Be that Guy Fly-Fishing in Manhattan Traffic
In the New York Times Magazine a couple weeks ago, I was delighted by the account of a guy who gets his quarantine ya-ya’s out by fly-casting off a West Village sidewalk:
I plant myself in the middle of West 12th Street and commence fly-casting — essentially fly-fishing without the fish — slinging 30 or 40 feet of thin nylon line behind me and in front of me, over and over again while stepping in and out of the street in sync with the traffic-light cycles to avoid passing cars, like some kind of bastardized urban version of Brad Pitt in “A River Runs Through It,” God and Norman Maclean forgive me.
And I was even more delighted to realize that this incarnation of old-school NYC weirdness was none other than my friend and colleague Jon Gluck, Medium’s editorial director of special projects.
“There’s a simple Zen pleasure in the metronomic rhythms of fly-casting, and it’s a pretty cool experiment in applied physics,” Jon explains in his piece. “The trick is to ‘load’ the line on the back cast, then transfer the coiled energy on the forward cast, stopping the rod at precisely the right moment to shoot the line forward with maximum speed.”
He lost me at “coiled energy on the forward cast,” but I am very on board for finding a moment of bliss in this grueling year. And who knows? Maybe one day he’ll catch something.
