Fly fishing

For about five months out of every year, I cannot have friends. It isn’t that I don’t want them, but rather that they find me so boorishly intolerable, that the survival of our relationship depends on me flying solo for a period of time.

My husband got a job in town. The same town I live in. For the entirety of our friendship, courtship, and marriage, our relationship has been based on 48-hour-intervals and social media engagements. Needless to say, I’m panicking.

At my home hill, Mt. Spokane, the lifts will be spinning for just 14 more days, and the nearing end of the season lends itself to reflection on not just the days spent on the hill, but also about the nature of the sport itself. Following, in no particular order, are a few truths that have become clear over the course of many days spent doing what I love most.

Right around now, I start perusing seed catalogs. Hoodwinked by their cunning advertising and false optimism, I invest embarrassing amounts of money in heirloom seeds and empty hope. Then I basically hold a family board meeting during which I present my case for The Best Gardening Year with a color-coded planting schedule and map.

In the very near future, the Spokane Public School District will build a new outdoor sports facility. That much is certain. It's already paid for. 

For the better part of 18 months, minor league baseball has been in turmoil.

Perry White was one of my favorite newspaper editors. No, not Clark Kent’s boss at the Daily Planet.

Approximately three days before the New Year, and 21 days into my diet of scones and self-pity, I awoke from a catatonia of COVID and realized I should probably take a shower.

It’s easy to forget that Spokane is a mountain town. Surveying the landscape from I-90 gives the impression that we’re living among gently rolling hills. There’s no feeling of being dwarfed by peaks looming overhead that you might get when driving alongside mountain ranges like the Cascades, the Missions, or the Cabinets. But those bumps around us that you see on the horizon through your windshield are much larger than they let on. They just don’t like to brag.

Yo, Tim. I have this load-bearing post right in front of my laundry room door. What can a person do to remove or relocate it to a more convenient location? Is this something that a reasonably handy homeowner with a decent array of tools can do by himself?

We fix that with the first pros roundtable of the season as Mark Gardner (Qualchan), Jeremy Wexler (Palouse Ridge) and Matt Bunn (Hayden Lake) discuss Bryson DeChambeau’s impressive U.S. Open victory, the challenges of COVID-19 and who they turn to when their game hits a rough patch.

There are entire manuals available on how to deal with the emotional fallout of the impending doom of our planet. Some might argue they were written for the snowflakes, but now I hope there are a few extra copies for me.

Despite looking the part with my “Grizzly Adams” beard, I’m not much of an outdoorsman, if I’m being honest.

“It really got my thinking maybe for the first time in my life about this kind of stuff,” Triplett said. “I’ve had an African American son for 18 years and this stuff has been going on this whole time. He’s had some racial incidents, but mostly minor things. For the first time it just really hit me, what can I do?”

The winters of the Great Northwest usually have us pining for warmer days and longer nights, and then rather inconsolable when it’s too cold to run around in our bathing suits all day. Not me. Not this year. Because I did everything this summer. Every sport, chore, adventure, sun-dress-affair – and with an intensity that had me begging for frost by mid-August.

Alphabetically, Zion National Park is last on the list of our 62 national parks, but it’s certainly not least. 

I’d venture to say that I have visited more national parks and other National Park Service units than most folks. And it has nothing to do with my job.