I always ride in the back. And I know some blemish on my morality, that I am the youngest among my fishing companions and that I am a few inches shorter, has acted as a catalyst to my occupying this lesser space; because I believe in causality. I believe that some previous sin has put me here where I have to lean between the two captain’s chairs to overhear conversation and struggle to provide my perspective into half-drunken rants after three or seven days of fruitless steelheading. But it’s even more fruitless to add my voice to these conversations because my words mean less because of my lesser personhood. And I know that it may be irrelevant of my height or age and may be because of some larger, unidentified vice. And this is how I understand my place in this world as the inhabitant of the backseat.
And this allows me to simmer. Allows me to endlessly contemplate how miserably I’ve failed as an angler and spend my nights eating with my companions and pursuing conversations that aren’t about the steelhead I haven’t caught. And we don’t look at the pictures from the previous days because there is no need to look at what hasn’t happened. Where I’ve stood and whether my flies have been blue or black or purple or pink or nothing have all been choices but are likely meaningless because these alternative choices are paths that didn’t occur and are nothing because they never were and each foregone choice is forever lost and manifests nothing and the end result of nothing is the only result that could have been.
Knowing this only makes all of it worse. That everything that has happened has been forever known and unchangeable and dictated long before I rode on 4 separate airplanes for 12 hours to arrive here and act out what was always going to happen. That I would transact and receive this failure, clandestine and known by God that I would apply myself this vigorously and be denied.
I thought about this the most as I stood outside the abandoned gas station on the side of Mt. Hood. The snow falling through the path of my precipitating breath, landing on my shoulders and not melting. I stood there and thought about all of this until I began to get cold and then I returned to the backseat. And I rode there, unspeaking, in my seat next to all of the beer. I know that the impacts of proximity are undeniable. That if I had been in some other space, not next to the beer, that I might not feel this way or act this way or might even perform in such a way that we could look at pictures and converse about positive results. And all of this returns to my morality; that I deserve to occupy this space with my inanimate backseat neighbors that fuel this nonsense and failure and drive this vicious cycle. I do not want to sit next to the beer anymore.