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The old man and the river

When the Wapsipinicon finally began to fall in September, I thought I would learn how the chronically high and swift water had reshaped its substrate, which I did.

But I also tumbled to the more sobering realization that in the many months since my feet had last trodden its sandy, rocky bottom, I had gotten older, weaker, wobblier and less fit to wade it.

The inexorable passage of time had forced me to identify with Santiago, the protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.”

The elderly Cuban fisherman had gone 84 days without catching a fish — a streak that prompted his neighbors to consider him salao, “the worst form of unlucky.”

Santiago’s luck i

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