Age won’t deter this ‘old’ river rat

The old man and the river

When the Wapsipinicon finally began to fall in September, I thought I would learn how the chronically high and swift water had reshaped its substrate, which I did.

But I also tumbled to the more sobering realization that in the many months since my feet had last trodden its sandy, rocky bottom, I had gotten older, weaker, wobblier and less fit to wade it.

The inexorable passage of time had forced me to identify with Santiago, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”

The elderly Cuban fisherman had gone 84 days without catching a fish — a streak that prompted his neighbors to consider him salao, “the worst form of unlucky.”

Santiago’s luck improved on the 85th day when he hooked a giant marlin that towed him along the Gulf Stream for days before he subdued it. After much hardship, misery and danger, Santiago eventually returned to his home port with a shark-ravaged, 18-foot-long marlin skeleton tied to the side of his boat.

Salao, yes. But undaunted by the infirmities of age, a symbol of the struggle against human limitations, Santiago inspires me to keep on wading.

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On several September outings, I observed shifted sands, scoured rocks and relocated trees. I learned where I could cross the river and where I could not.

I also learned that wading the Wapsi — strenuous under even favorable conditions with the density of water, the force of the current the resistance of river bottom sediment and the weight of chest waders — hurts more and takes longer when you are a few weeks shy of your 77th birthday. Under less favorable conditions — sunken logs, hidden rocks, sudden depth changes — wading can of course be hazardous as well as challenging.

To my further dismay I also learned that creeping vertigo had crept up and caught me. I had inklings of lost equilibrium last year when I stubbed a foot on an unseen underwater log and, unable to regain my balance, plunged head-first into the river.

I emptied my waders, wrang the water from my clothes and resumed fishing, never again thinking that advancing age might soon threaten my identity as a river rat. Until this fall.

Now I think about it every time one of my feet touches some unanticipated irregularity on the river bottom.

My only balance fail (so far) this fall occurred not in the river but on dry land as I climbed a steep bank away from the river, my spinning rod in one hand, a heavy stringer of walleyes in the other. Halfway up the 45-degree slope I tripped on a tree branch hidden in the rank weeds, lost my balance and tumbled backward, landing on my back, head against a tree trunk, my wader-clad legs extending uphill away from me, useless in any attempt to right myself.

Stunned but unhurt, I could not get up. Gravity pulled the weight of my entire body down around my shoulders, and I hadn’t the strength or the leverage to overcome my burden. I could not see the humor in my predicament until I compared myself to an upside-down turtle. Then, like a distressed turtle, I rocked side to side until I could push off the ground with an elbow and flip myself onto my hands and knees.

Getting old is OK. Being old is not. People don’t like to acknowledge it.

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I realized I’d been playing with house money for several years. Though I’d dropped out of probability and statistics at midterm, I’d stayed long enough to learn that in the long run the house always wins. But that’s OK. Even with the odds stacked against me, like Santiago sailing the Gulf Stream, I intend to keep wading the Wapsi.