On Top of Old Smokey

I’ve never smoked cigarettes. Although I knew (and still know) a lot of people who smoke, they just didn’t interest me. Now – between the Surgeon General, the prohibitive cost and the known health risks – I’d like to think that even had I started I would be able to quit.

Nevertheless, I have an embarrassing admission to make – I don’t dislike the smell of cigarette smoke. In fact, it’s kind of intoxicating in limited doses.

That wasn’t the case when I was in college and law school. Back then, you could smoke in bars, and we’d go out on weekend (and some weekday) evenings and come home with our clothes reeking of smoke. For those of us with a distaste for doing laundry, that was a problem. Air drying never fully got the smell out of your clothing, so we’d go to class smelling like chimneys. It was even worse for the ladies – and some guys – with long hair. The smoke would linger right next to their sniffers.

When I got out of law school and started fishing tournaments in the mid-90s, smoke remained a dominant theme. Of course, two-stroke carbureted outboards were the standard, and on startup they produced plenty of air pollution, but what I really remember is the old codgers – the ones who’d been fishing tournaments since before Izaak Walton tied his first Palomar knot – huffing away on all sorts of unfiltered cancer sticks. You’d show up on tournament morning and that smell would be fogging up all of the good conversations. You’d walk into the tackle store to register for the derby or pay a ramp fee, and that smell would be there again. My good friend, the late Harold Pack, once threatened to boycott our club tournament shirts because they didn’t have a pocket for his cigarettes. As I stopped going to bars, the cigarette smell rapidly became associated in my mind with tournament morning.

Now, twenty-plus years later, fewer people smoke, and they do it in fewer places. That’s a good thing both for them and for us. Nothing in this blog is meant to advocate starting or continuing smoking. Nevertheless, on those occasions when I do wander into a cloud of smoke it provides fond memories of my earliest days of tournament fishing. It conjures up the excitement of those mornings when I wasn’t jaded, wasn’t nervous, just anxious to get out there and see what the day brought. Messed up, I know, but very little about this sport makes objective sense.