With Chicago’s windchill at 13 gazillion below zero, and me here at the Super Bowl, I’d deserve a public whipping if I spent the day golfing in the sunshine and told you all about it.
But don’t worry. Happily, I don’t golf.
So I went fishing instead.
I suppose I could have spent Monday listening to poor Bears quarterback Rex Grossman defending himself from the hordes of reporters asking him in so many polite words if he plans to choke Sunday (which he won’t).
Or I could have used my time smooching various very important behinds to line up tickets to an ultra-exclusive Super Bowl party. That’s the party where the host’s “talent scout” flies in 500 peroxide blonds with vicious tiny dogs who truly believe they look like Paris Hilton because some old guy wearing cologne told them so.
But that’s where the fish come in. A fish has no behind to kiss.
Fish don’t care about parties or good-Rex, bad-Rex, as their minds are much too small. But not small enough that they can’t trick you and humiliate you and break your heart.
So while you’re freezing, let me warm you up with this picture: Islamorada, the Florida Keys, a BLUE sky with one thin cloud, the water powder green on the flats, and egrets pecking bare sand as a handful of pink spoonbills fly out of the mangroves toward the Everglades.
Do you hate me now? You’re not the only one.
It started when my friends WLS radio hosts Don Wade and Roma spoke to me on their program just before I started fishing. They didn’t like the idea of me wasting my time, fishing in the sun while they had to work and freeze. And I made the mistake of saying I’d keep my shirt on, as I’m quite sensitive about a clump of unsightly back hair.
“Back hair? Where is it exactly?” insisted Don.
I’m not saying, I said.
“Wax it! Wax it!” insisted Roma.
I tried changing the subject, but they wouldn’t let the heartbreak of unsightly back hair go, interrogating me like Mike Wallace in his prime, and I vaguely remember promising them something like I’d have it braided into the letters “B-E-A-R-S” after the Bears win on Sunday, which is a lie and they know it.
I stumbled out of the car with a pained expression and the fishing guide, John Kipp, asked me what was wrong. I told him what happened–leaving out the back hair part–and he said the best antidote for cold friends back home was to go fishing and not think about it.
So we did.
As that great Greek philosopher Daley the First said, “There is nothing so noble as a fish.” And he was correct. I wanted a noble fish, particularly a noble bonefish.
We searched for them all day on the flats, in a small boat that could run in shallow water, with Kipp using a long push pole to get us quietly over the turtle grass. He’s a top guide and highly recommended, and has been guiding for 30 years now, and he shared his knowledge about fish and this style of fishing.
“We’re hunting for them, we’re looking for the fish, and we’ll cast to them,” he said. “We’re not just throwing bait in the water. This is big-game hunting. We’re looking for signs.”
Actually, he was the one looking, because I didn’t know what I was looking for. All I saw was water, but in that water, somewhere, would be a puff of mud from the bottom, where the bonefish would be feeding, pulling in mouthfuls of sand and mud searching for food, expelling the mud through the gills.
There was one thing wrong with this strategy and it wasn’t Kipp’s fault. There were no bonefish. Not one. A cold front had come in–I know cold is relative where you’re freezing and I’ve got sunburn–but a sharp drop in temperature kept the bonefish away from the flats.
But we did see a barracuda 30 yards away. Kipp handed me a pole rigged up with a light rubber worm with a lead weight for a nose, and I made a perfect cast.
If by perfect you mean bonking the barracuda directly on the forehead, after which, to my shame, it disappeared forever.
“I guess that wasn’t one of your better casts there, was it?” Kipp said.
No, I said, knowing how Rex feels.
We continued looking for bonefish, and it was relaxing. But as I stared into the water pretending I knew what I was looking for, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt. What if some big embarrassing Super Bowl controversy broke out while I was fishing?
There’s always a big Super Bowl controversy, which prompts a media feeding frenzy. And there I was, searching in vain for mud mouthfuls from absent bonefish, while Colts quarterback Peyton Manning was perhaps doing something ridiculously wild–like raising 50 cents on his three kings at a poker game–and I miss the story.
Or Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher getting tackled by one of the Paris Hilton look-alikes, with 10 cameras from “Inside Edition” that happen to be there, almost by chance, and I miss that one too, because I went fishing.
But at least I missed the fish. All of them.
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jskass@tribune.com
