I can't really tell anyone when this started, or even if there was a real point when it did start. John Green once wrote that falling in love is like falling asleep - "slowly at first, and then all at once". Falling in love with fishing, as less romantic as that sounds, was much that way for me. But while I can't tell you when it happened, I can tell you why it happened.
I fell in love with fishing because my father took me fishing. Sure, I can tell you about how I love the scenery and the nature and being in tune with God and feeling the pure connection to the fish and everything else that I love about it. And I have told you about that, and I probably will again. But at the end of the day, my passion for fishing would never have started if I didn't have a dad that was willing to wake me up at the crack of dawn, lash the canoe to the minivan, and head off bleary-eyed into the day on his one day off per week.
When I came to college, I did not know what I wanted to do with my life. I was thinking about history, or maybe psychology, and environmental science. Now, I have a double major in biology and environmental science, and I know that I can't see myself doing anything else in the world.
This planet faces a plethora of immense and almost unimaginable perils. Pollution, acid rain, mining, logging, overfishing, poaching, overharvest - the list goes on and on. I could say that I want to fix the world's problems, but to honest with you, that isn't it.
Because, frankly, I don't believe that we can fix the world's problems. I don't believe that it is possible for humanity to make a herculean effort to coexist, shift all of our energy to some renewable and environmentally friendly system, and eliminate our system of greed and dysfunctionality. I believe that this planet will implode and we will be as dust on the wind long before humanity ever fixes its problems. And I don't really believe that my efforts will make that big of a difference on the long term scale.
But I believe that maybe, I can buy the planet a little time. Maybe I can keep these beautiful rivers and blue skies around for a little longer, long enough so that one day, my own son can go fishing with me in a canoe and even eat the fish he catches without worrying about mercury contamination and paper mill waste.
Because even if the truth is that I will accomplish nothing, that this world will succumb despite all of my efforts, and that nobody will ever remember me, the truth is that not trying will only ever prove them right.
"And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
