TIGHT LINES
GETTING THROWN UNDER THE BUS
Andrew Spencer
Buses have recently been elevated from their status as strictly functional person-movers to a more hip and cool level, that of American slang icon. You see, lots of people these days are using buses as a metaphor for disrespect. The first time I heard this new usage was in reference to a professional athlete that the hometown fans were booing. Someone told me that the athlete in question was “getting thrown under the bus.” Always one to search out new and exciting uses for otherwise mundane words (and “bus” is, by any other reckoning, a mundane word), I started looking for other examples of this new phrase.

It didn’t take much searching through Internet blogs and discussions with acquaintances to find frequent uses of this statement. Case in point, my friend Tom Walsh, builder extraordinaire, responded to an earlier column about his coffee-drinking expertise by using this new lingo: “Andrew, why’d you have to throw me under the bus like that?”

And trust me when I tell you that if Tom Walsh is saying it, it has to be hip and cool.

Recently, though, this whole “throwing people under the bus” thing took an ugly turn, so to speak, when yours truly was, in fact, thrown under the metaphorical bus. Multiple times. You see, the Powers-That-Be in the important offices (the ones with windows and permanent walls) at The Nantucket Independent recently hosted a holiday staff party at LoLa 41 (speaking of hip and cool). I was there — dressed to the nines, I might add — and everyone seemed genuinely happy to see me. Then it happened. Yes, I got thrown under the bus.

“Andrew, the thing I love about your column is that it’s never really about fishing.”

Say what?

My fishing column — fishing column, people — is “never really about fishing?” That’s like saying that a dinner party isn’t really about dinner or that “March of the Penguins” isn’t really about penguins.

Then it happened again. And again. And again. People just kept throwing me under the bus. By about this time, I was feeling pretty abused, as it seemed that everyone at the gathering was telling me how my fishing column was never about fishing, and that element of it, ironically enough, was the thing they most liked about it.

And just then, like it always seems to do, it metaphorically hit me.

If a bus could be used metaphorically — as in something to get thrown under — then why can’t fishing be used in a similar way? And that’s when another thing hit me (and in case you’re keeping score at home, this was a pretty violent party, metaphorically speaking):

Fishing truly is a metaphor for life.

And that right there, friends and neighbors, is the mother of all segues.

I’ve seen the T-shirts, as I’m sure many of you have, that pronounce that “Fishing is Life, the rest is just details.” Of course, I’ve seen similar shirts declaring football, deer hunting, cooking and reading (seriously . . . you can’t make these things up) as life, with the remainder being just details. This whole marketing campaign reminds me of an old joke about Hell being exothermic or endothermic, but I digress.

The focus here is that fishing is life. Or, to use the corollary of that idea, life is fishing. Now’s the part in our show when Andrew gets all philosophical on us. You see, we all spend part of our lives searching for things — be it a significant other, a career, a house, an official Red Ryder carbine action 200-shot range model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time — in much the same fashion as anglers cast their lures in search of the ever-elusive fish. Upon our acquisition of whatever it is that we seek, we cherish said item. In the case of a significant other, we lavish gifts on him or her (please make checks payable to “Andrew Spencer”); in the case of a career, we write our friends lengthy letters we know they won’t read and include them in Christmas cards; in the case of a new house, we invite those same friends over and berate them for not reading our heartfelt letters and then give them a plate of cookies for a gift. And in the case of the fish, we often have our photo made with said trophy and display the photo prominently and eat the fish afterwards.

In other words, the seeking-out of the fish — and the whole process of acquiring equipment and finding the time to go out, all the while depending on the weather and tides and whatever else — is all nothing more than a thinly-veiled metaphor for how we live our daily lives. So next time you’re out there, think about your place in the universe and how your fishing represents so much more than just fishing. It’s really a representation of all existence.

And for all the guys out there whose wives say they fish too much, consider that excuse your Christmas gift from me.

Tight lines.

I