Norman Maclean was haunted by waters. Apparently he thought that was a good thing. I’m haunted by boredom, and I don’t think it’s always such a good thing. In fact, things can quickly go downhill when I get bored. The elementary school principal had my parents’ phone number on mental speed dial given how often he had to call them to round me up for doing something creative because I was bored.
Out of boredom, I put a .30-caliber bullet into an acorn-sized hole drilled into an oak tree by a woodpecker. From forty paces, I shot at the bullet half a dozen times until I hit it. Of course, the lead slug didn’t go anywhere, but the bullet’s casing ricocheted off the rif le’s scope, which saved my eye from boredom.
Boredom is in the eye of the beholder. Some people might consider watching a size 20 Blue-Winged Olive drift, untouched, 96 times through the same pod of rising fish to be an act of boredom bordering on the psychotic. They might even call for an ambulance or squad car after hearing said drifter muttering and cursing to himself while making the ninety-seventh drift.
Flipping burgers and fried eggs is on the high end of the boredom scale. Short-order cooks are often stereotyped as being half-wit, pimple-faced teenagers or veterans of some long-forgotten traumatic event who make it through the day only by the miracles of modern medicine. I have a friend who not only delights in the hundred-drift syndrome, but is a short-order cook by choice and avocation. He is intelligent, creative, bright, and by anyone’s standards an overachiever.
Jim Slattery owns the Campfire Lodge and Resort on the banks of the Madison River between Hebgen and Quake Lakes in West Yellowstone, Montana. Before Jim and his wife, Wendie, bought the fishing compound, Jim was a punk rocker in New Jersey, writing music and playing with his band, The Violators He frequently played alongside the crosstown band, The Stimulators. By the turn of the 1980s, Jim had two popular singles (“NY Ripper,” “My Country”) and was already a long-established fly fisher and commercial tyer. One of the regional favorites at the time was his fluttering stonefly imitation, the Stimulator, named after the band. To make a long story short, the pattern (along with its name) made its way west, where the sincerest form of flattery made his pattern famous around the world.
Adjacent to the fly shop is Jim’s grill, where, from 7:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. seven days a week during fishing season, he will be found flipping eggs, hash browns, and one-pound strawberry hotcakes. He certainly doesn’t do it for the money or because he doesn’t have cottages, a store, and a fly shop to attend to — he simply enjoys perfecting the genre of short-order cook.
Every order is cooked to perfection and plated with the same level of precision as a payload mounted in the Space Shuttle. Each mound of hash browns is a clone of the last and the next, yet his casual, giant-palm-sized scoop of raw shredded potatoes seems an invitation to chaos. He shuttles eggs, one in each hand, at a machine-gun pace from the crate and breaks them single-handedly onto the grill without the slightest shell fragment sneaking into the egg. I was entranced by his perfection of the one-handed egg ballet and ordered two eggs to be freed in slow motion after hours. Jim showed me how break an egg single-handedly. It seemed so simple. But like tying a perfect quill-wing dun, the sum was reduced to a series of subtle moves that require time and imperceptible muscle coordination that can be perfected only through meditative repetition. At home, being somewhat bored, I bought five dozen eggs and started to go through that process. After a couple dozen mashed-up tries, I reverted to YouTube and found tutorials on breaking an egg single-handedly. Success involved mastering the Vulcan salute, a scissors-like motion with the two forefingers opposed to the last two fingers. It can take a while to learn how to perform the salute competently, and longer still to learn to crack eggs with it, but the lessons for fly fishers are these: what may appear boring can be engrossing, and once you learn a “boring” skill, you are unlikely to forget it.
Boredom can be the birthing center of curiosity and creative thought. I get bored stiff when meditating, but am frequently amazed at what swell questions and ideas come percolating into my psyche when boredom has laid waste to all those not-so-creative thoughts swirling around in my head.
Through the boredom of meditation, I’ve come up with answers to questions I didn’t even know existed. As an example, on a recent rainy afternoon, I took a break from tying beadhead nymphs for a brief meditation. (Lisa calls it “taking a nap”). The most irritating thing about tying small beadhead nymphs is getting the hook point through that damn little hole in the bead. It is what it is, and I had never really considered a hack, but wham, right in the middle of bored bliss the idea of using a small hypodermic needle as a stylet bubbled into my brain. It works perfectly. Stab the needle through the bead, slide the hollow needle over the hook point, and the bead quickly and easily slips onto the hook. You can even prepare half a dozen beads like a shish kebab onto the needle and slide them out as easily as spitting candy from a Pez dispenser.
Another time, while Lisa was meditating and I was “taking a nap,” I heard her rustling about, so I slowly opened one eye to see what was going on. She was already looking at me with one eye half open. She immediately sprang from her meditative state and exclaimed, “We need to go to the river where that big spruce tree is!” Her statement was so out of context it took a few seconds to break through my postnap fog to realize exactly what river she was even talking about, much less the tree. “Uh, that’s like 40 minutes from here and it’s almost dark. What gives?” “I just remembered leaving my net hanging in that tree last week.” And so goes the never-ending Zen dance between boredom, creativity, and inspiration. Anyone who has fished for a stretch will understand the connection. Swing after swing, drift upon drift, cast after cast: mindless repetition. It is good for us to empty the cache from time to time. Maybe I shouldn’t be so haunted by boredom and instead, start flipping eggs.
