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Everywhere I go I find a pal

Everywhere I go  I find a pal Everywhere I go  I find a pal

Peter Weinschenk, Editor, The Record-Review

Trout fishing is better than politics.

This is because in politics you can be wrong for years and never have to change your mind. Indeed, you can join a political party where you will find company with people who are just as wrong as you are.

This can’t happen in trout fishing. The actual world intercedes.

I know this because of what happened to me Sunday night in Taylor County. I started a very familiar evening of fly fishing by clambering down a rocky bridge abutment into the Big Rib River. For hours, I did nothing but follow the river, catching a miscellany of trout. As darkness fell, I emerged from the river at the next bridge.

But there was a problem, a huge problem. I entered the river from the Rib River bridge but I emerged from the river at the Wood Creek bridge. Immediately, I was disoriented and confused.

I was safe and sound, but nothing made sense. I had entered the Rib River and faithfully followed it north, yet now I was at a completely different river. Was my mind playing tricks on me? Or was the world playing tricks on me?

In that moment of unknowing, I couldn’t really tell. I thought I was at the Wood Creek bridge. There were the three culverts and the neighboring farmstead. That wasn’t the Big Rib River bridge...or was it?

My brain scrambled to make any sense of my situation. I came up with crazy scenarios. One was that I was in a tear in a Matrix-like simulation where realities did not line up.

My bewilderment was exacerbated by my fishing expedition. I had just spent hours splashing through creek bottoms, climbing over logs and doing the limbo under tag alder branches that stretched across the river. I was tired and sweaty and did not appreciate the world going screwy on me.

I started to walk back to my car, not by retracing my steps back down the river, but by walking the roads. After about a half of a mile, I came upon the Big Rib River bridge on Wood Creek Rd. This empirical data confirmed that my memory was working correctly, but it still did not explain the larger mystery of how a person could jump in one river and end up on another one.

This was a problem that the Greek philosophers couldn’t have solved. Heraclitus said a man can’t step in the same river twice. I couldn’t even step into the same river once.

I arrived at my car still shrouded by this cloud of unknowing. I drove home unable to figure things out.

It was only later that night did I understand that not only had I been wrong, I had been wrong for years and years. It took tracing the Big Rib River on Google Earth to see the error of my ways. For decades, I thought I knew where Wood Creek flowed into the Big Rib River. It turns out that what I thought was the confluence was only a backwater of the Big Rib River. The true confluence was a quarter mile north. I had taken Wood Creek at this juncture, not the Big Rib River, and that’s why I ended up at the Wood Creek bridge. This revelation was mind blowing and humbling. I have fished the Big Rib River for three decades and thought I knew the territory.

Every fisherman has had to admit to being wrong about a basic fact of the world.

And not one politician.

Contact Peter Weinschenk at pweinschenk@tpprinting.com

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