Bamboo Fly Rod Suite: Reflections on Fishing and the Geography of Grace

On His Slowness

47 ON HIS SLOWNESS hen I started shoveling, I thought I could get all that snow up in an hour. Soon it would be two hours, and I was not nished yet.Why was this?Why have I always thought I should be able to do everything I do faster: run faster, ski faster, even read and write faster? I picture myself as a boy, a rst or second grader, running down the hill in front of our house with my friends Tim Nowlin andAlfred Martin.They’re running off and leaving me, not out of some t of childhood meanness,but because I cannot keep up. Even at that age,I was what I would become,a wobbly bag of bones, nothing but knees and elbows and big feet slapping the pavement. I am slow. Unconsciously connecting with this long-recognized truth, I started to sing“OnTop of Old Smokey”as I shoveled:“On top of old Smokey / All covered with snow . . .” I tried to remember, was it W 48 snow or smoke? Snow seemed more appropriate on this day, so snow is how I sang it. “I lost my true love / For courting too slow.” How, I wondered, could anybody possibly court too slow? Sex and love both seem to me to be studies in the arts of delay and anticipation. Every Saturday night, my high school girlfriend and I played at this game. Parked out some muddy road to nowhere, we explored the varieties of kissing until our lips were numb.We went on to cautious probes through each other’s clothing, then to opening buttons and snaps.The chill air in the car on suddenly bare esh. The hoped-for and never-quite-arrived-at climactic moment.This is what we were learning,the pleasures found in opening the world out slowly, slowly.The pleasures found in the space of waiting. Fishing is like that for me, but not necessarily for everybody. I took Chris, my wife’s nephew, shing. It turned out he hadn’t done much shing, and like most people who haven’t, he wanted his sh and he wanted them now. It was already raining when we drove up, and I left all the reels in a canvas bag at home. By the time I got back to the riverbank with them the water was rising and carrying bits of debris.Within a couple of hours it was high,fast,and muddy.I made my way from dry ies to nymphs to streamers.The sh went down and stayed there. In a long day in the rain, I got a couple of sh on with my darkest streamers,but I didn’t land either one.Chris didn’t get near a sh.We got skunked. It happens; it’s part of shing’s cosmic wheel. Sometimes I go out there and look like a genius. Every cast seems perfect, every placement provokes a sh, every y I try seems to produce. Playing a sh turns into another chore; I’m a little relieved when one slips 49 50 the hook.I nd myself using those off-the-wall ies I tied up one day just to try a different pattern. I’m looking to nd the y that won’t work. And sometimes I look like an idiot. I hang up my back cast high in a tree; I overshoot my cast into the brush on the far bank and stand there looking at my dangling y in a branch across a stretch of current too deep or too swift to wade.What’s there to do but try to whip my rod around with the vague hope my line will work loose until I give up and break off? No accounting of my life as a sherman would be completely honest without admitting to all the above moments, good and bad.While they may demonstrate why I prefer to sh alone, I’ve come to accept them as the balled-up elements of who I am. Gradually I’ve come to see acceptance itself as an aspect of my slowness, an attitude that says, Take it easy,this is how the world goes,this is how you are one part of it.A deep current runs through my bones, the essential truth of slowness.With this knowledge, I wish I could go back to stand by my high school...