A Bad Day Fishing is Better Than a Good Day Blogging

My spirit rejuvenation place is located about an hour from the West Entrance from Yellowstone. Tucked away in scenic spot in Idaho, also about an hour away from the Montana border, sits Upper Mesa Falls. In the pic above, this would be looking down on the falls from about 500 feet above.

I fell in love with so much when my dear friend Wesley showed me the spot. As we were standing there at the tourist lookout, the first time I saw it, the first time I had been to Idaho, he said, “Do you want to go fish it?” My eyes got big in excitement and horror. The journey to the bottom of the falls is over and down volcanic boulders.

After, perhaps, 35 minutes or more to slowly get down, with fishing gear in hand, you are greeted by a natural spring that you would never know is there from above. Numerous springs flow into the river in this stretch of the Snake River. I always look back up as I am sitting there enjoying my spring water and think, “Oh my god, what have I just done? How am I going to get back up?”

About that time I hear a faint shout over the roar of the fall, “Fish on!” Wes has already got his line in the water. I jump up, grab the net, run the 80 or so feet down the river, over more rocks, to help land the fish, if Wes can hold on and if he really had one in the first place. I often get to be the beginning and end of a few jokes when I am there. Or, more than likely, Wes was just prompting me in his way to get up so we could go journey together.

Either way the companionship of excitement is rejuvenating too. To know his own wide-eyed middle age eyes have been on me when I caught my first rainbow trout has been much to fall in love with. To know his watchful eyes have been on me when I lost my footing on a slippery rock while fishing in the river has been an unspoken safety net. To know I can allow myself another human being and nature to soften my often hardened resolve is much to fall in love with.

About 8 hours later after hiking and fishing and exploring and savoring the river, I’m back at the same spot enjoying my spring water and the day and Wes and Mother Nature. Then I look back up and say aloud, “How the hell am I ever going to get back up?” I have said this for at least seven of these fishing trips now, and Wes has always answered, ‘You’ll be fine. It’s not a race. I’ll carry your rod.” The short conversation is always spoken as if we have never had it before.

I leave for the cabin where we stay at the end of July to fish and hike along all the numerous hidden spots on Henry’s Fork of the Snake River that Wesley has found throughout the years, and some we have now discovered together.

I have not been to my rejuvenation spot in more than two years now, a promise I broke to my friend Wes since I engaged in political blogging. I had never allowed another person to tempt me into the codependency of not fishing. Though I have allowed a couple along the way to tempt me with excitement and sometimes horror to journey down canyons that were not always guaranteed a rainbow over a waterfall.

A bad day fishing really is better than a good day blogging. Chasing rainbows in the politics of other people’s lives and the nature we all depend on is often just not worth the carefully thought out footsteps, volcanic boulders, scattered springs of rejuvenation, and wide eyes of excitement and horror of what have we done and how we are going to get back up.

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