Wampum is Money Symbol Better Than Nothing

Wonder and a hole not wide enough to fall into. Or dive, as some would. Brine freezes at 29, and the taste of salt and other admixtures is curiously a reminder of warmth, as if the proverbial salt of sanity assures by its actual substance on the mouth. A wetsuit used to be the actual protection for clammers, but we were always at sea in the winter, consumed except for the point of focus behind our foreheads. Comparing ice fishing to that is like comparing a picnic to survival hunting, but when the adventures were done for the day, we hauled onion sacks of what once served as wampum, money, into the wholesale market, and hot showers never, ever felt better than afterwards. 

It's like an object lesson. Where does money really come from? Banks? No. It's made. And all that is made begins with real stuff taken from nature.

These kids didn't fish any money through the hole. But they caught some pickerel. Not one of them would harbor any misgiving against money, either, so long as it's real and not fabricated. Not that wampum serves any purpose today other than symbolic, but that symbol is better than nothing at all, and debt is less than zero. 

I'd rather work a bay in sub-freezing temperatures and earn money than pretend.   

Clouds Carried Obediently Like Mass Transit Shifts City Status Quo

Forty two-degree breeze, clouds carried obediently like mass transit shifts the city status quo. Sometimes Round Valley Reservoir is burdened from above. Nothing is looking down as something moves by, and nothing lingers to hang along mountain edges like spirit imbibing substance. My boots found enough crunch in the gravel to ground senses to water within range I cast to, which promised trout somewhat, but the clouds didn't seem to swing low enough and as suspected, no hits. 

One of the men I met fishing two days ago had been out since 8:30 a.m. and caught two 18-inch trout.

I've caught plenty when the sky is a blue dome. But when the weather seems angry, when clouds bear down low and spit rain like they mean it, that's fishing weather.

Back to Improve on Development with Reacquired Means

As if things wild, given, undeveloped become the height of civilized achievement. Before cave walls were etched and painted by the first artists, man was a perceptual being without spiritual response, wasn't yet man. Perhaps bones were the first tools, as if knowledge of death began to awaken at the same time.

Most are born within walls and stay within walls. The cold of winter shakes them to the bone, frightens. 

A very few of us find our way outside. Even fewer make it back to improve on development, having re-acquired means where they begin.

Mountain Edges Diffuse in Thin Haze

Soft as a baby's skin, mountain edges diffuse in thin haze suggested mounds of ice cream. They relieved tension as suddenly and objectively as touch and taste. Released at Round Valley Reservoir, I could have been walking on clouds at 38,000 feet for a few moments of realization about how the past decade of my life fishing has ensured my novel writing. I don't choose the word assure to describe this, because actual security in physical conditions makes the difference. If I were pent up behind walls all day and did not get out into the wide open world, I couldn't think with the freedom I enjoy. It's not that the novel is all about fishing--it is in part--but that creativity is generated naturally.