The way I have been stealing fishing hours in the interstices of my overworked, silicon-valley-slave lifestyle of the past year or so, I have always felt like I deserved every damn little bit of goodness and happiness coming from fishing, and therefore haven't noticed something important: it has been GOOD and better than normal, better than before.
This came home to me a moment ago when I was reading back to blogs from a few years ago, when I camped on a delta levee and had a ball in general -- but only picked up a few two-pounders for my troubles. What? Well, generally, that's the delta: if you're not in the right place (in a massive quasi-wilderness of waterways) at the right time (in a swell of tidal currents that changes speed and even directions, daily) then you're out of luck. Sometimes you hit it, often you don't. Sure, I smacked the hell out of small stripers on the San Luis forebay with topwater all through September -- you expect that.
But check it out, on the big old delta, even with my lil kayak program, which limits me to a 10-15 mile range instead of the zipping and zooming 50 miles or more claimed by motorboats, I have been catching good fish every damn trip since they started in October.
October:
November:
December (OK, I took a break in December, but this still looks like good luck, right?):
January, in cold-ass, turbid water:
And last week, one of a dozen-fish FEBRUARY day!!!
Yes, I have been taking this for granted, along with radically wonderful Baja fishing over Christmas break, and Thanksgiving ceviche in Costa Rica . . . what an ungrateful pig I am! I should have been thanking my lucky stars while scarfing down a "Four Fish Feast" on New Year's Eve (sierra-grouper-snook-bonito), and the same for the day I fried up most of that big vermillion rockfish . . . but in flashes, I guess I actually was :)
Reminded of the reminding power of this blog a moment ago, though, I wanted very much to make sure to remind myself: though I'm aging and achey and overworked and disgruntled, I have been having it pretty damn good. So I should shut up --
There was great power in a wolf, even in a coyote. You have made him into a freak -- a toy poodle, a Pekingese, a lapdog. -- John Fire Lame Deer
I'll need to tread lightly here, as I come from a dog-loving family. Some of my fiercest sisters love dogs to distraction. One of them passionately advocates for pit bulls, while the other takes in any well-behaved mutt with a big heart (which you might think would incline her fondly toward me, but is not always the case). My mother continues, at 70-something, to care for the latest in a string of cairn terriers of varying degrees of likability. My maternal grandmother and grandfather are infamous for naming all of their poodles "Twiggy." Twiggy Two, Twiggy Three, Twiggies four, five . . . how high did the Twiggies go, anyway? I lost count long before we lost both of the grandparents.
Needless to say, those dear old Twiggies are exactly what Lame Deer refers to above. How did we get to a point where a wolf was transformed into a poodle, and not only did humanity fail to be appalled by this turn of events, but was made strangely happy. "Here's my best friend at last!" we said, instead of "What in tarnation have we created here?
Let's put our domesticated dog and a wild dog side by side, in very literal terms. This is exactly what happened when, a couple months ago, our local (and very lovable) golden doodle (a perfect name for my current purposes, I must say) came in direct contact with coyotes. The doodle belongs to my landlord and landlady, while the coyotes belong just to the general neighborhood of hills and houses. Every once in a while they start to raise an unholy chaos of cries, barks and yips in the middle of a sunny day, and then, some minutes later, your human ears start to hear the ambulance siren on Old San Jose Road that set them off. The coyotes are loud, and they're close. It is my belief that they live near the top of a little arroyo that I could hit with a stone thrown from the landlord's yard.
And, Rosie, golden doodle-cum-Escape Artist, broke through the fence one day and made her way down there. The result was a few hundred dollars worth of veteranarian stitches, a few shaved patches in wiry white fur, and a somewhat chastened domesticated creature. Much to their credit, the doodle's owners didn't go crazy with blood lust for coyotes. Unlike certain ranchers described by Lame Deer, they eschewed poison or booby-trapped carrion, and viewed the problem in terms of supply (domesticated dogs encroaching on coyotes) rather than a problem of demand (coyotes creeping up and trying to eat us all in our backyards).
Just for fun, let's take a minute to imagine this particular encroachment from a coyote's eye-view . . . and I don't mean that we should try to morph our minds into the coyote's, but rather that we should try to imagine what it would be like if some human creature, domesticated by who-knows-which unwise alien race, were to suddenly come at us out of left field . . .
That's right, you're sitting at home watching TV with your kids after a well-earned dinner, when -- yikes!! -- suddenly, right through the front door, sweeps an oversized, crazy-looking dude with, say, chartreuse-colored hair and, say, hot pink skin on comically long and ill-proportioned limbs . . . I mean, this guy just does not look natural; there's something really really off about him . . . he's got big bugged-out eyes and a clumsy way of standing just an arm's reach from you as he shouts right at you and your kids, in some almost-understandable but completely ridiculous quasi-language, apparently very upset and aggressive about something you can't make out.
The guy is making no fucking sense, and he is completely ruining your relaxing evening. More than that, he appears to be a vague (if bizarre) threat to your offspring's safety. So, after trying to talk to the thing and give it obvious verbal cues to leave, you swat out at it in frustration. And lo! a weak, feeble blow from you knocks it right over, and it runs off with a bunch of high-pitched, pathetic crying. "I'll be damned," you think, and settle back down into the couch.
Coyotes confronting a white-furred, long-limbed "dog" barking into their den might see it something like that, and might just give the thing a gentle bite to send it on its way.
I'm exceedingly fond of Rosie the doodle, so don't tell her that I would like very much to make friends out of the coyotes. It ain't gonna happen, I know. Those guys down in the arroyo are living on the lam, and no doubt they have made a way of life out of studiously avoiding humans even while living in our midst. But I sense that, in a perfect world, like one in which I could live permanently on the shores of Mag Bay most of the year, I might just be able to make quasi-friends and semi-pets out of some wild coyotes. I think they'd accept bowls of water and fish carcasses regularly, and hopefully they would conclude that it were best not to try and eat up the strange human creature apparently providing them. Dogs have proven to be smart that way.
If that happened, I guess the coyotes would just end up being mildly domesticated. But they'd still be coyotes! And I think that's what I'm really wanting here: a little less domestication, and a little more wildness, in whatever creature I pick for my best friend.
That's where you have fooled yourselves. You have altered, declawed, and malformed not only your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves.
