Sat, Jul 04 2009
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Published October 26, 2008 12:04 am - The older you get, easier it becomes to sit back, reflect I crawled out of my sleeping bag and sat there on the gravel bar looking at the bluff across the river, emerging from the fog little by little.
It was still, except for the sound of rushing water over a shoal just below our camp. A few years ago I would have been in a hurry to get some fishing done, but that bluff, and the big sycamore that framed it fascinated me. The colors of October creeping up that rocky crag as the fog slowly disintegrated had me thinking of other things than catching a fish. At times, I am sort of a philosophical type. Dennis Whiteside had a fire going, and there was a cup of coffee to finish. I thought about the fact that the world seemed so far away. No doubt somewhere there were hordes of people worrying about the economy and the stock market. I felt a little guilty being so content with a rock bluff and the smell of a campfire. We hadn’t seen a soul in three days, and it was wonderful. Our only real problem that morning was dry firewood. It had rained much of the day before, and the boats had quite a bit of water in them. The skillet was going to have to be washed out before we could fry some eggs, and the cool front following the rain was going to make fishing tough. There are always problems of some sort and you just can’t get away from them. I thought about that. On a roost just down river, an old hen turkey cackled. I had seen her and her brood the day before and there weren’t many of them. They were a scraggly looking bunch in the rain, and there wasn’t a good-sized one in the brood. If I’d get my shotgun out and load it, and if my turkey call wasn’t wet, and if I’d sneak up in the little opening above them, I could likely kill one of them, maybe. Or I could sit there and finish my coffee and watch that bluff get clearer as the sun came up, and do some thinking about how nice it was to be so far from what a mess the world is getting to be. A day or so before, I had caught and turned loose a pretty nice bass which would have been as good to eat as the young turkey would be. But we still had some stew and frozen deer steaks, so we didn’t need to worry about something to eat. I thought about that, there on the gravel bar. If you shoot a turkey, you can’t throw it back and try to get a bigger one like you can a fish, and that’s one of the problems with hunting turkeys in the fall. The old hen called once more and I heard a couple of them leave the roost. I decided I’d get one later, maybe, when I got through thinking and drinking my coffee. I decided the same thing about the big smallmouth I felt sure was waiting downstream ... later, maybe. Only three years ago in another October I caught and released a five-pound smallmouth in that hole. I know he must be a whopper now, and I am pretty sure I can catch him again, or one of his cousins. If I was younger, I would have been there with a little more enthusiasm. But when I was younger, that bluff across the river would have not been so fascinating to me, and I wouldn’t have been so content to watch the fog lift around it, and watch the river flow by and think. I got to thinking, as I sat there, about how much I hate modern times and modern ways, being old-fashioned like I am getting to be. Then I got to thinking about how much modern times has done for us grizzled old veteran outdoorsmen who love to get as far away from modern things as we can. I sat there with that hot cup of water and dunked a little packet of modern instant coffee in it and thought about how well I had slept in that modern sleeping bag on that foam mattress in that little modern tent which kept the rain out, held up by nothing more than bent plastic rods called shock cords. On that gravel bar, we had a little modern gas-operated lantern and stove, and Dennis even brought an air mattress with a modern battery operated device to blow it up with. It didn’t work, the batteries had gone dead and he wound up blowing it up himself, which is sort of an old-fashioned way of doing things. 
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