Last year was quite a ride, wasn’t it? Aside from all the good stuff, – I hope we all found lots to be thankful for throughout 2025 – we saw plenty of ugliness that we hopefully won’t see again. Without going into detail, I will simply opine that our nation may be as angry now as it has ever been. I would go so far as to say that many people considered it their job to make us angrier, and boy, do they deserve a bonus.
I tried to stay above it all, or at least to the side. To the extent that I didn’t entirely succeed, I attribute my failure to the fact that I didn’t fish as often as I usually do. As many miles as I drive around northern New Mexico, I normally keep a rigged fly rod in my car for the frequent occasions when I’m cruising along a stream and find some precious few moments to wet a line. In 2025, for reasons I can’t dream up, I left the rod at home. I drove to meetings in rural villages, turned around and drove home, where phones and computers lurked with their venom and their spite.
Honestly, I think I just forgot to fish, which was definitely a first. For as long as I can remember, fishing has been like a clock regulating my psychic rhythms for good and for bad. Various loved ones, but mainly my wife, have regularly banished me to the river for attitude adjustments, essentially saying, “I don’t want to see your (expletive deleted) (expletive deleted) back here until you catch a damn fish!”
These people taught me what I already knew, to heed the signals my brain was sending through an irritable temper and raised voice, or nights upon nights of insomnia. They taught me that fishing was my emotional hygiene. Like brushing my teeth, fishing wasn’t a practice I could skip without suffering significant reductions in the quality and quantity of life. At the very least, interrupting such a healthy habit would ensure that no one would want to come near me nor my filthy mouth.
It’s a well-worn cliché that fishing is like religion, and like all cliches, there’s some truth to it. During my Catholic boyhood, I remember lying in bed and sending anxious words into my pitch-black room in hopes that answers would soon return; praying, in other words. The transition from that to fishing was natural. If not certain knowledge of what lay in the depths, drifting a fly through a river current required a serious and yet optimistic faith in a being that, although invisible, had the power to make my next moment better than this one, or at least not too much worse. As such, my search was its own reward.
I hope I’ll remember that in 2026. Instead of getting washed away by the media-induced dopamine floods, I hope I’ll run for higher ground. Or better yet, over the next hill where a clear and cold stream with lots of hungry trout will be waiting for me.