In Which Fishing Is a Sport

Little Falls, MN (August 22)--Did 18 miles today, from 8 miles upstream of LF to the Blanchard Dam, 10 miles downstream. Before you reach dams (oh, there's one right in the middle of Little Falls, lending the town's name a poetic literalness) the current dries up, as one might expect, and the river widens and deepens, but the issue with the current is the one that bugs you as a paddler as you shout to the River “Come on man, carry me along!” because paddling downstream is more fun than paddling on a lake. Between the two dams I noticed a ton of fishermen, all of whom seemed to be really heavily concentrating on the task at hand, and while I will concede that there's more going on in a fisherman's mind than meets the eye (try to decipher the synecdoche in that phrase), they also seemed surlier than most fishermen (who tend, by the early afternoon, to be on their third or fourth Bud Light and to have attained its state of heightened friendliness towards strangers), and every boat featured a pair of anglers rather than one or three or four, and I was never out of earshot of a pair of intensely focused men in T-shirts and jeans and sunglasses and Twins caps watching depth finders and changing tackle and despite all this, it never crossed my mind (save for a brief joke fantasy at the beginning) that I was kayaking through the 1st Annual Royalton, MN Lions Club Bass Tournament, the HQ of which was at the landing where I got out, except that when I got there the competition still had an hour to go and so I ended up in the midst of a bunch of very bored middle-aged mustachioed pillars-of-the-community, 20 Ford F-150s (each with accompanying boat trailer), and a scoreboard with only the names of the competitors but of course no one's score yet, at which I'm sure there's a joke to make but I'm too tired to make it because haven't you heard I kayaked 18 miles and carried a 70-pound kayak 300 yards (Ed.: you're not too tired or, knowing you, drunk to proceed?)? Shut up, asshole, last I heard drunkenness or depression or both was practically a prerequisite--(Ed.: God, I know that bullshit back to front and I gotta tell you as someone intimately involved in the biz it ain't true.) In the biz? You're a figment of my imagination!

Editor's Note: here I'm going to make an actual editorial decision and just continue.

We're toying with the idea of taking a day off tomorrow

[Future] Editor's Note: We did take a day off, and the necessity of this act can be observed in the fact that he was too tired to continue.