NOTE: A special thanks to Ted Leeson for providing this humorous look at the characters we sometimes end up in the company of. Read this here or print out and sit down with a cocktail tonight. Enjoy. gt
Pick Thy Partners Wisely
By Ted Leeson
Maybe it’s just middle age, but I’ve drifted away some from a youthful penchant for solo fishing and these days more often spend my river time in the company of others. While fishing with partners promises the singular brand of enjoyment that comes only from camaraderie, I’ve also come to see that our keenest pleasures cut both ways. For a group gig involves, by definition, the eternally hazardous prospect of other human beings, few of whom are as competent, reliable, or well prepared as yourself. Granted, nobody’s perfect, but in this regard, popular wisdom as usual has got it all wrong. Where people are concerned, it does not, in fact, “take all kinds.” All kinds is merely what you get. An oil burner is a regular who, as a precondition of his very existence guzzles the fossil fuel of his fellow man.
Case in point: that universal subspecies of fishing companion—the high-maintenance partner, the labor-intensive buddy, the guy who for whatever reason in God’s great and mysterious plan simply cannot pull his angling shit together. He is a wading, casting, fishing bundle of loose ends, a disaster that continues to happen. Such people are angling’s version of a fixer-upper, demanding more upkeep than a ’68 Beetle, more vigilant tending than an Italian sports car. They are the oil burners of the human race.
And you are the designated mechanic.
Some friends can burn you out.
Oil burners consume precious resources of the community and must be topped off and kept running by the unremitting efforts or inconvenience of others. They cannot tie on their own tippets (“Never did get the hang of it”) or row the boat (“Sorry, bad back”). If you hit the back country, oil burners can’t camp near the water (“Too damp”) or sit downwind of the fire (“Asthma”). Asking them to cook is to invite half-a-dozen different tragic outcomes, of which a quick death is the most desirable. Get them squared away at night and they snore like a Harley stuck in a barrel of barbecue sauce. When it’s time to hit the water, an oil burner can’t find his waders (“Bet they’re on the front porch”) and doesn’t bring flies (“Yours work better”). If by some miracle he remembers his tackle, he forgets his license, eyeglasses, or angina pills.
On extended outings, you learn to compensate and never entrust an oil burner with bringing food, liquor, toilet paper, a poker deck, or other vital supplies. He is charged, you assure him, with weightier tasks—supplying the postage stamps, a clarinet, the latest copy of Issues in Modern Proctology. It doesn’t matter, he will forget them anyway (“Sorry, musta lost the list”). What he does remember to bring he won’t be able to find, and what he manages to find has dead batteries or is otherwise inoperable. Oh yes, and an oil burner never—EVER—has any money on him (“Square up with ya at home, remind me”).
When they don’t burn up your energy, your equanimity, your cash, patience, or gear, they burn your time. An oil burner has you driving around at 4 a.m. on opening day looking for a place that sells split shot, his special brand of fluorocarbon tippet material, or those glazed maple donuts of which he is passionately fond (“Just take a second”). Paddle out to the middle of a lake, and the oil burner will quietly inform you that nature is knocking, rather urgently, at the porthole (“Yeah, I know I just went”). And no matter what the circumstances, you are perpetually waiting for these people. You can’t get them moving when it’s time to hit the water and can’t find them when it’s time to leave. They seldom own watches, and if they do, they never look at them.
Oil burner in the bow, bumming out Hanby and Andrews.
One of the richer ironies of mounting an expedition with an oil burner is that he can never drive. His car is always in the shop, or just about to go in, or just out but still not running right (“My rig next time, remind me”). Should, by some miracle, an oil burner end up driving his own vehicle, he’ll lock the keys inside. If he’s got a boat, it needs patching, or the trailer needs a bearing job (“You busy on Saturday?”). If he has an outboard, pass on it (“We can take ‘er, but she burns a little oil”).
An oil burner shouldn’t be confused with that other creature we all endure from time to time—the wife’s distant cousin, a neighbor’s visiting brother-in-law, the friend of friend whom, from a sense of obligation or in a nod to domestic harmony, you reluctantly agree to drag along trout fishing for a day. He’s the guy who leaps into the front seat of the drift boat before it’s off the trailer, sprints ahead to grab the tastiest pools, and homesteads every prime run. He wolfs your lunch and scarfs your beer. When it comes time to pull out the boat, he buries his face in a gear bag as though a vision of St. Cecilia has appeared among the rain jackets, while you do all the work. Make no mistake—these guys go through more oil than a Saudi Prince, but they are not oil burners in the strict sense. Technically speaking, they are colossal assholes, and you never have to see them again.
No, an oil burner is a regular, one of the group who, as a precondition of his very existence guzzles the fossil fuel of his fellow man. It is hard to dislike him or carry a grudge. He is philosophical and relentlessly apologetic about his runaway consumption of petroleum products. He believes it may be the result of faulty wiring (I agree) and keeps meaning to have it checked out. He knows he burns oil; he just can’t help himself, just can’t seem to quell the flames.
Not all oil burners are alike, though. They specialize in weights that meet their particular energy needs. The low-viscosity guys are manageable small potatoes; they want only to borrow dry socks or gloves; they forget to reserve the motel room or bring the tent; they casually tell you just as the morning hatch begins that they need to be back by 9:30 for a dentist appointment. A 5W-20 burner smokes a lot, but you can keep him going.
The high-viscosity burner takes a more vital fuel—emotional support. He runs on sympathy. He needs you to listen—about a troubled marriage, disappointing children, job problems, health concerns, difficulties with the IRS—and to dispense the precious the lubricant of your compassion. Where your low-viscosity man merely annoys, a 50-weight burner is relentless buzzkiller, a brutal downer who has no intention of going down alone. The billowing smoke of his endless misfortune will choke the pleasure from a day in a drift boat, cast a blue-gray pall over the après-fishing watering hole, and give the beer a sooty taste.
Don’t misunderstand me. I like to consider myself as sensitive and supportive as the next guy who, say, just happened to beat impossible odds and draw a once-in-lifetime drift permit for the Middle Fork of the Salmon River and has been waiting in scarcely containable joy at the prospect of having his way with a bunch of cutthroats that don’t get fished much and would rather chew on little balls of tin foil than spend the next ten days in the coughing smog of his fellow traveler’s woes. I like to think I am exactly that sympathetic.
Aside from the low- and high-viscosity types, there are also multi-weight burners who do a little bit of everything, and even a few guys who are second-hand burners. Years ago I fished a good deal with a friend, Larry. Larry was perfectly normal, but he had a dog that burned oil, a husky named Sasha. Sasha’s idea of fishing involved following you down to the water, growling at rocks and barking fiercely at any type of vegetable matter until you were ready to cast. Then she would vault gravity-defying distances into the center of the best water and proceed to hog out enormous sunken tree limbs, one after the other, and pile them on the bank, celebrating each achievement as though she’d just found a cure for cancer.
I have no idea whether oil burners were born afire or burst into flame somewhere along the way. All the ones I know were quart-a-day men by the time I met them. Not that it matters much, for three things are certain. First, an oil burner cannot be fixed or overhauled; the reliable brain-gasket has yet to be invented. You can tighten his screws a little to stem the leak, but twist too hard and he grows defensive and hurt. Any attempt to change his ways is like pouring more oil on the fire.
Second, you can’t put an oil burner out. No amount of sympathy, support, extra gear, special accommodations, or unscheduled stops along the road can halt the dropping dipstick. The more oil you funnel in, the more goes up in smoke.Third, and strangest of all, oil burners never run out of oil. They have a direct pipeline to their own personal North Slope—you—that lets them just smolder away. And that is enduring mystery—why? Why do we breathe those fumes, wipe our watering eyes? Why do we put up with it?I suppose because, in the end, the naked and inexplicable truth is that the oil burners are our friends, nothing more, nothing less. And every so often, in a moment of rare clarity, you realize that their chief goal in life is not to irritate the bejeezus out of you or crush your will to live, though this is often the chief result. They are good and well-meaning people with redeeming qualities sporadically glimpsed through an oily, bluish haze.
And once in a very great while, in his own fashion, an oil burner comes through. In a hurried and careless moment, I once asked a low-viscosity friend to pack provisions for a fishing trip, the idiocy of my mistake only dawning on me as I drove to pick him up the next morning. He was there waiting, all his gear piled neatly around what appeared to a dirty white ottoman but in fact turned out to be an 84-quart marine cooler with an upholstered top. Without a word, he lifted the lid to show me four half-racks of my favorite India Pale, nestled in ice, and an entire Hereford’s-worth of prime New York strips. What could I do but smile? We were only going overnight.
Burn on, my friend.
Ted Leeson’s new book, Inventing Montana, is available online and at all quality bookstores. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon.