Current Flow State: How Fly Fishing Explains the World |||

River Time: A Manifesto

Recalculating…Recalculating…

There’s a rock formation atop Cader Idris, a mountain near Snowdonia, in Wales, that looks like a couch. Legend has it a giant (Idris) sat there (in his chair—cader).

In ancient British lore if you were brave enough to spend the night, in the morning you’d have become either dead, mad or a poet.

Cader Idris is a sacred place, and its lore a lesson in how to approach nature’s sacred places.

Chiefly, on their timetable. Communion with the sacred requires a momentary, personal approach. An approach where the sense-check is internal, not directed by satellites or predetermined barriers, calendar invites, daily pace or step measurement. There is no 10-minute alarm that rings before the hatch, and no hard stop” save the total darkness, and even that just signals the start of the day for nocturnal creatures, and the spirits that work their magic. When morning comes on Cader Idris, the sacred place has changed you.

For me, a river is a sacred place. I learned this from them. Any old river will do. It’s a nice bonus if trout live there. For when you step into a river, you step away from false time, and surround yourself in what’s real.

There’s freedom in a river. You’re inside something that always goes, until it dries up or is damm(n)ed. But even if humankind condemns it to one of those fates, it’s not penned—it’s changed. It’s now a dry bed, or a reservoir. You can’t tell a river to flow between two and three, then again at six. It’s always there, going. And when I step into one, I’m there with it.

Its only governors are climate and gravity. And those are things we can’t fully comprehend, one because it seems so complex, one because it seems so simple.

Across vast oceans, tides ebb and flow according to many factors. The water movement we rely on in rivers is CFS: the cubic feet per second. I think of it as the Current Flow State. It’s the aquatic measurement of a level of torment or serenity, a floating ball that gauges ferocity or meekness, enumerates a natural thing. We wait patiently for a muddy river’s heavy flow to soften, to clear its turbidity, so fish can see our flies better. And we rest a slow and warm river so when we test the fish with capture their exertions aren’t fatal.

Distance condemns us to quantify the river, sins that would not pass at midnight on Cader Idris. 350-400 CFS, time to head up and fish. 1,000 CFS, too heavy today. We put our love in the calendar, set an alarm, invite participants. Lessen it by giving it a number. Visiting forces us into this trap.

But wake up with a river for a year, and these number will be meaningless, and exist on a spectrum that’s infinite and derived from far greater authority. How many shades of the sky have you seen in your lifetime? Do you think you’ve seen them all?

Next left, right?Next left, right?

There’s a counter-premise to this. It is focus. The art of shutting out. The champion of the world at avoiding distractions will be the one who can balance a budget in a blender, make an origami crane on a tightrope, pilot a stunt plane while baking a cake. Hooray for you. You manage in spite of the world, however distasteful you find its occupants. It shall host a grand party in your honor to which you will afford no attention. We will sing your praises but you will be insulated to them. Your eyes will never wander up above the sidewalk in the canyon of heroes and see your shoulders carved in marble, and never feel pride in your chest upon hearing the world chanting your name.

No, this feeling isn’t focus. It’s freedom from focus. I propose the better way to focus is to let it all in. Our minds, untethered, in the only place big enough to equal their power. We put ourselves in nature’s mindset. In a river’s mindset. We hope one day its complexity will match our complexity. For now, we make it human, and bite off a piece, so we can meet it as a hypothetical equal, even knowing that’s a fallacy. Call the union Current Flow State. It isn’t immediate. It takes hours, or days, or months, to know without knowing. And the minute we step away, we struggle to put words to the feelings until the next reunion.

We try to shed our technology-stunted perception, our art of opening out. We long to escape from the the calendared life and flow of days and schedules, and in doing so we feel a reciprocal nervous response, a phantom limb of the world attached, dry land’s soft undulations after time at sea. The vapors of a connection, a tether to human things, endures. It pulls you away from what’s in front of you, a stirring in the night, the torments of Cader Idris. Getting through it is what’s important. Arrival time is altogether irrelevant.

This essay first appeared in the inaugural issue of La Petit Mort (RIP)