New England is a paradise. In May and October.
But winter is tough. Each year by early March I have to remind myself that I actually choose to live here. I could leave if I wanted to.
In South Carolina where it all started for me, gardens are already tilled. Potato slips and onion sets are in the ground. Flies are hatching. Trout are gorging.
But up here the cold claims every minute right up to the equinox. And then some.
This time of year I get itchy. It becomes apparent that the inner peace I won in Autumn wasn't a victory. Just a truce. A nervous ceasefire. After a couple months of frozen rivers, I jones. I need a day on the water to work my way back into a standoff with myself.
Meditation teaches you to begin again. Again and again. Without judgement each time. Again.
That mirrors the pattern of the seasons. The teasing days of thaw. The brittle grind of anadromous ice migrating to the sea.
Begin again. Again and again. Without judgement each time. Again.
Every cast on every river is the same. Every drift. Every nymphing run. Begin again. Again and again. Without judgement each time. Again.
Teasing. Delicious. Desperately needed. We replenish fly boxes, blow the dust off gear that sat for too long. We start a new fishing season. Again and again. Without judgement each time. Again.
That cycle gives me sanction, I think, to repost an old essay from this time last year...
I was itchy then too.
Enjoy.
The Ninth Circle of Hell
Dante Alighieri wrote a long and famous poem about hell.
Anyone who took freshman lit remembers his concentric circles, each more torturous than the last. His inner-most circle of hell, the place where the worst of the worst spend eternity? It wasn't fire and brimstone. It was ice.
Little-known fact: Dante was a fly fisherman. He spent his summer days chasing marble trout on the Arno, right in the heart of Florence. But during the Little Ice Age, the Arno would freeze over for six months at a stretch. No fishing for Dante until the slow and tedious thaw.
That lake of ice covering the helliest of all hells makes sense now, right?
Ignoring a few nuanced problems with the Rutherford–Bohr model, water molecules look a little bit like cartoon bunny rabbits. The oxygen atom is the bunny’s head. The two hydrogen atoms are the ears.
Those ears give up their electrons and the bunny’s head winds up with a full valence shell and a partial negative charge. That makes water a polar molecule. Like the earth it partially covers, water has a north and a south.
As the temperature drops, any latent thermal energy stored in liquid water is lost to entropy. No longer bouncing around in a thermally induced sugar-craze, the forces of molecular polarity come into play. The molecules quiesce. North attracts south and the bunny heads lock together to form crystals. They stack like chevrons.
Liquid becomes solid. Water becomes ice.
Hrmph.
Some people love the stuff. They swoosh on it. They slide meticulously carved and polished granite boulders across it for sport. They wax rhapsodic about powder-days with the same emotive glee I reserve for caddis fly hatches.
But I don 't care for ice. Neither did Dante.
Thanks to that crystalline lattice structure, ice is counterintuitively less dense than liquid water. That means it floats, making fly fishing impossible.
I feel ya, Dante! Frozen rivers are my own personal hell too.
While I wait for my home waters to thaw, I’ll take my ice in a highball.
It turns out it floats on top of whiskey too!
Thanks. Again and Again.
Your Substack posts always make my morning coffee more delicious.