Background: Being on the Wrong End of a Phish Hook: It's a Long Story

As some know and others don't want to know, I've been a fly fisher woman and professional fly fishing guide in the West for a number of years. It is a passion that I've been fortunate to participate in for over two decades.

Among other things, I believe God speaks to us through our passions, as well as our brokenness. Fly fishing is one of the great passions of my life. (It's something I would have never, ever expected or even heard of in my younger days as a housewife, mother, newspaper reporter, and citizen of my little corner of my world.) Life has a way of bringing us curve balls and surprises when we least expect it.

Whether I catch fish on any given day or not, I love, adore, being outside on a trout stream, standing in wild water, listening to the sounds of the currents, feeling the wind in my face, watching for wildlife, alone or with a friends almost more than anything else on earth.

Being with other people face-to-face in the great outdoors--- whether hiking, fishing, golfing, playing tennis---outside of drugs, sex, alcohol and rock and roll---is one of the healthiest, fun ways, I know to build strong relationships. We take far too many short-cuts on the road to building lasting relationships in our culture today. Short-cuts and quick and false intimacy on the front end causes all kinds of suffering, guilt and heartache on the back end. I say this from experience. But I digress.

In addition to personal and profession growth through fly fishing, I came to learn about the environment in which I chose to live and work. For all the pluses, there were also dangers that had to be taken constantly into account: injury and even blindness from fish hooks, strong currents, quicksand, grizzly bears and dangerous lightning strikes in high altitudes that could come from nowhere. I made my share of mistakes along the way and learned from them. But, I always prayed for safety, and believe I survived and prospered by the Grace of God.

The point is that I learned the lay of the land in the land and profession that I chose after leaving the city far behind. I learned the hazards and the strengths slowly over time and came to be at home with both.

I thought fly fishing was the great surprise passion of my life and nothing would ever come close again to what I found so unexpectedly, when friends literally dragged me out West on a horse pack trip oh so many years ago, I like to say against my will.

That is, until last year in the spring of 2006 on Interstate 81 while driving from Washington, D.C. where I had been in school for two semesters back to Nashville, Tennessee.

I stopped for the night at a little mom-and-pop motel where I took my laptop and plugged it into a land line to check my e-mails, the news and go to one of my favorite bookmarks, Instapundit. The computer moved slowly to Glenn's site. When I got there, one of his little one-liners caught my eye---something about the National Geographic and their celebration of the newly published "Gospel of Judas." It came with a link, so I clicked on it. In a slow flash, I was transported to a new site, one that I had never seen before called American Digest. I read the post and then read it again. The writer could clearly write. I read the piece still again. I had never been exposed to such good writing on the Internet. Who was this writer and what was his website about?

Webutante, on the left, and my oldest fly fishing girlfriend, Edie, after a glorious day on the river this summer. We're evenly matched with dry flies, but sometimes, just sometimes, she can whoop me on a streamer when the sun, the temperature, the moon, the barometric pressure, the stock market and interests rates all line up juuuuuust right..... ..