.

Not all of the Blitz Brothers were strangers to a golf course. One of them had even played in college. Ethyl had the distance, Methyl the hot irons, and Nitrate, to his bemused delight, found that he could putt. Just like lining up the eight ball for a bank shot, he said. The Brothers for as long as they could maintain their momentum atop the bell curve of enhanced perception were like besotted Jedi knights: the force was with them. The tournament was a scramble, a format ideally suited to their condition.

On the holes that ran with the wind the Brothers were absolutely splendid. They birdied the first and third, then Nitrate drained a thirty-foot putt for eagle from the fringe on the par five sixth. First prize was two hundred dollars, and the Blitz Brothers had already decided to spend it all in one place - like maybe Idaho. Then, on the eighth, Methyl was driving the cart in the rough searching for a hooked ball and lighting a cigar when he should have been watching where he was going. All three brothers hiked the tall weeds to the car, then stopped at a drug store, bought a postcard, drew a map to the cart and signed it with a sketch of a scuba diver, then continued fishing toward the Big Hole River, where it was deemed by popular acclaim to be cocktail hour, and time to switch to gin.”

-from True Love and the Woolly Bugger by Dave Ames, 1996

“A mining company was given the go-ahead by the Supreme Court on Monday to dump waste from an Alaskan gold mine into a nearby 23-acre lake, although the material will kill all of the lake’s fish.The court said that the federal government acted legally in declaring the waste left after metals are extracted from the ore as “fill material” allowing a federal permit without meeting more stringent requirements from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Water Act.”

=============================================

“I look forward to spending the next 100 years trying to fix this legislation,” said California Republican Brian Bilbray.

“This is the biggest job killing bill that’s ever been on the floor of the House of Representatives. Right here, this bill,” said House Minority Leader John Boehner. “And I don’t think that’s what the American people want.”

Donning reading glasses, Boehner then delayed the roll call vote by reading page-by-page through a 300-page managers’ amendment Democrats added at around 3 a.m. on Friday. Boehner seemed to relish the hour-long stunt, picking out the bill’s most obscure language and then pontificating about what it might – or might not – mean. Republicans laughed along with him and roared with applause when he was done.”

=============================================

“Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won’t we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe - but cap-and-trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private tax-collection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it’s even collected.”

=============================================

“They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They’ve been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s - and now they’re preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went - and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long - including last year’s strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn’t one of them. IF AMERICA IS NOW CIRCLING THE DRAIN, GOLDMAN SACHS HAS FOUND A WAY TO BE THAT DRAIN.”
=============================================

We are living in a complete farce.

Maybe we should blow the dust off this old tract:

Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages, are not YET sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favour; a long habit of not thinking a thing WRONG, gives it a superficial appearance of being RIGHT, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason. As a long and violent abuse of power, is generally the Means of calling the right of it in question (and in Matters too which might never have been thought of, had not the Sufferers been aggravated into the inquiry) and as the King of England hath undertaken in his OWN RIGHT, to support the Parliament in what he calls THEIRS, and as the good people of this country are grievously oppressed by the combination, they have an undoubted privilege to inquire into the pretensions of both, and equally to reject the usurpation of either. In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise, and the worthy, need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious, or unfriendly, will cease of themselves unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion. The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Many circumstances hath, and will arise, which are not local, but universal, and through which the principles of all Lovers of Mankind are affected, and in the Event of which, their Affections are interested. The laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword, declaring War against the natural rights of all Mankind, and extirpating the Defenders thereof from the Face of the Earth, is the Concern of every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling; of which Class, regardless of Party Censure, is the AUTHOR.

http://www.ushistory.org/PAINE/commonsense/sense1.htm