What would you do with an offer to restart your life?
Would you press a big, red button marked "Do Over" -- and find yourself walking into your first grade classroom with new Converse All-Stars squeaking on your feet and a Scooter Pie tucked into your rattling "Star Trek" lunchbox?
First grade is when I learned about Do Overs -- the playground solution to an knotty situation. My first Do Over was during a dodgeball game. One team thought the ball barely grazed one kid's scabby knee, and the other team claimed that ball missed by a mile. The bickering went on a for a couple of minutes -- until we all realized we were wasting precious Recess Time.
"Do Over!" everyone shrieked, and we got back to the game.
I thought the whole concept was fantastic. We got to rewind and go back in time -- kind of like the instant replay during football games on the old, black-and-white Zenith in my dad's home office -- and get back to playing. We were just a bunch of kids, but we knew recess was short and the school day was long.
This all happened back in 1967 -- that moment in my time where most moms stayed at home, dads were hardly ever at home and going to the Moon was everyone's goal. My school was in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles, and many of the dads worked in the space program. The Rocketdyne Company tested the giant rocket engines for the Apollo Saturn V rocket within earshot of our playground, and we would stick our arms out like airplane wings and run around in circles when scientists lit off the crackling, rumbling engines a few miles away.
We soon learned that life is actually pretty short -- and Do Overs are pretty rare outside of the Nevada Avenue Elementary School playground.
I started thinking about Do Overs while I fished a Puget Sound sea-run cutthroat beach a few days ago.
This beach is about a half-mile hike from the access road. Anglers park along the road -- right under a stand of mossy-barked cedar and Douglas fir trees. Trees loom over the trail for hundreds of yards, and branches as thick as my leg can tumble from the treetops when the wind howls in from the coast.
The trail drops down through the woods to the beach, where more trees hover next to the barnacle-crusted pebble beach. There is no room for a back cast during a big high tide, as the water laps within inches of the tree trunks. Madrona trees -- with peeling, paper-like bark -- cantilever their trunks out over the beach, and giant ferns clump in the damp, dripping forest shadows.
The beach -- even on a foggy, drizzly day -- shimmers with light after the long, shaded hike. Barnacles cover everything below the high-tide line. Rocks, driftwood and even oyster shells wear a sharp, studded coat of barnacles. Barnacles crunch under my wading boots -- and cut into my waders when I kneel to cast to sea-run cutthroat trout noodling around over the flooded beach.
I sat on a big rock and waited for the tide to begin the six-hour drop. On this day, the water level would drop 12 feet in six hours, and that meant the upper reaches of this inlet would empty like a bathtub. The tidal current would flow by like a big, smooth river. Rips -- the fishy seam between fast and slow water -- would form, vanish and form again as the water level dropped.
An hour later, the water level had dropped a couple of feet -- and exposed about 30 feet of beach, which was plenty of room to cast a 6-weight intermediate fly line, a 9-foot leader tapering down to 2X and a Knudsen Spider fly. The clouds and rain blew away, and a bright sun lit the water.
I expected to hook a cutt on the first cast. Thirty or so casts later, I was still waiting for a strike. Sea-run cutts wander all over Puget Sound, and they vanish from a beach for no reason. Well, we humans don't understand why the cutts abandon a beach with perfect tidal currents, plenty of food -- in the form of marine worms, tiny crabs, shrimp and baitfish -- and a waiting angler. I'm sure the cutts have their reasons, but they don't tell us.
Anyway, I kept casting. I didn't feel like hiking back up to the car and driving to another beach.
I wished I had a boat -- maybe a nice 16-foot Boston Whaler with a modest engine and walk-around deck. I wished I had bought that great used Boston Whaler a few years ago.
Boating anglers can zip from one Puget Sound beach to another -- just about every inch of the 2,500-mile shoreline is open. Wading anglers have to find public access spots -- or ask property owners for permission to cross their land. A wading angler has to make a choice on each tide -- and pretty much stick with it.
All this got me thinking about choices -- and how we usually have to stick with them. I remembered bumping into a first-grade classmate -- his name was Robert -- a couple years after graduating from high school. Robert vanished from school somewhere around 10th grade. Anyway, Robert was in the grocery store, and he had three screeching kids percolating around in the shopping cart. We stopped and talked for a few minutes, and Robert -- who was 19 or 20 at the time -- looked worn and old and exhausted.
Robert looked like he needed a Do Over. But he also looked kind of happy with all the chaos spilling out of that Ralph's Supermarket cart. Two of Robert's kids chanted "Captain Crunch, Captain Crunch, Captain Crunch...." as we talked.
I stood there in the cereal aisle and felt -- for just a moment -- the dense weight of having kids. Robert walked away like a man wading through knee-deep glue. I didn't become a father until I was 29 years old, and that choice was right for me. I was ready for the weight, and I loved the gentle chaos of fatherhood. I still do -- almost 20 years later. I never wanted a Do Over with Courtney.
I wondered whether Robert really wanted a Do Over on that long-ago day. I wondered what he was doing now -- and how all those kids turned out. I wondered how he was doing during this Great Recession. I wondered how I was doing in this Great Recession. I wondered if my days as a journalist were over for good. I wondered if I needed a career Do Over.
These thoughts washed through me as I cast my way through the next two hours -- with only one half-hearted strike. I figured that the trout had finned off to another beach -- maybe that beach just across the inlet. I wished again for a boat.
I stood in knee-deep water and watched the current bump into a point and split into yet another rip. I felt the warm sun on my back -- a rare sensation on Puget Sound during the month of March. I also saw flashes under the rippling water of the rip. Fish -- sea-run cutthroat trout -- were feeding in deeper water.
I remembered -- finally -- the sinking line in my backpack. I rigged with the sinking line and walked upcurrent about 30 feet. I cast upcurrent and let the line sink as it drifted down to the feeding fish. I started stripping in the Knudsen Spider when the line was pointed at a 45-degree angle downcurrent. A nice sea-run cutt thumped the fly. My reel chattered, and I felt like I had just gotten a nice little Do Over.
Someday, I will remember that a sinking line will reach sun-shy cutts feeding in deep water.
I hooked a few more fish before the falling tide stopped falling. I lost most of them. I released the ones that stayed on the hook. The sliver-sided, black-spotted fish made a bow wave like a surfacing submarine as they raced away in the shallow shoreline water.
I had been on the water for six hours, and it was now low slack. The inlet, so full of water a few hours before, was now mostly acres of dry oyster beds and barnacle-crusted pebbles. A narrow seam of water about 100 feet wide was all that was left in the inlet. The water level would start rising in an hour or so, and there was a good chance that sea-run cutts would follow the water. Cutts would probably feed in a new set of rips. Other fish might ghost along in the water right next to the shore to feed on crabs and shrimp creeping out of the pebbles.
But I was tired and hungry. And I knew that I would fish the next day with my friend Greg Cloud. Cloud has a great boat, and we'd cast to a dozen or so beaches during the falling tide.
I walked back up the beach and started hiking up the trail. A new storm was blowing in, and dark clouds rippled across the sky. The trees creaked overhead, and I kept looking up for falling branches.
I got to the station wagon -- and found that some knucklehead had chucked a rock through a window and stolen quite a bit of my gear. LIttle rectangles of broken auto glass -- green in the fading light -- gleamed from the backseat and the roadside mud. I called 9-1-1, but the police dispatcher told me that car smash-and-grabs were so common that there was little the cops could do but take a report.
I was angry and frustrated and sad. I will never again be able to park on a quiet forest road and feel that my car will be safe. That takes some of the luster out of driving the Puget Sound backroads and searching for new sea-run cutthroat beaches. And finding and learning new beaches -- beaches that I can hike into -- is one of the best parts of casting a fly for sea-run cutts. I felt poorer and sadder.
I wished I had a Do Over on my parking choice.
I got in the car and headed for the store. I needed tape and plastic sheeting to keep the building rain out of the car. As I drove, I thought about the person -- or people -- who smashed my window. What choices in life led them to driving the back roads, breaking windows and stealing? I suspected that some addiction -- probably the white-hot, relentless monkey of meth -- robbed them of their humanity and boiled life down to joyless, needy hunger. I couldn't imagine living such a sad, desperate life.
Those poor people need a Do Over.
I thought about my partner Heather, my daughter Courtney, the words that swim around in my head, bright water and sea-run cutts that wanted a fly sunk deep into fast tidal currents. I thought about March sunshine, the peeling bark of madrona trees and fishing the next day with a good friend. I thought about the clean scent of saltwater and the thick, musty, axle-grease odor of Puget Sound mud at low tide.
I thought about rocket engines burning a hole into the sky and running on a hot, asphalt playground. The heat would rise through the soles of my All-Stars, and I imagined rocket engines were strapped to my feet -- and I was flying, flying, flying....
I did eventually fly -- to the Northwest, where I found love, a family and endless trout water.
Life isn't perfect, but I don't need a Do Over. I just want more time -- lots more time -- to savor the beauty of each beautifully flawed, imperfect moment. And to eat a Scooter Pie every now and then.
