Zero Startup Inertia | Hatch Magazine

The multitool was somewhere in my vest. Forty-three tools in one. Well, forty-four if you count being able to hook it to a drift boat’s anchor line when the lighter anchor—the pyramid-shaped one made from lead—wrestles itself free from the carabiner. That was the good news. As for the bad, the tool was hiding among thirteen unidentifiable keys, twenty-seven paperclips, three empty Altoid tins, a rare-earth refrigerator magnet permanently stuck to a compass, two Kevlar gloves—both for my left hand, and a Zippo lighter without a flint, all making the tool as hard to find as a split shot in a gravel bar.

I needed the tool to do some maintenance on my Maintenance-Free reel. The one with Zero Startup Inertia. The kid at the fly shop told me this was the future. Like electric cars, tuck-free shirts, and Tinder. With this technology, I’d never bust off another fish because of drag hitch, and I wouldn’t get tennis elbow from reeling. I didn’t know you could get tennis elbow if you didn’t play tennis, but I sure didn’t want to wear one of those bands around my forearm like my neighbor Benedick Rutherford III with the pink Prada sweater tied around his neck. I told the kid I’d take it.

Zero Startup Inertia. I liked those words. So much so that I put the empty box on my kitchen table as a conversation starter when friends dropped by.

“What’s that mean?” they’d ask, pointing at the box.

“Zero startup inertia?”

“Yeah.”

“Why, that’s the technology behind electric cars, tuck-free shirts, and online dating.”

“Huh?”

“Remember how hard it used to be to ask someone out? Now, with zero startup inertia, it’s a piece of cake. You hardly have to make eye contact.”

“All that in one little box?”

“It’s something, isn’t it?”

I remember trying to learn about the number zero back in Westwood Elementary. I should have been better at it, you know, what with all the zeros on my assignments. So many that the other kids started calling me Zero, which I didn’t mind so much since it sounded like Zorro, and I always thought Zorro was the best. Plus, Zorro was never afraid to talk to pretty girls, which was a lot harder in the days before Zero Startup Inertia.

Learning about zero was easier when you thought of it as nothing. You see, one nothing is nothing. Two nothings are also nothing. A gazillion nothings? Still nothing. That’s how zero works for multiplication. For addition, if you add nothing to any number of somethings, well, you still have that same number of somethings. Same with subtraction. But I never did understand division by nothing. It just didn’t make sense.

That division thing must be what caused my problem with the Zero Startup Inertia reel. The one I needed the multitool for. You see, if a reel has zero startup inertia, then it must be able to start inerting from nothing. Otherwise, they couldn’t write that on the box. Turns out, my reel would do just that. It would inert at the slightest breeze. Nothing would stop it from inerting, because, after all, nothing was starting it.

The same kid who sold me the Zero Startup Inertia reel also sold me a rod with Zero Friction Guides. So, when nothing started my reel inerting, my line zoomed through the guides like a skinny kid on a slip-and-slide. I’d be watching Cedar Waxwings eat March Browns, and then, zing, all my line would be off the reel and in the river. It was pretty easy to reel it back in, what with the zero startup inertia. But, still, it was an annoyance I could do without.

One time, I fell asleep on a big rock with my rod and reel in my lap. Nothing was going on, which I used to think made for a good time to nap. Used to, that is, before Zero Startup Inertia and Zero Friction Guides. Because nothing was happening, the reel commenced to spin, the line began to slide, the Zero Memory Tippet forgot to keep the fly attached to the hook keeper, and I awoke to the powerful tug of a fish some one-hundred fifty yards downstream. The Non-Slip Loop holding my backing to the reel slipped, and that was that. Everything was gone. With nothing attached to the reel, it just kept spinning. Like the paddlewheel on the Delta Queen.

I explained this predicament to my neighbor, Professor Earl. Professor Earl wasn’t a professor at the college. I don’t think he even went to college. He just watched a lot of YouTube videos and fancied himself as something between a mad scientist and a plumber. For his normal job, he drove the Zamboni at the ice rink. He said that was good for him because he didn’t have to think too much, which gave him more time to work on his inventions. Einstein worked at a patent leather factory while he was inventing, Professor Earl told me, so jobs like this were perfect for inventors like him and Albert.

His latest invention, the one he said would make him famous, was a perpetual motion machine. I remember him telling me he was close, but he needed a way to eliminate startup inertia and friction. You can see why I thought Professor Earl would be interested in my situation.

“Say that again,” Professor Earl said. “The part about zero startup inertia and zero friction.”

“Here,” I said. “Let me show you the box.”

Professor Earl looked at the box the way Moses must have looked at the stone tablets. He even muttered finger of God under his breath.

“What about zero friction?” he asked.

“The rod didn’t come in a box like that,” I said. “But I can show it to you.”

“Yes, I’d like to see it all.”

I brought the rod and reel in from the truck and handed them to Professor Earl. He ran his finger in and out of each guide.

“Fascinating,” he said.

He looked at the reel.

“Hmm. Huh.”

“I can remove the spool if you want to see the inner workings,” I said.

“Yes. Please do.”

Professor Earl sighed a lot. Moaned a little. Then he got up from the table.

“I’ll be right back,” he said.

When he returned, he was wearing a tan corduroy sport coat with leather patches on the elbows. He removed a pipe from an inner pocket and lit it with a lighter resembling a miniature welding torch.

“I don’t mind if you smoke,” I said, “but if you’re smoking in the house when Roxanne gets home from work, you’ll need a lot more patches on that jacket.”

Professor Earl put the pipe in his mouth. He picked up the reel with one hand and the spool with the other.

“Fascinating,” he said, holding the pipe’s stem with his teeth. “They seem to have solved the inertia issue.”

“How so?” I asked.

He answered in Latin or Spanish or some version of English that only inventors speak.

“Fascinating,” I said.

“The material they use for those rings on that stick,” Professor Earl said. “And the gears on the egg beater. Same material as the rings. Brilliant.”

“The stick is a fly rod,” I said. “The egg beater is a fly reel.”

Professor Earl responded in his inventor language. I just nodded and acted like it all made sense to me.

“Is there anything I can do to stop the reel from unwinding all the time?” I asked.

“You want to prevent your perpetual motion machine from perpetually motioning?” he asked.

“Well,” I said, “I just want to go back to fishing the way I used to.”

“Give me some paper,” he said, then scribbled instructions that looked like the outcome of an eight-letter hangman game.

“I need to get back to my laboratory,” Professor Earl said. “Do you know where I can buy some devices like these?”

I told Professor Earl to ask for the kid, Donnie, down at the fly shop. He’d fix him up with all the zeros he needed.

From Professor Earl’s drawing, it looked like I’d need a clothespin, electrical tape, and a Topps baseball card. His handwriting was a cross between cursive and hieroglyphics, but it was in English, and I could see that the card needed to be a Topps. No cheap substitutes, he scribbled. I hadn’t followed baseball much lately, but Roxanne still put a pack of cards—the kind that comes with a stick of gum—in my stocking every Christmas. And they were Topps. I found one with a picture of a guy named Shohei Ohtani. It was from his first year in the league.

The idea was simpler than I expected it to be from Professor Earl. Basically, it was a knock-off of the old baseball-card-for-a-motor trick we used on our bikes when we were kids. Attach the clothespin to the reel seat with some electrical tape, then clip in the card when I needed to keep nothing from causing the reel to start moving. Remove the card and put it in my vest when I didn’t. For a backup, I found another card with a picture of some guy named Mike Trout on it. A fitting name. Roxanne would be happy to see me putting these cards to such good use.

After that, when I napped beside the river, I locked the Zero Startup Inertia reel in place with my Shohei Ohtani card. It worked well, but the constant pressure and tapping of the handle shook most of the bubblegum dust from the card and into the reel’s inner workings. Although Zero Startup Inertia reels aren’t made for blowing bubbles, they do a good job when the bubblegum dust gets wet. A great job, really. But when the bubbles burst, the gummy residue leaves a big mess, which is why I needed the multitool. The engineers who make No Maintenance Reels must not plan for their inventions to blow bubblegum bubbles.

Up to the time when my reel blew its first bubbles, I’d never used the multitool’s little toothpick. With it, I picked most of the gum off the discs and out from between the gears. Not all of it, though. The little tweezers did a good job on the Zero Friction Guides, but that surgery took away some of their smoothness.

When one of the bubbles burst all over Shohei Ohtani, I tried to scrape it off with the Mike Trout card, but wound up shredding both. Without the cards and with no further need for them, really, I peeled the electrical tape off and put the clothespin in my vest. You never know when a good clothespin will come in handy.

All the picking and tweezing turned my outfit into what Professor Earl called a Low Startup Inertia reel on a rod with Low Friction Guides. As for his perpetual motion machine, he said he was close but needed to go to Cuba to get a microliter of slime from one of those Cuban painted snails. He offered to bring back some cigars, too, for us to smoke when Roxanne was out. A week later, I saw on the local news that Professor Earl had been detained by customs agents.

That was the same year Shohei Ohtani made it on the cover of Time Magazine.

“Hey, Gomer,” Roxanne said, throwing the magazine in my lap. “Go look through your stuff and see if you have this guy’s rookie card. It could probably buy us a cruise vacation.”

I never told the kid at the fly shop what had happened. For me, a smidgeon of startup inertia and a touch of friction worked out better. Plus, I had a multitool to clean things up whenever it rained or when the rig slid from my lap into the water during a nap.

“How’d that setup work out for you?” the kid, Donnie, asked one day when I was trying to remember if I needed some more Memory-Free tippet.

“Great, Donnie,” I said. “I can’t imagine nothing being any better.”