On the significance of a fishing out of a swimming pool...

This is (yet) another late post, but I don't care.  I've been busy.  Nonetheless I wanted to go back to something I witnessed on Easter weekend.  

I had an assignment in Woodbridge to shoot an Easter Egg Hunt (an Eggstravaganza, they called it), only to find that the more interesting photo opportunity happened to be just up the hill at the pool where the Lake Ridge Pools and Rec, (LRPRA) stocked a public swimming pool with about 700 trout for fishing.  The money presumably went to helping out the association raise funds.  The website didn't mention what the money went to.  They were asking for volunteers to help, so they couldn't actually run the event themselves, but nonetheless they charged $7 a person to sit poolside and fish for rainbow trout in an olympic sized pool.   But it's not the money that compelled me to write tonight/this morning.

I was sitting at the computer at NVCC, scanning in my 4x5 negs and I came upon the one photo I actually captured there with my 4x5.  There sat a young boy with his parents, poolside, enjoying the decent weather, fishing for trout.  And it did strike me then, but not quite as poignantly as I sat at the computer in school.

Years ago, when I was a kid, I fished.  I grew tired of it, because I didn't see the point of sitting around somewhere for hours only to catch a small sunfish, throw it back, then repeat the staggeringly mundane process all over again.  Ok, so I won't become a bassmaster anytime soon.  However, the moment fishing became boring to me was also a time when I happened to become an hyper-aware, know-it-all 13 year-old whose idea of a long wait was the line at the diving board in the summer.  I played sports, and video games, I didn't fish anymore.  But I missed the point.  

But there was a time when I loved fishing.  And I also loved running around in the woods, along the creeks looking for newts and frogs and anything else that moved.  This was something my brother did, so naturally, being 4 years younger, that's what I did.  There's something inherently good in connecting with nature, I think.  I think by collecting frog's eggs and hatching them in a plastic baby pool, you get closer to nature, and develop a relationship with the natural world.  It comes to mean something to you, and you can recognize the inherent importance of the natural world.  It stokes curiosity.  

I suppose by bringing up all of this about my early childhood experiences, I really mean to say that fishing for rainbow trout poolside is a phony experience.  The point of fishing was not so much the fish, as it was the entire process of it.  It's the journey, not the destination.  

As Americans, we are expert at making it as easy as possible to do what used to be fairly tedious or difficult.  But somehow, that tediousness and drudgery of hooking the worms, unhooking the fish, and generally getting wet and muddy playing with animals in nature got you closer to being human.  It can't possibly be natural to sit on plastic deck furniture, inside a fenced-in concrete pool, waiting to catch fish that were put there by people.