Fishing vs. Catching

When I stepped outside the cabin this morning, the creekside meadow in muted colors of pre-dawn looked more like an impressionist’s watercolor than an actual scene… But minutes later the sun swooped above the ridge opposite, and the meadow suddenly popped with all the vibrant maroons and golds of September in Stanley. Or maybe that’s just when my coffee kicked in. ;)

Yesterday’s “hiccups” have been addressed–the Lodge staff kindly cleaned our chimney, I got batteries at the general store for my dead Bluetooth keyboard, and the Editor has found toothpaste. We met him at the grocery store yesterday before leaving town, and he was ribbing me about the previous day’s blog on packing: “You use a LIST?!” Oh yeah–I’d be liable to forget fingers & toes if they weren’t stuck on, let alone fripperies like toothbrush & undies. “Toothbrush!” he yelped with a stricken look, and went bounding back toward the toiletries aisle. Guess I should have mentioned toothpaste too.

But here I am, revived keyboard in my lap, ensconced in one of the cushioned adirondack chairs lining the Lodge’s main porch. The lawn slopes down to the sandy beach and the lake, shark-teeth of the mountain skyline towering behind the sun-spangled water. The Right Hand (a.k.a. Office Manager) and her husband are hiking the Fishook Trail; The Photographer (toting some of her 20 pounds of camera equipment) is prowling the shoreline; and her husband and mine have marched to the water with poles and tackle box, declaring their intention of terrorizing the fish. We’ve brought fish recipes just in case, though we’ve been warned that “the fishing is better than the catching” here at the lake. Happily, ours is a group of people as content with experience as with result.

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Thought I’d see how the “fishing experience” was coming along, so I wandered down to the water to find The Editor emerging from a swim (brave soul–it’s a pleasant temperature, but I’m in jeans & a flannel shirt) and the other gents up to their hips with lines in the water. I retrieved our (amazingly still dry) camera from my husband’s pants pocket, and retreated with it to a driftwood log just in time for the excitement of a hooked bull trout. I managed to catch photographic evidence of the flopping in the shallows (the trout, not the spouse) before it (the trout, not the spouse) escaped its hook. A flurry of reinvigorated discussion of lures followed, along with a quick census of numbed toes (the fishermen agree that waders are handy items–not so much for keeping your feet dry, but because you can pee in them and keep your feet warm). The Photographer threatened to make earrings from the “leopard spinners,” but was told she’d have to limit her tackle-box raid to items that hadn’t just caught a fish–now the boys are back in the water with the leopard spinners on their lines…

Me? I’ve got the keyboard balanced on my driftwood log–just another day at the office for an Idaho travel-writer!