Nurse seeks peace at the end of fishing line
Lori Patterson stood at the edge of Aker Lake in a tucked-away corner of pine forest in eastern Arizona and watched the fish dance.
As the sun set, fish jumped out of the water, casting a painterly blur on the blooming aspen trees’ reflection in the lake, high in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests.
Patterson felt a tug on her fishing line and a burst of excitement. Coached by her husband, she reeled in a wriggling Arctic grayling and with it, what felt like a life-changing love for fishing.
Patterson, a traveling ICU nurse from Tennessee, is on assignment in Arizona to assist with the COVID-19 crisis. Fishing has become a welcome respite.
“It was this really amazing feeling like you’re a part of nature,” Patterson said in a phone interview. “It’s like catching a wild beast, having a moment with it, then knowing it’s going to return to its home and not be harmed.”
Patterson had caught plenty of rainbow trout over the years in her home state of Tennessee, but it wasn’t until the pandemic that the joy of angling became an essential outlet rather than an occasional outing with her husband.
Patterson has worked in ICUs across the country for more than 30 years, spending the past two winters in Arizona with Banner Desert Medical Center. She’s no stranger to high-stress situations and has long known the necessity of healthy ways to lower stress.
Usually, on her days off, she’ll get a massage or have her nails done, maybe do some shopping and go out to dinner with her husband, Jeff. Once businesses closed, that was no longer an option.
“The pandemic has changed everybody’s lives, not just nurses,” Patterson said. “I’m still going to work every day. I still have to take care of patients every day. And I’ve taken care of infectious patients for 31 years. But it’s not something that you typically have to deal with to this volume and this frequency.”
The outdoors has long provided peace and quiet for the two in a fastpaced world. Now it has become their only respite.
During the pandemic, they made it their mission for Patterson to complete the Arizona Game and Fish Department’s Trout Fishing Challenge. Anglers must catch and release all four species of the state’s wild trout, or at least six of the eight total species in Arizona: Gila, Apache, brown, brook, rainbow, grayling, cutthroat and tiger trout.
In the past month, she and Jeff have traveled all over “the great state of Arizona,” as they refer to their home-awayfrom-home. She caught a golden Gila trout on the East Verde River, a cutthroat at Big Lake in the White Mountains, a speckled Apache trout and silver grayling at Aker lake and a brook trout at Perkins Tank in the Kaibab National Forest.
In 26 days, she finished the challenge. She was often surprised at the beauty of the fish when she saw them up close. A vegetarian and animal lover, she found the challenge and its requirement to release the trout a perfect way to intimately experience nature without causing harm.
Next month, the Pattersons will relocate to New York, where Lori will care for COVID-infected patients. Arizona will stay with her, she said.
“There’s just such amazing diversity in this state, not just the fish, but Coues deer and Gould’s turkeys and elk and mountain lions,” Patterson said. “It has been a huge stress relief for me to be able to unplug and get out in nature and enjoy the great outdoors.”
“Did Arizona need Lori more, or did Lori need Arizona more?” Jeff asked. “I think it’s probably the latter in this case. It was the place where Lori could do what she could do to help, and the great state of Arizona gave her a way to get the job done.”