Gone (Fly) Fishing

Flyfishing, who would have thought that I’d ever have a blog entry about flyfishing, let alone that it would be my last one about my summer in Maine, and yet here I am, actually sitting in the airport, ready to head back home, writing about fish.

But I’ll paint some sort of picture so that at least the experience of flyfishing makes sense, if not how it wraps up my whole summer.

Before my semester was over, I spoke to my religion professor. We had a long, meandering conversation in his book-stuffed office and one of his “assignments” for me this summer was to read “The River Why.” It is a fly-fishing novel/coming-of-age story, and, though I was not necessarily instructed to take up fly-fishing, the establishment of this fishing form was at least a seedling in my psyche.

Now, about a 10 minute hike/walk down from the farm is the Kennebec River. It is a gorgeous mid-Maine river that has a medium size island in the middle of it where the Lupine Farm Trail opens out into the river bank, and the water level has been quite low this summer, low enough to walk out to the island on dry land some days and for Bill to guess that the deepest channel of the river is no more than 17-feet deep.



Speaking of Bill, he is key to this whole thing. You see, I came up here to see it was like to work on a farm, and it was Bill who taught me everything.

Whether it was throwing around hay,
driving the tractor,
or fixing up the barn doors

Bill showed me the ropes. And when I had one of the biggest highs (fly-fishing) of my last days in Maine, it was Bill who was the one who showed me.

Picture of bill’s cast versus my first one.

note how his is smooth and mine looks awful.

But as I was standing there thigh deep in the warm water, thinking of flicking my wrist between 11 and 1 (o’clock) I realized that I was simply experiencing the most basic form of my whole summer. Flyfishing is a very active participation in a rhythm, in this case casting for fish, and my whole summer had been the process of me settling into farm life, figuring out what went out with the line as I moved it back and forth, and what sort of practice was needed to make everything smooth. And you know what? I think I found it. It took awhile, and I didn’t always feel helpful, and it was frustrating to be bumbling at times, but I knew that it was an age-old rhythm with my own particular touch: a little wild at times, and with some neglect, but always done with a big goofy grin on my face.

So this was the project of much of my summer,
discover the rhythm, and when I did it was beautiful and each day seemed to just add to the next.

But I must say that while each regular day was good, the special ones really stood out.
whether it was sitting at the views of Acadia national park,


playing around with my cousins

running or having fun at the beach

(all of these being suggestion of Emily’s or things planned by her to enrich my summer)

it was simply a huge gift. They were surprise moments of an experience already wonderful in itself but suddenly made that much brighter and more memorable by perfect moments.

So when I saw a swirl in the eddy and cast out my line, I found my summer in a nutshell. The rhythm itself had become the gift, and anything I caught was an overwhelming blessing.
So in that moment of realization of my last gift, I couldn’t believe my luck, because, with plenty of yelping and yeehowing, I caught and landed a small mouth bass as the culmination of and celebration of my time on the Kennebec and my summer in Maine.

Thanks for the memories, thanks for the friendships, I’ll be back soon, but in the mean time, as a good Arkansan must say,

Gone Fishin’