A "tedious brief" Essay

 

                    How Anglers Got Their Literature

                              

                         In the beginning was the Word
                                                    St.John

    And then, you and I came along to generate the Word, make it flesh, objectify it, give it body. And the Word continued to increase, each one of us imagining it over and over until its story gets told.

    For us anglers it had to start somewhere. Perhaps it began those eons ago with that little female hominid of whom I dream (shall we call her a “woman”?), who in her sluggish consciousness and those busy new thumb-like things, saw a fish hanging close-in to the bank of an equally sluggish African stream.   

   Something happened… something to do with her lying down, with those strange “thumb-parts” of her hand, deep in the water, going under that fish’s belly, and suddenly her lifting, tossing, throwing-- and the fish flies up out of the water onto the bank.

    She and her young ate it and it was good.

   I want to think that at that instant, the meager consciousness of her small brain conceived. She had thrown that fish not only onto the bank, but also into her brain where it lodged as an IDEA. There, like that original Word, it could reenact itself again tomorrow, and produce a new, another fish.

    With this, the little Mother of us all became the First Fisher. With her, angling and its literature were born.

   Should I go on Boulder creek tomorrow, I would, need to, put into practice, materialize, what she taught me of her primal IDEA, from that first literature, when that original fish entered our consciousness. She haunts me.

   But now, that I can no longer cope with the rigors of Boulder Creek, I am comfortably content with that Idea of Angling-- which serves to remind me of everything else under the sun, and keeps me and my Mac trying to write it all down-- before it’s too late.