Searching for Something

Since the time I was a little girl one of my all time favorite activities has been fishing with my dad. We spent a lot of my childhood out and about back and forth between various bodies of water. It didn't matter if we were taking his row boat out to Donagel Lake or braving the rocky current and crossing the Youghogheny River by foot, I've always set out to have some amazing adventure. Every trip is an opportunity to find something new or see something that I have never seen before. Every trip is special.

It is a thrilling experience to catch a fish. Depending on the type you have to set the hook and if you do that then comes the fight and hopefully the thrill of victory. Surprisingly the actual fishing part of our trips never turned out to be the highlight of the adventure. We've fished in the sun, rain, sleet, snow, and ice. We've fell in, swam out, and got pulled over by the police on the way home. We've brought home our limit of trout, caught nothing bluegill and have come home empty handed. It doesn't matter, we always have a good time and the story of the adventure always outlives the catch.

Looking back on two decades of this, I've come to realize that as I grew up I became more and more obsessed with turning over rocks and looking for critters than I ever was for fishing. Over the years I have caught thousands of crayfish, hundreds of minnows, dozens of frogs, toads, tadpoles, salamanders, helgramites and three baby snapping turtles. I can't go to a body of water today without analyzing the nearest rock and trying to guess what I might find when I turn it over. Probably a crayfish, maybe a snake, I think I see a tadpole, ack! a spider!

It's funny, but I'm starting to see this level of curiosity in my daily web searching. As an artist and a designer I'm always looking for new art and ideas that will inspire me. When it comes to web marketing I'm always searching for content about my company that I didn't know was Google indexed. I search and I search wondering what I'll find on the next page. What if I try this keyword? What if I put this in quotes? What if I try a blogger search? I'm searching for crayfish and tadpoles. I hope I find another baby snapping turtle.