Common Places

     As places go, it isn’t much:  a dam smack behind a mill, where the hum of high wires floats above the dirty-foam roar of the water. It is supremely ugly. But the fish are there, and because of them, the fishermen. Another place is a goose blind near a farmhouse which is fast becoming just a reminder of the area’s rural past. Buildings sprout up everywhere—“progress” not only has a foot in the door, but is about to barge right in. Spots like these—the ones we actually visit most often—are the less-fashionable stepsisters of the sporting world. They aren’t very prosaic; and even less poetic, because they are the road most traveled by.
     In our mind’s eye, we see ourselves following the religion:  in Scotland, uncasing a fine double gun somewhere on the grouse butts, or bonefishing in one or another cay with salt smell heavy in the air and the water the color of turquoise. Or we see ourselves on the Madison or the Firehole or in the Black Forest of Germany, or chasing any of the other Holy Grails of the sporting world. And then at the end of the day we relax; sun-and-windburned and pleasantly tired, while someone brings us a drink straight out of Hemingway. These are good fantasies, whether or not we ever get to indulge them, but when they are over we head to the stockpond, the woodlot, or the murky city creek.
     We started out there, of course, as kids with freckles and bobbers and rusty .22’s. And now we take our own kids. Game animals are largely squirrels and rabbits, and fish run the gamut from bullheads to rock bass to the ubiquitous carp ( ironic, isn’t it, that an immigrant from imperial old Europe should be the most democratic of America’s fishes.)
     And in between, we stray… to locales made famous by Ruark and Traver and Karamojo Bell. Call it hunting and fishing’s equivalent to the seven-year-itch. Still, the common places welcome us back like a faithful spouse, and offer the same blessings they always have. My goose-hunting spot is far from wild, and the birds are of suspect lineage. But even the tamest of bread-fed golf-course geese take on a certain majesty when the wind is cold and you have a shotgun in your hands.
     Sure, the old reliables aren’t the locales of catalogs and literature with a capital L. Places so steadfast can hardly be expected to serve up a dose of romanticism as well. And sport as religion? Well, epiphanies are common in stories, but rare in life. But sometimes the pedestrian places are like the plain girl in Chem Lab who everyone ignored, until one day she turned and spoke and you noticed something you hadn’t before.