These days my fishing wardrobe has settled around efficiency. What used to be a haphazard grab-and-go prêt-à-porter is now set for uniform wear. Four button down sun shirts, two pull-over sun shirts complete with hood, four pair of quick dry river pants (only two colors: gray and sedge), and two sets of Chaco sandals. When mornings get cooler I wear either a short or long sleeved running shirt—one of those nearly skin tight wicking deals that have become skin tight on me from too many years of gas station breakfast burritos, beef jerky, and binge eating on the road. As temperatures continue to drop in the fall or take their time warming in the spring, I have other layers: a synthetic puffy vest once bought to fit in with the San Francisco crowd of soulless finance professionals, an over-powered Goretex shell for rain and windy days, Grundens rain bibs kept in the drift boat for the rainy season or when the cool air cuts through my trousers, and those extra tuff Alaskan boots bought over a decade ago for when the water and air temps get too cold for bare toes. No one likes cold feet. While small in the scheme of misery, cold feet nevertheless catalyze all other miseries sending a whole day to pot before really getting started. The final pieces of my kit include two Irish wool sweaters Rene got me from a fishing town in Ireland over 20 years ago. Better than any jacket, these sweaters are the fall and winter wear that keep me on the water when most others are too scared of the cold.

I like the direct simplicity of what I’ve gathered. It streamlines things. My only choices in the morning are weather or laundry dependent. I can tell with my first cup of coffee what I need to put on which means the least amount of thought goes to clothes which also means significantly more thought goes to what matters. In my case, that is usually fish, river, fish and river, or fish, river, boat.

Rene claims my system is a holdover from my Coast Guard days. Ten years of a seabag and uniforms and not having to give much consideration to daily fashion leaves a legacy. She likes to point out that I followed a similar path when teaching. Then, I had a respectable closet full of professionally acceptable attire reduced to enough flexible pieces that at once met minimum standards of workplace dress code while still limiting how much consideration I had to give to the fit. Then, I could neither be a full on slob nor a fashionable man. My part was—and still is—functional, streamlined efficiency. This makes me no different than others with a mind to other things who have figured out the costuming needs of daily life. After all, that’s what we’re doing for the most part anyhow, right? Dressing the part, playing the role, meeting the standard?

There are a few consequences for my system, most good, some bad—if by bad you mean an increase in judgmental assessments of others which might not always be bad.

The good is mostly self evident. Versatility. Freedom from the prison of choice. I can go from bed to coffee to closet to dressed in under ten minutes. If I dress before coffee—a summer happening because all summer weather in Oregon is reliable—time wasted gets halved because I dress before coffee and rig the boat while the first cup brews. I can be out the door and on the road in fifteen minutes. Like I said, freedom.

Other, less obvious advantages linger at the edges, too. When camping, my packing always comes out less while covering more range of options than the over-stuffed. Sure, there are times when I have to endure the weather because of a forgotten tarp or because I refuse to buy, let alone carry, one of those pop-up monstrosities now seen at all campsites throughout the nation. But the demand to endure passes like all change or strife: with a fire or hot food or a stoic sense of superiority that might not keep me warm even as it warms my ego. I mean, isn’t the point of going outside to be outside? to sometimes feel your body move with the tune of things missed in the noise of traffic and screens and beeps and jostles and rings and vibrations and roofs? Reducing what is necessary for a week in the woods down to one bag and one kitchen kit does a lot of good for remembering what matters.

The way I see it, the only downsides to my uniform are the wearing out of things and waiting through the stall of other people.

Waiting on others has always been a problem for me. I’ve never understood the dawdling, scattered, haphazard, chaotic approach to getting ready even though such nightmares are almost always a daily occurrence. I never understood why people who allege to love fishing struggle to remember where they left their pants, hat, sunglasses, boots, rain gear, waders, fly boxes, rod, reel, wallet, car keys. How is it that otherwise competent people fall apart when stepping out their doors to be out of doors? What is it about waving a stick at moving water that short circuits an otherwise organized mind?

My best guess relies on routine. For most, going outside—let alone spending all day outside, sometimes beyond cell service (thank God!)—sits so far outside otherwise predictable routines they don’t know what to do. Faced with the unknown or the uncommon occurrence, people rip at the seams. The manner of their spilling out sets them in two broad categories: over-prepared or beyond the minimum.

Over preparers show up to a day fishing with three bags of useless crap. Stuffed to capacity and waddling down the boat ramp like an overloaded pack goat, they have everything they think they’ll need which usually means they can never find what they really need which invariably means making do with what they have on their person which was all they needed from the start. The bags just take up space. They crowd the truck, crowd the boat, lead to exasperation. In more ways than we like to admit, the urge to carry things shows our practice of purchase without consideration at its lowest. I am guilty of the charge as well, sometimes packing along things because of the need to justify an impulse by where my weakness for packaging and urge to spend got the better of me. I once had a guest bring a change of shoes. Not the kind of reasonable bringing given a watery environment. Oh no. She brought a rather fashionable, country-chic pair of wedged heels with less-than-practical straps to change into at lunch. At the end of the day she carried those shoes back to the car with a sheepish look of “what was I thinking” written into her stride.

If I was less judgemental, I might argue the need to bring more is a symptom of modern life. Everywhere we turn we are inundated with the urge to get, to buy, to need that one more thing to make living life bearable. At least that’s what we’re sold to think. The old adage that we don’t own our things but our things own us rings more true with every passing season. In fact, our culture teaches obsession with those who have acquisition and retention sicknesses. We have television shows dedicated to the subject. I am told there are social media genres and influencers and YouTube channels where the whole content circles the refuse pile of crap. Apparently they’re popular, going viral often. I consider it a testimony to my well-lived life that I have never seen or come across them in my own shameful digital wanderings. Conversely, we also become enamored by those who teach and preach a need for less stuff. These take similar form in terms of channels and influencers and documentaries and shows. Here, I am guilty. Something about new minimalism once appealed to my philosophical interests. I took a deep dive only to bottom out when realizing my quest had led to greater accumulation. Irony comes for us all.

The under prepared flip the script. These people show up looking as if a trip to the grocery store is the farthest adventure they’ve ever been on and even those trips, though, are fading because of delivery services and a post-COVID world were self reliance triggers the delicately constitutioned. Under preparers tend to live their lives in either athletic leisure apparel or pajamas. Granted, they get creative with the fit, but for the most part standard fashion includes either leggings or joggers or pajama pants, slides or crocs, baggy sweatshirt or jersey, occasionally an ironic onesie stained with Cheeto dust and despair. If they are dressed for being outside, they have no concept of changing weather whatsoever. Inevitably they end up borrowing my jacket, my rain bibs, asking if I have a blanket for their legs (I do, I have been fooled once and that was enough), or begging me to end the trip early because they are not comfortable.

Here, too, I see darker symptoms of the modern experience. A world of convienence, of fingertip purchases self-limited our understanding of how the world works. Our ability to engineer the environment has rendered us inept when faced with conditions we have not engineered. Climate controlled spaces do not prepare us for climate let alone climate change. The skillset of spending a whole day outside fell victim to making staying inside too easy, too desirable. The more alienated we become from our senses the less experience we have with choice.

It seems to me that both sides have no consistent reference point for being outside away from amenities. I get it. A large part of the work of guiding is teaching people how to be out of doors in a more precarious manner than a visit to the neighborhood park. I don’t mind the work but the manner in which people fall to pieces baffles me. I am sure their struggle says a lot more about how far removed from actual life, actual experience we’ve become in the last 50 years than it does about their capabilities. Honestly. Judging too harshly ignores the reality of the convenient life. We are ever so much softer than we once were. I don’t envy people their connected disconnects. I don’t trust that level of plasticity.

While the problem of watching the struggle is an other people thing, the fear of wearing out is a me thing. Like most stuff these days, I am well aware my uniform items are designed for obsolescence. We don’t make things on the hundred year scale anymore. My favorite cast iron pan and Rene’s antique desk can vouch for that. The absence of longevity as a design feature says something about how much we’ve lost in how far we’ve come. Truth is, a throw-away economy shows just how little we think of life beyond its expendability. Our human condition is very much a material condition. By ignoring the life of material things, by creating for brevity, we trash the value of all things living and otherwise.

Fishing and guiding can be rough going. Rips, tears, stains, fading, sun bleaching, me growing fatter—or maybe growing skinnier—all lead to a need for replacements. Unfortunately, replacements never replace what wore out. New designs, new fabrics, new cuts, lower quality at higher prices are just the throwaway economy at its finest and most extractive. That’s the story of everything in our profit-driven life. Make things on the cheap to ruin fast while charging more. God help me, I’ve become an old man ranting.

See, I got into this whole business of fishing because I wanted to do something useless with my life. There’s deep satisfaction in standing against the onslaught of professional purpose and flipping corporate the bird. My satisfaction (and ego) grows when I  leverage all my considerable education towards a zero-sum end of “fuck off, I’m not interested. Thank you very much.” Being efficient in movements, uniform, and gear realizes that desire. Not spending money or making fashionable purchases while wearing the same sweater for twenty years and the same fishing shirt for ten or hat for five does the trick as well. But when material needs grow or my sense of use reminds me all things fall to time, I get a bit edgy. I remember that no matter how good I am at a seeming pointless pursuit, not matter how well I roll my stone up the hill, it will roll back down again. Sisyphus may be happy in his eternity, but I know mortality.

There will come a point when I am too old to wade, when I’m too old and frail to row, too weak in the eyes to see a trout rise or squint against the glare of the water. Hell, the time will come when someone else sees me as too old and slow, carrying too much stuff or carrying too little. The day will come when my ratty sweater and grease stained hat won’t do the job, when I’ll need the blanket against the cold, when I’ll see a quiet walk to the park as a grand adventure. Soon enough, my rants will become just another washed up fisherman clogging up the flow.

That’s just the way of things. I can’t beat that.

But, maybe I can gather up enough memories of fish and rivers and lakes and oceans and streams to weather my coming inefficiencies, my inevitable uselessness. And, hopefully, when that time does come, I will wear it well.