After many many months of drifting in and out of the painful dream that is trying to learn the ins and outs of a complex fishery that holds its treasures in an impenetrable fortress of clear water and swift current I had come to a place of resignation. Maybe this is one of those maze dreams where you never get out; You always seem to take a different route but before you can hit the clearing at the exit, you awake to find yourself out of that subconscious maze but still feeling lost in a soup of conscious reality. This was the bull trout game for me. Failure is one thing, but failure without any learning is entirely another. Its liked getting punched in the shin, but it doesn’t stop hurting, and you keep going back for more…
Once more I found myself slipping in to the realm of the subconscious on a bitterly cold winter day when the ice hung tightly to every eye on the rod and my frost covered wading boots begrudgingly broke each ice sheet on the way upstream to a place I knew had to hold my desired quarry. As in a bad dream, every cast, every effort was useless until all of a sudden it wasn’t. And why? Why this time? Was it real?
The pain in my right bicep threw the gravity of the situation into the realm of undoubted reality and for the next eternity seemingly a spectral force of nature tossed and turned in the current of my dreams. When finally the water was too deep to navigate I jumped in with reckless abandon and began to float, bobbing in a fashion so as to just keep my head above water, intermittently finding gravel to stand on. Surely this was a dream… The leviathan had such sheer size and weight that no amount of lifting of turning could move it and the situation began to resemble those bad dreams of old. Finally the dream came to an abrupt end.