I doubt the rivers are high, even though significant rain fell yesterday, but I'm not going back out there in the cold and wind. I did a version of that last week, and while this week wouldn't be the same--of course not--I don't care. I thought of heading over to Round Valley for a photo shoot. It's been many weeks since I've done one, and since my suspicion is that the water's got rather low, I'd like to at least hear that from someone.
The sky is perfectly blue, too.
Turns out I asked Google last night if firmware updates for digital cameras--my Nikon D850 and D7100--are important. AI told me they're "very important," and though I could find no evidence that my image quality will improve, I'm going to go ahead and install the latest firmware for each camera.
In other news of the day, my day off, Jim Hutchinson at The Fisherman asked me if a January 13 deadline for a feature about South Jersey largemouths will work. (I'm interviewing Thomas Wyatt who does especially well.) Told Jim I'll contact Wyatt. I'm sure it will work out, but since I have another deadline for Jim coming up on February 1st for a Hotspot article about the Pequest River, I figure I might as well go ahead and get started. The interview for that one Gerry Dumont and I already did, when we also talked about the Musconetcong. The Musconetcong story is published online, but I believe you need a Fisherman subscription to access it.
Good reason to go ahead and subscribe.
I guess every year about this time, I look back over it's course. I began last year fishing the river trout, though I also ice fished Cranberry Lake at the end of January and did well with pickerel. Caught a trout in February, and though I caught nothing at all in March, I caught plenty of stocker trout in April and some largemouths. Loads of largemouths and some pickerel in May, some trout, a salmon, big crappie, few panfish. In June Brenden Kuprel and I tried once for muskies, but on that day I ended up catching 15 largemouths on Senko-type worms.
It's really not all about the fish. I'd say more about months that followed, but all of my outings besides a couple very short ones are posted about. We honor fish. I certainly don't discount that. Fishermen call them "beasts," feeling the power of big ones. One of my curiosities is the relationship between beasts and gods. And one of the things I notice about beasts is their close affinity with mythic gods, though with one big difference--beasts actually exist. Or do they? Species exist. A beast is something indefinite, or perhaps the behavior of a large animal when it inspires awe.
In that sense, Paleolithic men experienced beasts before species became recognized.
Many believe in God, though I know of no one but a Wiccan woman who believes in gods and goddesses in the plural. I believe God is the information that etches itself into existence, the result being a real world. Like the DNA of things, only that it also assumes our personal qualities on a larger scale than our own, so that the world--indifferent to us otherwise--has the potential to receive our addresses and answer back to us.
Maybe the "etching" is just the Higgs boson subatomic particle. I'd ask my son.
Some would say my notion of God as information suggests that we live in a simulation, but to believe we live in a simulation is to divest the world of truth. I believe the etching itself results in all the flourishing substances that make up a tangible world. It's that very tangibility--the materiality of things like water--that assures us when we value such active presence that it's real. And yet even though our very life is supported by things in the world out there, there is no care for us on its part, no meaning for us besides our own responses and the address we launch through each of our own life projects.
Mine isn't all fishing. I'm just as interested in what my thinking produces, as I am in what my fishing line connects me to. Either way, I wonder. But then, I get the hint of an answer from the very angle from which I cast a doubt, hot on the retrieve in an instant.
What's the use? Well, if you ask a physicist who spends day after day at a task practiced some 40 or 50 years now to no avail, he'll say that when we do create more energy from nuclear fusion than put into the reaction process, we'll solve a lot of the energy problem. It's always thinking...that solves problems, which should be a no brainer for anyone,
Some think thinking is God, as everything we humans address and respond to amounts to recognition. Or more to the point, that no God exists. Only the thinking in each individual brain amounts to qualities we formerly gave "God."
Even the Higgs boson has no meaning other than what we give it. Perhaps the Higgs boson never existed until we delineated its form, allowing it to function just so, as if indeed it has a meaning.
Does the intellect etch the identity of things into existence? I still believe God does that. Not as any Creationist's design, but as the source of the meaning we endow the world with. A differentiated, no less flourishing, existence indifferent to us, though difference itself implies the meaning we do find. Anyone who believes man's intellect "etched" the fossil remains of Tyrannosaurus rex, having "etched" millions of years into the past, is inviting intellectual chaos rather than any meaning.
"What is the meaning of this?!"
Do bass behave just so, in such a way that we can answer the question regarding what they are? To the degree we do know them. Every week it seems a new technique addresses something new about the fish.
Anyhow, I did catch a 20-incher this year, photographed below. Late July, I believe that was. Another was 19 3/4 inches, another 19, and one other might have been 19, didn't measure the latter fish. Every year I catch a number of 18-inchers, and this year was an exception of maybe fewer than usual.
The walleye? Weighed in at Dow's at five-pounds, 15-ounces. The third walleye I've weighed in there at just that same weight.
