Wally Hilliard
Retrospective
Longest fishing trip I eve made. Never spent 3 months living in a car before. Here is a pic of the route I took:
I am glad I did it. Wanted to break out of the routine of going into the same cubicle and doing the same thing every day. It was an adventure. Prompted partly by seeing people I knew and respected, who were about my age or younger, getting strokes or worse. Their lives limited now, or even ended, before they had the opportunity to make their own voyage of discovery. Glad that I made this trip now, cuz I might not ever be able to do this after I have my stroke, which could come at any moment.
In part the basstravaganza was dedicated to fishing, but in a larger sense it was dedicated to exploring the continent I have lived on for so long, but know so little about. Exploring the fishing was an excuse to explore the landscapes, and the people who inhabit them, and the cultures that have grown up within them. I purposely had no schedule, no place I had to go to next, no chance of being late to a commitment. For much of the trip I let the sun be my guide, heading in a general direction, wherever a little road might lead me. I made sure that I had lots of time to ponder the universe, and I took advantage of it. Could have caught a lot more fish if I had done less pondering.
In addition to fishing, I had a lot of time to think. About the events that had occurred in the past in the places I visited. I think they call this History, or if it is older than people, Geology. In many places the landcape today speaks of ancient glaciers, earthquakes, lava flows. In some places it shouts, and you cannot miss seeing the remnants of cataclisms that occurred thousands or millions of years ago. I have tried to capture some of this in pictures, and post it to this blog. It still defines our lives today. This is why there are low, rolling hills across Wisconsin, and why the Snake R follows the course it does across S Idaho, and why there is little but emtpy sagebrush across Nevada.
I wanted to step out of the competition - for money, jobs, status – for a little while, and simply observe the planet I live on. I was trying to figure out the culture that surrounds me, in much the same way that I was trying to figure out the lakes and rivers I visited. Cannot have much success catching fish unless you understand the waters they live in. The people I ran into on the way were common, ordinary. Not wealthy or powerful. Minnows in the human school, like myself. Individuals trying to survive in the midst of forces too powerful to challenge, or even understand.
Survival as a human being in a shifting universe is like calculus. Inserting the correct integral value into the equation to determine rate of change over time. The rate is slow for geology, but often very fast for human affairs. Plug in the right values into the right equation and you can become very wealthy and very powerful very fast. Like Cortes, who conquered and trashed a civilization greater than his own with a tiny and desperate band of looters and psychopaths. Get it wrong and you join the preterite, crushed under the wheel of fate. Humans are competing for space on this planet, just like zebra mussels and kudzu vines. But humans evolve in partnership with technology, which is not regulated by Darwinian constraints, not limited by DNA, does not have to wait for another generation to mature, select mates, and produce offspring. The rate of change is speeding up, exponentially, by orders of magnitude, as geologic and biologic factors are overtaken by technologic advances. Seems like only yesterday I knew how to operate a telephone. No phones are more complicated and sophisticated than computers that took up entire buildings in my youth.
There is a dichotomy, a kind of collective shizophrenia, that pervades all human culture. It is a world in which the masses are indoctrinated and expected to believe in the ridiculous. Just as true now as it was 500 or 1,000 years ago. This is a requirement in order to maintain a society in which material wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few - the King of Spain and his court (as in 1520), or in a world like today where 300 zillionares own more than half of the rest of the global population. Under the reign of the Castille regime it was offocial doctrine that witches caused all the trouble, and had to be burned at the stake. Under the Bush/Obama regime the masses are required to believe that the World Trade Center buildings were brought down by a lone gunman shooting from the 6th floor of a building in Texas in 1963. Always, the cultural mythology serves to justify pillage and slaughter of weak and innocent people around the globe, in the name of the empire, for the benefit of a few and the control of the many.
The rules of the road in the western hemisphere are descended from the Roman and early Christian eras in Europe. Christ was a revolutionary. His basic message was one of anti-imperialism. That the citizens of the empire – Rome in those days – owed no fealty to their rulers. Should not and did not have to follow its laws, or pay tribute. Instead should work for their own benefit, and live by their own set of rules, crafted for their own needs and not for their rulers, which he condensed into 10 simple and basic guidelines. Like revolutionaries thruout the ages he was mostly ignored as a rabble rouser, much like the Women in Black who stood on the street corners across the US for so long and silently protested the atrocities of Bush’s Iraq invasion. An annoying irritation, but not a threat to the regime. But when Christ walked into the temple of the moneylenders and threw their coins to the ground he could be tolerated no more. So they nailed him to the cross.
The Son of God was dead, but not his message. When the power of his followers became a serious hassle to the empire the Romans turned Christianity upside down. Adopted it as the state religion of the empire. Perverted its original teachings to codify one set of rules for the poor and the many, while justifying any manner of greed, sleaze, and slaughter for the few and the rich. This led to the debauchery of religion - the Medicis, the Borgias, and the Inquisition, and the general merger of the church with organized crime, extortion, murder, torture, and any imaginable form of perversion - which led to the fragmentation of the church into the competing Protestant and Islamic variants, all claiming to be the True Faith, and all competing to slaughter each other for the benefit of the few who controlled and directed the action.
The basstravaganza rejoices in history. For me it was an opportunity to escape the hum drum routine of work/eat/sleep and visit in person the places where glaciers scoured the land, or native people were anhililated by self-righteous psychopaths. Webster Tarpley points out that oligarchy depends on a rejection of history, and reality itself. “Here is history reduced to a fairy tale, with the cocaine-abusing, alcoholic, mentally-impaired Bush as the hero of the good, and the rich, misfit, raving ideologue Bin Laden as the champion of evil....Evil is always external, never home grown, as it was for the racist southern sheriff who thought that all racial tensions were the work of outside agitators.” (or itinerant bass fishermen parked under bridges?)
Change in the geological world requires sea floor basalts creeping across the globe into unimaginably slow collisions with continental granite landmasses. Makes glaciers look like jackrabbits. Evolution in the biological world requires DNA, which requires partners to select mates and produce offspring. Orders of magnitude faster than plate tectonics. But the human speicies has hitched its pony to technology, which is not limited by DNA. Change is speeding up, often faster than the human mind can comprehend. We are left behind, as the digital world races ahead. The planet is becoming a gigantic video game. The terror that the ordinary citizens felt in the face of the Inquisition, or that the native tribes in Florida felt when they watched the conquistadors slice off their chief's nose and force it down his throat, are replaced by make believe, made-for-TV, “reality show” horrors, like the kind documented so eloquently in Tarpley's book “Synthetic Terror”. Religion, which once focused on how people could deal with the incomprehensible, is replaced by pathetic billionaire mega-church preachers bilking money from the poor and ignorant, while promoting slaughter and exploitation of the weak.
Today's neo-con-artist Anglo-American oligarchy are disciples of the neo-nazi Leo Strauss from University of Chicago, who was himself a disciple of the nihilist and psychopath Nietzsche. As Tarpley describes better than I can, “modern irrationalists who camouflage themselves as Christians have left traditional Christianity behind, and have reduced the content of their religion to the cynical support of such figures as Bush and Ariel Sharon, both regarded, and perhaps accurately, as harbingers of the apocalypse.”
In spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that they possess a more potent military arsenal than all the rest of the world combined, the citizens of the US are a reduced to cowardly people at heart. Peed their pants every time their chickenhawk heros said the words “Sept 11”. Lack the courage to believe their own eyes and ears. The synthetic, make believe, Fox News terror that they cower from is the shadow of the real terror – the bombings, assassinations, torture - that their rulers inflict daily on the rest of the world. Not so long ago it was Franklin Rooseveldt who said “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But soon it was Bush who insisted that “The only thing we have to sustain us is fear itself.”
The faith-based regime demanded by Bush (and now Obama - installed into power after Tarpley wrote his book), forces its subjects to reject obvious reality in favor of conformity to the dictates of those more wealthy and powerful than them. As British psychoanalyst Ron Britton has observed, ‘we can substitute concurrence for reality testing, and so shared phantasy can gain the same or even greater status than knowledge.’ True, but at what cost to other variables, such as peace of mind? “the fundamentalist belief structure of Bush and of so much of his base as representing a rejection of human history, personal history, and of natural history as well: 'Just as fundamentalist creationist teachings deny history, the fundamentalist notion of conversion or rebirth encourages the believer to see himself as disconnected from history. George W. Bush’s evasive, self-serving defense of his life before he was born again displays just this tendency….To the believer, the power of spiritual absolution not only erases the sins of the past, but divorces the current self from the historical sinner.' (Frank 59-60)” The “hatred of the lawful character of reality, which we see manifested in Bush – who loves to live outside the law as an individual, from his drunk driving arrests through his National Guard shenanigans to his illegal election – and in the neocons – who hate the very concept of international law: “Wilfred R. Bion points out that the part of the personality that hates internal law – the laws of reality, of time, of responsibility, of loss – hates external reality as well.”
“No thinking person can fail to have been impressed by the degree to which Bush, in his attempt to demonize Saddam Hussein, engaged in self-description. Saddam, Bush alleged, was an oppressor, a violator of international law, a leader in contempt of the international community, an aggressor – all accusations which applied just as well or better to Bush himself.”
It is not pretty to see an empire in decline. Only money left in the US piggy bank nowadays is dedicated to paying for military adventures and bailouts for Wall Street skanks. The neo-cons Great American Century did not even last as long as the Thousand Year Reich. Imploded now, disintegrated, pieces raining down upon its own footprint. The nation bankrupted, like the USSR was bankrupted by their own failed invasion of Afghanistan. Printing money as fast as the presses can roll in order to cover the unauthorized withdrawals of banksters, ranksters, thieves, parasites and psychopaths. Forced to survive on money loaned from China, so the population can go to Wal Mart and buy cheap crap made by their near-slave labor. The many good and honest people I met along the way are stumbling around with me in the dust, like the survivors of the World Trade Center collapse wandering around the streets of New York. What happened?
The USA has always been a land of opposites and ironies. Founded in large part by refugees from political and religious intolerance, who immediately embarked on a campaign of theft and genocide against the native people who followed their own religions. Evolved into democracy – of rich white males ruling over women, dipossessed native peoples and black slaves. The country that invented democracy now reducing it to a cruel and sleazy farce at home, and installing puppet shills by brute force all over the globe. Worshippers of “free enterprise” - as if there ever was any such thing – depending on corporate welfare and trillions of dollars in bailout payoffs to wall Street ponzi scheme con men, in order to maintain a desperate fraction of “profit” for a chosen few. The enormous military juggernaut that my father was part of, that helped smash the nazis, now morphed into the same criminal slime he was sent across the world to fight. Modern day conquistadors bombing and looting Mespotamia – the cradle of human civilization – in the same manner that Cortes trashed Tenochtitlan. A tool for the neo-cons “favorite enterprise of sending other people’s children into useless wars”. Perpetuated now by Barrack Gobombem, the obscene spectacle of the richest, most powerful country on the world has ever known attacking and slaughtering the poorest country on earth.
Now that the basstravaganza is over the question is, what to do next? The same question faced by any basically decent, honest person in the face of the madness and carnage that surrounds us. Loyalty to religions and nations has always been demanded by the rich and powerful. Hard to get a decent job in Seville or Havana in the 1500s if you didn't support the Inquisition, and did not make believe you enjoyed seeing witches burned at the stake. As it was in the time of Cortes, Narvaez and Coronado, the big bucks are to be found in the fields of looting and pillaging, and terrorizing the helpless. It was ever thus. Stand your ground and fight, like Crazy Horse, or take a job at the casino catering to the whims of the degenerate? The same question that must have faced most sane people in Spain during the Inquisition must still be faced by sane people in the post 9-11 world of today. When an insane and brutal oligarchy demands acceptance and obedience to an obviously phony construct claiming to be the True Faith, but really serving only to stuff venal wealth and power into the hands of a degenerate few. This loyalty generates a disconnect and dichotomy, a collective schizophrenia, that forces people to accept conjured phantasms as reality, lies as truth, self serving propaganda as unquestionable doctrine.
Easy to get discouraged nowadays, typing into this blog in McDonalds in Tennessee with the hysterical ranting of modern day witch hunt inquisitors blaring on the Fox TV. Seems like we have not advanced very far. A prince in Saudi Arabia, where slavery is still legal, recently cut off the lips of his maid with a pair of scissors. A trick Narvaez might have enjoyed. One sixth of US citizens are said to be unable to afford enough food to eat, but corporate profits are at a record high, and so are executive salaries and bonuses. Ancient species going extinct faster than the US can arrest terrorists and ship them off to concentration camps for torture. But it is boring to be depressed. And ignorant – the state of a person who ignores reality and history – to hide from the fact that the universe continues to evolve, and the consciousness and compassion along with it, no matter hypocrisy, greed, slaughter and fear mongering may occur along the way.
For all the frustrations of the basstravaganza, it was a heckuva good time.
Hilites of the trip for me were the 3 day float down the Wisconsin R, and going back in to my old secret creek in Indiana and catching a big SM, and having the big musky turn and stare me down while I was snorkeling in Sugar Creek.
The lowlite must have been my first nite in Wisconsin, when I had still not caught a fish or even yet wet a line, and it was too hot and sweaty to sleep, and too many mosquitos to allow me to stop moving, and my legs and arms were just beginning to bust out with poison ivy. When the itching got bad the next day I tried scraping the worst spot with the edge of my knife until it bled. This will stop the itching from a mosquito bite, but is is a bad plan for dealing with poison ivy. Even for the most dedicated fisherman there are times when you have to question if it is really worth the trouble. The volcanic crater of pus on my leg is mostly gone now. Eroded and healed with time into a kinder, gentler landscape.
I am really glad I took the month of July off and stayed in Ashland, drinking homemade frozen fruit juice slurpies day after day in the 100F heat, rebuilding the boat and trailer. I was beginning to break the Bullship in half just from the expedition to BC, and surely would have trashed it on the much longer and rougher trip across the US if I had not taken the time to do this. In the end the boat and trailer made it all around the US, and returned in just as good condition as when they left.
The Volvo was – as expected – a Volvo. You cannot expect a 21 year old car to haul a heavy boat and trailer all around the continent unless you invest a lot of time and effort into maintenance. I am a fanatic about maintenance. You cannot slip up on the maintenance or you are asking for trouble. Whenever the gas gauge gets down near empty you HAVE to fill it back up, or else these old cars will just stop running and die beside the road. So I was obsessive about filling the fuel tank whenever it ran low, and it is because of this obsession for maintaining proper fluid levels that I attribute the trip's success. Otherwise I didn't do much maintenance. I lifted the hood once – somewhere in Wisconsin I think – and checked the water and oil. They were OK. Had one flat tire, which was the only time I had to touch a wrench or tool of any kind. The alternator belts were getting very loose on Van Isle back in May. They needed to be tightened then, and even more so now. I am not a fan of faith based religion or politics. I prefer a life of faith based mechanics. If you own a Volvo and do not mess with it, and truly believe it will keep on running, it will. Total fuel cost was about $2,000 for the car, and maybe $50 for the boat.
The most surprising thing for me, in a positive way, was the people I met in Wisconsin. Everywhere I went on the entire trip people were pretty good to me. Never ran into any serious jerks anywhere except under the bridge in Georgia. But in Wisconsin everybody I ran into for any reason was helpful, informative, and fun to be around. Just as curious about me and what I was doing as I was about their world. The people are a reflection of their environment, which is an inspiring blend of cities and industry mixed with wild lands and waters. People there still respect their forests and streams as much as they do their freeways and mega malls. They have a good thing going there.
Most surprising in a negative way was the change that I encountered almost everywhere once I crossed S over the Ohio R into KY, TN, GA, and AL. A land of stupefying fundamentalist quasi-religion and obsessive flag waving-mock patriotism. Characterized by a lack of public lands, lack of public access, lack of wild, free flowing rivers, lack of rest stops or even pullouts along the hwy where you can stop to take a picture. The people who live there are used to this, but I am not. In the western US and Canada there are still immense tracts of landscape that are owned by no one in particular, but respected by all. In the southeast there is very little public land or public facililties, and when you find any it seems to be full of garbage. Very different world there. It was a mistake to force my way into this country. The lifestyle I had in mind for the basstravaganza - camping out on islands in rivers, or pulling off to the side of the road and sleeping in the boat on its trailer - is no problem in Oregon, or BC, or Wisconsin, but in the SE US this is simply impossible. Now I know.
I got a chance to witness firsthand the seemingly invincible armies of invasive species - kudzu, zebra mussels, asian carp, rusty crayfish – sucking the existing life out of the ecosystem in a desperate struggle against native species, similar to the neo-fascist Bush/Obama invasives swarming the global political ecosystem like kudzu crawling over a valley in Tennessee.
I caught some fish. Did not do really well fishing anywhere, but that is to be expected when you are fishing in a hit & run manner like I did. I was usually spending only a day or 2 , or maybe even an hour or 2, at each spot. As soon as I figured out how to catch fish in one place I would take off to explore another. Amazing that I was able to catch anything with this attitude. Would have caught many more fish if I had stayed at one good spot and pounded it. Heading off to fantasy fishing spots is always disappointing. I never catch as much as I dreamed I would when I explored these places on the internet during winters past. In fantasy fishing land the weather is always good, and the river level is always perfect, and the bite is always on. Not surprising, I have never been skunked in fantasy fishing land. Actually making the effort to go there and challenge the waters and the fish they hold is sometimes a different story.
Could have caught way more fish if I had rented a guide, but something in my soul objects to this. I don't mind spending lots for gas and fishing lures, but the objective of getting out on the water to see what the lake might yield is a personal one for me. I would rather catch less and be humiliated, and explore the ecosystem on my own terms, than pay someone to teach me how to catch lots. The target of the basstravaganza was not so much to catch fish as it was to explore a variety of watersheds, see how they related to the landscape, and how people related to them. I spent only a relatively small fraction of the time actually fishing, and a much larger fraction of the time getting out into places where I might want to fish.
I never ate a single fish all summer, not even in a restaurant. The fish I caught were all released alive, often after posing for a photograph on the Seat of Fame in the Bullship. I don't think I inflicted any permanent damage to any fish, other than to their pride. Must be embarrassing in front of your peers to be the stupid one that gets fooled by the old rubber worm trick. The exception was the one afternoon when I fished with live worms, and gut hooked an unfortunate sheephead. That fish ws bleeding bad, and I put it out of its misery. Insignificant in comparison to the hundreds of butterflies and wooly bear caterpillars, and thousands of other bugs, that I smushed with the car. I stopped using bait after that. Other than that fish, the total amount of blood spilled by all the fish was roughly equal to the amount of my own that I spilled during the process of catching them. And they did not even have to endure the misery of poison ivy.
I mainly used flashy, darting artificial lures, targetting attacks from aggressive, predators like bass, Esox and trout. There are much more efficient ways of catching fish, but it is an exciting and special event for me to see them charge out of the deep and chase my crazy lures. For some reason, knowing that these big predators are out there, and finding out where they lurk and how they live, means a lot to me. The places where they can be found are unique and special. And there is a definite correlation between these locations and places and people that I enjoy being around. I have great respect for the fact that I am descended, very recently, from a lifestyle of hunter/gatherers. It required a tremendous knowledge of the complexities of the ecosystem to survive in this manner. Too many people, and not enough stuff left to hunt and gather nowadays, to allow for this kind of behavior on a large scale any more. Fishing is a way of re-connecting with this past, even if I let the fish go when I happen to catch one.
The art of blogging is new to me. I am awful at it, but getting better, slightly. A very powerful new way to communicate. The public face of the current Bush/Obama regime in the us is fiercely nationalistic. Make a furious show of pissing on the United Nations, or the opinion of the rest of the world, or any concept of global government or resposibility. But in fact, world government already exists, in the form of the World Bank, IMF, Bilderberg Group, Trilateral Commission, Skull & Bones. And they are more governed by it than anyone. Just don't like to talk about it in public. The blogoshpere, and the internet in general, is an emerging, evolving, digital electric global consciousness. The awakening brain of Gaia, if you will. It is a pleasure to be a part of it.
