A use for February?

I hate this winter and blame the puritanical or just plain stupid bastards who, in early January, were telling me to "embrace" the snow, cheering when it appeared in the forecast. Now they know. To walk in New Haven is to covet a broken bone. Basement floods are inevitable. Weekends are spent with roof rake and chisel. Children. Housebound. 

I don't have shares in HomeDepot, so for the rest of us it's like living on the planet Hoth without the groovy outfits or access to a TIE fighter. It blows here.

College Street, New Haven, last Tuesday

Or does it? Like every angler I know, I need spring. As soon as those peepers sound (March 16 last year), we'll run for the rivers and salt marsh as if for our last breath. It'll be here then gone. And in the midst of this fleeting bounty I'll trudge through my local estuaries and curse the depth of the mud and the absent stripers that made me venture out for the 4th time in a week. I'll forget how I feel today, on February 7th, 2011, as ice dams threaten my dwelling. In April I'll swear at the invisible fish for making me jump in all directions. Local stripers, stocked or wild trout on the Farmy, Housie, Hammo, Q, or others I've come to abbreviate in this most annoying manner. Lake bound steel head, newly foraging carp, stripers throughout the Housatonic basin: it's feast from famine in a nanosecond. It's hardly fair after all this time in the Hoth System.

Tonight at dinner, as my children refused to eat while demanding yet more, my mind wandered: perhaps it's good to be an angler in February; to make use of the shitty fag-end weeks of winter.  Time to fantasize about what's to come, even to kid myself that this year, maybe this year, I'll be ready.

Jon