Well, it’s been more than two months since I promised more content here. I’ve told myself repeatedly that I’ll do it as soon as I finish moving, as soon as I sort out my career, or simply whenever the muse hits. None of those things have happened yet, but I’m sick of making excuses. Also, I don’t have anything better to do while I wait for my crème bruleé to set.

There are a ton of things I’d love to write about, but I won’t ever get to most of them, and you’ll never know what you missed. C’est la vie. Organic Matter used to be about slinging science around in the name of analyzing news and advocating for people and their relationship with ecosystems. I’ve been thinking much more lately about my relationship with the world than about telling people how they should relate to it. I’m not sure how many readers will be interested in me writing about that, but I’m much less worried about readership than I used to be. So tonight, for the first real content that this site has seen in almost two years, I decided to just write about what I did yesterday*. I went fly fishing. Kind of.

I’ve had an interest in fly fishing since reading A River Runs Though It, from which I learned that fly fishing is – if nothing else – an elitist endeavor**. As you may know, most fly fishermen have nothing but disdain for your classic hook & worm fishermen. But it’s not just the elitism that I find attractive, or else I’d spend my leisure time listening to opera and sipping martinis (both of which I despise). It’s also the idea that your success ultimately depends on your ability to understand the ecology of the river.

To clarify, I didn’t know the first thing about fly fishing two days ago, and I didn’t just take some gear and go play in a river. What I actually did was attend a presentation by local fly fisherman and amateur entomologist, Mike Mercer. He talked about the history of the watershed in which we were gathered, he demonstrated casting techniques, and he even caught us a nice sized rainbow trout, but he mostly talked about bugs. In fact, the better part of Mike’s gear was comprised of insect nets and tanks for collection and observation. The point of all this trouble is that the our prey – the fish – are most interested in the spread laid out by Mother Nature, and her buffet changes on a daily basis. So if you want to catch yourself a fish you need to be able to figure out what they’re eating, use a fly that looks like what they’re eating, and then be able to make that fly act like the real thing. Poetic fishermen have termed this entomological approach to fishing “matching the hatch.”

Perhaps more importantly, fishing – whether on flies, bait, or spinners – is also a chance to escape the convoluted industrial food production system that we live in and get back in touch with the fact that to eat meat, you have to kill. Michael Pollan reminds us of this easy-to-forget fact in his recent book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Whether eating a cow that spent most of it’s short life in a pen eating corn, a chicken that lived outdoors feeding on grubs and grass, or a wild pig that you shot and killed yourself, you are responsible for the death of the animals that you eat. The lesson shouldn’t be that there is anything wrong with eating meat, or even with killing; I’ve done both and regret neither. The lesson is that your simplest actions have consequences, and in an age of smoke and mirrors, it’s important to try your damnedest to appreciate those consequences.

* The timeline that I describe here is based on when I started to write this entry, not when I finished it. If you want to see just how bad my writer’s block has been, check out the photograph timestamp on my Flickr site.

** Ironically, there is a deeper sect of elitists within the fly fishing community who glare reproachfully at fishermen who admit that their initial draw to the sport was A River Runs Through It.