Opening Day

For the past I don’t know how many years, I’ve observed the start of the baseball season by watching the first televised game (which traditionally was the Cincinnati Reds game, but since ESPN has taken over the broadcast, it’s that network’s team of preference, the damn Yankees) while eating a bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts and drinking a beer (or two or three or . . .). I’ve never been an avid baseball fan, rather a casual fan. And “casual” is the perfect word to describe why I like the game – why so many others apparently don’t like the game – the relaxed pace, determined by play and not the threat of the clock, punctuated by occasional excitement, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exasperating. You can decide how to watch a baseball game, either following intently the decisions and outcomes of each pitch or allowing the game to run as background to conversation, reading, cleaning, or driving (while listening on the radio, perhaps my favorite way of experiencing the sport). When traveling, I try to find a bar to watch whatever local team is playing, getting as near as one probably can to sampling the native culture.

So opening day 2011 is finally here. The peanut shells are on the floor. The empty beer cans are scattered about. All’s well with the world. (Though the Yankees win – damn!)

Goa Beaches

Walking along the beaches of Goa, India, one is harangued by young men (mostly; we did see at least one young woman), urging us to follow them to a beach chair with umbrella. We don’t know if they were employees of the cafes/bars that line the upper tiers of the beaches, or if they were freelancers, working off tips from drink and food orders. Probably the latter. The chairs were public, so they were apparently offering an ad hoc service. As we walked along the water’s edge (Arabian Sea), they would swoop down the sand, ardently urging us to take refuge in a beach chair in front of their respective café or bar, sometimes ardently, relentlessly, sometimes to the point of imagined homicide. And often they would be a mere 50 feet or so from each other, close enough to see and hear our refusal of the offer from their colleagues. They weren’t incessant beggars, but most often soft-sell, even charming hawkers, though they never tried to differentiate their particular venue from the next. We understood their situation in general (this was their meager living), and we even grew to find it amusing (“Congratulations! You’re the 100^th to offer us a beach chair on the last half mile of this beach!”), but it was hard to comprehend the incessant badgering. Yet as we walked back up the beach later, we noticed that there were fewer beach-chair-hawkers and more doughy tourists in the beach chairs (mostly over-aged and overweight Brits in bikinis and Speedos, requiring the adverting of eyes). So apparently the hard sell works.

First Spring Fishing Trip

My first (early) spring fishing trip to northeast Iowa looked promising. The forecast was for sun and upper 50s on Wednesday, then clouds and lower 60s Thursday, then down to upper 40s Friday morning. Most of the snow in the valleys has melted but not so much as to flood the streams. Last year’s vegetation has been tamped down by winter’s snow and early flooding a couple of weeks ago, making for easy footing along the banks. And there never is much pressure this early in the season.

My first stop was Ensign Hollow, north of Strawberry Point, a small, winding catch-and-release, artificial-only stream. For half a mile up the stream, stopping at maybe a dozen small runs and riffles, I didn’t see or feel a fish. But it’s typical this time of the year, in high water, for the fish to spend much of the day hunkered under bank hides, not feeding, so I didn’t get frustrated, just enjoyed being outside in the warmth, the quiet, the only sound of birds and running stream. And in the next-to-the-last run on the upper part of the stream, a run where I’ve had luck in the past, I did hook into a 10-inch brown trout (good sized for this stream) that I maneuvered to the lower end of the run where I would have had to slip down the bank into the water to release it if it wouldn’t have thankfully flipped the fly out of its lip before I had to.

But Ensign Hollow – and one fish – would wind up being the highlight of the trip.

I drove on up to Decorah, where I was spending the night, and since it was still mid-afternoon, decided to drive to South Pine, a tiny stream that holds the only population of native brook trout in Iowa. I’ve fished South Pine probably half a dozen times, and I don’t think I’ve once been able to find the parking area without getting lost in the maze of dirt roads in the area. This time I was lost for nearly an hour before finally recognizing where I was and where I needed to go. To get to the stream from the parking area, you need to hike down beside a corn field, then further down through a narrow valley, without a path of any kind, through trees, vines, brush, and, this time of year, snow. I remembered the trek being about half a mile, but as I cut my way through the thicket, I realized it was closer to a mile. And when I finally got to the stream, I was reminded why so few make the effort to get there.

South Pine is no more than two or three feet wide in most places, widening out to ten to twelve next to the bluffs, but too shallow and slow there to hold fish. As I walked upstream, I quickly saw that there wasn’t much fishing on the stream – the water was low, there were several bank hides that had collapsed into the water, and there were no fish visible in the clear water. I walked the quarter mile up from the fence at the east end of the stream, but was only able to put my fly into two small runs, with no fish apparent. A frustrating trek. But not as frustrating as the trek back to the car. I didn’t get lost, but I did get fouled in the snow and brush. At a certain point, I looked up the hill, along a deer run, and thought it might be best to hike up the hill, which I assumed would lead me to the cornfield that would lead to the car. But that hike would be circuitous, losing the deer run, through deep snow at times, thickets of vine, some with thorns. By the time I reached the corn field out of the woods, I was sweating and looking out over a landscape of rubble and snow and mud that I only thought led back to the car. Fortunately, it did, finally. And I drove back to Decorah, checked into the motel, and had a nice dinner in town that night, not fish.

The next morning I drove up through Waukon, north to one of my favorite streams, Waterloo, to fish the take-and-release section south of the Highway 76 bridge, near the Minnesota border. I was surprised to see a truck in the parking area, but figured the stream was long enough for two of us. I’d heard on the news in the morning that flooding was expected in the next few days, and was worried the water might already be high and muddy. It was a bit higher than usual, not too bad. But the fish didn’t seem to be anywhere in the stream. I fished from the parking area up to the bridge, not able to get down the bank to about half of the runs or pools because of my bad knee, but didn’t get even a bump, let alone a strike or see a sign of a fish. As I was fishing one of the last pools back near the parking lot, the other fisher from the truck came over and asked how I was doing. “Nothing,” I said. “That makes me feel better,” he said. “Nothing for me either.” And that made me feel somewhat better as well. It wasn’t something I was or wasn’t doing. Or at least I was or wasn’t doing the same wrong thing as this other sorry angler.

But as I waded through the stream back to the parking lot, and across the still melting snow, I stopped and just stood still, looking down the valley, at the bare gray trees etched against the snow on the hills, the soft whisper of the wind. And that seemed enough, worth it. As the old saw goes, it's called “fishing,” not “catching.”

Art For Art's Sake

One of the nice things about visiting art museums is that you might not only be able to view works of art hung on the walls or strewn on the floors, but also view works of art being created just about anywhere. At the Louvre in Paris a few years ago, I was fascinated with all the art students (or what I took to be art students) as they copied in meticulous detail the works of the masters, learning style, form, technique.

We were at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago today, having lunch at Puck’s restaurant. At a table next to us was a thirty-something woman, alone, who had finished her salad and fruit cup, still sipping her coffee. She had a small sewing kit on the table. I didn’t think much about it at first. But then I saw she was running a needle and thread through something – sewing on a button? darning a sock? Looking closer, it turned out she was lacing various colored thread through a dollar bill, though I wasn’t close enough to see if she was embroidering a pattern or wording, or if it was just a random abstract. But it had to be art. Didn’t it? Surely she was a student, honing her craft, fostering her vision? I considered going over to ask what her work was about, perhaps it was part of a series. But it struck me that I might have been under a false assumption, that she might not have been an artist at all, but rather a crazed defacer of federal currency. After a while, she packed up her sewing kit, put on her coat. For a moment, the stitched dollar remained on the table, and I thought for a moment it was meant as an elaborate tip, monetary art as gratuity – how great would that be? But she picked it up, stuck it in her pocket, and left. Leaving me in confusion. Which, come to think of it, is how I’m left with much of contemporary art.

Forecasting the Weather

I used to check the weather forecast, TV or online, for information, to get some idea of what I should expect as I ventured forth for the day, or the next few days if I were taking a trip. I still check the weather forecast regularly, but now not so much for information as for entertainment. It’s humorous to follow the changing forecast, day to day, sometimes hour to hour, seeing it change regularly, yet still presented with the assurance of meteorological science, as if meteorology were a science. Truth is, you might as well scatter chicken bones on the ground, or dance around a burnt cedar stump, dressed in diapers, chanting some Mayan supplication. Or just be ready for anything.

First Sign of Spring

A few days ago, on my morning walk, I saw my first robin of spring. A few minutes later I saw my second. And a few minutes after that I saw my next dozen, a crowd of them flitting on the still-brown grass. And every day since, I see them everywhere, the prevailing harbinger of spring, returned from their winter in the woods. Robins don’t migrate south, but rather to the nearest forest where they had lived for millennia before humans migrated to the continent, built cities and then expanses of lawns that provided the robin with a convenient buffet of worms and insects in the manicured grass and grass roots. But when the snow falls and the ground freezes, the buffet closes, and the robins return to the forest and feeding on the insects in the bark of trees. So when the snow melts and the ground thaws, the robin is well-positioned to emerge and become the proverbial first sign of spring.

In the next week or so, though, we’ll no longer notice the muted robin as it recedes to the background in its gray and rust coloring, replaced by first the flowering hyacinth, crocus, daffodil, and then the more vivid yellow goldfinch, bright blue jay, sleek cedar waxwing. The grass will grow green, the trees will bud, leaf out, and bloom white, pink, purple, red. The robin will still be there. Just not as prominent as it is today.