President's Journal August 2006
Tuesday, 01 August 2006, 11 a.m. CDT
Survivor: Fly Fish Mountain
(Bring a vise, scissors and a bobbin with thread to the meeting. No feathers/fur/etc. You'll see why.)
You're finally relaxing a little bit. The plane lifted off from San Francisco International Airport an hour ago, the warning lights are off, you have a small drink in hand, and the seat has reclined as far as it will go.
You were out in northern California for a niece's wedding, and it wasn't exactly stress-free. When you arrived, the in-laws were still bickering over the guest list, the caterer had gone bankrupt the week before the event (making off with the deposit) and an uncharacteristic (but accurate) California weather forecast gave a 100% chance of rain for the 3 days surrounding the wedding day. You were there to "help as needed," but things were too disorganized for an outsider to do much more than shake their head in wonder. It being northern California, you had taken a fly rod, but the wedding chaos made sure that your rod stayed in its case, perfectly dry.
The wedding did take place and the couple are now off on their honeymoon, although the things that were said by both families in the last hours before the wedding left you wondering about the longevity of the "blessed union."
Well, all that is behind you, and you're thinking how nice it will be to see your family again. You lean back and close your eyes, drifitng off... Then KAROUM! The plane jolts and slews sideways in a sickening way, and your heart is racing! The pilot comes on, tells everyone to stay calm, they've encountered "a little problem" in the cockpit. You can see smoke out the window, the oxygen masks pop out of the ceiling, and you think "Little problem, right!" Losing altitude, the pilot comes on again, saying that in the middle of the Rockies, there are few airports, and they will have to crash land the plane as best they can. You look around the nearly-empty compartment, and think "Good thing this was a red-eye that no one wanted to be on!"
In no time, the mountains loom large, there is a huge series of screeches and jolts, and then finally, silence. You unbuckle, grab your rod (being a true fly fisher) and clamber to safety. Eventually all the passengers re-assemble and miraculously everyone survived. The pilots inform you that the first explosion took out the radio, and so no one knows where you are. The best he can tell you is "in the Rockies, somewhere between Salt Lake and Denver." In the morning, the group scouts the area, and discovers a nearby cabin, in which you find an old trunk full of odd items left when the cabin's inhabitant gave up subsistence mountain living and moved to New York to become a Wall Street broker.
Polling the survivors, you learn that the majority of passengers are San Franciscans flying to Omaha for a steak-buying weekend excursion; you and a couple others are the only ones with anything like survival skills. You've got one rod, a pocketful of hooks, a spool of thread, and the trunk of materials you found in the cabin. You can see fish in the lake and streams around the crash site. . It's up to you to keep the group fed until rescuers arrive.
Get to work!
We will break into small "survivor groups," create flies based on the "air-crash" materials at hand, and then share them with the other groups at the end of the meeting. Good luck!