Climb to the top, raise the band saw, cut off the foot peg clip. Then hang the saw on my side, remove the grinder from my tool bag, and unplug the saw to plug in the grinder. Grind the rest of the foot peg clip away, and move down until they’re all gone. Lean back and look down below as the rope goes tight, the half pipe making its way up. A hand signal to stop its accent at just the right place, then lean out, grab a six-hundred pound length of steel and pull it in. Position it on the leg, maybe it’s tight and the sledge hammer has to be used to convince it to fit. Once it’s there, a couple U-bolts hold it in place, and it’s the climb to the hook to de-rig it and move up to start all over again. Three days. Three days of real work. My muscles were tight and sore. My shoulders rubbed raw from the harness and all the weight trying to pull me down. Three days, and two-hundred and eighty feet of tower to the top. And I felt great. I felt like I earned my money and I liked it.
The weekend never felt so good either. I found myself wading the Oriskany Creek behind my new house with a fishing rod in my hand. The water was cold, but the waders I had gotten for Christmas were all I needed. Waders and an ultra-light spinning rod. Life was good. The creek was known for Brown Trout but I wasn’t finding them on my line at all. I was using 1/16oz red marabou jigs and catching some great Smallmouths. Ferocious fish of bronze and black, some of which the vertical black markings reminded me of a tiger. I was fishing a section that snaked back and forth between cornfields not a mile from the house and washing away the week on the road.
It was tough to explain, but even though I missed Holly and the boys during the week, and I only had two days with them, even though I felt that I should spend all of my home time around them, I needed time to myself. It seemed selfish to me, that I was on my own without them during the week, but that I still needed time to myself on the weekend. But I had to do it. While I liked the job, there was some kind of tension with it that I couldn’t put my finger on, I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe it was just so different from anything else I had ever done that I didn’t know how to cope with not following my dreams anymore and move on from them. Like I felt I shouldn’t be happy, walking away from my passion of thirteen years.
It may have had something to do with talking to Holly every night, while I stood on a river with a fishing rod in my hand while she was home alone, the boys raising hell in the background, and the stress in her voice after a a full day at work. I felt guilty during those calls that here I was fishing, and on the other end was my wife, the single mother five days a week with nowhere to run and hide or to even breathe.
Or maybe it was the phone conversations when I wasn’t fishing. Stuck in a hotel room with nowhere to fish and the same TV shows on night after night put me in a foul mood. And if she had a rough day, and I had a rough day, and if she was trying to talk over the boys being loud and raising hell in the background, I would get aggravated and short. I would end up texting her later sometime before I fell asleep that I was sorry for being short with her on the phone, sometimes she would reply, and sometimes she wouldn’t.
One weekend during the Auburn tower mod job as I walked home from fishing the creek, it hit me. The explanation for why I needed my couple hours of alone time on the weekends after having it all week. For years I had ridden a motorcycle. Everyone always said how free they felt riding, how it cleared their minds. I felt that was B.S. It didn’t clear my mind at all. When I rode, I had nothing to do but think. It was just the opposite for me. But fishing on the other hand, while I was fishing, I thought of nothing else but the water in front of me, I pictured the lure underwater as I made it dive and swim, and the feel of the releasing of the fish after the catch was like releasing something in me. Fishing was what cleared my mind, and it seemed that I needed to clear it quite often these days.
Fish or Die! 