Is it just me, or does it seems that my plans never go according to plan? Not that I am lamenting it. Most of my most enjoyable memories have arisen from most of my most miserable misfortunes. I think it is God’s ever-present witness of His sovereignty in my life. If all of my plans went according to plan, and all of my happiness arose from my happy situations, there would be little cause for praising and worshipping God. But alas, this is certainly not the case for me. A simple recollection is plenty enough proof for me that God is working all things for my good. Friday after Thanksgiving was just such a day. My friend Greg, the Overnight Bellman at the Four Seasons who I share those most active hours of the day 2300 to 0700 with, and I went fishing together down on the Salt River after work Friday. Though it was still pretty cold, the sun was shining and it was looking like it was going to be a beautiful day. We drove down to Alpine (small town south of Jackson) where he lives and ate some breakfast (whole wheat bread with honey that was surprisingly tasty and filling) and waited for it to warm up a bit. Since Greg doesn’t fly fish, and I didn’t know the river, I decided to just borrow a spinning rod from him and fish that way. We stopped at the local shop, and I bought a rooster tail and a sinking Rapala crankbait for the exhorbent prices of $2.50 and $9.25 respectively. Yes, that’s right, $9 freakin 25 for one lure (Remember that, it’s important to the story). Anyway, we began fishing and knowing that I am prone to losing lures, I began with the rooster tail. No joke, first cast I get hung, can’t get it free, break the line, I’m out my $2.50 rooster tail. But it was a beautiful day, and I was glad to be out doing something, so I didn’t mind. Of course now I’m even antsier about using my $9.25 Rapala (that’s before tax, too), so I borrow one of Greg’s rooster tails. I fish with this for a while and hook two, but lose them both. In the meantime Greg hooks and lands one with his $8.50 Rapala. He offers to let me use another copy of the same lure, but I’m still a bit nervous about losing it, so I decline. We continue on walking down the river fishing. My fingers keep starting to hurt, and so I have to keep shaking them to get the blood flowing back into them and warm them up. Eventually Greg tells me to stuff them down my pants, which works really well since I’m wearing fleece pants underneath my snowboard pants (When I say pretty cold, that means snow on the ground and below freezing, not TN pretty cold as in 60 degrees). Anyway I finally thought I’d figured out how to fish the Rapala (yes, the $9 freakin 25 Rapala) without losing it, so I tied it on. I fished for a while, but was seriously considering quitting because my thumb was hurting so badly from the cold. When I would put my gloves on to keep them warm, they kept catching on the reel, and I could barely wind it in. Greg told me I’ve got to try this one more place before we go back so I walk down the river a ways to where the Salt runs into the Snake River. I fished there for a while and was getting ready to call it a day when, yes, need I say it, I get my $9 freakin 25 Rapala hung. I walked up and down the bank trying to change the angle hoping to work it free but to no avail. That went on for a while, but eventually I conceded and tried to pull it free or break the line. To my utter excitement, the lure pulled free. Of course, in my attempts to get it free, the line had gotten tangled up in some brush out in the river and would get hung again as soon as I tried to reel it in. I slowly pull the lure up to the brush and give it one big jerk to try and pull it through. It came through perfectly and I excitedly yelled over to Greg that I had gotten it free. I started reeling it in only to discover that somehow (and this one I don’t understand) I was hung again. This time I could see its green and yellow body in the water only about 15 feet away in what looked like water only about a foot to foot and a half deep. I again walked up and down the bank trying to work it loose but to no avail. Eventually I had to try and pull it free and the line broke. Now I’d been fishing with the lure for quite a while with no luck, and I wasn’t a spin fisherman anyway, so the lure wasn’t super important to me, but just the principle of losing a lure that costs $9 freakin 25 on my first day and in a place where I could see it just didn’t sit well with me. So I told Greg I was going in after it. Now as I said, it was pretty cold, but I didn’t mention that the whole bank along which we’d been fishing was lined with ice. Big sheets of ice had been floating down the river all day, at times getting caught in eddies and flipping halfway out of the water. In fact I’d gotten hung on ice several times throughout the day. So I knew the water was going to be cold, but I didn’t think it would be a big deal. I’d strip down to my underwear, wade in (the water shouldn’t get above my knees), get the lure, dry off with my fleece pants and then clothe back up good as new. Greg tried his best to persuade me not to, but really I just couldn’t walk away from a lure so expensive and so close. I got him to come over because I imagined I wasn’t going to be able to climb back up the back. I stood there shivering in my underwear and base layer shirt, standing on my neck warmer, so I wouldn’t have to put my bare feet in the snow, waiting for him. He eventually came over, and I climbed down the bank. At the point I had chosen to enter the water, there was a sheet of ice extending about 4 to 5 feet out into the river. I stepped on this slowly weighting it to break through. It broke fairly easily and I stepped down through the water on to what I thought was going to be rounded rocks. This was another miscalculation, as the bottom was mud that was slightly textured and looked like rocks. I got out of the water to look again, but everywhere there was just mud that looked like rocks, but no rocks. That one step in had also giving me a taste of the temperature of the water, and it was cold. I knew it was going to be cold, but mentally you can’t really prepare for that extreme of a cold. It’s always colder than what you thought. Plus the water was deeper than appeared and with sinking in the mud, the water had already been above my knees, and that had been just the first step. I contemplated not going back in, but I was wet already, and I’d already told Greg I was going to get it, so back in I went. I walked out to it, losing feeling in my feet as I went and getting deeper as I went. When I got within about 3 feet of it, besides almost slipping and getting completely wet and the water lapping dangerously close to my groin area, I realized that I would have to submerge my whole arm in to reach the lure. That didn’t seem too appealing as it meant I’d get my shirt wet, and I could totally see myself falling while trying to bend over and reach it while shivering and with completely numb feet. I got Greg to toss me a rod which I caught (all those years of football coming in handy) and was surprisingly able to fish the lure out easily. When I reached to pull it off the rod though, I couldn’t help but chuckle. At some point in trying to get it free, I had broken the entire bill off, part of the wooden body and the ring to attach the line. Ha. The lure was completely destroyed and worthless. Ha. I’m laughing about it even now. I told Greg and he began laughing even harder. Apparently the sight of me in my underwear wading through ice is a comical scene, so he’d already been laughing a good bit. I waded back to the bank, got help climbing out and stood there shivering just laughing. I had planned on coming out the water clean, but instead my feet were covered in mud, so I grab my fleece pants and started cleaning them and drying off. My legs were cold, but my feet felt like ice blocks. Actually, they didn’t feel like anything. It just felt like something was there at the end of my leg, but there wasn’t enough feeling to know anything about it. I finally got my socks, fleece pants, snowboard pants, boots and two jackets back on and immediately started walking back to the truck. We were probably close to half a mile away from the truck by then, which at first I was dreading, but the walking ended being the best thing for me. For the first quarter mile or so, I was just walking on those unknowable things at the end of my legs. After that, a little bit of a burning sensation came (which I actually welcomed) and by the time I reached the truck I was good as new. I had planned to get in and crank up the heat and throw my feet up in front of the vents, but the walking had sufficiently circulated my blood to warm them. I waited for Greg, who I unfortunately missed seeing almost bust scrambling up the rock covered hillside. We got in his truck and eventually got turned around, almost getting stuck several times and eventually headed back down the icy road, almost sliding off of it a couple of times.
So what lessons can we learn from this. The first one is pretty obvious. I’m an idiot. I think I pride myself on being a pretty smart guy, but really, I’m pretty stupid. I make a lot of bad decisions that miraculously all work out fine. At some point people are going to start catching on to this and realize that I’ve bs’ed my way through 27 years of life. I can totally see how people get hypothermia and die from falling in freezing water now. Fortunately Greg was there so that even if I had slipped he could have fished me out, but if someone were to accidentally submerge in water like that, even for a moment, I could see how they could die. First, your head getting that cold that quick would probably really screw up your thinking and give you at best a splitting headache, at worst maybe knock you unconscious. Second, your hands getting that cold would probably make them totally worthless as far as intricate tasks such as buttoning, zipping, tying shoe laces, starting a fire and maybe even putting clothes on or taking clothes off. Third, you would lose a vast amount of heat in the brief time you were submerged and continue to lose it until you dried off (which would be difficult with your hands as functional as clubs). All this to say, I should be careful. Not that I really care whether I live or die, but what a lame way to go. “Yeah, we found him frozen. He went fishing, fell in and died before he could get back to get help and warm up.” Lame.
I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with the $9 freakin 25 Rapala. I kept it of course, and it has become my new favorite lure. No way I’d sell it for a meager $9 freakin 25.
