Super Bowl Sunday 2024 landed on a damn good day to fish. The Saturday before had been a false spring day. Warmer temperatures and sunshine nudged water temps up a tick. Humidity got the bugs moving which meant the fish were moving, too. Despite being an avowed dirtbag trout bum, I surrendered to my better angels and stayed away from the rivers to help the wife clean the house (a much needed thing) while prepping for America’s favorite holiday the following day. I did my chores, albeit grudgingly, with my ire rising because I knew Sunday was shaping up to be one of those February days fly fishermen in Oregon dream of—a day of hatches and empty rivers—and I was socially obligated to stare at a screen while twenty-two strangers ran around in tights and helmets slamming into each other for no other reason than money. If you can’t tell, I am still bitter about the whole affair and no, it’s not because my team lost. I don’t have a team unless we’re talking fish and then I’m on the side of wild things everywhere, always.

The High Holy Sunday came as expected: with showers and sunshine; it came with scattered clouds and the kind of dappled light that gives rivers their storybook hues. Stuck in mindless civilization, I watched as every rain burst carried the potential of a rising hatch somewhere. I felt it in my gut. I smelled it on the wind. Years of fishing Oregon’s Februaries has taught me that days like that come with an early March Brown rise, or barring those bigger mayflies, then some of the best BWO action of the new year. I knew and smelled and sensed all of this and was screwed because family and friend entanglements obligated me as a witness to the Roman Circus which really means sacrificing bits of freedom and life well lived to Moloch and the NFL.

Every serious fly fisherman I know—these are the people that fish year round, building lives and travel plans and births and deaths around rivers and hatches and fish—possess an autonomy streak just about as wide as (insert river here). An autonomy streak doesn’t make them unique in and of itself. I’m certain that virtue ranks pretty damn high on most American’s list of core values. As fishermen, though, our autonomy streak pushes us even farther outside common social circles and market economics. Whereas average or common autonomy leads to purchasing and expenditure patterns because capitalism has found a way to sell people to themselves, there is a ceiling to that strategy in fly fishing. Sure, we all get caught up in the rush of new gear. Sure we spend more money on trucks and airfare and waders and sticks and tapered bits of nylon and toe nail clippers than most, but fly fishing has a philosophical code written into it wherein the truly dedicated will reverse uno capitalism and start doing more with less as part of things. Our ascendancy does not manifest as having everything. No. The truly enlightened fly fisherman only manifests once they have exactly what they need, no more no less. Granted, there is always something more to need. However, the point is our autonomy drives us towards a needless state, and deep down we know no amount of gewgaws and gimcrackery will get us there. So, while everyone around us talks of wanting or needing this and that and how they need to acquire things to achieve a state of being, I promise you the fly fisherman is thinking on what they don’t need and how that letting go leads to freedom through unattachment.

For my part, autonomy means autonomy of thought. It means my happiness, satisfaction, peace, ease, and transcendence has nothing to do with what most people value. It means I couldn’t care less how the success and failures of twenty-two strange men slamming into one another in the coliseum plays out. If that puts me on the outs of most company, so be it. Such is the price of freedom.

But, family is family and friends who can tolerate most of me are in all too short supply. In other words, while everyone else is watching a game and placing their lives on the balance scales of existence against gladiatorial performance, I’m looking out the windows, trying my best to be present for them even as my mind wanders while watching a white fly hatch rising off the backyard puddles in the slanted afternoon light imagining rivers.

We all suffer our obsessions, our fandoms, our fanaticisms even as the qualities between them are as different as they are deep and wide. Suffering apart from one another is still a way of being with one another. It’s not always pretty. It’s not always ideal. But rivers are only rivers and wilderness is only wilderness because of absences. So, every now and then I’ll suffer others theirs because I know their bought and sold autonomy, at least for now, keeps suffering me mine.