Change I'm Not Ready To Believe In...

I was standing on the staircase reporting today’s weather forecast to my infinitely Better Half as she prepared to leave for work when it happened.

The digital hearing aid in my right ear issued two extended beeps, much like the warning noises made by a forklift or garbage truck when it is backing up. But my hearing aid was not backing up, although I suppose it won’t be that long before somebody develops one that does. Then everybody who wears a hearing aid will probably have to have one that backs up of its own accord. After all, if such a thing were not absolutely essential, it would have not been invented. Right?

But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The dual beeps from my hearing aid were to inform me that the little battery that powers the thing was going to expire in 30 minutes and I should be ready, spare in hand, to change it. Not 26 minutes or 31 minutes. 30… I resent this. Frankly, I wish the thing wouldn’t beep. Here’s why…

I’ve worn a hearing aid (two, actually) for a long time. More than 25 years. I like to believe that over this time, I’ve developed a mastery of wearing and using these devices and that it is an art of sorts and I am proficient at it. That my hearing aids are a tool I use to help me communicate and that I am accomplished and effective in doing so. That I know instinctively when it is almost time to change the battery and do not need the sound of a forklift backing up in my ear to remind me.

So, I resent the little beeping noise.

But what does this have to do with fishing? Well, the longer in the tooth I become, the more examples of the same sort of unwanted help I see creeping into the sport. It used to be that my Dad, my brother and I would fish a new lake for the first time and we would use our previous experience in other places and physical clues like the locations of drop-offs, weed beds and brush piles to find fish. Nowadays, anglers turn on a sonar device and watch the screen for the little blips. When they appear, they stop there and fish. It requires all the effort of eating a pretzel and almost certainly is a good deal less satisfying.
This is bad for the fish and I would also argue it is bad for the fisherman. The art is gone and most of the skill needed to succeed has gone with it. There is no achievement and no sense of mastery in it. It is a shortcut on the road to removing the meaning from our sport.

Lately, as the Spring draws near and my thoughts turn more towards being back out on the water, I’ve been dropping in now and then on a couple of online fly fishing forums, mostly just to read what some of the fellows have to say. What I’m finding there bothers me even more than the matter of the sonar fish finders. There is a lot of excitement about the potential of using auto-based GPS systems to find small out of the way trout streams. Whatever happened to taking a map with you in the car and using it to find the stream yourself, making a wrong turn here and there along the way, but finally succeeding? Are we really worthy to fish the Hidden Fork of Lost Run if we expended no effort to find it, but rather sat on our duff behind the wheel of the car and punched in some coordinates and let a set of circuits do the thinking for us? I’d almost rather sit home and run the channel button on the TV remote up and down or enjoy a Mountain Dew by intravenous administration or take a condensed turkey pill for Thanksgiving dinner. It’s roughly the same thing and uses less gasoline. Again, where is the effort and where is the mastery? Where is the art or the feeling of having earned something that has always been such a big part of why I enjoy this sport? Do I have any standing to catch and handle a creature as beautiful as a trout when I cannot escape the feeling that I arrived at the stream by pneumatic tube, as if I were one of those old style plastic cylinders you used to see at the drive through window of the bank?

So, I’m a little disgusted at these turns of events and trends in fishing, of which I’ve given just a few examples here. Or maybe I’m upset that the world would so soullessly capsulate and streamline the rituals of my sport and make it more like flicking a switch than meeting a challenge. Or maybe I’m just getting old and grumpy, although certainly, I’d know if this was happening and I’ve yet to see any evidence…

I do know that not everything that makes our sport easier necessarily makes it better. A wild trout has a dignity that calls on us to not stoop to undignified means to find or fool him. This is one of the reasons we are not permitted to fish with dynamite. When we, with our comparatively big brains, find ways to make our sport too easy, we disrespect the trout as well as diminish ourselves.