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Oh I understand the fascination with fishing pictures.
Every photo of a nice fish elicits in me a range of emotions – admiration for the angler and the angled (forget bears -- nothing screams ferocity and wildness like the toothy grin of a northern pike) … curiosity about the story behind the catch (What lure? How was the strike? How long the fight?) … some uncontrollable salivary response (no better way to start a campfire debate than to mischievously suggest that smallmouth tastes better than walleye) … and, truth be told, a vague twinge of envy.
That being said, to reduce one’s Quetico experience to the poundage of a stringer is to be inexplicably blind to the spiritual fervor of the place as well as the sensory blitzkrieg around you, or (to update the military lexicon), the sensory “shock and awe.”
Part of the challenge of being in Quetico is being able to keep moving – who wants to leave behind the vista surrounding you at any given moment, both on a macro and micro level? Look wide-eyed at the wide expanse … narrow the focus on whatever’s at your feet. I’m sure that’s what draws people like Spartan2 (whom I don’t know) to be perfectly and completely satisfied with bringing a camera and leaving behind the rod.
My skill with the lens is limited, but I can see in my own mind, this very moment, a range of images that for me make up the fabric of the Quetico experience … the rhythmic drips of water sliding off the paddle on each return stroke across a mirrored lake … the endless covering and emergence of a tip of a rock washed over by a wave, every two or three seconds, for all of eternity … the tenacity of a tiny pine gripping a spot of dirt in a cleft of rock … the scree piled up underneath an Agnes cliff … the haunting echo of each pictograph … the silhouette of individual pines and spruces on a far shoreline at dusk … a ground squirrel bold enough to grab a crumb … the falls of the Poet Chain … the many hues of lichen … the ….
Oh.
Wow.
I’m sorry. I got lost for a second.
The thing is, when I first began visiting Quetico, I marked each day by “events”: the 19-inch smallmouth I caught that morning … the Northern Lights I saw that night … the moose … the wolf I heard. And my litmus test for a successful day was the number of such occurrences. A day without a nice stringer was oddly diminished.
But as I got older, I realized that I was drawn more by the whole expanse – the simple “being” of the place that writers like Wallace Stegner and Rick Bass have captured so well in describing the remote corners of the American wilderness. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, that spiritual shadow calls to our ancestry.
And that “being” is captured in my opinion best not by a stringer shot or even a horizon shot captured by a wide-angle lens or those funky disposable cameras you can buy that capture the whole width of a landscape (sorry, my mind is blanking, what’s the name of them?), but on a micro level, with pictures of a split-apart rock, an insect, a pile of bones, scales and claws left by the gulls, an assortment of rusty hinges and nails, a unique-shaped pine cone, or a single, white-capped wave.
While I like to fish and I love to eat fish and I too smile extra broadly when holding an especially fine fish (Look at me! Look at me!), the fish are but a part of it. And to weigh Quetico by the weight of the fish, to judge by the numbers and to tally them like one would tally profit from a day’s work, is almost sacrilegious. (And no, I am not directing that at anybody at this forum or in my life).
In “The Unforeseen Wilderness,” Wendell Berry said it best: “To be blind to everything outside an account book is, as we have been told over and over, to be spiritually dead; it is also, as we are slowly learning, to be an accomplice in the death of the world.”
So, in closing (and sorry about the length), give me fish pictures. I love ‘em. But give me a healthy dose of trees and luna moths and portage bogs and flowers as well. Through the eyes of these cameras and these camera holders, I relive each trip and anticipate each one ahead, too.
Thanks for reading ...
-- Kypaddler
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POD (cont. 12) (Read 59274 times)
