The Immediate Exalted Task

In February the weight of forty-plus Minnesota winters defeats Micah Hardy. His soul wilts. He no longer counts the season’s accumulation of sub-zero nights. The handful of sub-zero days adds insult. After frost gnaws the exposed tip of his right ear Hardy goes on strike. When he doesn’t have to go outside he refuses to. Too damn cold. It’s what he replies when asked to stand in the evening air to view the rare Super Blue Blood Moon. The debilitating fatigue and stiffness he experiences in the wake of too many driveway snow clearing forays also contributes to his collapse. He assumed the shoveling chore after his housemate wrenched a previously injured lower back. Hardy still wears the bruises he acquired from an ungraceful tumble on sidewalk ice. His shoulder aches constantly with the cold. The long-vacated chilly Other Side of the Bed makes his heart ache. The truth is basic. The accumulated load of cold, frostbite, shovel fatigue, black and blue marks, aching joints, loneliness and a dispirited attitude does him in. Then during a notably frigid hike to work Hardy fixates on an image a good friend attaches to a recent email. His smiling buddy triumphantly displays a thirty-inch redfish he’s pulled out of a Florida Gulf Coast backwater with a fly rod. Hardy’s imagination briefly transports him to that subtropical location as he crunches along a snowy path. Somewhere right now there’s a guy standing on the bow of a flats boat. He’s wearing shorts. He’s casting a big fly toward a cruising tarpon. In that Arctic Instant Micah Hardy vows to change his life. He breaks out laughing and a sidewalk passerby gapes. He considers his vow. One he’s made a thousand times. He knows he doesn’t possess the energy or the gumption to make any lifestyle revision. Instead he yanks open his office building door and resumes his rightful place on a familiar treadmill. He does not know the winds of change stir. Much like a hurricane developing in the Atlantic off the African coast.