“NO FISHING FROM DOCK.”
Oh, I’m sure they have their reasons, but they always do. Dale Carnegie said no man thinks himself wrong, and I’ve yet to see an illegal tyranny. Little men in little cars need big books of rules to hide behind, for rules become god to them, their holy scriptures to quote and justify, and modify if they’d like. Well, it’s legal they say, ink barely dry on their hands from the alteration, reasonable.
(Once you see it, you’ll never be the same.)
But people, God bless ‘em, still fish from the dock. They keep us going.
The mist rose from the creek back home one morning in the near past, the new sun turning the sheet of water silver. A man disobeyed, with a cooler full of blue cats a reward for his chutzpah–the sweet breaded taste of victory. I put my kayak in, waved, and pushed off down the silver.
I’ve been fishing from the dock lately in my own way, casting a line into the deep, snagging galactic light from the age of the Megalodon shark, and poking Neptune in the eye.
Well, most people would call it looking through a telescope on the back deck.
It seems more than that, though. I’ll stand, holding the railing, watching the eastern side of the mountain sink towards night, the watery constellations surfacing: Pisces the fishes, Cetus the sea monster, Aquarius to bear the water, Capricornus the sea goat. The autumn sky is a sea.
The porch becomes a dock, one to fish from. There’s no sign.
So I’ll set up a telescope, and voyage into this dim part of the sky, Saturn burning a lighthouse amber to mark the way.
Glittering on the seabed, the Silver Coin galaxy (NGC 253) showed up ‘round midnight last night. It doesn’t look like this through the scope, although the shape is the same, and the gossamer glow lovely: the photons traveled 12 million years to reach my eye. (But if you ask them, no time passed at all. “Traffic was great, man.”)
Neptune showed up two nights ago, barely bigger than a speck, a star turned into a pale blue disc.
For a sense of scale and speed:
I stopped for lunch on the way back from grandma’s the other day, and rolled into my driveway four hours later. Whew, it’s good to be home. Light from Neptune takes the same time to cross 2.6 billion miles of space to arrive at my house, too.
But it doesn’t have to stop for gas.
Back to fishing.
A cast here, a cast there. The Andromeda galaxy and companions (galaxies have “moons”, too, but they’re smaller galaxies.) The Double Cluster in Perseus, a fiery, dazzling of jewels across black velvet, as if an unseen hand were either mad, or glad, and, sparing no expense, flung stars across that corner of the sky as if to say you want stars? Have some stars.
Jupiter rose late, blazing a regal white in the east. A look, a marvel, three of the Jovian moons, tiny discs. Things had calmed down, mellowed out, and the air was still, like calm water affording a glance down to sand. Saturn seemed etched, with the largest moon Titan showing a disc, too. What a hula-hooping beautiful sight.
I reeled in it, packed up the tackle box of eyepieces, and staggered off to sleep.
Keep fishing.
-Josh