Inventory

Just a start

Every April I go through my fly boxes, taking an inventory of sorts. This habit has been going strong for a while now—at least five years, maybe more. I am not sure when the whole thing started. My best guess places the initial incident around the time I had started studying for the first round of exams required by my PhD. I won’t bore you with the exam details. It suffices to say there was a list with a lot of literary criticism, history, novels, poems, and essays that I had to read. The expectations for the exam were that “I would know the material and know it well.” While I was excited by the challenge the exam offered, the procrastinator in me found the idea of getting a jump on a list of sixty-plus books while I still had seminar work, teaching, and grading to do less than seductive. Moreover, April in Oregon marks the tangible end of winter. Sure, we still have our cold, miserable, wet, rainy, sometimes snowy days but, April also has just a little more sunshine than the last three months and that sunshine feels all the warmer when standing on the front porch, looking to the west, and wondering if those grayish-black clouds mean rain or are just an idle threat. So, I suppose the April inventory started like most of my habits start: by avoiding more pressing matters because I have always had a problem with people telling me what to do, even when the person doing the telling is my own better angel.

However, calling this April ritual an inventory is kind of a misnomer. I don’t count the flies so much as go through the boxes, various fly patches, my fly tying bench, and every other place I can think where I might have stashed the damn things in an attempt to clear out the old, organize the remaining, and have a starting sense of what the season will bring. The whole thing is a process. It takes at least a few days. The goal—and there really is a goal—is to have my various boxes arranged by kind, size, color, and insect species. Inevitably the dries receive more fuss than the soft hackles, the nymphs end up being the most organized, streamers always devolve to chaos in short order, and steelhead flies (both winter and summer varieties) fall far short of any real discernible pattern. What I’m left with, then, are boxes in better shape than I found them, a house and work bench cleared of random cached flies, but ultimately nothing resembling those enviable catalogue-shots where everything fits just so and even Marie Kondo would be impressed.

Truth be told, my inventory never leads to pristine order. At some point in the process my contrarian temperament gets the better of me and I rebel against the imposition of order. I know this is an absurd rebellion. After all, I am the one imposing this thing on me. I am doing this to myself. Of course, that doesn’t matter. All that matters is something in me feels the collar getting just a little too tight and then I start to resist and then I go full rebel. Like I said, it’s a process.

Today, I started the process. I didn’t get far. I made it through one cache of random flies on my work bench. I tossed about half of them. They were hold-overs from last season’s guiding. I had stuck them in a section of one of those bullshit pool noodles that I had cut in half and sometimes use when tying a batch of flies. All of them were covered in construction dust from other projects done in the garage. A few were rusted. Most were tattered in the way bad casting and stupid hatchery fish tatter a fly. Of those that I saved, most were nymph patterns I am too lazy to tie on my own, one was a parachute Adams, another was a buck tail streamer I remembered caught me one hell of a cutthroat in late November of last year.

Working through that first batch didn’t take long, I’d say five minutes. But, about two minutes in to those five minutes that old familiar itch started just behind my eyes. The tying vise started to look more attractive than it had with the first cup of coffee. The need to clean off my tying bench seemed more important than it had with the second cup of coffee. Charlie, content and snoring at my feet, looked like she needed a walk. I had to make a grocery list because the house is getting dangerously low on vegetables (never mind we have enough food in this house to survive at least a month of Armageddon because my wife likes to squirrel things to the point that she doesn’t even know what she has). The lawn mower started to look sexy. I started to wonder if maybe today was the day to finish reading that book I’ve been pecking at for the last week now.

Anger followed close on the heels of manufactured distraction. Why the hell do I have to do this fly box thing every year? Organized fly boxes are stupid anyhow. What? Do I want to be one of those social media people who post photos of their fly boxes? I catch plenty of damn fish just the way things are now. Do clients even care if things look organized? All this stupid work doesn’t speed up my process. I’m just over here making work because I don’t want to mow the damn lawn and I’m pissed that April is being a little shit of a month right now and the rivers are high and the water is still cold and we have only had one day of real sun in the last 3 weeks and that was back on a fluke day in March. The hell with this. I’m not doing this shit today.

And so it goes.

Back when I was in graduate school, I knew plenty of A-type people. I’m talking about the kind of people who plan their days out in blocks of time to maximize efficiency. They created reading schedules for themselves, had grading routines, had specific days for specific kinds of research, had dedicated time for writing. Back then, I knew of cultish people who worshiped at the altar of the hand-written planner. I knew of high priestesses who so controlled their worlds that they interfaced these planners with a digital life as well.

I have also known athletes who do something similar. These are the people that meal prep by macros. They are the ones who program their workouts to maximize fitness, growth, and peak performance around competition dates. They keep fitness journals, plan rest days, track gains, track daily load, calculate stressors, measure aerobic capacity AND anaerobic capacity.

These personality types fascinate me. Truth be told, I find their discipline remarkable. And, for a time, I tried to join their ranks. For a time, I was a well-ordered scholar with dedicated reading and writing times. I planned grading sessions, I had a fancy personal planner that I custom made for my own patterns. I interfaced that with an app. For a time, I meal prepped, planned workout routines, measured all kinds of things and kept graphs on apps and in my journals. But, like my fly inventory, those things did not last all that long or turn out all that well. Like I said, I’ve always had a problem with people telling me what to do—even if I am the one doing the telling to myself.

My persistent habit of resistance means a large portion of my temperament lives in constant tension with another, equally large portion. On the one hand, I am drawn to and fascinated by the art of discipline and order. Efficiency can mean more accomplished. It means a kind of freedom. On the other hand, I rebel against order and discipline. Discipline and order run contrary to spontaneity and openness to experience. Openness and spontaneity are hallmarks of whole other kind of freedom. In the end, then, I am not so much pulled in two directions as I am pitted against myself. I don’t know what to call it. Maybe the consequence of being?

Then again, all of this is just a kind of human experience. One of many kinds, and probably not all that unique on an eight billion-plus persons scale of uniqueness. All of which is to say, for all my talk here, the flies are still there, in disarray, much like me, except they lack the agency to change and I am too much of a self-made problem to go about rectifying one material condition to the ontological condition of the other.

I’ll finish the April inventory soon enough. No doubt, the end result will not be what I hoped it would be when I started. But, isn’t that the way of things any how? We all start out with some measure of discipline and order only to end open—only to end with freedom of experience in the first place.