Enchantment with a New Portion of the State and a Pattern of Return

This afternoon I visited a part of the state I'm familiar with but not in detail. The Scotch Plains, Fanwood area, invited by Garret Daniels to fish crappie. I ended up catching a small largemouth, and Garret a small crappie. If that were the end of the story, there'd be no point in wasting my time on Google. I lived in North Plainfield with my wife-to-be for a year, and a few times we visited Westfield nearby. I fished the Green Brook repeatedly in the spring for stockers, which now happens to be some of Garret's favorite water, but this was before he was born. I remember once passing through an area, I believe on State Highway 28, and seeing a pond to my right as I traveled south. It was full of map turtles. Whichever, it was a major roadway with the pond right next to it. 

New Jersey is rich with waters to discover. It's not upstate New York or Utah, but if you live here in the same state I do, why waste your time dreaming if you want to fish? I'm not mentioning the place Garret and I fished today, nor showing a photo of it, but everywhere you can find public water. 

And new adventure, as well as to touch base, perhaps, on former. We fished only an hour, it's all the time Garret had today, and as I drove home, I switched on WDHA. I hadn't heard "Mystery Achievement" by the Pretenders in more than a decade. Is it a guy who is the girl's achievement, or is it herself? Read the lyrics and you can't tell exactly, except that, "Don't breathe down my neck, no," at the song's beginning does suggest it's someone else. 

Whatever. The instrumental tone, the instrumental refrain like church bells, and the verbal refrain on "mystery achievement" used to make me feel no matter how unfinished my own work--I was busy at keeping hundreds of handwritten notebooks--they've achieved an integral cultural value. It's not the only way I believed that, of course, but the song was a "thing." This was back before I had any internet, too, so no way existed of promoting the work, and I lived too far out on the edge to publish as yet. 

I turned the radio off. It was the only song I heard on the drive home. Garret and I had talked about long COVID and a little else about "COVID times." A little about the possibility of a July 4th incident of another sort. Clearly, this is a somewhat dystopian time we've entered into over the course of the past decade, but speaking for myself, I never give up on the soil that roots the trees. Roots are absolutely necessary to what we see of trees outright, but they're all underground and out of sight. 

Like my handwritten journals, but also like qualities of my experience anyone else might also relate to, because patterns belong to us all. 

I had switched off the radio when I passed under Interstate 78, recognizing that I had been here on March 17, 2020, the day businesses began to get shut down because of COVID. I had driven to Scotch Plains, the Stonehouse Coin Shop. I had some silver coins I wanted to sell, but the proprietor turned me away, telling me that with what was coming, they wouldn't be able to sell them. He told me to come back after things returned to normal. 

They have but in a way inclusive of long COVID and other unease in many people. I'm not a political writer, but anyone can turn on the news. I'm someone who can recognize in an underpass not hope exactly, but the mystery of recurrence after a portion of the state new to me had awakened enchantment. Not a dark shadow under that highway. Recurrence has a way of suggesting closure, as if maybe new values will seek the light as the old are absorbed into the ground. I had felt excited to be at the Stonehouse perhaps the last day it opened before the Shutdown. Why would that be, unless I already knew it wouldn't last? 

Outsmart It

Hillsborough NJ River Largemouth

Often an encounter with the wild isn't the serenity and bliss we expect, though we still manage to finish the outing feeling it was worthwhile. I got back home before my wife was up and before the tv got turned on, so the feeling of early morning peace remained in the air, though she turned it on within five minutes. (Not even 6:30 a.m.) That's when I understood that for all the conflict the news brings, it comes from the world we call home and feel proud of, if we're successful. We occupy our own property and achievement within that world, and though it stands in relation to the wider world of others, we don't abandon ourselves nor our belongings, as if politics determines us altogether. No. And like war, the wild is a place that will swallow us whole if we stay too long; even a short outing can subtly remind us that its beauty has a dark side. Politics that has gone astray always seems to involve so-called leaders who have abandoned their own. Ultimately, the penalty is death. Just as the wild exacts the same eventuality on those who do not build. The difference is that within society, laws bind us together. In the wild, it is the absence of law that will assure us of death if we establish nothing. Not only have leaders abandoned their constituents. Why on earth would those constituents have voted them in? The agreement moves both ways. 

It was a feeling I had today. Possibly because the South Branch Raritan River at Hillsborough ran off color after recent rain. And possibly because, when I got there, it was still too dark out to tell.

I put a Rebel Pop-R, quarter ounce, along the break between evident bottom and darker depths. At least, that was the situation when I fished there during the winter for rainbow trout stocked in the fall. I had decided I'd go with a quarter-ounce plug, because I felt I stood a better chance with a bigger bass. I did bring smaller along, as if I might try one of them, too. Casting, I felt reminded that the quarter-ounce plug casts a lot farther.

My second cast came down near some wood in the shallows. I popped once and got hit. I believed from a fairly big fish. Just what I had been hoping for, and it felt too good to be true. Even so, I'll amend those hopes a little. If it was a good fish, it was no 22-inch smallmouth as I had dreamed of. (Some day, I'd really like to catch one that big in the river.) I thought maybe it was 15 inches, judging from the weight I had felt for a moment before the plug came free. I put another cast there. Within a moment or two, I was aware I didn't see the plug. It was dark out, but I could just barely make it out on the surface. That is, unless a fish had taken it under. It has white feathers tied to the rear treble and sometimes a fish will take the plug down by nipping them. Though I set the hook into substantial weight, you might think of sunfish pulling on those feathers. 

A good fish, but it didn't feel like a smallmouth. I believed I had a largemouth on. The splashes it let loose were heavy and powerful, but the fight had that comparative sluggishness. I got the fish along in front of me, where I thought I could just barely make out the horizontal stripe of a largemouth in the dark. And then on the sand and pebbly gravel, there it was--largemouth bass. I measured it at 17 inches. 

I made sure to fish out and across the river where I knew the water got shallow. It moved through there a little faster, too. I worked the plug thoroughly, but didn't tempt another hit. My plan had been to switch to a Wacky rig, once I was satisfied the bass weren't going to hit up top any longer. In that nice, deeper water I figured I had a chance. 

But it wasn't looking very petty. By now enough light on it revealed that it was off color. I had gone over to the North Branch near home yesterday just to check, and it ran plenty clear. I knew the lower South Branch is another story and might not be clear, though. I had also checked the United States Geological Survey and it showed the water still up a bit. 

I don't like fishing off color river water with a Wacky rig, and even if I had a noise-making Rat-L-Trap with me, I wasn't sticking around.

Years Back