Editor’s note: Walt Amses is a writer and former educator who lives in Calais.
[W]ading in a local river last week, hoping the water temperature was finally favorable to entice a trout or two, my left foot began sliding on pebbles while my right was adhering nicely to whatever the rocky bottom had to offer. I’d gotten used to confidently striding across riffles and slippery stones thanks to perhaps the best gift an aging fly fisherman could hope for: a set of crampons that — once strapped on — made previously treacherous stretches of stream more like a walk in the park.
Although it’s difficult to explain exactly why they work while every instinct says they shouldn’t, for some reason they do. Consisting of flat aluminum bars across both the sole and heel of the boot held in place with a set of leather straps, it would seem a recipe for disaster, which it is if you’re stepping on dry rocks, wood or some other surface. But on the wet, mossy boulders that once guaranteed your looking like a hippo on roller skates right before a visit to either the chiropractor or emergency room, they stick like glue, offering solid footing and a new lease on a fishing life.
But stumbling along with one barely useful limb was instructive. Usually fly fishing is the one activity that can get me out of my head whether or not I’m catching fish, simply because it’s completely diverting, requiring all the attention I have. But minus the stability I was once again victim of whatever the river bottom had to offer, trading the meditative serenity fly fishing provides for the kind of anxiety you experience in a strange city, waiting to be mugged.
My insecurity became a segue to the much more complex issue of the accommodations many of us require to simply get through the day. Scanning the rocky bottom for feeding fish, I relied on polarized sunglasses to cut the surface glare along with a prescription in order to (maybe) distinguish between what is or isn’t a tailing brown trout.
In addition to the crampons I use a wading staff to maintain balance walking in thigh-deep moving water that frequently shifts your feet to where you hadn’t planned on stepping, adding some adventure to the day. And, (I presume) like other deteriorating boomers, I also tuck a pair of cheap reading glasses into my vest so I can join the microscopic eyelet of my flies to the barely visible end of the tippet without convulsing my optic nerve.
It is not lost on me that the ordeals encountered while fly fishing are a frivolous metaphor for the serious problems faced by millions of Americans whose families are continually threatened by one faction of our political establishment.
Broadening this meditation into practicality as I stumble through pool after pool, spooking every fish within miles, I realize that our culture readily accepts some accommodations for some people, while rejecting out of hand any such supports for others considered undeserving. For instance, there are few complaints that police officers, firemen or military veterans receive publicly funded health insurance, but no similar reservoir of sympathetic understanding seems available for public school teachers. The perception, hammered home by conservatives in their decades-old, union-busting effort to privatize education, is that public school teachers are on the dole, bilking honest taxpayers out of their hard-earned money.
While a crutch, cane, wheelchair or hearing aid might be accepted accommodations understood as necessary to daily living, the universal health care that might provide financial support for someone who needs them is met with far more skepticism, often derided as “too expensive” even for one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. Worse yet, if you’re poor, unemployed, underemployed or a single parent struggling to put food on the table, your challenges are deemed a kind of moral failing on your part while your plight is reduced to a political football.
Scrambling up a steep, muddy bank on my way back to the car, I become an internet cat video as I struggle for a foothold. My surviving crampon — a lifesaver on wet, mossy rocks — becomes less than useless negotiating the slick clay surface I’m attempting to scale, and I wonder if it’s practical to carry a rope ladder in my vest. But it is not lost on me that the ordeals encountered while fly fishing are a frivolous metaphor for the serious problems faced by millions of Americans whose families are continually threatened by one faction of our political establishment.
Even those of us who seemingly have a variety of solutions at our disposal rely on some kind of accommodations: glasses, prescriptions, hearing aids, knee or hip replacement along with numerous others. We take many of them for granted. But imagine needing a medication you couldn’t afford, having a toothache you were unable to quell or wondering if you were going to be able to provide healthy meals for your children or heat your home next winter.
When you’re retired and lucky enough to pursue your interests, the tendency is to conflate trivial issues that may pop up with serious problems needing to be quickly solved lest they interfere with your enjoyment. My malfunctioning crampon was an embarrassing yet valuable lesson in understanding how self-absorption might interfere with clearly seeing the rest of the world.
