Bestow Value on the Adverse Brave the Weather

I should have photographed Oliver Round fighting his 18-inch smallmouth bass. He's had a breakneck busy schedule at work without much opportunity to get out and fish, so it's especially unfortunate he lost that bass, though his having hooked and fought it, complete with aerial display, was a lot better than not. 

Caught the smaller walleye and a hybrid on an ultralight-light power, 5 1/2-foot spinning rod I built from a St. Croix blank that put me back $70.00--just for the blank--years ago. Six-pound mono. What a fight! The big one fought very hard on my son's Speed Stick, but the walleye that I'm pretty sure didn't weigh four pounds--I put it back--put up a great fight on that light rod. "Maybe a catfish," I said at one point, as if 10 pounds was dragging. 

The hybrid was 17 1/2 inches.

That big one in the photograph above? It's the third five-pound, 15-ounce walleye I've had weighed in at Dow's. Unless any of the three weighed six pounds before I had them weighed in, I've never hit the six-pound mark! I was so sure I did today!

Raw weather felt good because fishy. I know people think wretched weather is that. No matter how you romanticize it--and I do romanticize it--there's an objective element in its being adverse. I don't argue against that. I just know--otherwise--that you can bestow value on things adverse. And probably live to ripe old age, too...if not live longer than you would had you not been brave. 

Even cigarettes. Jeez, I confess I used to smoke. They are medicinal. I never hear anyone say that or write that, but they not only put off anxiety--if just enough to get an edge over it that lasts a bit--they put you in a meditative space. They will kill you, if nothing else will, though it remains likely something else will. Of course, they complicate one's health, too, so whatever kills you might not have if you didn't smoke. But a lot of medicines are adverse for health otherwise, which is not to say, either, that smoking is wise to take up. I really do not recommend it. I wish cigarettes would go away, because I hate to see people hooked on them. It's better to find out what causes you anxiety and deal with it. It's even possible that the attempt to escape anxiety by smoking only elevates that anxiety. 

All I know is that since I quit three years ago, I've desired smoking very little. It makes me feel I should have quit at age 25, but of course, I really should never have smoked. Nevertheless, to attest to smoking's medicinal quality, I began smoking in the University of Pennsylvania Hospital, aged 19, while suffering "the most severe manic-depression I have ever seen in all my 20 years of practice," according to the Director of Psychiatry of that university hospital of the Ivy League, Richard Brecht, who served as my doctor. My father knew whatever hit me was immense. He was not wasting a cent on anything less than great care. When Dr. Brecht told me that, after I had come back around, he held my gaze unflinchingly, a big smile growing on his face. He was truly amazed, and I loved the guy for loving his subject matter and admiring such survival of total annihilation. He started to talk about Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway--manic-depressives he admired, but this guy! Right in front of him in his office! But I took a cigarette from another patient on the hall and smoked it...Dr. Brecht never complained at all. Ah, smoking did help. Talk about things adverse! Many people think manic-depression is horrible, but if you yourself are manic-depressive, I doubt you really believe that. The artistic temperament overlapping with the qualities of illness facilitates the ability to romanticize manic-depression, and no matter what others tell you, they can't take that from you. Sturm und drang! Heavy weather, man!  

I had four days of fighting urges after I quit smoking. Just said no to them. Never bothered with any of the techniques. No drug. No nicotine patch. Just NO.

A little more on the great adversity, the best book on manic-depression I've read is Kay Redfield Jamison's Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament , but according to another book, Manic-Depression and Creativity , even Isaac Newton, the physicist, was manic-depressive, not to mention that the illness is that of the saints. (Often nicknamed the Divine Madness.) And rock 'n roll. Certainly. 

China Grove!

The artists Jamison's book refers to are mostly writers and musicians, like poets Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, composers Robert Schumann and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

Long digression today, but who wants to leave the world without letting his readers know just a little about him? I've got 30 years left, perhaps, but I don't want to pass on opportunity when it arises. 

The fish got caught on small herring. I always used to believe the big herring are better, but they told us at Dow's the small herring have been doing it. So we got a dozen-and-a-half small, a dozen large. I cast & cast a Binsky. Oliver cast a Sonic. No hits. Oliver did miss a hit along rocks on what I think was a Senko-type worm. My Yum Dinger only got pegged once by what I believe was a yellow perch. 

I did mark fish as deep as 39 feet, which really surprised me, but most were 20 to 30 feet deep. Water temperature 70 degrees at the surface, go figure with fish swimming as deep as 39 feet! All of the fish I caught came on no more than size 10 trebles as weight. The biggest came from the shallowest water, besides Oliver's smallmouth, which came from the same 15 feet or so. Don't know how deep the herring swam down otherwise.     

  

Released the smaller walleye

Teeth! They don't cut line.

Lake Hopatcong in the Fall