Frontiers

Occasionally the stars align. And, when they do magic happens. This should happen in everyone's life at least once. I have been lucky; my stars have lined up a few times and they are about to align again before too long. I won't enumerate the circumstances, let's just say it's a good thing.

But, I will share with you one premise to my star-magic. So many I know are now living in "the pipeline", - i.e. that long dark tube called birth, education, career, marriage, mortgage, children, empty nest, living your golden years babysitting grand-kids, assisted living, death. For most, perhaps, this is the "American Dream" and exactly the life they've longed for. For some this is a simple, inescapable misery. For a few "the pipeline" is a glass-walled cage that must be shattered at any cost. I fall into the latter sort. A big house with a three-car garage, a pool and an electric creek in the backyard was never my dream.

"The solution to any problem - work, love, money, whatever - is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be." ~ John Gierach

Fly angler on the Firehole River by Mike Cline. Source: Wikipedia

But, there are frontiers. That said the last remaining frontiers remaining may be peace, dignity and freedom – those very virtues that we as a nation once fought for and won – but now have let slip away. Still, there are other frontiers and without giving too much of the plot away I'll simply say this: I want America and all of it's rivers. I have mountain dreams. John Gierach summed it up nicely, "The solution to any problem – work, love, money, whatever – is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be."

There will be Journal updates to "Frontiers" in the future. The last words say it best: Before it's your favorite place, it's a place you've never been. – WES:::

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