Three years ago or thereabouts, we considered in this space the nightmare possibility of an alien civilization coming to earth years hence and finding little that remains of our culture but boxes and boxes of someone’s stock of old postcards. The nightmare, of course, would be that the columns found in this space would no longer exist to EXPLAIN these postcards. Thus, the successors to our command (such as it was) of the Earth would have to conclude that men fished, and women wondered why.
We have also discussed the fact that women DID fish, but to go by the evidence presented by the cards, the vast majority of women on Twentieth Century Earth were, at best, just a distraction to the poor, persecuted fisherman.
The fisherman, we see from the cards, was a man with a purpose, a noble quest, always discouraged and sometimes even foiled, in one way by the presence of women.
Success in his chosen art was hardly guaranteed, and even when he did achieve some major goal, he could count on women somehow getting in the way of his triumph.
The most skilled of fishermen could hardly set out to work at his craft without some woman providing both distraction and obstruction.
This was never the fault of the fisherman, of course, but of huge masses of women who chose to swim in the traditional sacred fishing sites (to judge by how many more times than two this particular gag was used.)
Even those women who did become skilled at the manly art of fishing turned out to be impediments to the men concentrating on their own piscatorial pursuits.
Some men did apparently attempt to explain their passion, with little success.
Attempts to include the ladies on fishing retreats generally ended in disappointment.
And those women who DID fish expressed undeserved scorn for the men who had attempted to show them the way. But there was one threat even worse than the prideful female who thought herself worthy of the fishing rituals.
Next time: The Fisherman’s Wife
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