Why I fish...

So why do I do this? I'm asked that a lot. Why do you fish? And why so daggone much? Never mind that those that are asking have probably spent more time watching television than I have fishing this week.
The answer is pretty simple really. (in a complicated sort of way) People watch movies or TV or follow a sports team to get away from life for a while. To forget about their lousy job or bills or their horrid spouse. Not me, I'm not out there trying to get away from life. Out there is where I am most alive, where I am free to be completely me.
If you fish a lot you find you don't get away from life at all. Instead you get it under your fingernails, smeared all over your tee shirt and baked into your skull. You even smell it on yourself sometimes when you get back home. Doing something genuine like fishing is reality, all the stuff we do in our "real" lives is absurd when you really think about it.
For me the ultimate, the very best kind of fishing trip is the overnighter, or week long one for that matter. Where, tired from fishing all day, I can sit by the fire. Possibly hear the hoot of a barred owl or just the soft music of the wind in the treetops up on the ridge. Watch the sun set or rise and experience time the way you are supposed to, the way a deer in the woods does. Not the artificial, contrived, fake time we have created to get us to work and back in time to see our favorite TV program. But instead real time where things unfold at just the rate they are supposed to. You cannot make the evening rise on a trout stream happen any earlier. You cannot make the topwater bite on your smallmouth river not end with the coming of the heat of the day. Out here in the "real" real world things happen according to their own rhythm and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
People talk of the beauty of nature and I have seen great beauty while out fishing, thundering waterfalls, tiny mountain streams, first light coming thru the trees, brook trout seemingly painted by the hand of God. Things so beautiful they almost bring tears to your eyes and are beyond mere words. But I've also gotten stuck in the mud, rained on, snowed on, baked by the sun and nearly hit by lightning or washed away in flash floods. I've fished behind factories, under highway overpasses and in bad neighborhoods. I've cut myself, hooked myself, fallen, had my eyes nearly put out by sticks and nearly bashed my brains out. But all of that, the good and the bad, all of the things listed above and ten thousand other things I would never have experienced sitting on the couch.
I think some people have to do certain things. They have to paint, or hunt to feel alive. There are runners who have to run. They would run even if it weren't good for them, even if they could never race. It's just a part of who they are. It's like that with me and fishing, without it I wouldn't be whole. I could never be completely me.
I sometimes get to the grocery store and forget what I came for or where the car is parked. But I can name you every creek or river within a hundred miles of my house and probably half of those within three hundred. And give you a pretty good run down on how their individual food chains differ. I fish for the same reason I breathe. I cannot help it, it's just who I am. A fisherman.