Hooked On Annual Event

On the Friday before the last Saturday of any given April, the northbound freeways out of southern California are choked with SUVs and pickup trucks towing boat trailers and loaded to the gills with work-weary fishermen headed for the same general destination – the streams, reservoirs and lakes of California’s Eastern Sierra mountains.

If you aren’t an avid angler or married to one, you may not know that the last Saturday of every April is the annual Opening Day of the Eastern Sierra Trout Season – often shortened to just “the Opener” – as in, “Are you doing the Opener this year, or waiting for warmer weather?” Also affectionately known to participants and those they leave behind as “Fishmas,” the annual Opener sends Southern California anglers by the tens of thousands up Highway 395 and into Inyo and Mono Counties to try their lucky lures against the wild and planted fish stock that have had the long, bitter winter to grow bigger and hungrier.

On Opener weekend, fishermen head out by the carload, bleary eyed and caffeine-fueled, visions of rainbow trout dancing in their heads. This legion of lake loiterers becomes progressively more alert as they drive through the Owens Valley towns of Lone Pine, Independence, Big Pine and Bishop. Signs and banners in shop windows and hung across the highway greet the wader-wearing warriors as they pass with graphic shouts of “Merry Fishmas!,” “Welcome, Fishermen!” or “Land a lunker!”

As part of the Opener ritual, most if not all of this convoy of casting characters will make a stop at one or more of the many bait and tackle shops along the way – many of which stay open all night on “Fishmas Eve” (and yes, they really call it Fishmas Eve). After all, it doesn’t matter how much fishing equipment you’ve brought, there’s always a new flavor of bait or type of hook that simply must be purchased in order to ensure a successful weekend.

The high school kids in Independence (a tiny, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town along the way to hallowed fishing grounds) sell Styrofoam containers of night crawler worms on Opener weekend to raise funds for various school activities. I’ll bet the clean up.

Having a son who’s been a certifiable fishing addict since the age of five, I know of no other hobby – some would say affliction – that requires the near constant addition of new gear and accessories. (Although, golf may come close.) To be a true fisherman, one needs to invest a sum worthy of Goldman-Sachs bailout on new and improved ways to catch fish.

I’m not saying that fishermen are gullible (“gill”able?), but I would bet that you could take a simple size 12 single salmon egg hook, repackage the exact same hooks with a new label marketing them as revolutionary left-handed technology designed exclusively for use in water flowing right-to-left instead of left-to-right – and a million fishermen would spend perfectly good cash to add these special “new” hooks to the arsenal in their tackle boxes. You never know when you’ll run into reverse flowing water, after all. Or ambidextrous trout.  

As we have for many years, my above-mentioned son and I often take part in any given year’s Trout Opener weekend – getting up before dawn on the Saturday morning in question to put our small aluminum boat into the frigid waters and await the first rays of sunlight, and with it, the official start of the Spring/Summer fishing season.

How do we usually do? Well, if you measure the “success” of a fishing trip by the number of rainbows brought home in the cooler, we typically fail spectacularly. Depending on the year, either most of the lakes are still covered by ice and the water just too cold for the fish to bite – or the wind is blowing at gale force – or there are enough boats crowding the prime lake locations that you can’t cast your line without hooking another angler, or … you get the idea.

But as far as I’m concerned, the chance to sit in a boat with my college-age son (and sometimes my father-in-law) for most of the day, in the high altitude splendor of the snow-covered Sierras, sharing a cheese and cracker lunch with a side of priceless conversation – well, it’s pretty hard to classify a trip like that as anything but successful.

Besides, I hear there’s a brand new sun-dried Tuscan garlic flavor of bait that I’m going to pick up before our next fishing trip. Yeah, that should have ‘em absolutely jumping into our boat.

I’ll see you ‘round town.

Note: A version of this post was originally published in the April 29, 2010 edition of the CV Weekly Newspaper (www.cvweekly.com).

Clearing the path

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it’s the difference between the lightening bug and the lightening.”  -- Mark Twain

One of several books I’m currently reading (I’m easily distracted by new releases and old friends and by many books bought but not yet read) is titled Unless It Moves The Human Heart  a newly published book by bestselling author and commentator, Roger Rosenblatt, about the craft of writing.

As I am prone to do, I often read what I hope will be inspirational, thought-provoking books when I go to bed – usually late at night just prior to midnight or sometimes even when a new day has officially begun on the calendar. Although there is danger in this late-night practice of mine (rarely do I read more than a page or two – and sometimes not more than two or three paragraphs! – before falling asleep myself and the book falling from my hands onto the floor beside my bed), there can also be wondrous times of inspiration. Often, when reading a Bible devotional or a superbly written book on the craft of writing such as Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, or The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, I will read a particularly inspiring passage just before falling asleep – and dream it’s message deep into my subconscious to have it surface in my waking thoughts time and time again in the ensuing weeks and months. I love when that happens.

Sometimes, not so much. And in my tiredness, I simply cannot focus either my eyes or my thoughts  -- drifting away from comprehension of what is written on the pages before me and into a deep sleep. So it has been with this particular book. Not that it isn’t written well, or that it doesn’t hold many useful bits of advice on writing – but for whatever reason, I have had the book a couple of weeks now and had only managed to read the first ten or fifteen pages. Its paperback cover is already creased and dimpled having hit my bedroom floor so often!

However, all it took was an anniversary getaway weekend away from my usual routine at home in Southern California and all its distractions to actually read nearly half of the book in one sitting. I should explain.

My wife and I drove 300-plus miles from home to our family’s vacation home high up on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. It’s supposed to be in the 90s at home as I write this, but up here around 9,000 feet in elevation, it’s still winter – and the small resort town is still buried in as much as 15 feet of snow drifts. Nighttime temps are still down below freezing. Most of the windows on the ground floor of any home are still blocked by snowdrifts. Can you picture it? Now picture a wall of snow filling the entire front porch space leading from the driveway to the front door of our house. Arriving close to midnight in 30-degree temps and then having to shovel a path through heavy, rock-hard ice and snow the 15-foot distance just to get inside and turn on the heater so you can unpack the truck, put away food in the fridge, and eventually try to get some sleep. Yep, nothing like a relaxing getaway! But, I’m not complaining. Really, I’m not.

So, after getting maybe a few hours of sleep our first night in the cabin, I got up ridiculously early and read more of the above-mentioned book in a couple of hours than I have in a couple of weeks so far. Granted, I was reading as the sun was coming up – having been awakened from a too-short, deep sleep by my elderly yellow Lab, Darby, who thought he needed to go outside into the below-freezing darkness of pre-dawn in order to pee. He didn’t, by the way. He just wanted to go out and sniff the trails left behind by miscellaneous wildlife. He loves it up here, as do I. I just wish we had a fenced yard and a doggie door -- especially at 4 a.m.

Regardless, I was wide awake after the false-alarm bathroom break, so I dove into reading. In one of the early chapters of the book, writer/instructor Rosenblatt discusses the process of what he calls, ‘clearing your throat’ as a writer. He tells of  how the famous writer, E.L. Doctorow (of Ragtime & City of God fame) had once written 150 pages of his story, The Book of Daniel before realizing he had chosen the wrong person to tell the story. Doctorow ended up tossing every single word of all 150 pages and starting over with the story being told from an entirely different viewpoint and character. That’s discipline, my friends. I can honestly say that I don’t know if I could round file that many pages willingly – without being forced to do it by an editor under threat of not being published, that is.

I regularly slash and burn whole paragraphs of passages I’ve labored over for hours or sometimes days at a time. More often than not it’s because a piece has to come in at a specific, inflexible word count – not because I realized that a line, paragraph or thought was only included because I thought it was particularly clever or observant and didn’t really make the piece any stronger. One of the most difficult things to do as a writer is to “kill your darlings” as they say in this business. I have to say, however, that I’m getting more and more ruthless these days. All in the name of experience, I guess.

But I like the idea of having to clear your throat as a writer before you get to the really worthwhile stuff that you want to get down digitally. It’s almost like having to clear away all that snow and ice before we could get in the front door of our mountain getaway home. So much “stuff” piles up in between using the place (and my writing chops) that it takes some effort and energy to get past it all and on to the good stuff. I know, you’re still waiting for the good stuff.

Maybe posts like this one are simply clearing my throat or shoveling snow. Shoveling something, at least. You’ll be the judge, anyway.

Thanks for reading.