Fish stories

After living in the Pikes Peak region for more than 20 years, I’ve gotten accustomed to seeing soldiers. There are nearly 20,000 of them stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs, with nearly 20,000 more at other military installations in the area. Still, my life rarely intersects with any of them. I don’t have any friends in the military, and I’ve only visited the area military bases a handful of times, working on stories for the local newspaper. So when I get a chance to meet soldiers off-base and talk to them about their lives, I welcome it. I had such a chance last weekend, and we found a common ground in fishing. My husband and I had hiked the Rainbow Gulch Trail to Rampart Reservoir to reach our favorite fishing spot – a rocky perch on one of the lake’s inlets. Soon, we were joined by two guys with military haircuts; one teaching the other about trout fishing. At first, we politely observed each other’s space. But when the rainbow trout started jumping out of the water right in front of us, we started talking about fish. The soldiers had been transferred here from Georgia; both had seen action in Iraq. They didn’t say much about that, other than how bad the food was. They delved into politics (it became obvious we wouldn’t agree -they were Huckabee fans; we voted for Obama.) We talked about how soldiers are respected more now than they were during the Vietnam War, but how that treatment varies around the country (it's better in Colorado than in Georgia). But mostly, we talked about fishing, and the good fortune of having this fishing spot so close to home, and the good luck we were having on that day as the fish practically jumped into our laps. We shared fish stories, and by the end of our morning together, even the quieter soldier had relaxed and started talking. He was a bass man, he said, but now he understood the appeal of the sport of trout fishing. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Many men go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.” On this day, we were all there for the trout and the sun and the wind that pleated the water. And, it turns out, the company.