If you’re like me, when familiar and unfamiliar intersect, nonsense occurs.
I’m driving with my brother from North Carolina to California. He’s a general practice physician in the Navy and his new orders required the move. His wife and kids flew and it’s up to us to get the two family vehicles to the west coast.
So of course I want to fish as much as possible. And while the journey has been filled with sightseeing – mountains, rivers, scenery, shirtless dudes in Arkansas driving combines down the highway – it’s been the wildlife that has arrested most of my attention.
We’ve seen dozens of deer, a couple really cute fawns, armadillos and of course trout. In an area of the Blue Ridge Mountains where a 10-inch trout is considered large, I caught a rainbow just under that. In the Smoky Mountain National Park, I hooked into a brown trout that would have cracked doubled digits, but I lost it. (My brother documented my despair from shore.) But it’s the snakes and ticks that have the most attention.
I find myself walking through the woods utilizing my bear tactics.
“Hey snake, hey snake.”
It sounds stupid, but it’s what I know. If you’re in the wild and you don’t want to sneak up on something you don’t want to eat you, you make your presence known.
Yeah it’s for bears, but I don’t want to provoke anything. I don’t want anything to eat me, so I’m making my presence known so I don’t stumble upon a snake and her cubs or a pack of ticks.
The rocky shores of these rivers are not at all dissimilar to my rivers of Southeast, but so much more lurks in the cracks and hidden in the grass. I am not a hypochondriac or a chronic worrier but I’m totally wondering if that sensation running down my leg is a bead of water now that I’m not wading as deep, or if it’s a critter.
I think, “Why would a snake swim over and bite a human who was doing nothing but minding his own business and catching brown trout?”
It’s the same thing we tell Lower 48ers about black bear being more scared of us than we are of them, to which some of them reply, “Well, how do you know?”
It’s scarier for ticks though. If you’ve been set upon by a pack of ticks, you don’t even know until your brother calmly says, “Hey look at that” as if he’s pointing out an innocuous cloud shaped like a smiley face. He’s extracted ticks from humans. I haven’t. As far as I am concerned, all ticks have Lyme Disease and the thought of a tick “throwing up into my blood stream” if I try to burn it off once it’s burrowed into my skin makes me want to get back to my Alaska rivers, where the only thing I have to worry about is a 500-pound bear.
In the meantime, my mental column writing has been interrupted by the 18 inches of brown trout that just took my fly.
• Jeff Lund lives and writes in Ketchikan.
