Although it’s been many years and many miles since I last spent an afternoon with Tim Stengel, on afternoons filled with lecture notes and correcting essays, I often reflect on the last fishing trip the two of us young bucks spent along the secluded shores of the Little Manitou River. In many ways, this last trip spent in the coniferous forests of Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region, really envelopes who Tim was and why I so looked up to him. The whole trip began with a simple phone call. I was engrossed in marking up the many pages of a poorly worded sophomoric essay on the virtues of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby when the phone shook my caffeine-laced nerves. It was past eleven …show more content…
We didn’t battle the Moby Dick of the North Woods. We didn’t end up mounting a monster trout, nor did we satisfy our appetites on the cagey fish we happened to snag from the deep pools of the iron-stained Manitou. Instead, I took away something much more precious than trout flesh or bragging rights. I took away an illogical adventure. In Tim Stengel, I had learned the real meaning of throwing caution to the wind. In Timmy, I watched the ancient Latin phrase “Carpe Diem” come to life. With every deerfly we swatted and with every trout we happened to hook, I learned what it meant to be truly alive. And though it has been many years since we spent the afternoon on the Little Manitou River, I still find that I need to remember that life is meant to be lived. Sure, life is filled with obnoxious consequences, whether they be deerflies or uncorrected essays, but on that fateful fall morning, my old friend Tim Stengel taught me how to throw caution to the wind and live it up. Some days, when I hear the faint ringing of the telephone, I imagine that the rings are only the incessant buzzes of distant deerflies, and deep down, I hope that Tim is actually on the other end of the