The Tides of Change

If you’re like me, you’ve heard the expression “the winds of change” more times than you can recall.  I imagine someone sagaciously uttering the timeless expression, perhaps standing with a pasted grimace on their face, arms crossed, and stretching upright as they stand, verbally predicting a looming, ominous event.  There seem to be no shortage of aphorisms and adages for everything we humans endure throughout this life.  I happen to enjoy hearing them; they often place my mind in motion, making me think a little deeper than normal of the trials I may face ahead, absorbing the wisdom which others have inured and so conveniently packaged for the rest of us to learn from in a simple, trite sentence.  While most of these quoted maxims may tickle our fancy in that we can certainly relate on some level, never do they serve to act as a preventative substitute to the real experiences yielded by everyday life.  Those trials we seem to painfully learn or encounter first-hand, and only then we ironically advise others who seek to follow in our footsteps of our newfound enlightenment with, you guessed it, an age-old adage.       

For better or for worse, it seems those winds of change are always changing.  Just this past weekend, I parked my car beside a stretch of the Shrewsbury River to feast my eyes on its sights and enjoy a morning coffee at a location where I’ve caught dozens of Stripers in the past and have mentally produced a sonar-generated-like map of its bottom contour in my mind, envisioning its details and recounting them effortlessly, making them fully-accessible when a graphite rod is gripped between my hands and I’m standing at this coveted location.  I feel that confident and familiar with these swiftly-flowing tidal waters.  In my absence since the end of the spring-run, the fecund months of summer have kissed her embankments with life.  A variety of tall, verdant, stalky weeds and wildflowers now grow densely from wherever the sandy soil holds firm.  It is an exhibit of Nature in her raw power of proliferation.  I was not surprised to see it, but I couldn’t recall that much plant-life growing in years prior.  I reason it to be yet another by-product of Sandy’s invasion last fall; no longer is this parking lot a tightly-packed bed of gravel.  Deposits of sand and littoral detritus have remained in placed for so long now, that they have become compost where sources of plant life spring forth, flourishing against all imaginable odds, extending skyward towards the nourishing sunlight it reaches to.  It reminds me of the boundless and baffling resolve exhibited by Life, whereby a weed will rise through a crack on an excessively-travelled asphalt roadway, grass and moss will grow overhead on the roofing shingles of a house, or a quite fitting example, a weedy grass flourishing atop the wooden ice-breaking abutments affixed to the foundation of this river’s spanning bascule bridge. Grass took root in the middle of a two-hundred-foot saltwater channel simply because it had somewhere to do so!  Specifically, these aberrant cases of vegetative growth are the unintentional, yet consequential, result of seed dispersals carried forth and deposited by stirring air currents (anemochory) and excrement by birds (endozoochory), instances where change was brought about by wind, and by creatures whose wings glide upon these incessant streams of transformation.   

What really caught my attention amongst this patch of grassy-growth however, was a small sign affixed to a rusting metal U-channel post, standing crooked in posture, boasting menacing, attention-getting, blood-orange colored letters, forming and declaring words of dread to surfcasters seeking access along the coastline, proclaiming “PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING.”  As my eyebrows lowered in disagreement, I asked myself “where did this come from?”  The growth of riverside plant life did not disturb me; I welcomed its naturally-appearing presence.  The posting of this unwelcomed sign however, the black cloud distastefully encroaching over a blue sky, resulted in my suspicious emotion.  I speculated that it may have simply been implanted to deter “illegal” beach parking throughout the summer months, but who is to say that it isn’t a message from the owner of this parcel of land letting me know I’m no longer welcome to fish here?  Only time will tell.  It wasn’t as if this was the first sign of its kind which I have come across as a fisherman.  I actually find it relatively exciting and daring to defy these inherently staid, but seemingly baseless phrases, to proceed beyond their demarcation, creeping onward to the desired grounds I seek.  With any level of realizable comfort won, “no trespassing” signs actually work in the trespasser’s favor, in that they invariably ward-off law-abiding anglers, affording a sought-after setting all to their own.  With this spot being in clear-view of passersby, but more importantly, the town’s ambitiously roving police units, I had to question whether or not the untenable message displayed on the sign of not more than one-square-foot in dimension would alterably determine my fate during the much-anticipated Striper fall-run, acting as the relentlessly irritating pebble in my wader boot.  A fishing hole such as this would be worth getting into “trouble” over, at least once anyway. 

As fishermen, we are more than aware of the ocean’s tidal change delivered to us on a daily basis, fluctuating approximately every six hours between ebb and flood in a predictably changing, sinuous fashion.  Barometric pressure changes as the weather changes as the time of day changes.  Ultimately, to be human is to embrace change.  As surf fishermen, we are always at the ready for change, and the moment we fall accustomed to familiarity, our dear old friend “Change” comes out of the woodwork to suddenly, if not blatantly, shadow our proverbial sunshine and spoil any delight.  Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher, knew this thousands of years ago, intuitively endowing us with an idealistic insight, professing “the only thing that is constant is change.”

I do not feel overly-threatened by this sign’s inanimate, resolute resolve, but I will not feel any more comfortable fishing beside it at 2am for that matter.  During middle-of-the-night hours, I expect to be fishing alone; I do not need its companionship.  I’ll have to let the “no trespassing” sign know that it is trespassing upon my favored ground!  What more can I do, but to optimistically recite in my mind the words of bestselling American author Augustine Mandino, “always seek out the seed of triumph in every adversity.”  Wish me luck that my seed of hope may find fertile riverside sand to grow this fall alongside the Shrewsbury’s trying tides of change.