One early spring, my boss Ron and I drove up from Los Alamos to fish Eagle Nest Lake.
Ron was a former Army officer, and he was a pretty unflappable guy. As it turned out, that was a useful quality to have in a fishing partner.
We were using my old twelve-foot aluminum boat—the same little boat that seems to have figured prominently in a surprising number of my adventures.
The fishing wasn’t bad.
But fishermen have a peculiar problem. No matter how good the fishing is where they are, somewhere else always looks a little better.
That day, the other side of Eagle Nest looked promising.
So we headed across the lake.
We had just about reached the other side when the weather began to change. A squall was developing, and it developed quickly. The wind came up. Rain and snow began to fall, and before long the waves were getting pretty high.
A twelve-foot aluminum boat is a perfectly good little fishing boat.
It is not a boat you particularly want to be in when a mountain lake gets rough.
It became obvious that we needed to get back.
The shortest route was straight across the middle of the lake to where we had launched.
I decided that was a bad idea.
I told Ron that getting back was going to take a while. Rather than cross all that open water, we would stay close to shore and work our way around the lake.
So that’s what we did.
Slowly.
The rain and snow pelted us as we crept along the shoreline. The waves were high enough that we were taking water over the side.
And once again, that little aluminum boat presented me with a familiar problem:
We needed something to bail with.
Apparently I never thought to carry a bucket.
But I did have shoes.
So Ron and I began bailing the boat with our shoes as we worked our way along the shore.
It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t comfortable. And we were a long way from where we wanted to be.
But we were making progress.
At some point during all of this, I looked over at Ron.
He was smiling.
And the funny thing was, so was I.
Here we were in a little aluminum boat on Eagle Nest Lake, rain and snow coming down, waves tossing us around, bailing water with our shoes—and I think both of us were actually enjoying ourselves.
Not because we didn’t understand the situation. We did.
We had a problem. We had decided what to do about it. And now we were doing it.
There was something strangely satisfying about the challenge.
Eventually we worked our way all the way back to the landing.
And naturally, by the time we arrived, the rain had stopped.
We stood there looking at the lake.
For one New York minute, I think we actually considered going back out.
Fortunately, discretion finally made an appearance.
We trailered the boat, climbed into the truck, turned the heater on, and headed back to Los Alamos to tell our story.
And as I recall, we even had a couple of trout.
I’ve forgotten a lot of ordinary days of fishing.
But I still remember that one: the squall, the little boat, the long trip around the shoreline, bailing with our shoes—and especially looking over and seeing Ron smiling.
Apparently we were both having a pretty good time.
This happened to me.