Adjust­ment– Steven Brutger

Hunt­ing and fish­ing have been a con­stant in my life. But when I moved from Mon­tana to Wyoming a few years back, it came with a sud­den shift. With a move came new ter­ri­tory – the dis­rup­tion of rou­tines and famil­iar ground.

At first I lamented the change. Even cal­cu­lated change can be painful. But I soon real­ized I needed to move on.

And so began my tran­si­tion from one sportsman’s par­adise to another.

I now look for­ward to the two days a year I hunt sage grouse. Why? Because sage grouse live in gor­geous coun­try. Because sage grouse are in sea­son. Because my dogs don’t care that sage grouse are slow or barely edible.

Or this summer’s adjust­ment. Drought had made the local trout streams too warm to fish. With noth­ing else to do I checked out a reser­voir that most peo­ple don’t even notice as they speed past on the high­way. It was full of carp. The chal­lenge and even­tual pull of the golden ghost sati­ated my need to fish dur­ing an oth­er­wise smoke filled inferno of a summer.

Where I live being a spe­cial­ist is lim­it­ing, but if you are will­ing to branch out you get rewarded in sur­pris­ing ways.

My brother, on the other hand, has yet to adjust. Grow­ing up my brother hunted and fished more than most. At the age of twelve he was on the Math­ews pro-staff and had a bow engraved with the moniker “Lil Killer.” Now he lives in Prince­ton NJ and is pur­su­ing a PhD in polit­i­cal sci­ence.  On the phone he recently con­fessed that he was  des­per­ately miss­ing the chance to hunt or fish.

All good broth­ers are full of advice, since mov­ing back out West seems imprac­ti­cal for him I shared the West­ern ver­sion of ther­a­peu­tic advice: I told him to suck it up and make the most of it.

As it turns out, he has a canal nearby that may poten­tially hold bass. And then there’s the ocean, which an acquain­tance of his makes the trip reg­u­larly to fish for stripers. My guess is there are also some grouse woods in the area where he could give his golden retriever a chance to chase some­thing other than ten­nis balls.

It’s been a hard real­iza­tion to come to, but with­out unlim­ited time or an unlim­ited bud­get the life of a sports­men tends to be dri­ven by oppor­tu­nity – not habit. Take advan­tage of what is avail­able where you live.

We’ll see if my brother can make the adjust­ment.  It’s a hard adjust­ment to make, but I’m guess­ing the new birth­day fly rod on it’s way to New Jer­sey will help. Hope­fully it will help ease the bur­den a bit.

–Steven lives in Lan­der WY with his wife, 2 chil­dren and 2 black labs.  He is con­stantly torn between hunt­ing big game, chas­ing birds, grab­bing the 5 weight for trout, the 8 weight for carp, or day­dream­ing about some far­fetched adventure.