Irene and the Aard compare bucket lists

I think a lot of us older couples play the game of “What would you do if you received $10 million dollars tax-free?” The amount for us has gone up over the years; since we’ve been married a long time, we both can remember playing the game with $1m or $3m, then later, of course, with $5m and now it’s $10m. We usually add rules, like “you can’t just give it to the kids or to your charity”, which forces it into more of a bucket-list experience; what would we really like to have or experience before we cross the ’ol Rainbow Bridge?

This, by the way, is also a pretty fun cocktail game to play although you get some pretty interesting answers, notably Ms. Jane’s which is “I don’t want it! We are just fine the way we are, and I don’t want to complicate my life!” I think hers is really a perfect comment from a pretty nearly self-actualized person, (near as I can tell about her), but it’s sort of a downer in terms of providing a few laughs at the get-together.

Irene’s bucket list has stayed the same over time. And although her list can get long, it really amounts to the same one thing; she wants to travel more, and if the list is long it’s only because she mentions lots of places. She is a freak for travel; she will go nearly anywhere on a moment’s notice. She will go even to places she’s already gone recently. Take Hawaii. We’ve been to Maui twice in the last two years and, teasing, I just asked her if she’d like to go to  Hawaii. The gleam in her eye was answer enough; it was more than a “yes”, it was more like…”when???”

Hawaii aside, her current wish is to spend a prolonged period offshore somewhere, probably in Europe, most probably in France or Italy, in some small town. This would be at least a month, maybe two. She’d get to know a few people, pick up a few words of the language, and so on. For Irene that would be heaven, except that it wouldn’t fully satisfy her, the hussy.

And it’s not that we haven’t gone anywhere up until now. Actualy we have traveled a good deal up to this point, both personally and on business, and last I counted I think we’ve been in 22 countries if you include the several small ones we’ve only driven through or stayed a nite or two like Lichtenberg.

Unfortunately, our river cruise (actually another true bucket list item for both of us, as we both like cruising and we’d love that small-boat experience based on what a bunch of our friends have said) got blown up during the pandemic and we’ve yet to reschedule it.

So I’ve drifted a bit here and there but Irene’s bucket list is full and it’s mostly all travel. And when I tease her about “What will you do with your time when I’m gone?” I get the same answer, “Travel!”, although sometimes she will throw in “With a Pool Boy!” to annoy me. Which it doesn’t, but I pretend sometimes it does. She’s definitely worth being jealous about.

I myself answer this question more traditionally when I’m asked about my own bucket list or about $10M or whatever. Usually I would talk in the past about having a remote vacation home virtually surrounded by large trout. But now we’ve owned a place for one decade on the Upper Sacramento River in California that fit that bill; it was a truly unique piece of property in that it was only seven acres but ran lengthwise along the Upper Sac, with over 1,400 feet of river front. The property was maybe 500-600 feet deep at the most but the entire back side was river. Across the river was a railroad yard that only saw a few trains a day, and acted as a great buffer against foot traffic and created a near-private fishing environment that for a while was very reliable fishing, mostly for wild Rainbow trout in the 10”-18” range.

Also, once in a while, usually during spawning time, a huge Brown trout might show up, having traveled some 10 miles upriver from Shasta Dam Reservoir to do his or her thing. Irene hooked one of those monsters once underneath some elephant-ear ferns virtually in front of our little home and I could easily hear her screams a half-mile downstream, although I got there too late as the fish was long-gone, as was her leader, flies and composure.

Irene has, btw, landed any number of big fish herself, her largest being a 13-lb fresh hen Steelhead trout a few years back and she landed it on the same rod and reel as she was fishing the Upper Sac now, so big fish don’t typically intimidate her, and the fact that THIS fish shook her has aways made me wonder what the hell it was doing way up there anyway? And just how big was it? I wish I had at least seen it.

Following the wisdom of “be careful what you wish for”, and not many years after we acquired the property, the Upper Sacramento River experienced a catastrophic railroad car spill of astonishing consequence right up near its top at a spot called Cantara Loop. This amazingly unlikely event occurred when the car-full of poison, on the back-end of the string of cars, was pulled towards the center by an effect called “string lining”, defined in physics as a situation in which an attracted (or pulled, in the case of a railroad car) object moves directly towards the source of the force which is pulling it, the locomotive, which at this point was unfortunately located directly across the loop as it went around. And just FYI, string lining, while rare, is a known phenomenon in the railroad trade and is normally prevented by having a second locomotive located at the rear of the line, this one the called “The Pusher”, a name which also graced the town where Pusher locomotives were manufactured, (a town now known as Dunsmuir, also where our property was, coincidentally. The story about the name change from Pusher to Dunsmuir warrants another blog post of its own sometime soon.).

Anyway, all the cars on the back end eventually wound up in the river and the car  with the pesticide dumped tens of thousands of gallons of concentrated pesticide poison right into what had been one of the most pristine streams in the U.S.. Within a day all 30 miles of the river were completely sterilized down to the bacterial level, including everything in the river along our property. And, although the stream did come back and is once again supposed to be a first-rate fly-fishery I will believe that when I see it.

A couple of years later, when the river was still trying to mount its comeback, we sold the property and moved on. So that dream, of owning a fly-fishable property on excellent trout water, was met. I often miss those good times at Eagle’s Nest, our name for the property, but we’ve driven by since and I don’t feel too many twinges so I guess my longing for that, at least, is gone.

If I had anything else on my bucket list currently it might be to have a timeshare interest in a fly-in flyfishing lake in Alaska. I’d like to go there for a month a year for the next few years anyway. Since I am getting old and have quite a bit of money from the $10 M  give-away attempts mentioned earlier,

If I couldn’t have that, the only other thing I’d like to have would be a total release from my anxiety disorder, and that big ask will soon be the subject for another blog post, I suspect. I guarantee I have a lot to say about that.