Water Pig
Posted by: Greg Keeler
/ added: 04.12.2010
/ Back to Tailgate
At least this pig wasn't fin-hooked on a trailer...
A Water Pig Will Not Give Up
Times you bother water pigs
are times well wasted.
So spoke Uncle Walt
at the unbeknownst
edge of his grave.
Now, I choose early spring
to bother them.
That's when Uncle Walt did.
At the end of a finely tapered
tippet, a spring water
pig will become
immensely annoyed.
Again, that's how
Uncle Walt put it.
But as I implied,
the grave took him.
The water pigs are still here.
I've never seen a rainbow,
a cutthroat, brook or brown
look anything but serious.
A water pig will look funny,
especially when it's not.
It's scales designed for battle,
it's mouth a vacuum hose,
a water pig will not give up.
At least that's what
Uncle Walt said,
not knowing
at the time
that he soon would.
Comments:
Posted by Bob MacNeal on Apr 13th, 2010 @ 8:00 am
Uncle Walt Wisdom
Greg,
I dig the water pig image. Did you paint it? The shimmering water elevates the water pig, with its primeval scales, to stately knighthood.
Our perception of classes of fish - from the lowly carp with a deflated belly emaciated by a tapeworm, to the lofty Teflon-trout with a gut full of the latest hatch – mirrors our perception of human social classes.
After over 30 years of enjoying your work, it struck me that reconciling the silliness of human social stratification with boots-on-slimy-green-rocks reality might be something you’ve been musing about.
There’s something sublime about the guileless buffoonery of carp just as there is, in a true egalitarian sense, something unseemly and vacuous about the cagey farm-raised trout.
Wedged between the puffery of an English department and the odd celebrity expatriate that blooms in Bozeman like mid-summer sweet peas, there always seems to be an Uncle Walt to tell you what’s what.
Cheers.
I dig the water pig image. Did you paint it? The shimmering water elevates the water pig, with its primeval scales, to stately knighthood.
Our perception of classes of fish - from the lowly carp with a deflated belly emaciated by a tapeworm, to the lofty Teflon-trout with a gut full of the latest hatch – mirrors our perception of human social classes.
After over 30 years of enjoying your work, it struck me that reconciling the silliness of human social stratification with boots-on-slimy-green-rocks reality might be something you’ve been musing about.
There’s something sublime about the guileless buffoonery of carp just as there is, in a true egalitarian sense, something unseemly and vacuous about the cagey farm-raised trout.
Wedged between the puffery of an English department and the odd celebrity expatriate that blooms in Bozeman like mid-summer sweet peas, there always seems to be an Uncle Walt to tell you what’s what.
Cheers.
Follow us on Twitter
