This is Not Sad

I arrive at Pete’s in a flurry. Upset. Overstimulated. Dramatic. (Thank my Grandma Tine for the dramatic flare.)

“Ugh! That was the most frustrating drive!” If Pete had a dollar for every time he heard this, he’d have a lot of dag-gum dollars.

It’s tourist season in the Finger Lakes, and more specifically, it’s Grassroots in Trumansburg.

“I must have passed at least 6 people between here and Corning.” Not because I’m a speed demon, mind you. “I’d get past one guy doing 50, and then I’d catch up to the next guy doing 50.”

Arkansas. Arizona. Maryland. New Jersey. It’s like if they drive too fast to see the 38-mile-long lake out their driver’s side windows, it might disappear or something.

“Poor Miss Beans!” Pete says from his perch on the couch, where he’s finishing his Duolingo.

“Yes, poor me. I don’t like passing people.”

Pete laughs at me. It’s a ribbing laugh, the kind where you know someone’s poking fun at you but for good reason. “Oh, you don’t, do you?”

I give him an articulate arch of my eyebrow. “I do not.”

Pete finishes his lesson, puts his phone down, and takes a dramatic breath. “Miss Beans.”

I poke my head back out of the kitchen. “Yes?”

“I’m thinking of going fishing again with John.”

“Tonight, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if we do that, then I’m gonna take my book instead of wade. I’m pretty tired.”

“Oh, I think you’ll like this new spot John found. It’s got a little beach, but no one really knows much about it, so it’s usually deserted.”

This intrigues me. I like a good free, deserted, pebble beach.

I chop the veggies for our dinner. Pete cooks the meat. We collect the few things we might need for an evening at the lake and hop in the car. Our errands take us through Grassroots traffic. “No parking” signs litter the sidewalks every six feet. Closer to the fairgrounds, we see signs for paid parking everywhere. At the school, at businesses, in people’s front yards. Two police officers wave us through the crosswalk at which gaggles of people have gathered to cross the road.

“Ugh—” Pete says. “Grassroots.”

It’s a love/hate relationship, I’ve learned, between T-burg and Grassroots. They love the business and even attending. They grudgingly accept (some downright hate) the congestion and the tourists. It can be annoying. It always increases my parking anxiety.

We finish our errands, wade our way back through the madness, and turn to leave town.

“Geez Louise. They’ve even got the ‘no parking’ signs down here,” I say.

We roll through a few more intersections and turn onto a back road, and there in a gravel lot maybe a mile from the fairgrounds are 25 cars parked next to dirt piles.

“I guess they aren’t joking with all those ‘no parking’ signs. They really need them.”

Pete quirks his eyebrows. “That’s a pretty long way to walk.”

To be honest, nothing feels sane about this week. I’ve just been skipping from one yahoo, upside-down-world thing to the next. Compared to that, the town being stuffed to its gills with music festival crazies— No Big Deal!

I had been hoping for something calm for the weekend, though. Something that more closely resembled the normal routine. Even if it was just to be able to think straight for half an hour!

Pete drives us down curvy roads and finally parks us in this old access road that’s blocked off by a cut section of tree. He gets out of the car and begins assembling his fishing kit.

“This used to be an old camp. They shut it down and now all those cabins and buildings—” there are two cabins right in front of us behind which I can see and hear the lake— “they’re all empty and locked up. It’s kind of eerie. I bet you could film some kind of low-budget, student horror film here or something.”

The cabins would be perfect to turn into vacation rentals, especially these two with their lake frontage.

Pete hikes up his fishing pack and dons his sunglasses. “Let’s go see if we can find John.”

We cross over the bridge and see John’s truck. Pete leads me past all these wooden benches set up like pews in a half circle. It’s obviously an overgrown meeting spot for people to watch a bonfire. Behind this, a small, green yard leads up to a tiny speck of pebble beach. The lake is choppy tonight, the waves raucous. The water has already taken on that pastel shade of turquoise that’s reserved for a certain time of day and a certain kind of sky. Today the color is muddied a bit because of the Canadian wildfire smoke and the haze. The sun hangs orange and heavy just above the ridgeline to our backs and over our left shoulders.

Pete spots John standing in the water. He’s a tiny, Lego-figure of a man standing in the roll of the shallow lake waves.

“I think I’ll set up here. Have fun, handsome man.”

Pete wades out into the water. I unpack my camping chair and set down my Diddlysquat bag (the best bag in the world!). I make myself comfortable and take out my book. I look up at the lovely (if bizarre) view of the smoke haze that turns the far bank opaque, and I find I can’t quite turn the frazzledness off in whatever section of my brain produces frazzle.

Here is all the loveliness that usually calms. The sound of the water. The rustle of the wind in the leaves. Far out, two ducks bob blissfully on the swell. Large pieces of driftwood dance in the lake’s backwash, and they shimmer with orange from the weird sun. Here are all the things to loosen the tension, quiet the mind, and yet I still feel that I have to talk myself into it, give myself permission to relax.

My Lego-sized man has now joined the other Lego-sized man out in the swell, and I lean forward to watch. The sun tosses out its orange coins in the water right behind them, and I see their mouths work but hear no words. They backcast and haul their lines.

There’s a whole language to this, you know. Fly fishing. I haven’t learned it all yet, but maybe I will.

I like to watch them fish. There’s something peaceful about it. Something peaceful about this moment. And I realize suddenly that this is one of those moments that will stand out golden (or nuclear orange in this case) forever in my mind. I watch my Lego-sized man out in the rolling swell, and I know I’ll never again see him chonk his gum in quite that same way. Or see the fishing rod bend almost double just like that.

(“That thing was a monster! It took me into the backing.”)

This is not sad in the way that some would call these things sad, but it is beautiful. It’s beautiful because I woke up from the frazzle just in time to notice it. Just in time to hear the exclamation when Pete’s line snaps and he loses the monster fish. Just in time to see them each shake his head in recognition of the disappointment.

Pete repairs his line. Ties on another fly.

They cast on. And the wind blows on. The waves reach out for the shoreline again and again. The round, smoke-oranged sun sits down against the hill.

And I sit back to read in peace at last.