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I've got a story . . .

By Steven J. Meyers

Found in: | Outside | Fishing | Fly Fishing |

I've got a story.

I can hear you thinking. Well that's a big surprise. You've always got a story. Ask any of my students. Turn in a paper late - you're gonna hear a story (something you might call a morality tale). Or, in the middle of what started out like an almost normal lecture, a discussion trying to connect the newly reaffirmed and all too real (if too often unacknowledged) risks of assuming certainty in the current contents of science related as a story in a semantics class (possibly during a lecture about Thomas Kuhn).

"Somebody tell me what plate tectonics is."

A brave geology major might answer, and since she's smart, it's not just about the crust of the earth moving around like a bunch of separate pieces of dinnerware on top of a profoundly unstable base. Tectonic plates will be described as sometimes subtending where they meet, sometimes one riding over the top of another. Mountain ranges will form. Los Angeles will become a very scary place to live. Someone might offer the once one great land mass hypothesis - make the observation that it's a little odd it took geologists so long to notice that the western coast of Africa looks an awful like a matching jigsaw puzzle piece for the eastern coast of South America. We'll take that question as far as it goes, then maybe look at physics. "Newton thought that time, mass and length were constant. Mathematicians and scientists believed that Euclid and Newton articulated the mind of God. Sure looked that way. Were they right?"

Then I'll ask another question. "What did they call geologists who talked about plate tectonics 60 years ago? Physicists who questioned the constancy of distance, mass and time a hundred years ago?" Silence. So I'll answer my own question. "Kooks. They called them kooks."

I've got a story.

This spring, after a particularly hard winter - I took a bad fall in December, broke a mess of ribs and spent the entire winter term playing catch up, trying to sketch the lectures and prepare the lesson plans that never got done over break - I made a decision. This summer, I was not going to guide as much. I was going to fish more. I was going to call all those old buddies I used to spend time on the water with, and set up weekends and weeks of actual fishing.

(An aside . . . Guiding is not fishing. As wonderful as it can be, as much fun as it sometimes is, guiding is work, and it is most definitely - at the risk of repeating myself - not fishing.)

I spent some spare time in the final weeks of school cleaning fly lines when possible, changing old lines for new ones when necessary. I lovingly tied the nail knots that knotted new leaders to those cleaned or replaced lines. I cleaned and oiled reels. I gently scrubbed the stains of use from the cork grip of a favorite bamboo fly rod. I've had that rod as long as I can remember; and remember, too, that it was lovingly and beautifully rewrapped and varnished for me by John Flick nearly 25 years ago shortly after he and Tom Knopick opened their fly shop, Duranglers, here in Durango. How could I have known then that one day I would become as grateful for their warm friendship as I am for the pleasure that rod has brought me - a 7 1/2' split-bamboo beauty made by Wes Jordan while he was still at Cross Rod Company, before he joined Orvis.

I took it out in the yard with an old Hardy reel and imagined casting it on Lime Creek. Then I cleaned up a few others. A sweet 3-weight Scott - the old, original G model. Some Sages, old and new. A 3-piece, 6-weight Winston just made for stoneflys. All lovingly cleaned and replaced in their tubes.

I even tied some flies to fill holes in fly boxes that hadn't been filled in nearly a year.

Blissed out, and for reasons that even now escape me, I jauntily left my office, stepped out onto the landing of stairs that would carry me down the 10 feet to the flagstone path that would lead me to our mudroom door, and slipped. Launched myself into space. I immediately thought, this isn't good. Then, in an act more reminiscent of the 20-year-old college soccer playing me than the 60-year-old much less agile fool I'd become, I managed to right myself in midair! Hey, I thought, I'm going to land on my feet!

(Anyone who has survived a car crash knows how much time there is to think in those milliseconds before . . . )

I landed upright on my left foot, and immediately heard my left femur crack. It broke with the sound of a dry piece of lumber snapping. And there I was, on the ground, immobile, but miraculously with my cell phone in my right hand. I never use the damn thing. It's never on. I never carry it. But there it was, appearing out of the blue and for no good reason, in spite of prior arrogance, ignorance and stupidity - like relativity, and plate tectonics.

I cannot thank the EMTs who arrived, the nursing staff at the hospital, the brilliant orthopedic surgeon who anchored my shattered leg with a rod of titanium and some very fancy sheet metal screws nearly enough.

In six or seven weeks I'll be able to put weight on that leg again. I'm hoping to be able to fish some easily waded places shortly after that and get a few weeks of play in before school starts. And when I do, although I sincerely hope a few trout will grab my feathered frauds, it's the stories I'll be fishing for, not the fish.

Let's hope none of the new ones involve broken bones.