Fencerows: Obsession
By John Luthens
Obsession is a long and winding word. It is defined as a crazy compulsion. As a fisherman, I don’t care to deal in distinct definitions, choosing to live instead in the shadowed waters of rumors and lies. But the compulsion to do crazy things, of that, I am guilty as charged.
It was my daughter’s 13th birthday and I was up at the ripe hour of 3 a.m. It was going to be a heck of a day. I’d heard rumors of a shopping and movie outing she’d planned with her friends. She’s 13 going on 21. Webster should define that one as “Dad just tends to get in the way.”
I checked in on my sleeping daughter and whispered Happy Birthday. Then I pulled out of the drive and zeroed the trip odometer before the first birds started chirping. Obsession is a long and winding road.
Trout Day’s float in Preston, Minnesota.
I crossed the Wisconsin River in Portage. The water looked promising, smelling of walleye and bass, but I left the sand islands and back channels for another day. I drove further, bridging over the Black River in La Crosse and sliding up the Mississippi. Prime fishing spread out the windshield in front of me and disappeared in the rearview mirror. I was after bigger game.
When obsession pulls you from Wisconsin and over the Minnesota border, it is probably time to seek help. The eastern Minnesota hills and valleys were green and rolling and the smell of freshly-turned farm soil was in the air. It was a fine morning to be alive and there were no therapists in sight to do an intervention. I just opened the windows and drove.
The Root River cuts through Preston, Minnesota like a dark knife. It is hill country, tucked snugly in the Driftless Region of the Midwest, where the ice-age glaciers gave up in defeat before they ever penetrated the land. Every year since 1987, the small town has celebrated Trout Days. It is a festival dedicated to the brown trout that hide beneath the banks of the river.
Amanda Luthens has a love for photography and writing, as well as for Dakota, the family’s black lab.
I set up in Preston and began the patient waiting game. Sometimes you wait all day with no results and the trout gods just laugh at you. I tried calling my daughter to see how her day was getting on but the bluffs and valleys that blocked the glaciers a million or so years ago also blocked my cell phone. Obsession doesn’t care about modern technology.
It rained a little. It was humid. It was tailor made for brown fishing, one of those days where the heavy spots will flash out and smash a fly from almost anywhere. But craziest thing about this particular bout of obsession is that I wasn’t in Preston to fish. I’d been invited there to sign copies of my book, which, while it’s about trout fishing, isn’t worth much in the way of actually catching fish.
My daughter helped with the proof reading, and she helped me design some book markers. When it comes to movies and shopping with her friends, the line is drawn quite clear in the sand between us, but we both share a passion for writing and photography. The markers show an old railroad piling in a remote stream, with a lone, white pine tree sprouting from the piling itself. My daughter is a fine writer and photographer, but it is still a hobby. She has not yet learned the true definition of obsession.
I signed some books and my daughter’s book markers were a sensational hit. The Trout Days parade rolled down the small town street at the end of the day and the highlight was a float that sported the biggest trout I had ever seen. I drove back home in the dark and there were bugs hatching from the new and green earth. They spattered the windshield like rain and by the time I pulled back in the driveway, the car looked like it just crawled out of the darkest trout swamp imaginable.
The total tally for my daughter’s 13th birthday was 520 miles on the odometer, 16 hours away from home, and a single picture of a massive trout in a parade. I’m not especially proud of it. But I could see a light in my daughter’s face when I told her the day’s events, and her smile said that I was not skunked. She was all for running right out and taking some more photographs. If she keeps down that path, she might very well find that obsession runs in the family.
John Luthens is a freelance writer from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com