Depending on where you live, fishing season may have just started, be just around the corner, or, if you are fortunate to live someplace where the water doesn’t become solid, you may have been fishing all along.  Here, in the Northeast after a very long winter, the season finally seems to be beginning in earnest.  Which means it is time to get the rust out of the old casting arm.

Which for some reason made me think of how I had to re-learn to cast.  The pictured X-ray is not mine, but I know exactly how that person feels.

“Mr. Murphy, I have some information for you.  As we suspected your back is broken in five places, but your spine is stable.  You have also broken your ankle, tibia, your clavicle, and your radial head. ”  Dr. Murphy (no relation) informed me of my boo-boos, after being strapped in a neck brace and tied to a backboard for seven hours.

“So no big deal then?”  I’d seen enough episodes of Trauma: Life in the ER to know the difference between a spinal cord injury and a vertebrae injury.  Few pieces of news are as welcome as the ones dealing with not  having to use a baggie as a bathroom for the rest of your life.  Still I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t also thinking about fishing.  The broken radial head was in my right arm, my casting arm, my very favorite appendage.

“How’s my arm?  Will it heal?”

“Are you a golfer?”

“Hell No.”

“A fly fisherman?”

“Yes, and a yakker.”  Little worried that he picked that as his second guess.

“I’m afraid that may be a problem…”

Luckily for me, Dr. Murphy was also a fly fisherman and instead of sending me for surgery right away, he recommended we try extensive physical therapy.  Surgery would fix the elbow but not well enough for fly fishing, if it could heal naturally that would be best.  Wont bore you with details, but the catch was the bones would heal but the “spider-webs” that hold the thing together would tighten up.

The Physical Therapy was largely a failure.

It is my belief that the therapist failed because she possessed a human soul. This soul caused her to feel something called guilt or mercy.  She did not torture me as much as the accordion shaped tissues of my elbow needed to be tortured.

Luckily for me, my brother Brian had no such hang ups.

When the Physical Therapy had been exhausted, the measurements for my range of motion were still pretty bad.  Worse I had no strength in the arm for anything involving a rotation.  So I could pump a dumbbell, but I could not turn a key.  Casting a fly rod seemed all but impossible.  Dr. Murphy informed me that surgery could alleviate the pain, but motion would be even more restricted.

I was more than a little disappointed.  I had done all the exercises, I had suffered through months of discomfort, and now it looked like it was all for nothing.  Should probably note that never once did I think I would never fly fish again - I started practicing casting with my left two days after the fall (more on that later.)  My brother heard this news slightly differently.

“So you need to be able to straighten you arm?”

“Ya basically, the thing kind of looks like a San Franciscan Tyrannosaurs now.”

Brian sounded a little too confident,  “No problem.”

So my brother, the same man who once poked my eye out, the same man who once lit his ass on fire during a Boy Scout trip, the same man who did things which are not suitable to print here due to statute of limitations liabilities, became the man who saved my casting arm.

He had me sit on the floor, braced my upper arm against his knee, and bent that thing perfectly straight.  The first time he did it I yelped.  It hurt so bad that it almost didn’t hurt at all, and I  was taken by surprise.  The second time I was prepared for it, and my Irish was up.  I wasn’t going to make a peep.  I’m proud to say I didn’t make a sound; I am less proud to say it is because I passed out.

My brother worked on my arm each day for a week.  We don’t live very close to one another.  He would drive down and put me in a hold similar to an arm bar.  He taught me some conditioning techniques that he uses for his Karate fighting.  During these sessions we would joke that this could be filmed for a Rockyesque montage:  elbow twisting, push-ups, forearm to forearm punching drills, and my least favorite of all bracing my upper arm and holding a 5-pound weight out straight while watching a Lord of the Rings marathon.

It was a such a happy day when I was able to walk up to my door, put the key in the lock, and turn it with only a dull discomfort.  A couple weeks later I was only mildly surprised to learn from the Doctor that my right arm now had a greater range of motion than my left.

All told the accident cost me: three inches of height, I have pain in my arm and back that I suspect I always will, and I missed out on a great fall run.  That is what irks me the most.

The accident was also the catalyst for a few other things.

I started writing again because of it.  Writing was always something I enjoyed but like so many other things what we enjoy is often crowded out by what we don’t.  When you are laying on the ground and you have to ask someone if your foot is moving, murky things become crystal clear.  Aspects of your life that you had come to accept are no longer acceptable.

The fall was the beginning of the end of an unhappy marriage.

“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy.  If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”

Socrates

When you are home for a few weeks you notice things.  The History Channel repeats itself, Carl Sagan is awesome, and the phone doesn’t ring much.  One could say that you really learn who your friends are, but that’s not entirely true or fair.  I think what you really learn is how over and misused that title is.  I work with some guys, I fish with some guys, and shoot darts with some guys - none of them are my friends.  The guy I was helping when I fell came to see me once - he also had to drive my truck back to my house.  I don’t hold this against him.  Our not being real friends is as much his failing as my own.

There is of course a bright-side.  Think of just how much of a real blessing it is to have any friends at all.  I had been Brian’s brother all his life.  In that time he has annoyed me, injured me, charmed chicks from me, and openly mocked me.  I used to wonder if it were not for a few stitches of DNA we held in common would we even talk to each other?

My brother was a soccer player.  I played football.  There was a tradition of the football team harassing the soccer team.  Brian and I ended that tradition.  I’ll never forget the look on my coach’s face when he was screaming at me because I sided with my brother against my teammates.  I simply asked him if he heard himself - like these morons who are only in my life temporarily are of any importance to me compared to my brother.

That’s the key.  A friend is a person who you invite into your life, not for a season or a semester, but for good.  Brian and I had been brothers all our lives, but now I realize that we are friends.

If I could just get him to fly fish…