Trivial Pursuits

...At noon I would usually stop in some forlorn, passed-by spot to eat a lunch that I had packed in a small cooler; forgotten, neglected little parks in forgotten, neglected little towns, or windswept prairie cemeteries full of ghosts and tattered, sun-bleached plastic flowers. Sometimes, if I was in a particularly unpeopled area, I would simply pull over on some little-traveled county road and eat lunch there. But I liked the abandoned public spaces and cemeteries the best, perhaps because the ghosts of dreams and folly were so much closer to the surface, more tangible.

In the cemeteries I would eat in the uncomplaining company of long-dead souls eager to tell their stories, stories written in the dates of their birth, their death, and in the terse inscriptions on their headstones. Death banal and death tragic. Death too soon  and death come at last. Death for the rich and death for the poor. Death for the loved and venerated and death for the alone and long-forgotten. 

Cemeteries are good places for pondering the arc of existence and collective experience. I would walk among the weathered headstones, cracking pistachios and wondering about the lives of the people under my feet while marveling at the screw-turns of history all that old, accumulated time represented.

  

Some of the parks had little creeks running through them, or dying lakes or ponds, so when I found water I would break out the little three-weight I always carried with me in the car. It didn’t matter that I rarely caught anything. The improbability of the act itself, in those places, under that sky, in the presence of so much immense loneliness, was reward enough for me. I would cast in silence in the shimmering heat, high on the opiate of space and solitude and a rod in the hand.

It was on one such day that I sat beside a dead river that once emptied into a dead lake, eating my burrito and pondering the folly of man. There were no fish here to catch, no answers to be found, no balm for the demons. Forces inexorable and mysterious, but obvious and undeniable, had rendered this once- living thing into a dry, thin wisp of memory.

And it occurred to me, sitting there with my rod cased and wondering about the fish that surely once swam in this dry riverbed, that in the face of such systemic change and uncertainty, pleasant trivialities like fishing may be one of the few things we have left. And if that is truly the case, then one must encourage and pursue trivialities when one can, before they’re gone.

 Because in such trivialities - or more specifically, their loss - can be found the bellwethers of larger history; of tragedy and despair and telling of story on a grander, more terrifying scale. Every headstone in a cemetery, every dry riverbed on a prairie, every ruined patch of earth or failed dream tells a single, inconsequential story, a triviality. But taken together, they tell a history, and perhaps even more. Seers, quacks, hucksters and algorithms can’t predict the future. Future, as the old philosopher (sort of) once said, is the province of the dead and the gone and the whisper of wind across the dry bones of water and memory.

So my takeaway from this arid, dusty lunch shared with rattlesnakes and harvester ants was this: Go fishing, whenever you can, wherever you can. Revel in such trivial pursuits, and try to forget, momentarily, the future those trivialities may someday portend.