The Drift of Things

Fishing, Frost, and an elegant sufficiency

I went fishing with my son on Tuesday. Trout fishing at a little lake a little over an hour west of us. It’s probably only fifty miles away as the crow flies but it is far enough out into the country to feel like another state entirely.

The route from home takes us out onto a highway and then onto another and finally onto an interstate. By the time we near our exit, the suburban commuters packed six lanes wide are long behind us. While there is still a bustle, it isn’t the frenetic and harried rush of people hurrying to work. It is the through-traffic of deliveries being made over the road to places not well reached by rail.

The exit from the interstate drops us onto a rural route. It is, technically, a highway too; but even at two lanes in each direction, it feels like a country road compared to the arteries and interstates before it.

I have missed the exit at least a third of the times we’ve made this little outing.

There was the year that I was just too excited to watch the road closely and somehow managed to drive 20 miles past the turnoff before noticing. And then there was the time my son and I were lost in conversation and I forgot about the upcoming exit until I saw it go blurring by at 65 miles per hour three lanes over.

This is a trip loaded with legacy. Those accidental detours have become part of its lore.

Each little driving error had been a gaffe of no real consequence. They had taken us a little out of our way; that’s all. On the surface, they were the benign human errors of momentary absent-mindedness.

Had they been only that, they would have been long forgotten. Instead, each was the result of something well known to both my son and me: I love this trip and its every moment from the minute we set off to the very last moment in the driveway before turning the car off.

It is a trip where I go with the drift of things; and sometimes, they carry me away.

When I manage to take the right exit, the remainder of the route takes us up through foothills; down into little towns; and then up again into sunny highlands that are a checkerboard of distant meadows dotted with grazing cows and dark squares of newly plowed earth.

It is a pretty drive. I’ve been making it with my son once a year for nearly a decade.

After I separated when my son was 2, I made regular work of growing traditions. Each started with a little green sprout. We would do something together which somehow tied to some circle on the calendar - a season, a holiday, an annual event – and then I would feed and water it through a practiced repetition. Year after year, we would do again what we had done the first until my son saw it as just a thing that had always been and not a thing I was tending to with purpose and care.

And that was the goal.

What I had wanted was to give my son a sense of stability. Things that could be counted on to return no matter how much else in his life changed. To help that along, I turned routine into ritual. Things that had been done the first year or were added later became things that must be done at each future iteration in their proper time and order.

The ritual-est of all of these little enduring rituals is this annual fishing trip.

It is a daylong affair. There is the packing of the car with rods and gear and empty cooler. Then, there is a stop at a little country grocery for fried chicken and drinks and ice and a couple treats. Next is a stop at a bait shop for my fishing license and a couple little tins of bait. And then, we are on to the lake where we fish and catch trout and make an occasional trip back to the cooler to eat or get a drink.

In years past, my son was into the fishing but only so much. I’d invariably want to fish longer than he did. Ast some point during the afternoon, he’d ask if he could “go exploring” and then tromp off to the little stream feeding into the lake to look for salamanders. I’d fish by myself for a while longer with one eye on the water and one on him splashing through knee-high water.

This year was different.

We were so much farther into the year, there wasn’t much chance there would be trout to catch. The lake has already warmed up and weeded in. All of our usual spots would be past being habitable for spring trout. By now, they would have long ventured off to parts of the lake we can’t reach. In their place would be sunfish and an occasional bass maybe. We knew that would be the case. Neither of us much cared.

This year, maybe more than any prior, the trip was a preservation of a ritual for the sake of its preservation.

And with that shift in purpose came a shift in experience.

We took our time. Left later than usual. Meandered out to the lake in no particular hurry. Wove our way there casually as if it didn’t much matter when we arrived. On the way, we just talked in one long conversation about things important and not: school, an upcoming concert, the freshman dance, summer plans, soccer, sports, news...

It was the kind of conversation that just flows on its own without prompting or interruption. We were both just settled and present. We have never been short on things to talk about; often these days, we’re long on distractions.

On his side of that, he’s a teenager with an active social circle and a phone. There is always someone on the other end sending messages or waiting for a reply. While, I may be in the car, ours isn’t always the conversation he really wants to focus on. I know that. It’s normal and age appropriate. I accept it and get it; and I accept that it means our own conversations will often be more like a set of conversation fragments interrupted by stops and starts rather than being singular wholes.

This time, there were none of those interruptions. We just drove and talked and drove some more. The conversation ebbed and flowed. It had the easiness of a flat stream where the water just moves along as if merely eased on by the soft current.

At the lake, we fished side by side at the spot where he caught his first rainbow trout and where I caught mine. I baited his hook a couple times but he largely fished on his own with one rod while I fished with another.

In years past when he was less into the ‘fishing’ and more into the ‘catching’, he’d start off wanting to fish on his own but then get tired or bored and be ready to lay his pole down and just sit. I’d tell him it was time to switch to ‘fishing as a team’; and then, for the rest of the afternoon, I’d cast our bait way out there and then either hand the rod over to him or wait for a bite, set the hook, and let him reel in the fish. This time, he fished with his own rod from start to finish.

We caught next to nothing. A few sunnies. He lost what we suspect was a trout. We didn’t land a single trout. That may have been a first. To be honest, we hadn’t tried that hard. We hadn’t even remember ed to bring the net from the car.

We fished for a few hours maybe and then were both ready to go.

On the way back to the car, we laid down in the pine straw beneath the big pine at the corner of the lake and took the same picture we do every year. I have all of them in a folder in a sequence. Nine photos. The two of us side by side laying on the bank next to a lake. They are like a time series of my son growing up. In the first, he was a little boy with his arm around my neck. In this week’s, he’s a young man. Nine years. Nine photos. A blink of an eye and a lifetime all at the same time.

On the way home, we stopped at the old fashioned ice cream place with the big board showing all the flavors (which are stuck on and pried off as they come and go over the year). We each ordered peach. We always do. This time, we went through the drive-thru though and ate our ice cream during the first part of the drive.

We were near home before sunset. He had some schoolwork to do, so we stopped at a café. I let him out while I looked for a space to park. On the way inside, I took a picture of him through the window. A high school kid wearing my headphones in front of his laptop looking up at me with camera smiling from the other side of the glass.

The trip was what a friend of mine calls “an elegant sufficiency.” It was a “perfect enough.” An amount that is just right which leaves you full and satisfied and glad you ate every bite and not more.

It was a day of “going with the drift of things.” That is how it felt. I treasured it for that.

That turn of phrase – going with the drift of things – is from a Robert Frost poem. I’ve been thinking of it since Tuesday. The poem is called “Reluctance”. While those lifted few words fit how Tuesday felt, the mood of the poem itself so very much doesn’t.

In it, Frost is out on a winter walk grieving the death of autumn. He did that kind of thing a lot, Frost. People think of him as some kind of warm, sentimental Wilford Brimley good with a phrase. In truth, the guy got in his feelings A LOT; and he had a real penchant for the melancholy. The man was no stranger to lamentations. The dude could lament with the best of them.

And “Reluctance” is just that – a lamentation. Frost wistfully notes the frozen earth and trees now bare of all but a few leaves which they will send down one by one to scuttle across hard ground.

I remember it because of its last stanza:

Ah, when to the heart of man
   Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
   To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
   Of a love or a season?

“When […] was it ever less than a treason […] to yield with a grace […] and accept the end of a love or a season?”

I first read it back when I was in my early 20’s. I was either still in college or just out. I had just broken up with someone. The parting had hit me with all the crushing exaggeration of young love that makes break-ups feel like little deaths.

Back then, the poem resonated as an ode to how hard it is to accept the end of something you love. The literal metaphor compared seasons to loves.

I’ve been thinking about that poem this week. It’s metaphorical device – seasons – and its conceit – that they end and when they do, it is a death both final and hard to accept.

Mostly, I’ve been thinking about how very apt a description “[going] with the drift of things” was for the way I felt on Tuesday; and how very inapt the final stanza was for describing the way I feel in this larger moment in my life and in my son’s.

Seasons do not end as much as they fade in and fade out. There are no hard stops between winter and spring and summer and fall. Instead, one season fades out as another fades in. There aren’t hard ends per se. There are no concurrent deaths and births as fall dies and winter is born or as spring ends and summer begins. Instead, there is just a continuity of change through times of growing into times of rest and then back into growing again.

A few months ago, when my son’s life seemed to be accelerating into a new season far faster than I was ready to accept, the last stanza would have probably felt just right. I was gripping tight to the wheel not just reluctant but resistant. I was struggling to accept the end of the phase he was leaving behind where I had taken up more of the pie chart and commanded more room on the calendar.

There was no “yield[ing] with a grace”.

There was a father deathgripping onto a fallen tree refusing to be pulled along by the current. That has since ebbed though. My son and I negotiated some minor adjustments. Those helped.

I had been fighting against an inexorable reality which stubbornly refuses to moderate for my convenience: kids get older; time passes.

Our time of being parents to little ones just slips past and is then gone. It is a season. And it ends…

But unlike the sentiment in the Frost poem, it is no death. It is not a place of living being rid of it. Instead, it is the drift of things: a slow current which carries our children from babies into little boys and little girls and then into adolescents and teenagers and adults. None of those phases ever abruptly ends with the slamming of a door as some other one swings open. The phases drift from one into the next.

The phases of our children’s lives are seasons. They shuffle in softly as another is shuffling out and then they burst into full bloom only to eventually fade and be replaced themselves.

I have loved every season of my son’s life. Every one. I have loved every season. It is sometimes hard to accept that they are but seasons but I’m learning to yield with a grace and go with the drift of things.

On a day like Tuesday, that relaxing into the current feels like a joy. It is the outstretching of arms in a summer lake, nothing above but sun and sky.

Life carries us along whether we want it to or not. Sometimes, it is in letting go of our resistance that we are freed.

Every year prior to this one, I would have opened this piece with “I took my son fishing.”

This year, I said “I went fishing with my son.”

It was different this time. I noticed. I welcomed it in and enjoyed it and basked in it.

I went with the drift of things.

Yielded with a grace to a change of season.

And that, in the heart of this man, felt just right.