It's been almost a year since I last fished with Oliver Shapiro, though it doesn't seem as long. During that outing, he spoke of an essay about how fishing slows time, an idea serving as an antidote to how the years seem to wing by as we get older. That much said, both Oliver and myself look forward to retirement. I can't wait for the next five years to pass, as I hope to retire in 2025, but part of me seems wiser than my eagerness. It keeps telling me to appreciate the time I have right now. No matter that I would rather not participate in the hurly burly of a supermarket. That part of me knows I would rather do that than be dead. The wonder of the Great Beyond aside, the point of living can be to do it well, even when it seems as if rewards are slim.
Like pike. I paid keen attention when one of them came after Oliver's jerkbait. By the commotion at the surface, I felt sure it was a pike, though Oliver hadn't actually seen the fish to make a positive identification. Largemouths exist in the river, too.
It was off-color, but not as bad as it gets. We tried a spot new to me, though Oliver had scouted it once about 10 years ago. Trails took us well upstream, and though we found fish as the photo shows, nothing came at our plugs as the pike attacked during the previous two outings I took this year. (The first was far and away the best.)
One comes here with an expectation of "river monsters" like those represented in photos posted on Facebook, but reality offers the best reward. No doubt plenty of big fish exist, but it seems clear that only a very few anglers, if even that many, catch them well over 30 inches regularly. I have no plans to keep treading the mud until I start catching them myself. Pike fascinate me, but I'm committed to my canoes and other species as well. On the previous outing, a big pike probably over 30 inches did come after my plug, and the way the water moved around and over its body reminds me of the poet Charles Baudelaire when he wrote of "the wing of madness" clipping him.
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