The Lonely Fisherman
It was by sheer luck (or should I say “providence”) that I saw him without him seeing me. As I braked my bike to stop at the overlook at the dam, I caught a glimpse of the back of his head through a small opening in the tall grass. By the time I stopped I was now behind the taller grass where he couldn’t see me even if he turned his head. He was fishing at the bottom of the dam—where the water from Rowlett Creek spills over to form two giant eddies. These eddies actually sweep water from the center of the creek back upstream toward the dam to produce an ideal fishing spot. In the Spring, large sand bass get caught right at the spot where he is fishing, as they try futilely to jump over the twelve foot high impediment to their upstream migration. I never see him here in the Spring, however—only late summer and into Fall.
Usually as I approach this spot, even when I am trying to be stealthy, he sees me. His modus operandi is to have one eye on the dam, and the other eye looking back towards the overlook. And even if I creep slowly to the place where I can just gain visibility of him, he sees me first and takes off. His huge, six foot wingspan, flapping slowly so that his retracted feet just barely miss the surface of the creek, and then with one mighty stroke fifty yards downstream he rises like a giant blue kite that suddenly has caught a fresh breeze and alights on large branch that overhangs the water. He looks back at me and waits, knowing that eventually I will leave and he can return to his lonely fishing spot.
But today is different. His head was turned totally towards the dam as I went by, and he missed spotting me. Now I could view his long blue neck that supports his head and turned-down beak. I want to see more of his big blue body, so I push my bike slowly forward careful not to make a sound. But then, just as always, he sees me and the blue kite maneuver is once again executed.
It occurs to that I never see the fisherman with any other matching blue heron. Is he, like me, a widower? Perhaps he had a mate that used to go fishing with him at the dam, but she came down with a long illness and is now departed. Or maybe they were fishing together and some beast, whose sneaky traits are superior to mine, ambushed his female mate and terminated her life.
But there is another possible scenario. Maybe blue herons by nature live solitary lives. Maybe they are all solitary fishermen, an introvert’s introvert, spending each day alone, except for a few hours a year when they decide they must come together male and female to produce progeny to extend their gene pool.
I’m sure that with enough time and Internet resources I could search this out and determine which of the two scenarios is correct, if either are. But I prefer to think that scenario 1 is right. Then I feel a certain kinship with the lonely fisherman. He was living his life, totally independently, a young heron with a wonderful future, and then “she” came along. And his life was changed forever. For the better. Together they fished , feathered their nest, and raised their brood of baby herons. How happy he was, how good life was with his soul-mate doing the things herons do. And then disaster struck, the children left the nest, and he is left to fish alone at the bottom of the dam.
But then after reflection, I thought of how even the second scenario could produce resonances in me. Thirty-eight years seems like a long time, but from an eternal perspective it is just a few hours of heron-time equivalent. I had a life before “she” came along, just like my friend the fisherman. And now my “she” and “me” are on divergent paths again, just like before our marriage. Oh, we would never have chosen this if left to us. Each day, even each hour, we loved one another more with an attachment that only death could break. Our lines had fallen in very pleasant places. We often talked of simply wanting the life we were living to go on and on and on as we became almost the same person in our thoughts, our words, our loves. Only the Lord could know that there was something better for us than the life we were living. For her it was to be taken to a disembodied glory that is now unimaginable to me until some day I go into that life myself. She is alive, but it is a very different kind of life—a more glorious life—than I am living here. Yet, I am alive here in this world. I have my missions to accomplish, my “fish” to catch like my friend the heron. It’s a lonely life, but it is a life nonetheless and I am called to live it as best I can—-alone.
I climb on my bike to resume my daily route, glancing back to see the fisherman still waiting for his fishing spot to be vacated. “See you tomorrow, friend,” I say half aloud to him. “Perhaps when I come again, I’ll see another smaller matching bird standing by your side, and you will look up at me and wink.”