Another roadside story

On a perfect spring afternoon, the air temp at 70F, I enjoyed a couple of hours of bike workout yesterday, including pushing into a stiff northeasterly breeze—15 knots or so—all the way to County K. Around mile 20 I turned south, so the was wind finally with me. I finished my final climb and turned west toward home.

Hammering along 9^th St around 28mph I passed a guy fishing in the irrigation canal, his car parked on the north side of the road. I didn’t see the filament of his fishing line until the sun caught it, perhaps a foot ahead and at chest level. I uttered a cry of dismay as I hurtled into it, hoping it wasn’t tipped with a big hook, which I could just picture ripping into my left arm and then tearing across my chest. Instead there was a quick thump as a lure of some sort struck me and bounced away. I stopped and rode back the hundred meters or so I’d traveled in the three or four seconds the whole episode had lasted. The fisherman was walking tentatively toward me, staying on the grass off the road, as if he expected me to ride into him with my bike. I said it was a risky thing to have done as he repeated apologies. I glanced at the end of the line in his hand, as he told me I hadn’t parted it; the line was tipped with what appeared to be a very small spoon. Good luck for me. Without discussing the matter with him, I surmised that his line had been blown back over his head and into the bushes on the south side by the strong northeasterlies.

As I headed on back again, no damage done, I thought of the surely thousands of men and boys, all over central Wisconsin, I’d passed fishing from the roadsides in ponds and streams, without ever once thinking that I might encounter one of their lines across the road, as I just had for the first time.