Fly Fishing Camp

Edit: See photos related to this entry here (Pictures 8: Tennessee Fishing Camp)

The men are under the tarp with kerosene lanterns, tying flies. I’m in the car with Blake (I would let him wander the campsite but Darrell’s camp dog Zoe the boxer is here, and Blake is no good with other dogs), writing this. Pat put on Astral Weeks, perhaps the single best summertime album of all time. The air is getting a chill.

Today the men didn’t leave to go fishing until about 11:30 am. We woke late, hung out around the campsite, and when they left I decided to stay back at the campsite with Blake and the computer. That was when I wrote the previous two entries. When it began to drizzle, I got in the car and went into Bristol to the Food City and picked up some toilet paper and Clorox wipes to stock the bathroom.

The farmer who owns this land asks campers to donate whatever they think is fair, so I thought cleaning the bathroom and stocking it would be fair on my part. Not that it was dirty – it is very well kept-up, and the farmer even dropped by yesterday and left us a stick-on light bulb for the electricity-less outhouse. Nonetheless, I filled a garbage bag with old spent toilet paper rolls and some random antifreeze jugs that were lying around, and left a big economy-sized canister of Clorox wipes in lieu of hand-washing (though there is a sink in there, it isn’t hooked up to anything).

Back at camp I remembered that the guys had talked about how little they like doing dishes, so I went over to the pump near the outhouse and did the dishes as well.

It’s a small thing like doing the dishes in a river, or using an old-school water pump to fill a bucket for your shower, or dipping your car floor mats in a creek to clean them that just makes me feel like life is better than I thought it was and that there are a lot of things left for me to do and love. Call me weird (it wouldn’t be the first time someone did that), but I like doing things some weird modern version of an old-fashioned way. I don’t want to churn my own butter or spin my own thread or anything, but when I spilled coffee on my floor mat yesterday, I knew it would be fine to dip it in the lagoon and let it dry on the hood of my car. When the shower ran out of water when Pat was showering, he said to just dip the bucket in the river and fill the cistern with river water. I feel more full this way; I feel like there is so much less that I need. Of course, it’s a bit of a false feeling of simplicity (that shower plugs into my car to function; the dishes I’m washing are my $25 coffee press from REI), but don’t tell my heart that.

The water, however, is definitely cold. Later, Brad told me that trout start to die at 60 degrees, so pretty much anywhere that there’s trout fishing, the water will be cold. News to me. I think of the lake I camped at as a kid, Lake Absegami in South Jersey, and it was temperate as a bathtub. No trout fishing, I guess.

I cleaned up the campsite, talked on the phone, took some pictures, wrote some more. That was my day. When Pat, Darrell and Brad came back, they didn’t comment on the dishes or the lack of trash or the filled shower cistern, but that was okay – they repaid me with a huge load of brown trout, dipped in a mix of flour and garlic and salt and what-have-you and fried in Crisco. Brad showed me how to eat the fish without getting bones in my throat and Darrell urged me to eat the tail – it’s like a potato chip. (It is.) They brought home too many fish, though, so Zoe got a huge plate to herself.

So now, here we are. Tomorrow the men will go fishing again, and Pat and I will head into Knoxville and get a cheap hotel room for the night. Patrick has a job interview at 9 am Friday morning, so he wants to be clean and pretty and well-rested for it – hence no camping Thursday night. I’ll hang out in Knoxville while he does that, maybe find my way downtown, and we’ve yet to figure out when, precisely, I will leave here.

I would like to make the drive back more scenic than was the one to Tennessee – I was so desperate to get here to be with Pat that I didn’t want to stop too often. But now I can take a little more time, take a few more pictures, maybe see some sights. Now that I’ve learned traveling on my own isn’t as sucky as I thought it was going to be, maybe I will take some time.

Take some time. Since when do I do that?