Fios and Fishing

Ah, Sunday! A warmish day, not really warm warm, but warmish enough to go down to a nearby trout stream. I felt a fierce, joyful anticipation as I pulled the car off the side of the road along the stream, opened the trunk, and put on my wading boots. I looked around; the trees were bare, but thick around me, the brush brown but brown was OK, it's an earth color, after all, and the stream was there, running clear, and the air was fresh and it felt great to be out. Next step was to put on my vest, flipping up the license holder just to check that son of a god-damn bitch, and I stood there dumbfounded. 2007, the license said. I pulled the other licenses from underneath it, like I'd made a mistake and shuffled the 2008 one into the deck. 2006, 2005, 2004, damn. In a normal year I'd have been fishing a number of times by now; you can fish in the winter in Pennsylvania. I was sure I'd gotten out at least once this year, but clearly I hadn't.

I pulled off the road an hour later and put on my waders with a fierce if somewhat chastened joy, having gone home for a sandwich and a session at the computer, downloading a new license. The state site worked with interminable slowness, I suppose because it was a civil service site and knew I couldn't go to a competitor. But eventually I got the license and now I was on the stream. I tried some of the usual spots, and eventually found the fish, and landed two and hooked some other dandies in the course of two hours.

It wasn't going to go into the annals of sport, but it was great to just shut the door on everything and concentrate on fish for a while. If you catch fish, well, then, you can tell yourself you did something right, and if you keep your head in the game and do the work and thinking required when the fishing isn't easy, you can still tell yourself you did something right. When I do either one I feel entitled to go home and pour a little bourbon or Scotch into one of the fishing-art glasses I found in an antique store. They were done by a wildlife artist named Ned Smith and they have a certain old-world style that recalls a time when hunting and fishing had a certain place in people's lives, at least on the East Coast here, that it doesn't now. I read Field & Stream these days and the photography is edgy and the whole publication has attitude, but these Ned Smith glasses don't have attitude at all. Sometimes, when you come home feeling good after a day—or even just a couple of hours—on the stream, you don't miss attitude. At any rate, that was Sunday.

Saturday I waited around for the guy to install my fiber-optic line. I was assigned to wait from 8 a.m. until noon, and bless his heart, he showed up around 9 and got right to work. He was a big burly guy with a whole variety of clothes draped on him in layers, topped with a nondescript plaid jacket, and his round head wore glasses and a keen expression. Right away he'd discovered that the scouting party that comes and checks out your house had given him information that was either vague or wrong. He gave me an amused, rueful look—"It's a simple job, but they make it complicated," he said, and we grinned at teach other. He took a while to check that out before he started cutting and soldering and such, but soon he put on the hard hat and got the ladder out.

A few hours later I had fiber-optic service, which Verizon, the local phone company, calls Fios. It didn't immediately transform my life, or anything. But they'd given me a new wireless router, so I took the Airport Express router I had been using and hooked it to my stereo, and damn, it was easy to stream music from my desktop in the office upstairs down to the living room. I don't know why I found this so delightfully astonishing—wireless is precisely the word they once used for radio, which is appropriate, because that's all it is. But somehow the idea that Dr. John or La Bohème should come floating like a spirit down the stairs and out the stereo seemed like telepathic magic. Plus which, I felt kind of up to date, which is rare and marvelous in itself. So it was an interesting weekend all in all. Now—you guessed it—gotta work!