A Slight Delay

Lately I find myself watching a lot of nature shows. I’m not sure why. I like nature in many of its forms (except the many-legged forms that crawl up the back of your neck, or the particularly slimy forms), but I like it in its… well, natural setting. Not mediated by a cathode ray tube. But nature shows are a bit of a guilty pleasure, especially since the same guy has been doing all the narration for every nature show that’s been done since 1968.

And with 238 channels, there’s a lot more nature shows than there used to be. I’d love to see the NRA do one. Can’t you just picture the voiceover? “Here we see a majestic flock of cranes. Every year, the crane, following a deep biological imperative, comes in large numbers to this marsh to nest and to mate. And if you think they look noble now, you ought to see them with a belly full of twelve-gauge shot.”

Even Lifetime could get in on the act. They could send a pack of women into the middle of Macy’s, accompanied by a camera crew. And hounds. They’d have to have a narrator, too. “Sparky has just flushed two microsuede blazers out of a clearance rack.”

Then again, maybe the reason we have so much nature on television is because there seems to be so little of it everywhere else. Our towns and cities, to say nothing of the exurbs, have very little left by way of open space or nature. That makes it difficult to “get back to nature,” unless your idea of nature is watching the migration of the taxis, or the stockbrokers swimming upstreet to spawn.

Fishing is great for urban areas and small towns. You can carve out your own oasis of calm nearly anywhere with a rod and reel. Fishing is essentially contemplative; it’s portable Zen at the end of a stick. You don’t even have to fish, as such, but the pole provides great cover for otherwise sitting there and doing nothing. The best part, though, is that your average downtown area has no game wardens. This allows you to avoid some very awkward conversations:

“What you fishin’ for?”
“Oh, nothing.”

If that doesn’t get you a one-way ticket to the loony bin, nothing will.

So anyway, there’s always the option of fishing in your favorite municipal park or other public place. To start with, make sure you have all the right gear. You won’t find any of this in L.L. Bean—yet—but your local K-Mart, WalMart, Target, or even 7-11 should be suitable ‘til Bean or Eddie Bauer catch on.

I would suggest stocking up on each of the following: chum (catnip, biscuits, or People Crackers would probably work best). You’ll also need the right line; 20-pound test on a light rod will suffice for cats, but if it’s dogs you’re after, you’d be much better off with at least 80-pound and a heavy rod; even wiener dogs fight when you reel them in.

Lures are easy. Cats like something they can sink their claws into, like a stuffed badger. If there are no stuffed badgers lying around, a stuffed platypus should suffice. Rawhide or synthetic bones are fine for dogs, which aren’t as picky. Just be careful not to get bitten in the process.

In our next Urban Living article, we’ll cover how to make a fine cookstove out of a newspaper vending machine. In the meantime, fish on!

Tags: cities, fishing, hunting, nature, Television

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 11:13 pm and is filed under Humor, Re-Make/Re-Model. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.