I’m ready.
This sort of thing happens this time of year. The novelty of the cold is getting stale and old. I want the sun to have some warmth behind it, or maybe just to see it again. I don’t mind fishing in layers of clothing, but I’d prefer not to. Yeah, El Niño is making things warmer (by the way, the Saturday Night Live Chris Farley El Niño skit is still funny) but it’s winter-warm. I’m ready for real warm.
This is totally unAlaskan and mentally weak of me, but it’s not my fault. I’m wracked with thoughts of hot July days boulder hopping in the Sierra Nevada. It is exactly what it sounds like. You’re in shorts, a t-shirt and wading boots that you wear with neoprene wading socks — your feet get wet, but it’s a warm wet — and you stand, kneel, or spoon large granite boulders, reach your arm over the water and gently place your fly on the surface. Fish bolt out from edges, nooks and deep water to take your fly. It’s awesome. When the sun becomes too much, you just lower yourself into the cold water, and cast upriver to the top of the run. Your toes wrinkle and maybe get chilled, but your forehead still sweats, leaving salt rings on your fishing hat which makes it look more worn, so you look like a veteran fisherman, not some newbie who bought the look-like-a-fisherman-kit.
My buddy Kurt is responsible for these ridiculous longings in mid-January. He’s been prowling our old haunts catching big rainbows and brown trout on rivers that meander out of the Sierra Nevada then flatten as they reach the rolling bottom of California’s Central Valley. It’s winter in California, sure, but if it was 58 degrees and sunny here like it is there, kids would be jumping off the cruise ship docks.
But Kurt’s not the only one who has me emotionally compromised.
I think about deer hunting too, which is a total waste of time, because the season is most of a year away. There is zero point in getting Opening Day ready before the snow is even gone. But I am. Rolling out of a tent in the thick, green alpine is unlike anything else.
My buddy Jesse has been posting pictures and videos of hunting deer on mountain tops. Who does that in January? The season just ended. Leave me alone. Let me think about the steelhead I’m not able to chase because my weekends are filled with basketball and other engagements.
But really the problem isn’t that time is going too slow; instead, things are going too fast.
Before I know it, it will be August. I’ll be living what I’m craving right now. Then August will be over. Then it will be December and then a new year. And again I’ll look back at a collection of memories from the past and wonder how it all went down and how so much time got put between us.
• Jeff Lund is a teacher and freelance writer based in Ketchikan.
