Things got way off the rails this summer. So far off, I couldn’t see the rails from where I ended up. We got a dog, Bartleby and a cat, Doah. They ended up taking a lot of attention. I can’t abide a poorly behaved dog and I judge people who have poorly behaved dogs. So, I started putting in time with the dog. He’s still goofy and a puppy who gets into trouble, but it’s within the normal limits. Doah is a cat, she’s fine.
The cabin we bought has taken a lot more time and money to get on track than I anticipated. Like, a lot more of both time and money, but it’s about there and we enjoy it when we’re there. It’s clear though, that this was no investment, it’s a luxury. A base for us to launch our fishing adventures, if it would every stop raining.
Which brings me to the rain. It will not stop raining. Just rain and more rain. Fishing trips cancelled, sitting on the porch watching the rain, rain and more rain. There are a couple of bears in there around the cabin and snakes, lots of snakes this summer. It’s the summer of the snake and bear. Snake and Bear would be a good pub name, or maybe a bronze age comedy duo, “people from beyond the river hunt and gather like this, but people of the hill hunt and gather like this.”
The rain has blown out the South Fork. It doesn’t just have that chocolate milk look that a blownout river will get. It often has that reddish tinge of a profoundly blown out river; it doesn’t look so much like chocolate milk as red-eye gravy. When you glimpse it through the woods, you’d think it was dirt road, not a river. On the rare occasions when it settles down, you notice debris and mud high up on the banks well past and in the branches of trees. I only managed to get out on the water a few times this summer. Brookie streams that are normally so skinny by late summer that you wonder where the fish go are raging and blown out. Everything is kind of sodden and limp.
The dead man was my father who died at the beginning of the summer. Things got off track, things slipped. This blog was one of those things.
First Fish 