Dreams vs. Memories
This past week my daughter went to her high school formal. She looked beautiful and it was a bit of a shock to realize how quickly she has turned into a beautiful young lady!
Where does time go? It seems like just yesterday when I held her for the first time, or when she rode around the porch on her little bike with training wheels. How about those little squeals of delight when she would reel in bluegill after bluegill and I would take them off the hook and put on another worm.
The scary part of all of this is the fact that I am getting older just as quickly. It could possibly be setting the stage for a midlife crisis!
I heard somewhere that if your dreams are bigger than your memories then you are probably still doing ok. If that's the case then I'm probably doing really well. I still have lots of dreams, but when I do look back at my memories, I don't necessarily remember the big dream that I was after, and so my memories are small. Usually when I think about an event in the past, it's some small little happening that comes to mind. Something unexpected that happened while in pursuit of accomplishing another item on my bucket list. I like to think of these things as gifts, little things that you can only hope will happen without actually knowing what to hope for. Most of these are random and insignificant and barely noticeable when they happen, yet meaningful enough that they aren't easily forgotten.
Early spring is a great time for fishing, especially if you are fishing for trout or Northern Pike. I don't consider myself to be much of a fisherman, but between spring turkey season that ends in mid May and the start of bow season in September, I tend to find a fishing pole in my hand quite frequently, and so I guess it's fair to call me a fisherman. They say "birds of a feather flock together", and so I often find myself talking to fishermen. This past week was no different. I found myself with several friends, talking about the importance of steel leaders when fishing for pike.
And this led to a memory from my younger years and a little story telling of my own.
I had a Coleman canoe and an '87 Dodge Ram at the time. My cousin Mark and I pulled some things together and headed up to the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area in Minnesota for two weeks, chasing our dream of catching some big ole pike and canoeing and camping.
We paddled and portaged our way towards the interior, away from the people and more popular areas. We had also located a small lake on the map named Record Lake, that didn't have a portage trail going to it. And so we decided to muscle and bushwhack our way to Record Lake and try our luck there for at least one of the days.
When on such a trip, going light is what we strive for, because you have to carry all of your gear from lake to lake. And so I only had one Zara Spook in my arsenal. I wasn't aware of it's ability at the time, but since then the Spook has become my favorite top water lure for pike and bass. We made it to Record Lake and immediately started fishing.
I had an eight inch steel leader connecting my line to the Spook and was casting and working it back or "walking the dog", as we call it. Little twitches that cause the lure to dart from side to side. Apparently I had it right because a big Pike came up from the back and, wham, hit my lure, leader and line, and cut the line with it's razor sharp teeth. I didn't even get a chance to set the hook. I was minus a Zara Spook and there was a fish out there with a new piece of jewelry hanging from it's lip. We caught a couple of fish and then headed on to other lakes and camping spots, fishing and seeing moose and loons and all of those other good things that happen out there. Several days later, we paddled back towards Record Lake. I wanted my Spook back. We didn't portage the canoe up to the lake this time, but hiked up to where the water flowed out of the lake. And there it was. The pike must have spit it out and it floated to the outlet.
Mark always says that I can fall into a barrel of crap and come out smelling like a rose. That's his way of calling me lucky. Call it luck or whatever, acknowledging that the little things in life are often just as important as the big ones is key. We caught some decent pike on that trip, but my favorite memories are the Spook, catching moths and feeding them to the toads that came up to our fire, and discovering how the war dance came into being. That's right. We discovered it one evening. We were sitting by the fire. The wind kept shifting and we would have to move to get away from the smoke. Then the mosquitoes came out. Before we knew what was happening, we were dancing around the fire, slapping ourselves and cursing the mosquitoes, whooping and a hollerin. We decided then and there that that was how war dancing and such was started.
And the fact that all these things happened approximately thirty years ago and I can't hardly remember the fish that we caught or how many moose that we saw, says a lot!
And so my dreams will always be bigger than my memories. But in chasing those dreams, no matter how big they seem, I'll be looking back at the old memories and waiting for those new ones to happen. And maybe one day all of those little memories will add up to being bigger than my biggest dream. And when it does, that will be ok.
