About Bucket Lists

A while back, I was talking with some angling friends about places we’d like to visit and fish before the day came when failing eyesight, frozen joints, gum disease and the general decrepitude of getting old overtook us and closed the window of angling opportunity forever. Our own personal fishing bucket lists, so to speak.

Over the course of all the fantasizing, the names of a lot of places ended up on the table of the discussion. The pile was high enough to be worth at least $100,000 in air fares or a similar amount in gasoline, tires, coffee and Visine in the event the place in question was reachable by automobile. Most of the destinations were famous, exotic and far away. The trout rivers of the west slope of the Andes in Argentina and Chile. Pitching 12 inch streamers to monster brackish-water Northerns in the estuaries along the coast of Norway. Enveloped in clouds of black flies while swimming big deerhair mice over seven pound wild brook trout on the Little Minipi or Big Rivers in the wilds of Labrador. Flying into Great Bear Lake right at ice out for a shallow water fly fishing shot at lake trout old enough to have been born during the 2nd term of the Reagan administration. And so forth and so on. Lifelong dreams deferred by the realities of our lives, budgetary constraints and our responsibilities at home. Brought momentarily to life and piled on the table of wishes before us.

While I contributed a few of my own dreams of exotic or far away angling destinations to the pile, I’d be less then fully truthful if I didn’t admit that my real angling “bucket list” is a lot more modest than the general run of what was on the table. I’m not sure why this is the case, but it is. It may be that the more I think about these once-in-a-lifetime trips, the more anxious I become about the way the years are rushing by, while at the same time knowing I’ll never get to most of the places I want to go, let alone all of them. That’s possible. I’ve had a lifelong habit of avoiding anxiety when I could find a way to do so.

But I also think that a part of the reason that my bucket list is fairly modest is that destinations have never been what fishing was about for me. I can have a near out of body experience in angling ecstasy simply by figuring out which submerged brush pile in the 70 acre glacial pothole lake I grew up on in northwest Pennsylvania holds the biggest or most crappie. Or by arriving in the aftermath of a brief, hard shower on a Pennsylvania trout stream I’ve fished 500 times and finding that the rain has the fish up, moving and feeding aggressively. I’ve probably caught most of them at least once over the previous 499 trips, but it is all new and exciting to me anyway. I get short of breath. My pupils dilate. My knees quiver. I’m here at a magic time and the fact that I know the stream so well that I can count virtually every rock in it in my sleep doesn’t detract from the experience at all. I’m flying way too high on the heady brew of anticipation and discovery, that is, if anything, amplified by the fact that I already “know” this water. Well guess what.. I didn’t know everything. There is always more. This is fishing to me. The learning of the water and the solution of the riddle of the fish. The magic times when everything is right that more than make up for the hundreds of times I have stood in the same spot when virtually nothing was right and I had to work hard for every fish. The times when old friends (I consider all my streams to be my friends) briefly show me new faces, extending the definition of the possible and as a result, heightens the magic.

Maybe I’m just easily amused or I choose not to dare to dream dreams that I know will never come true. Or maybe my inherent frugality causes me to limit the scope of my dreams as a matter of practicality. I don’t know and it doesn’t really matter. We all have our reasons why we see fishing as we do and we all differ in how much various things about the sport matter to us.

So, I’m a cheap date, I guess. I can be just as happy and feel just as fulfilled by a week of bouncing around on my favorite Wisconsin Spring Creeks as I would probably be by spending a week on the Bighorn or Deschutes. Does this mean I would turn down an opportunity for a week of fishing Chile or Kamchatka? Well, you could ask me to go and I’d think about it. I’m also flexible and firmly believe that philosophies are meant to be discarded when they no longer make sense…:)

In any event, I do have an angling “bucket list”. It just isn’t a very big, ambitious or fancy bucket. More two gallon molded plastic than five gallon triple galvanized steel.

Here it is:

Before I abandon this mortal coil, I’d like to:

1) Do some trout fishing in Southeast Minnesota. It is the third area (along with southwest Wisconsin and northeast Iowa) that combine to comprise the trout-rich Driftless Region and the only one I have not fished.

2) Spend a week (or a month) canoe camping and fishing for smallmouth bass in Whiteshell Provincial Park in southern Manitoba.

3) Fish the small streams of New Hampshire’s White Mountains for three species of wild trout.

4) Spend a week exploring Idaho’s Lochsa River for wild cutthroats.

5) Fish the trout streams of the Black Hills in South Dakota.

6) Fly fish the shallows of Lake Champlain for post-spawn Northern Pike.

7) Return to the fish over the small wild rainbows in the rushing streams of the Pisgah National Forest in Western North Carolina. This is where I first experienced southern Appalachian trout fishing and one of the first places I courted my wife. It holds a lot of memories and magic for me.

8) Float the New River in Virginia and West Virginia for smallmouth on the fly.

9) Go over to Lake LeBoeuf with my brother. We’d launch his little boat and fill a bucket with crappie while we talk about music, rabbit dogs and the greatest man either of us has ever known, our Dad. There are better crappie lakes with bigger fish, I’m sure. But none of them are home. Being on Lake LeBoeuf is like going back to the very roots of why I fish and a tip of the hat to the man who gave me my first fishing rod and with it, the lifelong gift of my love for the water and the fish.

There… That’s not so unreasonable, is it? Let’s leave it this way: If the timing for our trip to Kamchatka conflicts with my schedule to achieve any of the items on my bucket list, I’d probably be willing to re-schedule…