THE THRILLING MOMENT

 Sometimes the best part of a journey can be just getting there. The journey itself.
My son had rented a cabin for a night for our fishing trip. Sixty bucks a night they said. I drove, Lee was was the navigator. He navigated us up to the southern shores of lake Texoma. We veered off the main road to a twisty-turny side road that took us past mansions and horse stables, past lush green fields and lily-padded ponds. We passed the golf course, country club, day spa, tennis courts, and spilled out into the parking lot and entrance to Tanglewood Resort, pictured above.
I stopped the car a distance from the entrance so we could take it all in.
“How much did you say a night?”
“Sixty dollars”
“Somehow I don’t think this is us."
"I‘m not seeing any cabins here”
"Don't look like a cabin kind of place, do it?"
"It probably don't"
“We’ve got Cabin #7?”
"Supposed to be"
“You reckon that’s a restaurant at the top of that tower?”
“Probably might be, yes”
We both laughed.

We debated whether to go up to the valet parking and ask for directions to Cabin #7.
The navigator looked again at our map and we were on our way a few miles down the road, into the most jumbled maze of gravel side roads like you never been on, through the poison oak thicket in the dark past untold numbers of copperhead snakes, on the phone with a lady trying to guide us in, who just kept saying over and over in a wonderful Texoma drawl “Just keep coming to me”.
We had a great day of fishing and caught our limit, but that may have been the best part.

“Every moment of life, I suppose, is more or less of a turning-point. Opportunities are swarming around us all the time, thicker than gnats at sundown. We walk through a cloud of chances, and if we were always conscious of them they would worry us almost to death.

But happily our sense of uncertainty is soothed and cushioned by habit, so that we can live comfortably with it. Only now and then, by way of special excitement, it starts up wide awake. We perceive how delicately our fortune is poised and balanced on the pivot of a single incident. We get a peep at the oscillating needle, and, because we have happened to see it tremble, we call our experience a crisis.

The meditative angler is not exempt from these sensational periods. There are times when all the uncertainty of his chosen pursuit seems to condense itself into one big chance, and stand out before him like a salmon on the top wave of a rapid. He sees that his luck hangs by a single strand, and he cannot tell whether it will hold or break. This is his thrilling moment, and he never forgets it.”
From “Fishermans Luck” by Henry van Dyke, 1923