"Patience is a virtue," goes the old adage.
Though I find most sayings to hold a grain of truth, patience has never been my strong suit. I find myself pacing and checking cookies as they bake in the oven, I find myself frustrated over tasks until I complete them, and aggravated about concepts I don't understand until I work through them. This has mostly worked out in my favor.
Enter my first real experience with fishing.
A am standing on the edge of the Buskin River with a rod in my hand, and a lure that is stuck under a rock for the third time in about 3 hours. No matter how much I tug and flail, the line will not come loose. The men next to me have been fishing for sockeye salmon for years, and are hip-deep in the river, reeling in salmon after salmon... and letting them go, because they are too small. I have yet to catch one fish. My frustration trumps my lack of patience, so I stand alongside the river for the 4th hour in a row, with steadily falling hopes of catching my dinner. A frustrated bald eagle across the river's high-pitched cries mirror the ones I am yelling inside my head, as the fisherman next to me pulls in a huge salmon on the banks right next to me. He walks back, still reeling in the fish, and it settles on the bank, not 15 feet from me. As the fisherman walks forward, pole in hand, to retrieve his catch, the frustrated bald eagle swoops down across the river and grabs the fish, still on the line, in her talons. She flies into the marshland, struggling against the perplexed fisherman whose fish, still hooked, is now flying away. The line stretches taut and the eagle and man struggle, each pulling against each other, fighting over a fish.
The eagle drops the fish and my line, miraculously, becomes unstuck. The fisherman lets the traumatized and somehow living salmon back into the river, and it swims slowly in front of my dangling lure, and passes on upstream. The eagle flies back to her perch above the stream, carefully watching the subsistence fishermen, waiting for her catch of the day. There on the river, it is just man and bird playing a game of patience: who can wait the longest for their dinner?
