Rejoice! The purpose of life is joy. Rejoice at the sky, the sun, the stars, the grass, the trees, animals, people. If this joy is disturbed it means that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. Find your mistake and correct it. Most often this joy is disturbed by money and ambition. — Leo Tolstoy
Caught my first line yesterday. The Mary M. Miller had a two hour picnic cruise yesterday durning my 8 to 4 shift and I nagged the mate and a deckhand into letting me catch a line. With the Mary, having someone on the wharf to catch isn’t such a big deal; but if I ever get to catch lines on the Belle, having a brief introduction will matter more. It’s not that I have much ambition, or that I want to do anything other than The Watch. But in spite of how simply the job was talked up to me during training, there are aspects of the job that are basically a utility function. I sweep and take out the garbage. Yesterday I made copies of the Watchman Journal form for the binder because we were out. The Watch is also typically left at the wharf when the boat goes out because one person is always left behind to catch lines during the docking process.
Yesterday I talked to one of the fishermen on the wharf. I’ve seen him there before in my local wanderings. He sets up 4 poles. I went and introduced myself; I want the regulars to know me and I want to know them. Tourists, passengers, come and go. They come for the picture. It’s the reason the gift shop pipes New Orleans jazz through the speakers, even though Louisville is not New Orleans and has it’s own sound and complex character. (It has its own dark and bloody history, too.) People come for the hyperreality version of history: the sanitized, homogenized, and standardized version. They come for the lie. And, for the sake of stewardship — because maintaining the Belle is certainly a form of stewardship — it’s a tolerated lie. But the fishermen aren’t part of the lie. They don’t come to the river to feed the city’s economic engine. They come to fish.
Let me ask you a question, I asked. Do you eat what you catch?
He hemmed and hawed a bit. If they’re small, he said, I throw them back. But I’m here for the buffalofish.
And if they’re not small?
I eat them, he said. I get asked that a lot.
I told him he was a braver man than me.
The way things are going, he said, we’re all going to have to go hunt and catch our own food.
I wished him luck. The water is still a little too cold for the big fish, but fishing is is as much about faith and luck as it is skill.Learning to commune with the river means taking in all the life that’s there. As it gets warmer there will be more life to take in. Warmer waters bring more life. It’s all about catching the line: being there to draw in what needs to be drawn.