I Was Warned
Inexorably, the aim and direction of your purpose resolve into the blinding light of the rising sun. The death of your former life has given way to birth. All is holy; all is aflame with the glory of life. Nature is but a mirror of the newly born. |
Steven Foster (1938-2003) |
I had spent four days alone, fasting in the high, wild White Mountains outside Death Valley. Following Native American tradition, my goal was to remain awake though the last, long night – my symbolic death – to greet the dawn and rebirth.
I was in my late thirties, marking what I hoped was a passage through a turbulent stage in my marriage. Prolonged anxiety attacks were plaguing me for the first time since law school. I nearly abandoned going out alone into the mountains, fearing I would panic. But the intrepid leaders of our group, Steven and Meredith, lovingly got me back on course. I gathered my courage during the days we prepared to go into the wild, each of us alone.
Before we met every morning to prepare for going out, I fished at dawn for rainbow trout in Big Pine Creek as it flowed through willow forests down the east side of the Sierras. I happily fed our little band with my catches. The anxiety faded; maybe I could live four days alone in the wilderness.
On departure day, I woke to the sound of Steven playing his cold banjo in the distance, rousing us before dawn. The sound and scene evoked excitement and apprehension.
But reasonably confident, I set out from our mountain base camp as the sun rose, after a quiet, solemn ceremony of prayers for my safety and success, the scent of burning sage in the air. When I stepped outside a ring of stones to begin my adventure, I became invisible. The others ignored me as I began my ascent higher up the mountain.
I camped nestled among scrubby ancient Piñon pines, just big enough to support a tarp – my only shelter from the sun and afternoon showers. As the days passed, fasting slowed my pace to a crawl. But I explored during the bright, warm days, finding quartz with bits of gold that lured gold miners there a century ago and shards of obsidian from ancient Paiute arrowhead makers. I gazed over precipices plummeting thousands of feet toward Death Valley, watching hawks and vultures soar endlessly. Immense white sand dunes shimmered below, many miles away.
The fasting and sheer solitude sharpened my senses, but with a surreal edge. I spoke to a rabbit squatting at my feet one day. Unafraid, it feigned interest in my warning about the red-tailed hawks circling overhead. I silently wished the hawks good hunting as well. I laughed as male lizards did push-ups on the rocks to impress the ladies. Some things are universal. I watched for rattlesnakes with every slow, careful step, probing snake hiding places with my walking stick. I painted and wrote, including a story for my children. The anxiety attacks disappeared.
The fourth and final night was the hardest. At 6,000 feet, the May evenings were breathtakingly clear, cold, and moonless. For hours I watched the brilliant night sky, marveling at the darting shooting stars and slow moving satellites. I listened attentively to the owls and other night creatures.
Four days without food had weakened me. I wanted to stay up to greet the dawn, following the venerable ritual. But part of me wanted to sleep so morning would come and I could return to companionship and my first food in days. Not necessarily in that order. Waves of fear were followed by waves of deep contentment and connectedness to all things, including myself.
Eventually, restless sleep won out. In the most vivid dream of my life, I found myself in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, thinking, “Why am I here when I’m supposed to be in the mountains finishing my vision quest?” I desperately needed to get back to where I was supposed to be.
Later I found myself in London, in a shop owned by an early member of the Grateful Dead. He was pleasant, but no help at all in returning me to the White Mountains. My desperation, and hunger, grew. Riding in a gondola in Venice, I devoured a crunchy head of lettuce, then realized it was a delicious pair of socks.
After a globe-spanning struggle to return, I was suddenly back in Golden Gate Park. But it had changed completely, the gardens and towering eucalyptus trees replaced by strip malls, fast food joints, and other plagues. I was hopelessly forlorn as the dawn approached and I could not find my car to race back to the mountains.
Just before I died of despair, a young dark haired boy came to me and took my hand, smiling. “Don’t worry mister, I know where your car is.” He led me by the hand to the car. My vision quest was saved and I awoke.
After I hiked gingerly down to base camp, we hugged and smiled and feasted on hard boiled eggs and fruit. Back at our original camp, we plunged naked into the icy creek, rushing with fresh Sierra snowmelt. We lounged in Steven and Meredith’s sweat lodge in the willow forest.
Then, for three days we sat together in soft grass in a clearing, one by one telling the stories of our experiences.
Our leaders were my beloved, long-time friends, Steven Foster and Meredith Little. In the early 70s they rediscovered the ancient vision quest ceremony for recognizing, marking, and honoring life’s passages. Since then, they had been introducing it to a Western world that had a serious soul deficiency. Doing this work for so long, their deeply thoughtful insights into our stories were illuminating.
After I recounted my epic dream, Steven said without hesitation that the little boy who saved me . . . was me. I shuddered and knew, of course, that he was right. I had saved myself when all hope seemed lost.
Steven and Meredith had known me since I was sixteen. They knew about my marriage, anxiety, and disenchantment with my career as a lawyer. After sharing his thoughts about my vision quest story, Steven chuckled and made a prediction.
“You’re in for one helluva mid-life crisis!”
I laughed nervously, fearing his powers of perception.
Losing My Self
At the innermost core of all loneliness is a deep and powerful yearning for union with one’s lost self. |
Brendan Francis Behan |
I married a week after graduating from Berkeley. My bride was not yet twenty-one. We met the summer before, studying Spanish in romantic Guadalajara, Mexico. We fell in love and marriage seemed obvious to our young minds. As I came of age in Marin County in the mid-seventies, “dating” seemed uncool and smoking pot made me even more self-conscious than the average teenager. Lacking much experience with girls and being in love – with a girl who would sleep with me – I jumped headlong into marriage.
There were red flags. My young wife seemed threatened by things that had always been dear to me. She demanded I throw away letters from my childhood sweetheart. She created tension with my family that lasted for years. Even the Grateful Dead, my beloved hometown band, seemed to threaten her.
So did my love of fishing. We drove through Wyoming and Montana in our early years, before children. I wanted to do some fishing, but my wife was not encouraging. As time was running out, I dragged her to the upper Firehole River in Yellowstone. But an elk carcass on the trail ended her grudging cooperation and my last fishing opportunity vanished. I actually cried, and tears didn’t come easily to me. But instead of fighting for what I wanted, I submitted to living without things that were important to me.
Despite thinking I would become a writer, I went to law school. It would be intellectually challenging and seemed responsible. During our second year of marriage and my first year of law school, she checked out. Between law school stress and my new marriage veering for the rocks, I started, for the first time ever, having anxiety attacks a month before first year finals. Somehow I got through my finals. But the attacks – actually, one long attack that paused only when I slept – continued as I stayed home for an internship that summer while my wife returned to Guadalajara.
By fall, the anxiety attacks had gradually stopped. My wife tearfully admitted the affair she’d had with an older man the year before. To stop the flood of tears, I forgave her on the spot. I did nothing to express my devastating hurt, burying it instead. I believed total sacrifice of self for others was the honorable path for a man.
We both wanted children, and our oldest son was born nine months after I started my first job with a San Francisco law firm. Five years later, we found ourselves outnumbered by three wonderful children: five, three, and newborn. We adored them and we were good, loving, sleep-deprived parents.
But litigation was a bad fit for me. Working under extreme stress and constant deadlines to help often ungrateful clients fight over money conflicted with my conciliatory, non-materialistic personality. I went to work before dawn so I could go home at a reasonable hour and be a real father. Not working even longer hours intensified the pressure at work. I tried to escape litigation more than once. But I let it keep pulling me back, largely to support a family of five in expensive Marin County.
My fishing dwindled to a salmon fishing trip every year or two with my dad and younger brother, Joe, outside the Golden Gate. I fell out of touch with my best friends and fishing partners of my youth, including Joe.
The years passed and my wife was preoccupied with the children. I felt more and more alone and disconnected.
In 1993, while I was working at 101 California Street in San Francisco, a deranged man bristling with automatic weapons murdered eight people at a law firm just a few floors above ours. I heard the police rushing up the emergency stairwell, screaming “Halt!” to people fleeing the mayhem. We were trapped for hours until rescued by a SWAT team. A friend was among the wounded.
I reacted by calling a woman I had struck up a friendship with on the bus. She had only recently left the firm targeted in the massacre. We met for lunch and continued to meet and talk. I fell for her. It went nowhere and we exchanged a single hug, but I admitted it to my wife. After marriage counseling, things improved for a time, but quickly our old patterns and my loneliness returned.
So did my anxiety attacks. I had done a vision quest with Steven and Meredith when I was nineteen and I decided it was time for another, hoping to regain a semblance of balance. It helped for a time.
The children grew and my wife became consumed by her new teaching career. I found wonderful refuge with the kids, who were a delight. We hiked, played with the chickens in the backyard, and sometimes I rousted them out of bed for nighttime fishing expeditions to catch sea monsters – sharks and rays. They were very willing participants, too young to know they were helping me stay connected to who I was.
As teenagers, the kids understandably came to have things they’d rather do than go fishing with Dad, who didn’t fish much anyway. Thankfully, they shared my love for music and we went to concerts. I was a good sport for some (Blink 182) and they were good sports for others (Ornette Coleman with the Grateful Dead).
Our home was where the kids and their lovably offbeat friends hung out. Sometimes the police came too when neighbors complained about the joyous noise. One afternoon I met a sheepish officer at the door, embarrassed to say he was responding to a report of “loud acting” in the backyard. Often the boys played music in the garage while the girls did art projects in the dining room. I was the dinner cook and did not know, or care, if I was feeding five or twelve.
One evening my oldest son enticed me into picking up my trumpet for the first time in years, appearing in my room saying, “Dad, we’re playing Miles Davis from Kind of Blue. I know you know this stuff. Your trumpet is set up in the garage for you.” At sixteen he seemed to know what I didn’t – that returning to my music would soothe my ailing soul.
Yet even in a house full of raucous, happy teenagers, I could still feel utterly alone. I had returned to litigation and it was beating me down, but I kept at it, fearing change and needing to support the family. In the early 2000s, the severe anxiety returned for a time, then receded.
Around this time, I took my firstborn, then sixteen, to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s otherworldly Black Rock Desert. I had wanted to go for years. We went with a family friend, a founding member of the fiendishly talented and notorious Extra Action Marching Band. We loved the marching band and camped in their compound. In the mornings I paid protection – in the form of bacon – to an ominous pit bull who patrolled the camp.
As their contribution to the Burning Man theme that year, “The Floating World,” the marching band built a stunning one-third sized replica of a 16th century Spanish galleon, over the frame of an old school bus. Early mornings I watched it “sail” across the horizon, with towering masts and tattered sails. My son and I helped paint La Contessa, but I declined to take him on their evening debaucheries at sea. They were an intense bunch.
I simply thought it was funny at the time, but my artistic contribution to Burning Man that year was revealing. I had found a life-sized human figure made of cardboard and paper mâché in the garage, likely liberated from the high school art department. I sat it in a lawn chair holding a fishing rod, removed the head, and hooked the end of the fishing line to the head, which I put on the ground, painting the whole thing silver. “Fishing For My Head” was a miniscule project by Burning Man standards. But it spoke to my own search.
Within a few years the kids and their entertaining circus of friends and music moved on. Little remained at home besides our neglected, empty marriage. In that void, I found myself being attracted to other women, including my childhood sweetheart (of the discarded letters), who I had located in a distant state after nearly forty years. My work drove me to the brink of despair. Finally, after twenty-eight years of marriage, I no longer felt a connection and could no longer live on vague promises of better things to come. I left while I was still young enough to try to make a better, truer future for myself.
My transition into living alone for the first time in my life was not easy. As always, I presented a strong face, but I started sinking. The crisis Steven Foster foretold had come to pass.
I began fishing as if my life depended on it.
A Fishing Life
The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual series of occasions for hope. |
John Buchan |
My earliest, fondest memories are of fishing. My father and his brother David grew up fishing together in Indiana, where I was born. As soon as Joe and I were old enough, Uncle Dave’s family and ours went on adventurous fishing trips together.
The first was to Black Sturgeon Lake, in Lake of the Woods, Ontario. To a six year old it was magical: staying in a foreign land in log cabins heated by Franklin stoves on a lake in primordial deep woods. No bathrooms, just outhouses. Uncle Dave and Dad warned us to always knock hard on the outhouse door before going in, to scare away the deadly – non-existent – snakes.
Poor Joe, only four, was relegated to fishing for bluegills and sunfish from the dock with his even younger cousins. But I was allowed to join the men on the boats, fishing for walleye and northern pike. The early morning smell of outboard exhaust on a lake still triggers happy memories.
We filled stringers of fish every day. I caught my first notable fish, a northern, and was overjoyed. I was entranced watching the men clean the fish every evening in the shed on the edge of the lake. Back home in South Bend, Dad, Joe, and I delivered fish to our extended family. I was so proud.
I adored my Uncle Dave and Aunt Sally. Sally, like my mother, was beautiful and a fine actress, with a sparkle in her eye and a hearty laugh. David was legendary to me, not only as an expert fisherman and my dad’s best friend and accomplice in their youth, but as an actor, director, set designer, architect, builder, and playwright. He was always good naturedly teasing us and making us laugh. His love for me, his firstborn nephew, was obvious. He and Dad were patient and happy teaching us how to fish.
We moved from Indiana to New Jersey. Uncle Dave and his family also moved east, to New Haven, where he studied architecture at Yale. Our family fishing trips continued. When I was in second grade, we met in the north woods of Maine. Again, I was allowed to join the men, this time in a canoe with a guide manning the outboard. We fished for smallmouth bass on the St. Croix River, the eastern boundary of Maine and Canada. The idea that I was on a river between two countries thrilled me, and they let me climb out of the canoe to stand on Canadian soil. Not so thrilling were the rapids, nor the signs along the river warning the flow could suddenly increase, apparently from releases from dams upstream. Dad and Uncle Dave gravely reminded me more than once about the torrential flow mercilessly bearing down on us at any moment.
We fished with jitterbug lures, which the smallmouths attacked violently as the lures gurgled across the surface. But the hook had to be set precisely, and between the rapids and my fear of the coming devastating floodwaters, I missed every strike. Still, the men caught dozens of fish and it was unforgettable.
The families met next at a lake in New Hampshire. Finally, Joe was old enough to join us on board. The fishing was not great and I dreaded my job of being the lookout for submerged boulders as we motored along. Uncle Dave was not his normal self. He was quick to anger, even at me and the other kids, and had no patience with us. I was distraught and talked with my parents, who told me about his alcoholism for the first time. They reassured me his tirades had nothing to do with me, but with his drinking. That was the last of our joint family fishing vacations.
I missed fishing with my dear uncle, but my fishing life went on. Living in New Jersey, Dad took me on my first trip in the ocean, fishing for fluke. To a Midwestern boy, fishing in the ocean was a true adventure.
Joe and I were lucky to be kids in a time when after school, and on weekend mornings, our parents simply told us to be home for dinner as we headed out the door. Besides playing sports in our big, unfenced yards, we spent much time exploring an abandoned rock quarry and a remote forest. But we liked fishing best, riding our bikes to a lake, or catching minnows and eels in the creek near our house. We marveled at how the eels coiled into a knot, intertwining with low hanging tree branches, when we pulled them from the water.
My family traveled again to Ontario one summer, to the Rideau Lakes. We fished with limited success, catching bluegills, crappies, and a few small bass. Mom made family history when, after she violently set the hook on a fish, something came flying through the air right into the boat, all of us ducking for cover. The flying largemouth remains a family legend. I caught a five pound bass; the hook of fishing lodged deeper.
Dad took a job in San Francisco and we moved west, to Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. Now eleven and thirteen, Joe and I explored the vast hillside open space, full of creeks and wildlife and an old, abandoned mine. The creek running through the valley was full of crawfish and minnows. The big fish we saw sometimes were, we later learned, part of the remnant steelhead population.
Our family fishing trips continued. Just after moving, we went to the Trinity Alps. We rode horses through the mountain forests, shot rifles at bottles, and fished for trout for the first time, in a gin-clear stream flowing to the Trinity River. One day a truck drove up as we fished. The driver climbed out and casually dumped countless rainbow trout right into the hole we were fishing. Unfamiliar with fish stocking, we were stunned by our good fortune.
Joe and I made a core group of fishing buddies. As soon as we could drive, we fished San Pablo and San Francisco Bays from shore with a vengeance, catching perch, flounder, and sharks. Night fishing in Raccoon Straights from Elephant Rock in Tiburon, we caught big leopard sharks, to the frequent horror of tipsy tourists leaving the nearby restaurant.
One night fishing at the foot of the Richmond Bridge, one of our best fishing buddies, Mingo – aptly nicknamed after Daniel Boone’s Indian sidekick on TV – decided to try another spot. Hours later a kid ran up to us, breathlessly asking if we had a friend with red hair. “He’s fighting a gigantic fish!” We rushed with him to a rocky point at San Quentin and, sure enough, there was Mingo fighting a huge fish. It turned out to be an eighty pound bat ray, flapping menacingly in the dark water. Joe and I laughed at Mingo’s suggestion we get in the water to help land it.
We hiked to remote spots on the Marin and Sonoma coasts and caught flounder, surfperch, rockfish, cabezon, lingcod, and greenling. We fished for silver salmon in West Marin and caught crappie, smallmouth, and catfish in Lake Berryessa. Dad took us on party boat trips for king salmon and rockfish, from San Francisco to Westport, Washington, and to catch trout in British Columbia.
As a high school junior, I enthusiastically joined a three-week expedition to Baja California with thirty of my fellow alternative school scholars. We went in a dilapidated, psychedelically painted 1947 school bus with a top speed of thirty-five miles an hour. We crawled seven hundred miles south of the border, down the newly completed – and first ever – paved highway running the length of Baja. The bus had no seats so we sat on our backpacks.
Our rightfully fearful, incredibly brave leaders were Steven and Meredith. They had just fallen in love and shared a passion for using wilderness experiences to help at-risk youth. I was not so much at-risk myself, but – to paraphrase Joni Mitchell – I was drawn to those that were.
During the trip, Mingo, his girlfriend Mary, and I visited Mulege, a village on the Sea of Cortez. Before dawn we watched a bright comet in the southern sky as we walked to the docks in search of a guide to take us fishing. We were heroes when we returned with fresh yellowtail and barracuda for our hungry schoolmates back on the windblown beach. My love of the Sea of Cortez was born.
A few months later, our family travelled through Mexico, stopping to fish out of Mazatlán and La Paz. We caught iridescent dorado and tried for sailfish and tuna. A huge yellowfin tuna grinned at us as he jumped high out of the water, spitting out Dad’s lure. From shore in brutal heat, Joe struggled for half an hour to land what he assured us was a tremendous fish. To our amusement and his chagrin, it was a two-pound triggerfish, expert at wedging itself between the rocks when necessary.
The next two Christmas breaks we somehow convinced my parents to let us – a vaguely questionable bunch of sixteen to eighteen year olds – take the family car for two week trips to Baja, with a small aluminum boat strapped on top. We camped on deserted beaches on the Sea of Cortez. We caught fish that were strange to us and gathered baby clams by the bucket full. Coyotes came in the night, biting through our water jugs to quench their thirst; scorpions darted from their hiding places in our firewood. We caught sharks at night as we drank tequila by the beach campfire, only to wake up staring at the tide that had completely covered everything we left on the beach.
Since it was Mexico and we were teenagers, we narrowly survived disasters by the skin of our teeth: food poisoning from eating past-its-prime sea turtle steaks in a restaurant; a car accident; and Joe and I being stranded overnight on a desert isle on Christmas Eve, after our toy boat nearly capsized in suddenly dangerous waves. But the fishing was great in this strange, beautiful wilderness, we could buy beer legally, and we were having adventures, so all was right with our world. Mingo was fond of quoting Helen Keller that, “Life is a daring adventure, or it is nothing.” That was our credo.
Right after high school Mingo and Mary moved to Deer Lodge, Montana. He worked first as a janitor, then as a guard, in the state penitentiary to feed his fishing habit. Joe and I joined him there to fish two summers in a row, before the winters drove him back to California. We rarely saw another soul or even the tracks of other fisherman in Montana. The fishing was staggeringly good: big wild rainbow, brown, brook, and cutthroat trout, and even a few rare grayling, from the Clark Fork, the Gallatin, the Madison, the Firehole, the Bitterroot, and the Big Hole rivers. Montana joined Baja in my fishing mythology.
During college, Dad took me to an island in the Alaskan panhandle. From the small river running through the temperate rainforest we caught all the salmon we cared to catch and Dolly Varden trout from the streams. Bald eagles flew so low we sometimes felt the wind from their wings as they fished the same waters. Black bears were everywhere, fishing nearby in an uneasy truce. Dad lost his senses one day when a bear took his salmon, running after the beast as it ambled away nonchalantly with its prize. His plan if he caught the bear remains a mystery.
One summer during college I flew to New York and stayed with my best childhood friend from New Jersey. I hitchhiked west, stopping in eastern Pennsylvania, where I fished with my younger cousin. On to Nashville, Indiana, to visit Uncle Dave and Aunt Sally. Now on the wagon, Uncle Dave was in good health and high spirits and was very happy to see me. We laughed, reminisced, and told fish stories late into the night.
My fishing dropped off suddenly in my last year of college when I fell in love with my bride to be. I started turning down fishing offers from Joe and Mingo. In less than a year I was married and my fishing gear started gathering dust.
While I was in law school, Uncle Dave took his life.
Closing A Circle
Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after. |
Henry David Thoreau |
My instinctive response to the trauma of leaving my marriage and home was to start fishing.
On weekends I often hiked to the railroad trestle across the Petaluma River, jackrabbits crisscrossing the path in front of me. I loved the soothing beauty of the place, watching the tides flow in and out through the marshland while countless shore birds and waterfowl plied the waters, ospreys flying overhead firmly gripping juvenile bass in their talons. I meditated as I patiently watched my rod tip for the slightest movement.
I reconnected with best friends from my youth. Erik, a founding member of the old gang, often joined me at the Petaluma River, braving the cold winter downpours in pursuit of striped bass and huge, prehistoric sturgeon. I lured Mingo out of his deep woods lair to join us on the river. In turn, I joined him on a three-day trip to fish for rockfish, sheepshead, kelp bass, and white seabass around starkly beautiful Catalina and San Clemente Islands, many miles off the coast from Los Angeles. The old fishing gang reunited on the Trinity River, catching steelhead from drift boats. Joe and I caught twenty pound king salmon as they headed up the Sacramento River. We revisited our old fishing haunts in Montana.
For our dad’s seventy-fifth birthday, Joe and I took him to Cabo San Lucas, where we battled dorado and yellowfin tuna off the tip of the Baja peninsula. We traveled up the East Cape, catching acrobatic needlefish, along with pompano, bonito, and triggerfish.
Erik and I also returned to Baja. We stayed in a little house in the desert outside a small town, where skinny cattle and goats still wandered the streets. We met Tito, a friendly guide who took us out at dawn to catch big powerful roosterfish as they patrolled the beaches for baitfish. It felt so right to be fishing again and with the friends who meant the most to me.
While the fishing provided much needed relief, my divorce dragged on and brought me down. My work as a litigator was oppressive. A profession that leaves little room for personal problems, the law does more than its share to create them. Lawyers are more than three times more likely than those in other professions to suffer depression. Their suicide rate is fourth highest in America, trailing only dentists, pharmacists, and doctors in this dark distinction.
As my loneliness and divorce ate away at me, I found it harder and harder to successfully navigate the litigation minefield. I narrowly averted disasters and constantly worried what would go wrong next, coming to fear the phone and email, which only seemed to bring bad news. My partners’ confidence in me dwindled, along with my self-esteem.
My divorce finally concluded, but at terrible emotional and financial cost. Just months earlier, my mother had been diagnosed with cancer and had major surgery followed by devastating chemotherapy.
The threats closing in, I suddenly froze, unable to address them or anything else anymore. Suicide entered my mind. I thought about a lawyer at my first firm – a good man I liked very much – who killed himself, without warning to anyone. I remembered how peaceful and happy he became the week before he took his life.
I reached my breaking point. Terrified, I went on leave from my firm and sought counseling and treatment. Things worsened when I had to leave my firm three months later. Fifty-three years old, I was divorced, depressed, nearly broke, and facing a major career change. I sank and again thought of suicide, having failed in my poorly chosen career. The hardest year of my life was in full, dreadful swing.
Joe and I returned to my place one evening after a fishing trip to a favorite mountain lake. As we reached the deck to lay out the trout for some photos, taped to my door was the eviction notice from my estranged landlady.
I totaled my car. I had to move in with my parents. Everything was broken.
For solace I returned again to fishing. Erik and I went back to Baja, where we caught seventy pound roosterfish with Tito. Joe and I returned to Montana and caught hundreds of wild trout in magnificent solitude and fished the wild Lost Coast of Northern California. Mingo and I caught a multitude of beautiful fish off San Clemente and Catalina Islands in Southern California.
The loss of my car turned out surprisingly well, since I was convinced my luck had run out. But the insurance money paid for a reliable old truck and a long-coveted fishing kayak. Erik bought a kayak, too. They let us go places we never could before: off the Pacific coast fishing in kelp forests among curious otters and sea lions; in San Francisco Bay catching sturgeon, stripers, and leopard and seven-gill sharks; or in pristine Manzanita Lake in Lassen Park, fly fishing for wild rainbows.
But the hits kept coming. I had started a long distance relationship with my childhood sweetheart – of the burned letters. It was wonderful and brought me great joy for years. But the distance and other serious complications led us to the point where I had to break it off, even if it broke my heart.
Little did I know how broken it was. Two bleak days later, I awoke with terrible heartburn that only kept getting worse. When it got to the point it was scaring me, my mother took me to the emergency room. After a quick EKG, the doctor told me I was having a heart attack, a dangerous type known as a Widow-maker. Forty-five minutes later a stent was inserted by angioplasty. Two days later I was back at my parents’ house, wondering how many other shoes remained to be dropped.
Once I felt well enough, Erik drove me up to a beautiful lake in the Sierra foothills, to get me out of the house and back to the water. Joe took me to his favorite spot on the Bay and I caught my first post-heart attack fish. After a while, I started kayak fishing again off the coast. Fishing helped to lift the darkness that had enveloped me.
A year later I moved to New Orleans, to be near two of my kids who were there, in a city I loved. It was the fresh start I needed.
One day at JazzFest, in a crowd of at least 40,000 people waiting for Steve Winwood to play, I happened to turn my head to the right and recognized an old friend and neighbor of mine from 25 years earlier in Marin County, where she still lived. Back in the early 90s, Kathleen, her friends, and I had gone to some Grateful Dead shows and the Golden Gate Park memorial for Bill Graham, when we were both married with three very small children each. Now we are single. Three days after meeting again at JazzFest, we were social media friends. Eighteen months later we were married in the old Algiers courthouse, across the Mississippi River from New Orleans.
We are a wonderful match and feel so incredibly fortunate to have found each other so late in life. My good fortune turned out to be even greater when we realized Kathleen loved fishing nearly as much as I did. Moving back and forth between Marin County and New Orleans we kayak fish in San Francisco and Tomales bays for halibut, sturgeon, and striped bass, and in the stunning marshes of southeastern Louisiana for redfish, speckled trout, sheepshead, flounder, and others. We both feel the profound connection fishing gives us to nature. And we – and our friends – eat well. We now spend most of our time living happily in New Orleans. The fishing kayak lives on the roof of our truck.
Supremely meditative and peaceful, fishing brings me back into the natural world I love. It creates adventures that become, and connect me to, my history. The inherent mystery inspires excitement, hope, and awe. Fishing reminds me that I am competent and successful. It gives me solitude and brings me together with life-long friends and my soul mate.
Mingo and Helen Keller were right; life is indeed a daring adventure. Coming home to my fishing roots kept me tethered in desperately hard times – and maybe even saved my life. Fishing is an important part of who I am. It helps me realize that by living true to myself, I can better weather the storms and live an authentic life.