Outdoors | With right strategy, injuries and aging don’t have to stop your fishing trips

Fishing for stocker trout in desert seep lakes is on my mind when Dr. Livingston bangs my left knee, and then my right knee, with a rubber mallet. Dragging a fly behind a float tube while you kick backwards with high thrust fins can test your leg strength.

His quick taps fire my neuromuscular system, cause a rapid stretch of adjacent muscles and trigger nerve receptors in the tendons. A nerve impulse transmits up my spinal cord and triggers a reaction to contract the muscles that were just stretched. Part of me still works, it appears.

My first knee injury occurred when I made an awkward stretch for a fly ball during a softball game. The knee joint swelled up twice its size and had to be drained of excess fluid. I dragged the associated leg around for a month before visiting an orthopedic surgeon who diagnosed a torn meniscus. Weightlifting exercises strengthened my quadriceps and allowed me to participate in field sports without surgery.

A later scare occurred while fly fishing for trout on the Walla Walla River. The prior mentioned left knee held up for a few miles up the river trail. Brief climbs and descents were not a challenge but wading on loose river cobble sent shooting pains up my leg. I once got stuck like a (dummy) in the middle of the river when the bad knee locked up and my good knee wasn’t strong enough to make up the difference.

A few decades later, I failed to keep my tips up while downhill skiing and ran into a snow bank. My body flew forward. My right knee held position. I limped back to the lodge with torn meniscus in what had once been my best knee. More time passed. I launched my boat for a day of salmon fishing, tied off the bow rope, and walked up the ramp looking for a place to jump down to move my truck.

A loose shoelace snagged on a cleat, leaving me with two choices: take a header on my boat trailer or sacrifice a leg. I chose the latter. That decision and the acrobatic move that followed led to a torn ligament in my right knee.

The collective outcome of those sporting events eventually put me in an orthopedic clinic waiting for a steroid shot to my rickety knees. A gray-haired woman sits in a wheelchair beside a freckle-face girl in her teens.

“I love my doctor,” the woman says to the girl, in a loud, raspy voice. “He’s the best. You get arthritis once you have ligament damage. You have small feet. I’d guess size six. No, they are five. Mine are size nine.

I think it goes back to when I split my skull wide open. Flew off my bike like Superman and hit the asphalt. I need neck fusion from the accident after I get my knee fixed. How long ago was that? I was eleven. I’m sixty now. I used to walk every day until my knees went bad.”

A few minutes later, a middle-aged woman attired in leopard-spot leggings and an over-size hooded sweatshirt enters the waiting room pushing an empty wheelchair. “Got a license to drive that?” the talkative woman yells.

About then, I get called in by a young trainee. “Denise,” she says, in a loud voice. “I think you mean me,” I reply. “I’m Dennis, not Denise.”

“He looks like Dennis to me,” the gabby woman declares.

My aged left knee recently began to operate like a rusty hinge. A search of websites revealed a short list of physicians who admitted patients on Medicare. After a series of x-rays, I was taken to a brightly lit room and plunked down in front of a 15-minute video that described knee replacement surgery The graphic scenes convinced me to resist going under the knife.

When the doctor strolled in, he reviewed the x-rays and stated, “You have arthritis.”

“Is there anything I can do?” I asked.

“Try taking aspirin,” he replied and walked out the door.

I am often reminded that well-used body parts wear out at some point in time. Not a year goes by without a golfing pal getting a knee or hip replaced, while fishing pals might report the need for a new casting shoulder.

Thankfully, dragging a trout fly behind a float tube is low impact exercise that allows me to flex my ailing knees like a lazy frog. With luck, my geriatric angling career will extend well into the future.