“It’s my belief that history is a wheel. ‘Inconstancy is my very essence,’ says the wheel. ‘Rise up on my spokes if you like but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths.’Good times pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away.” – Boethius, “Consolation of Philosophy”
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The last thing I expected on a business trip to Chicago was to see anything related to big game hunting. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon the dreaded Man-Eaters of Tsavo at the Field Museum of Natural History. These are the lions immortalized in the 1907 novel of the same name by Lt. Col. J.H. Patterson and later depicted in the movie adaptation, The Ghost and the Darkness. The 1996 film with Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas is not the only film version of Patterson’s story. Bwana Devil is considered the first American color feature shot in 3-D. Starring Robert Stack and Barbara Britton, the 1952 movie promised: “A LION in your lap! A LOVER in your arms!”
The most striking difference between the real-life lions and the cinematic versions is their lack of manes. Apparently due to the extreme heat in Tsavo, lions there are often maneless. The hides were trimmed down for display as trophy rugs, so the live specimens were even larger than they are as displayed at the Field Museum. Nonetheless, taxidermist Julius Friesser did an excellent job restoring the skins and patching bullet holes considering the quarter-century or so the lions spent as carpeting. Patterson sold the hides and skulls to the museum in 1924 for the considerable sum of $5,000.
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I am struggling with an issue, and I have exhausted my own personal wisdom in attempting to resolve it. It took me about fifteen minutes. And so, gentle readers, I appeal to you for a solution. I am trying to plan some fishing trips with the Sporting Wife for the summer, and I keep running into the same problem. When I am at a ten on a ten-scale dreaming of a fishing vacation, I always hear the same refrain from my partner,”I never catch anything.”
This is patently untrue, as she has caught fish on most of the trips we have taken when she has actually deigned to fish. She is correct only in that when she comes with me as a spectator, does not buy a license, and does not hold a rod for the entire trip, she does not catch any fish. I love fishing as much as anyone, but I imagine if I were forced to watch someone else catch fish while I remained idle, it would be about as much fun for me as a root canal.
Her usual tactic to avoid fishing is to impose a series of contradictory conditions during the planning phase:
“I don’t want to get up too early; I can’t stay out all night.”
“I can’t stay out in the heat all day; I don’t want to get out in bad weather.”
“It’s not worth dragging all that stuff out for a few hours; I don’t want to board the dog and cat.”
You get the idea. The only day for fishing, apparently, is one between 70 and 74 degrees, with low to moderate humidity, and with willing fish biting during the late morning to early afternoon hours. How many such days have you ever had on the water? Yeah, me neither. We went out in the midday heat to catch the one good redfish pictured in the last article just before dark, and it was pretty chilly by then. Supper that night after filleting and a shower was at about 22:00. (10:00 P.M. for you twelve-hour types.)
What am I to do? I’m already to the point that I dread asking her to go. I know if the trip does not come off perfectly, it will be an “I told you so” moment, but if I never take her with me, her pronouncement about not catching anything is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She won’t fish because she never catches anything, and she never catches anything because she won’t fish. The chicken and the egg.