Headed to Rhode Island on Wednesday to check on the rental property and conspire a bit about what it might take to get it sold in the next year or so. If we can manage to do it, it'd be a relief to be free of that albatross.
That house is perhaps the signature example of my poor track record in interpreting the long-term intentions of God for my life. Think you'll be in a place for a decade, end up called away after a year. Bought a house at peak market, and it's subsequently crashed? Looks like you'll be riding out the next ten years as a long-distance landlord.
A good excuse to reconnect with Curtis, though, and keep apprised of the goings-on in the life of his family. We've got a bit of a track record of his receiving major life news whilst we are sharing a truck cab en route to one place or another, which was reinforced yesterday; a job offer, this time. A good, and needed, development.
Also a good excuse to spend a couple of hours chasing some Wood River trout, too. As thin as the results of my early season north country endeavors have been, I figure it couldn't hurt to see what was popping just a couple of hours closer to the equator. The theory paid off reasonably well.
Hit the water just in time for the evening hatch. In the waning sunlight, mayflies dancing in the air above the water. There's no comparison or substitute for casting dry flies to rising trout; no clearer articulation of the purpose for which the discipline was invented, and no greater joy in the culmination of the right fly with the right cast and timing, to the splash of the take and a trout in the net. Watching the tip of the light fiberglass rod bend and shake under the weight of conflict, feeling the energy of life press against the palm and wrist through the reel seat, the electricity of unfiltered, instinctual gratitude that every hunter feels with the nearness of quarry and the promise of hunger satisfied. Of course, the hunger in this case is purely experiential - if not spiritual - rather than physical. But the instinct, and need, runs deep in the human heart, regardless. We're a people born for a fight; in the water, the hunt, the puzzling, the waiting, the explosion, the pressure and, finally, the netted foe, we find an existential and metaphysical release.
There is memory, and nostalgia here, too. It was in RI that I first stumbled in to fly fishing, and here on the Wood that I first put those fledgling disciplines to the test. First casting lessons on the small suburban street in front of Curt's place, nestled in the sprawling ugliness of Coventry-West Warwick. First fish caught on the fly, a tiny hormonal blue gill on a South County pond. But it was here on the Wood River that I was introduced to the fumbling beauty of the art; as a river it retains a special place in my heart for that gift of grace.
In the pre-dusk softness, mosquitos buzzing and mayflies dancing, I am puzzling over a rising trout. Not more than ten feet away, in the shelter of an overgrown bank. Thrashing, consuming, breaking the water in regular intervals; immune to my nearness, uncompelled by my offerings. One fly, then another. Worse casts, better casts, perfect drifts... nothing. Then, the one. The splash, the hit, the pressure and energy of the fight. Fat, strong rainbow in the net.
I am grateful.