A vacation that wasn’t what it was s’posed to be but, hey, that’s OK

Every year I take a week’s vacation at the family homestead in Phoenicia, N.Y. I try to time it for the end of September or beginning of October, the better to take advantage of early fall fishing on the Esopus Creek and tributaries.

It’s a happy time, especially since there is no internet at the house, no cable TV, and I have to drive 5 miles to get a cell phone signal.

That means, for instance, that I will not know what Kanye tweeted that week. 

This is a good thing.

Besides fishing, I load up with DVDs of obscure and/or awful films, so I may continue my research for the soon-to-be-award-winning “Schlock and Awful” series of deep thoughts about bad cinema.

So I was all set to beat it on Tuesday evening, Sept. 27.

Except it rained.

It rained all the previous week. It rained that week. The rivers were unfishable.

And there was no way to get a week’s entertainment out of watching adaptations of Stephen King books and cleaning the gutters.

So I stayed put.

I cleaned the apartment. This took a while. 

My cousin blew into town unexpectedly, and there was family togetherness. 

To honor the complete meltdown of the Senate Judiciary Committee, we ordered pizza and watched “Animal House.”

With my mother.

Finally the rivers receded enough to get a little fishing done, on the little blue lines on this side of the Hudson anyway.

I can’t complain. This is the first time in 16 years that the autumn fishing plan got rained out. 

In baseball stats that would look like this: 15-1, .938.

A while back, my buddy and I took on a little blue line in Massachusetts.

First we took on a swamp. It was supposed to be the headwaters of the little blue line, and may well be.

But mostly it was a swamp.

We de-swamped ourselves after about an hour of futile and stupid activity, and got to the stream via the regular trail.

We used a super-duper bushy dry fly with some kind of new wing material that has something to do with ultraviolet rays and how fish see.

After a few brook trout hit the fly the UV wings fell off. It didn’t seem to matter to the trout, who kept smacking it.

I probably caught 30 fish in about three hours. The best was a mighty 10 incher; the smallest was about the length of a number 6 hook.

Getting rained out of the annual fishing week was disappointing, but we persevere.

As Linus J. Scrimshaw said, “He who laughs last gathers no moss.”