A day of fishing

I went fishing last week with my friend Charlie and my son. Charlie is a member of a private club with a number of miles of protected and private river access in the mountains of North Carolina. The fish are big here. They are fed all winter long, and on Sunday evenings during the season.

There are not many people who get to fish in waters like these. I am not sure what Charlie has to pay yearly for this privilege but I am sure it is more than the annual income for many people. There is a nice lodge there, full time caretaker, and of course the fed trout. There are only 11 members. Full disclosure here, that other guy who sometime inhabits my body is a member to two fishing clubs of similar sort.

I do wonder how fair this divide between people who can pay for private fishing grounds and those who can barely afford their satellite TV’s. Perhaps fair is not the word. Fair might imply that I think that the teacher of my children should earn some approximation of the guy who puts together my hedge fund. Lets see… 40k per year versus 325 million. I have searched my thesaurus for a word to describe this particular situation and it appears that we don’t have one.

Fishing with my son a special treat. It is an opportunity to share a love of the outdoors on an equal level. So much between fathers and sons is unequal. The father has the money. The father makes the rules. The father grants approval. On the other hand a son, or a daughter I presume although I will never know, provides the father with only pride. That’s fine with me.

I usually catch my biggest fish of the season on this private water. This year was no exception. In fact, in the first hole on my beat, I tied on a female adams and hooked the largest rainbow I think I have ever caught in the lower 48. I learned a hard lesson; never fish in this place without a net. I worked Moby Dick to the shore to try to extract the hook, and every time he got a look at the beach he was off on another whirlwind tour of the river. When I finally got Moby close enough to try to grab him, I pulled on the leader and broke him off. So now Moby will have to wait for time to remove the hook.

This is how we fish. We try to let go of the fish so we can catch it again. Imagine that.

Hanging around the lodge in the evening, after fishing allows all of us to relax over a bit of liquor. I am not sure what goes on in this place when I am not there. But whenever I am with a group of people that are obviously my seniors, and very successful in the business world and probably Republicans; I feel the need to impress them with my liberal thinking. “So what do you think of the Bush administration and this stupid war they have gotten us into”. I ask expecting them to support the tenor of my injective. Full disclosure again; that other guy in my body is a Reagan Republican. It all made for an interesting evening especially my conversation with the woman who is friends with Mitt Romney that Barrak Obama might be a good president.

I actually went to the Pew Forum… http://pewforum.org/… to learn a little about Mitt. I am always looking for someone who can be fiscally conservative yet socially responsible. Mitt is not the guy… sorry.

I am not sure what my son thought of the conversation. Kids today don’t seem quite as obsessed with the failures of government. They seem more positive about what might happen in the future, than negative about where the present is leading us. This could be good; or not. When I was their age I was incensed about the Vietnam War. Now I am incensed about the Iraq War. I hope that my kids will keep us out of war rather than get incensed about being in one.

All in all, just your typical fishing trip; plentiful, and fat trout, on a private river in the middle of the mountains.