9/10

Where to start?

I recall that 10 years ago today I was guiding on the Missouri and had my first real life experience with black fly pupa. Something I had always mistaken before as Trico nymphs. I remember standing with a client along a seam with an endless parade of gentle noses picking up spinners for hours and hours that morning. We occasionally got one to eat our fly and the fish were good fish. I remember Rick taking one of the guys below an island at lunch and casting a leech to a cruising fish and catching it. I remember that I didn't get home until well after dark that night.

My father called me the next morning and asked me if I was watching TV, which I wasn't as I was exhausted from the long day before. He told me that he thought we might be under attack and that something awful was happening. I remember know that shot of adrenaline and hair standing up on my back when he told me these things. I turned on the TV just as the first tower began to fall and I've never been the same.

I can't imagine the heartache of all those people that lost loved ones and acquaintances that day. I was/am so far removed from the whole event yet felt as if it was happening to my friends and neighbors. I think about those people almost everyday. The only thing they did that day was go to work. I don't know that any of us will be the same or better as a result of 9/11 or that there were any real lessons to be learned by us. Everyone has their own connection to that horrific day and mine is certainly much less dramatic than many, many folks.

It did get me to ask a lot of questions about my life and the important things in the following months. Perhaps, I have become a little less open-minded and tolerant as a result. Maybe this is part of the explanation for the political polarity of today. One thing that did certainly happen for me as a result was a re-evaluation of the shortness and finite nature of life.

Tomorrow is a day of remembrance for everyone affected by 9/11, which is pretty much all of us. Not only Americans, but pretty much everyone that craves freedom and has any love for humanity.

 I feel like I should say some other niceties, but the fact is that I hate those MF's that did this to us. I'm glad that we got Bin Laden, hope we get the rest of them. I hope they stand trial in NYC someday. I'm about to go to a dark place now so I'll stop the rant.

Amazing how insignificant a trout's rise seems in comparison now; yet I remember the joy of 9/10 as much as the sorrow of 9/11. I hope to never witness anything like 9/11 again.