Age
FIELD NOTE NO. 024.Someday you might miss bitching about getting the boat out.
Move the bikes.
Move the mower.
Find the tackle.
Charge the batteries.
Remove three things from the boat that have absolutely nothing to do with fishing.
Then put the entire garage back together when you get home.
Fishing would be a hell of a lot easier without the boat.
Hobbies are funny. Most of life is already spoken for. Work. Chores. Family. Birthdays. Holidays. Flag football. Bonfires. The big game.
What’s left, we spend on the things we love.
When you’re young, you’ll do damn near anything. You have the body. You just don’t have any money.
So you borrow. Buy used. Fix things. Sleep somewhere questionable. Walk farther. Make the wrong equipment do the right job.
You engineer a way in.
Then you get older and finally buy all the stuff you couldn’t afford.
Good boots.
Good packs.
Truck.
Boat.
Grinder.
Vacuum sealer.
Coolers that actually work.
Twenty years of solving problems.
Then the problem becomes twenty years.
Ten miles on public ground looking for where a buck crawled into the thick stuff?
Absolutely.
But you notice the ten miles now.
Shoot a big doe opening weekend?
Hell yes.
Then you feel the temperature.
Oh, shit.
Field dress.
Hang.
Cape.
Quarter.
Ice.
Your son has a flag football game. Being Dad outranks being hunter.
Afterward everybody goes to dinner.
You go home to a dead deer.
Trim. Grind. Vacuum seal. Nice flat packages.
Experience teaches you important things. Like hamburger stacks better flat and thaws quickly in water when nobody thought about dinner until 5:30.
Wisdom.
Eventually you get pretty good at your hobbies. Which is useful, because by then you’re too tired to do them badly.
Then you notice the older guys. The ones who ate, breathed and slept this stuff. The hunter who knew every ridge. The fisherman who went every weekend. The guy who had a system for everything.
Somewhere along the way, they stopped.
Maybe knees. Maybe getting up at 4:30 stopped sounding like fun. Maybe the boat got heavier even though the boat weighed exactly the same. Maybe getting it out became more work than fishing.
Maybe one Saturday they just didn’t go.
Then another.
Nobody announces the last trip.
Nobody backs the boat into the garage and says:
Well, that was it.
One day you just notice it hasn’t moved in a while.
That’ll sober you up.
Because maybe all that work surrounding the thing you love isn’t actually surrounding it.
Maybe that was part of it too.
The packing.
The dragging.
The cleaning.
The walking.
The grinding.
Putting the boat away.
At twenty, you barely noticed.
At forty, you bitch about it.
Someday you might give quite a bit to have one more Saturday worth bitching about.
— Esker