Gone Fishing
I’ve been out a while, taking some much appreciated (and needed) down time. And yes, I really went fishing. In Northern Minnesota. And I caught one (lots)…this big (luckily you can’t see my hands).
This was not a cushy trip. It was the kind of experience at a simple (read very rustic) fishing resort where the smell of fish guts in the pails at the fish filleting shack will make your eyes burn and make you run for the door. Where air conditioning in the cabins is non-existent. Where mosquitoes descend at dusk like a fog.
The kind of place with no internet connectivity and the only way to get even a single bar on your cell phone was to treck a few miles yonder to the highway and stand on the hill.
And it was awesome! On day 1, I felt a bit guilty being so out of touch. Day 2 brought withdrawals. Day 3 and beyond brought elation. Fishing by day. Sometimes a little adrenaline rush on the jet ski or a peaceful float on an air mattress.
Sitting around a bonfire at night, making s’mores and reading book after book after book. Trash fiction I picked up at Sam’s as well as an autobiography that had at least some redeeming social value.
I plowed through every book I brought with me including the new Harry Potter book I had purchased at Mall of America the day it was released (it’s so heavy you almost need a book stand). Desperately out of books toward the end of the trip, I ended up reading one my 15 year old daughter brought with her. By far the most disturbing yet soulful of my consumed reading material. A book called “Uglies”. The premise of this future world is that to avoid the harsh judgments, prejudices, and discrimination brought about simply because of the way people look, society devised a plan that you were an “ugly” until 16 at which time you had major reconstructive surgery to become a perfectly symmetrical “pretty”, conforming to an ideal standard of beauty. There were “new pretties”, “mid pretties” and “crunchys”. Strange yet compelling story to it.
For a while I completely got away from it all. And it felt great. I got my fill of beer-battered walleye, wrestling frisky northern pike who were determined to break my line and really saw the beauty of the sun rise and set more than I had in years.
Now it’s back to the world of marketing. As soon as they ship the rest of my brain back from Minnesota.
This post was written by: Kim Mickelsen