Scary Cool

And God caused the sky to shake and the waters of heaven to open.  His brilliance illuminated the earth.  His voice made the trees tremble, and he said, "Fall on your knees, before the Lord your God."

**6 months earlier**

I'm a sucker for shows that start this way.  There is always a tension inside me between distaste with the writers for hooking my attention with this cliche tool and loving that this cliche tool succeeds in hooking my attention.  I really want to see what happened earlier to lead up this climactic moment in the show.

Compared to most television shows/movies, however, my life is much less climactic.  But that doesn't really matter, does it?  Pain is a relative thing.  Ask people of differing ages and experiences how much a skinned knee hurts (say, my eight year old son and my 75 year old father) and you will get significantly different answers.  Our pain is uniquely qualified by our own perspective, not others.  What is devastating to me, may seem trivial to someone else.  The sharp pain of a stubbed toe temporarily obliterates your awareness of all else, yet an onlooker may simply find it funny.

I explain that as a disclaimer and a justification of the fact that the last several months of my life have been really hard (relatively).  And, frankly, it is hard for me to admit it.  I was raised on stories of the Bataan Death March and Vietnamese prisoner of war camps; images of monks lighting themselves on fire and tanks rolling over people in Tienanmen Square; knowledge of the War to End All Wars and then the next one and the next one depictions of the Great Depression and the Holocaust; studies about despotic and genocidal leaders like Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao Tse-tung and Hitler and the Ayatollah Khomeini; real possibilities of nuclear war and, and, and...  

Life's pretty good

In the knowledge and perspective of these and more, it has always been difficult for me to admit pain.   Who am I to complain?  I don't have it so bad.  This will pass.  Heck, I'm married.  I have four healthy kids.  I have a roof over my head.  I make more money than 98% of the world. My parents are alive and still married. My dog doesn't bite me anymore.

So, it is hard to complain... out loud.

Because I do plenty of complaining.  I just don't verbalize it.  Complaining out loud would be wrong.  That would allow others to compare my pain against those absolute standards of suffering like poverty and starvation and abuse that makes my hardship seem less, well, hard.  So, I try and focus on what I have, what I'm thankful for.  And it works.  Mostly.

Our Grubby Little Lives

A lesser known fact about me: I am the world's worst fisherman.

That's not hyperbole.

My dad, who is really a pretty good fisherman, has taken me fishing many times over the years.  I've trolled for trout and angled for bass and jigged for salmon and even cast a few flies.  I love the idea of fishing, but one thing has always been missing for me.  One thing has always kept me from enjoying it the way my dad does, the way almost everyone who fishes enjoys it: the fish.  I don't catch any.

In all of times I have fished in my life, whether in a row boat or a float tube or with waders or on the shore or 300 feet above a weighted down rigger, I can count the number of fish that I have caught over the past 30 odd years on two hands.  I just don't catch fish.  I'm cursed.

It doesn't make sense.  'The funny thing about fishing is that it isn't hunting.  You don't have to stalk them or cover yourself with fish urine so they don't smell you.  While diehard fishermen may disagree with me, success in fishing is largely about preparation and equipment.  The right lure, the right spot, the right time, and voila, fish on the line.  Equipment impacts hunting, but a good hunter can be largely successful with inferior equipment.  On the other hand, while there is definitely skill involved in reeling and netting, all the skill in the world won't make fish bite the wrong lure at the wrong time.  

That's what doesn't make sense about my inability to catch fish.  I'll be on a boat with the latest person who is going to show me that the curse is nonsense.  We'll be fishing at the same time, in the same spot, using the same equipment, and the fish just don't bite my line.  I don't know why that is, but I know when it started.

When I was nine or ten, my family took a trip to Alaska.  No, we didn't fly.  We drove.  Towing a trailer.  35 miles per hour.  On a 2,000 mile dirt road. Sound fun?

It took a while to get there.  But that was ok, because the fishing is great along the way.  And it was.

30 years later, I still remember reeling in the grayling on rivers while being sucked dry by the biggest mosquitos you will ever see.  (My brother bought a cap in Alaska with a picture the pest and the caption "Alaska State Bird".)  Up till this point I was still a kind of normal kid when it came to fishing.  Sometimes I caught fish, sometimes I didn't.  

But that changed when we reached the Kenai River.  

On the Kenai, the river literally boiled with fish.  Salmon so thick, it looked like you could walk across the water on their backs.  My dad caught a fish that was nearly as big as I was, and I wanted to go out on the river too, but I was young and the boat was full, so while they fished, I sat.  Later though, because no one was going out and I wanted to catch a big fish like my dad, I grabbed a pole, geared up, and got in the boat by myself.

I wasn't going anywhere.  The boat was tied to the dock.  The older men and boys snickered a bit at the adorable ignorance of a 9 year old thinking the fish would swim up to the doc to be caught.  (This is a disease that you catch if you fish too long.  I call it I've-fished-so-long-I-forgot-that-fish-really-do-have-to-swim-up-and-bite-my-lure-itis.)

So I sat in the boat and cast my salmon pole out into the river in hopes of hooking a "big one".

And I did just that.  (In your faces!)

I had reeled in a couple of times and then cast out again, when all of a sudden the pole started making this horrible whining noise as the line shot out of the reel.  I was terrified.  I had actually hooked a big salmon and had no idea what to do.  So, like any red-blooded, american male in the throws of a primal and manly pursuit would do, I screamed.