There is a borderline, a thin membrane that covers the world in all aspects. Your life, your job, your car, and of course your all-encompassing fishing addiction. On the opposite side of that borderline lies greatness or destruction. Maybe that membrane covers something as miniscule as a thought. Each floating thought stopped by a net that only bears two outcomes. Life or death. Maybe it is our will to survive that forces us not to complete a thought for fear of that one percent of failure. We strive for the familiar.
One such story involves myself and the South Platte River. I hiked over a hill into a particularly fishy looking hole. It seemed a particularly brilliant plan. Fish where people won’t go. Dropping an 11th hour for well over an hour produced nothing. Time was running out and I knew the hour of fishing to come would turn out to be a better experience than the hour before. I tried different bugs to no avail. Sometimes while fishing, we change flies. This is not a normal practice for me. Yet, I changed the pattern. Knowing a new tactic would only inhibit my catching ability. This process pulled me out of the realm of familiarity. I knew what would work, and it wasn’t tied on. I looked up.
When you are on the brink of greatness, you do things you wouldn’t normally do. You tie your right shoe with your right hand and left with your left. Accidents, like the tying of an RS2 because of your determination to tie a better comparadun. Then you go and do something crazy like tie on your original fly that didn’t work and fish the most overpressured water you can imagine, and it worked.
I looked up again, death began to fall from the sky. A death I have become to familiar with. Lightning. I pushed the limits as fish began to rise to the bubbles pushed down from falling rain. I had made it this far. In the brink of life and death was success.