On Fishing and the Observation of Details

Joanie and Chip cooling off in the creek on a summer day.

My husband has to bribe me to go fishing with him. Because I don’t actually fish myself. I just help paddle the canoe and lower and raise an anchor.

If you like to fish, you may think that if I’d just try it, I’d like it.

I have tried it. My husband taught me how to fly fish decades ago.

The fun part is just so fleeting.

When a fish nibbles on the fly lure floating on the water, I get a tiny thrill. But after I reel the fish in, I have to touch it in order to remove the hook. And that wriggling, slippery fish gives me the willies.

Plus I feel bad about causing it pain from the hook—even when I’d toss the fish back. And let’s not even talk about my hypocrisy about eating fish and meat.

So fishing, for me, is a quiet, slow, mind-numbingly boring activity. My husband knows this, which is why he bribes me with breakfast out.

To manage the two to three hours of boredom before the late breakfast reward, I usually take a book with me in the canoe.

But recently I decided to go wild and take nothing to distract me—no book, no notebook, no camera, no phone.

And I didn’t wear a watch so I couldn’t keep checking it, wondering when we’d be done and go have breakfast.

I decided that I’d just observe, use my senses, notice what I noticed. Would I go bonkers without some stimulation from words?

We put the canoe in a small lake that’s supposed to be good for pan fishing. One end of the lake was near a “T” intersection of two rural, asphalt roads with a little bit of traffic.

There was no dock, just a bit of gently sloping sandy shore, so I climbed into the canoe first and crawled over the seats to the front. Larry shoved the canoe farther into the water before he climbed in. Then we had to use our paddles to try and push off.

We paddled maybe a hundred yards. Dozens of small lily pads grew near the shore. We stopped about 20 feet away and I dropped an anchor.

It was shortly after 6 a.m. and the birds were quite chatty. I don’t know bird calls, but there were at least two different species making noise. I could also hear the gulping noise that I associate with bull frogs.

In the distance was the hum of traffic, which surprised me a little. I didn’t know Highway 8 had enough traffic so early on a Friday morning to make that much noise. The air was calm, so perhaps the lack of a breeze made the traffic sound louder.

The trees on the shore were a mix of maples and birches in a lighter green next to the darker greens of pines and spruces. In the water along the shore, the trees’ reflections were messy, more like an Impressionist painting. On the other side of the canoe, the water was more still and the blue sky and clouds reflected in it looked more like a photo than a painting.

Larry caught a few small bluegills fairly quickly and tossed them all back. They landed with a light splash and I watched their ripples move away and intersect with ripples from other things, like a leaf dropping in the water.

As I watched the ripples, I noticed the tiny bugs, about the size of fleas, zipping across the water. A bright yellow insect dashed among the much tinier bugs. It looked like it was flapping wings about a hundred miles per hour but could only glide across the water, not take off into the air.

A man put a kayak in the water at the same place we’d used and soon paddled across the lake to the other side and then up the shore away from us. I saw no other boats out, though many were tied up at private docks along the shore.

We moved a couple of more times and I raised and lowered the anchor. Larry had worse luck at the other places he tried.

And before I had time to get bored, he was ready to go for breakfast.

I was surprised to discover that we’d been on the water for an hour and a half. It hadn’t felt like that much time.

My rather obvious takeaway from this experiment is that by staying still and letting my mind wander freely, I noticed small details, like the wildly careening yellow bug.

How would my characters react to being on a lake in a canoe for a couple of hours? Do I know them well enough to predict that?

For the middle grade dog novel I’m revising now, I think I do. And I think I know what they’d notice.

What would you notice and how would your characters react?