The Hammock Papers: Bar.

04 April 2020

Bar.

These days, the fishing guides in Livingston, Montana, are extremely concerned about the care and upkeep of the lights on their drift-boat trailers. Anyone who has owned a boat and trailer is familiar with the ongoing battle: Electrical wiring systems installed on a piece of metal that you frequently dunk in the water are prone to failure. As guides, we abuse the hell out of these things, backing them down steep, rocky riverbanks and rattling them in high-speed runs down washboard roads. Going an entire season without a trailer-light issue is a minor miracle. And it seems as if at any given time there’s someone in the group who’s in the parking lot in the evening trying to figure out why his left taillight is flickering.

Having a trailer light out in Livingston in the middle of guide season is a major liability, so we look out for one another. One evening last year, I was returning from a long day trip to the Stillwater River, a two-hour drive, and it was nearing dark by the time I pulled off the highway. As I made my way through town, I got three text messages before I’d parked:

Light out!

Trailer light out.

Got a light out, dude!

The reason for the concern goes beyond guiding duties. Having flawlessly working trailer lights is also directly tied to our regular destination at day’s end, when a big neon martini glass flickers on and draws the parched and sunburned like moths. The Murray, the Blurry, the Slurry and, most often, simply the Bar.

CONNECT

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL