Dear Diary,
What a fool I’ve been.
Almost 40 years wasted. Opportunity frittered away. Great blocks of knowledge down the drain. All because I never bothered to write things down.
If I had one thing to do over in my outdoor endeavors, it would be to keep a log book. A diary, if you please.
Had I done so, I would have remembered so many special occasions to hunt and fish, those precise times and places to form those magic moments that transform the ordinary into the sublime. I would have written down pearls of wisdom whispered occasionally by friends and acquaintances in moments of weakness or out of plain pity.
All gone. Lost. Leaked through the holes in a Swiss cheese memory that seems to recall volumes of meaningless trivia, but not directions to the lake above timberline wriggling with 5-pound cutthroat trout.
Actually, as an employee of a newspaper that keeps an extensive electronic filing system of its publications, I have a certain advantage in looking back on many years of past events – provided I take the time.
But this is scant substitute for a tidy, condensed journal pressed close to my chest for ready reference. Nor will it ever contain those many pearls of advice, all the campfire chatter that passed into a hollow ear, soon to be forgotten.
In all those years and conversations, I can’t begin to speculate how many important pieces of knowledge I let slip away, only that it makes me cringe to think about it. Worse, I’ve even been in possession of manufactured log books prepared expressly for that purpose, all bound in soft leather with lovely etchings of leaping trout that practically cry out with suggestions of just what to write down. For the life of me, I don’t know what I did with them.
Chalk it up to a certain arrogance, the misplaced belief that I can’t possibly misplace a bit of information that juicy. It’s the same excess of confidence that causes us to forget birthdays or, God forbid, anniversaries.
The worst personal example came a quarter-century ago when someone told me about the awesome number of double-digit trout lurking in the lower Colorado River below Glen Canyon Dam. I tucked the information away in my memory vault. By the time it finally found its way back out several years later, the standard of measurement at Lee’s Ferry had shriveled from pounds to inches.
Pure information isn’t the only reason to keep a journal.
Part of the reward of being an outdoor writer is we get to savor every experience twice – first when we do it, again when we sit down to write, perhaps even affecting a certain judicious improvement the second time around.
So it is with a diary. There’s sweet music in all those notations from years past, an absolute delight in recalling people and places and, perhaps, even a special fish or two.
I have this friend who spices his log book entries with well-selected photographs – or at least on those occasions when he actually catches something.
You can purchase suitable journals at outdoors stores, create your own from a standard appointment book or even use an ordinary calendar. The beauty of the process comes from what you write down and the benefit that comes from it.
All I know is that I resolve to do a better job keeping track of things. If the giant trout ever return to Lee’s Ferry, I’ll be ready for them.
Listen to Charlie Meyers at 9 a.m. each Saturday on “The Fan Outdoors,” KKFN 950 AM. He can be reached at 303-820-1609 or cmeyers@denverpost.com.
