Finding a passion is no small feat. Sometimes it is difficult to find what you love to do and what makes you happy. For some folks, it takes decades. Some people never find what brings them copious amounts of joy. Finding that niche on top of finding a special person, let alone people, is even rarer. When a person finds a passion and like-minded individuals to share it with, that person has truly found something special. I am blessed to have found all of those things and they fill my soul despite so many things that seek to drain my spirit of all things positive.
To say that I am blessed to have fly fishing in my life is a profound understatement. Being in the outdoors, casting a fly rod, and catching fish on a fly that I tied brings me a joy unlike any other. I love my wife with all my heart. She is my soulmate and we have a companionship that I only thought was possible in movies and overromanticized novels. I love my sons at a depth that only a parent could describe and at a breadth that is not easily detailed. My stepson, Collin, has brought a youthful vigor to my life that I haven't felt since I was a young man and I love him for that, among many other reasons.
I don't have a lot of, what I would call, close friends but the ones I do have are given a special place in my heart. There aren't a lot of open voids in my soul after that much love, but fly fishing, for me, fills some of those gaps. When an opportunity came along that united so many of the things that I hold dear, I recognized how special the potential opportunity could be.
Specifically, I am referring to an opportunity that arose in my life that allowed me to fly fish for smallmouth bass on an Ozark stream with one of my best friends, Corey, and the most knowledgeable fishing guide that I have ever met in Ryan Walker. This chance encounter was one of those things that seems to just fall in your lap and if you take a moment to really analyze the happenstance, it just might appear to be something that fate assembled. I am not the type of person to question fate or the "coincidences" that the universe sends my way, so this trip felt fortuitous. With destiny seemingly leading this small group down a thin blue line in the Ozarks, there was little doubt that a rarely found joy and unbound happiness lay ahead.
An unseen, but hard to ignore, energy filled the air the moment Ryan slid his raft off his trailer into the stream. It was clear to me that this was going to be a special day. As I have said before, on many occasions, one of the best moments of a fishing trip comes right before hitting the water and this trip was no exception to that idea. With soaring hopes and grade school-aged idealism, Ryan's craft launched from the pebble-ridden bank and into the deeper water that gently provided an equal amount of optimism and excitement of the unknown.
We, as anglers, revel in the unknown. Could changing flies produce a strike? What might happen if we walk upstream and made some casts around the next bend? Maybe a little longer cast could entice a strike from the type of fish that creates legendary type stories that might be told around campfires for years to come. The bottom line is that even the best anglers can't predict what will happen on the water. But that's what creates the type of anticipation and exhilaration that is rarely rivaled by any other activity.
Flies were thrown and fish were caught. Each one of them were special and appreciated. While Ryan has forgotten more about fishing, the conjoined knowledge between Corey and I was essentially the equivalent of a kindergartener, metaphorically speaking. However, we were students that voluntarily sat at the front of the classroom with sharpened number 2 pencils ready to lay graphite on brand new spiral notebooks which were accompanied by starry-eyed enthusiasm to receive college-level instruction on the ways of fly fishing for smallmouth bass in the Ozarks. We were vessels that were ready to be filled with Ryan's knowledge and experience.
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