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 The Beginning
Some people think I've been fishing trout my whole life. It's not that simple. Some would be happy to brush me off as a fanatic and one-dimensional. Truth be told, here's what really happened. Bass were my first love. I cut my teeth on bass fishing, you might say. When the other kids were playing baseball and doing homework, I was casting bass lures into the side of a barn. I entered my first tournament at the age of eleven and won my first tournament at the age of thirteen. That's when I dropped out of school and went full time. The money was good, a hell of a lot better than my buddies were getting for the odd jobs that were available around town. My parents didn't understand it. Let's just say they had a different vision for me. They were librarians. In the early years most folks couldn't quite buy into the concept that I was actually related to them. My folks had never strung up a reel or even put a worm on a hook. They were intellectuals, and I was a natural-born angler, and that's all I knew. An outdoor adventure for them would be to pack a picnic lunch, sit in the gazebo on the village green, and read Hemingway to each other. My folks fell in love among the great works of literature, the classics. Among the rows and rows of philosophy, history, art, the sciences. As luck would have it, they were rearranging the outdoor adventure section of the library nine months before I was born. That was as close as anybody could get to an explanation. I was cut from a different cloth, but I was nevertheless their son, not the subject of a switch-a-roo at the hospital as some folks maintain, even to this day. Not to say I could have reached fame and fortune without them. The books definitely helped in the early years, as I devoured every one ever written on bass fishing. And I'll always owe them a debt of gratitude for not having me institutionalized.
The Early Years
With my dedication to research and my God-given abilities, I was unstoppable. I was the Upper Peninsula Bass Champion before I bought my first razor. The only thing remotely strange to me at the time was how I'd have to hire an adult to ride in my boat, as I was too young to drive a boat on my own, and bass tournaments were still under the jurisdiction of the local sheriff, especially if he was in the tournament. Typically, I'd pay a rider twenty bucks, if I couldn't talk them into going for free, on the condition that they'd keep their mouth shut and stay out of the way. Sometimes I'd have to pay them an extra ten bucks to keep them from jumping out of the boat and swimming to shore, after they got a taste of my piloting skills. The only other time I ever paid an adult for anything was outside a liquor store. Anyway, the carnival lifestyle went on for a number of years; town after town, tournament after tournament. I was great for the bass business, the promoters I mean. Whenever I was fishing in a tournament the promoters would get an extra level of attendance, the people who were coming out primarily to see the little fishing freak. They weren't all that concerned with what was going on in the tournament. Anyway, I guess they got their money's worth when they'd see my overpowered boat skimming over the water at close to sixty miles an hour, a fearless kid and a terrified boater of legal age, praying, white-knuckled, and hoping to live long enough to collect on the hardest money he might ever earn.
Burned Out
Like a lot of child prodigies, I eventually burned out, dried up, and blew away. The thrill of competition bass fishing was gone. I was like a hardened drunk, craving one more drink while in the back of my mind, I knew it wouldn't really help. By the time I was twenty, I'd caught enough fish to feed a small nation. And I was getting lazy. For years I had reinvested my winnings back into my rig. I had the best equipped boat imaginable. Winning tournaments became easier and easier. I'd usually knock out the competition in the first half of the tournament, and spend the rest of my allotted time speeding around the lake and throwing down Buds.
BassFinder 5000
It was about this time that I began to look for something new to hold my interest. I'd been hanging around the local community college, pretending to be a student, and trying to meet coeds. I ran into some gearheads in the computer lab and before too long the conversation turned to bass fishing. In retrospect, that's where the idea of what would later become the BassFinder 5000 was first hatched. If we could convert my knowledge of finding and landing bass into a rules-based algorithm held in low-powered programmable silicon, with input feeds from sensors measuring water depth, underwater topography, water speed and current direction, sun angles and shade spots and so on, we could make the most ordinary Joe into a legendary angler, a hero to all that knew him. The system could tell you in real-time where to throw your lure, and what lure to use. The system would even drive the boat if you asked it to. We could put anybody in a boat equipped with the system and guarantee a top five tournament finisher out of him: insurance salesman, hog farmer, Broadway producer, it didn't matter. When Fish Head Magazine named our BassFinder 5000 their product of the year, the floodgates opened. We gathered up all the sober people we could find in the Upper Peninsula and began production with a crew of twelve people.
Fame
It's said that everyone gets fifteen minutes of fame, so I'd have to say I'm double-blessed. In addition to my glory years as a teenage fishing sensation, the BassFinder 5000 was going to provide me with yet another fifteen minutes of fame, for a total of one full half-hour. Of course, I'm hoping that my new career as a purveyor of web-based commentary will take me up to three-quarters of an hour real soon. Anyway, with the system available in thousands of sporting goods stores worldwide and the programmers having turned a lot of would-be sportsmen into technicians, our work was complete. My travel schedule was another story. I was quite busy promoting the product and talking to fans. In some hamlets, mostly up North near the border I'd arrive to throngs of adoring devotees. I even had groupies, but not like the groupies you'd see hovering around the rock stars on MTV. My groupies were usually women from the great outdoors, the backwoods. The kind of women who could survive the northern wilderness for a week on nothing more than Lucky Strikes and insect larvae, and enjoy every minute of it.
Born Yet Again
Back at the assembly plant, the bankers and investors were phasing me out of the operation, and I couldn't blame them. My management style was something like this: ship orders until a big check arrived, cash the check, buy food and beverages and head out on the road in search of god-knows-what. I called this "field research," but the new manager the bank had sent over called it "taking the week off." It was during this idle time between cashing royalty checks and being told politely to "take another week off, or month," that I was born again. A new consciousness was taking form, as years before I somehow imagined it would. I had always wondered about that rarest of all anglers, the trout angler, ever since I saw a picture in a magazine when I was a little kid. I've always thought of the mythic trout masters as forces of nature first and anglers second. Trout would be my destiny, I realized, and my life once again had meaningful purpose. I was like a house painter who stopped painting houses one day and started painting scenes of houses, instead. I was seeing things from a different perspective, you might say.
Enlightenment Period
It was during my early trout days that I first experienced enlightenment. I was setting out on a journey to places unknown, unseen and un-tasted. A voice inside my head suggested that I could realize the essence of my being through the subtleties of trout fishing in mountain streams, in secluded lakes, in godforsaken places reachable only in small aircraft and dreams. A small yellow pill would later take care of that voice inside my head, once and for all. Yes, I would leave my given name, Alvin Bednarski behind, like a carnival hack sheds his work clothes and steps out on the stage as the Magnificent Pierrot Grenade. The transformation hit me like a ton of bricks as I cast flies over the rippling waters of a Canadian mountain stream on an otherwise ordinary summer day. A strange laser-like beam pierced the amber mountain sky, just like it was from a UFO, and penetrated my skull, I think, rearranging many of the neurons in my brain. At that very moment I seemed to become Merrick. Merrick Trout. The Henry David Thoreau of the northern trout streams. At least, that's what I remember.
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