“For fashionable anglers everywhere, a high-design fishing set includes a wicker-and-calfskin creel, a flax-fiber fly-fishing rod with a sycamore handle, Victorian flies for trout and salmon and a few feathered lucky charms,” writes the magazine.
The price tag for all of that? Hermès creel, $14,900; fishing rod, $11,800; charm, $700; and lures, $700.
A couple of thousand years from now, post-Apocalypse archaeologists will unearth caches of such stuff in the late 20th and early 21st Century layers and speculate as to just what People and Culture produced them.
Here is a preview of one of the 23rd Century archaelogist’s initial reports:
“Were these completely useless, non-utilitarian but clearly hugely expensive in monetary terms items some sort of votive offering to the ancient’s great deity Me Myself Mammon Fish? We shall never know. What we do know, however, is that they represent the last flowering of a Culture that was to crash and burn and disappear from the record very soon afterwards, leaving nothing but remains, just a whole load of gadgets and junk and a little of this sort of crazy high-end stuff plus a very few super-high-status motor chariots named Bentaygas found preserved in walled-up caves in bluffs above valleys through which rivers once ran. A lesson from history, and a cautionary one to us all….”
PS – several hours later:
That 23rd Century trowel-wielder has been in contact with me since I wrote the above over a mug of breakfast coffee this morning:
“Get it right if you are going public with my material, will you! I am strictly 41st Century, okay?”
But clearly still descended from Gadget Man and his Epic Fail Culture, I thought to myself, as I mused on the downside of literary time-travel. … I wonder if they still give ludicrously expensive supersonic hairdryers to their womenfolk at this time of year in his millennium … or did they disappear with and into his late-21st Century post-Apocalypse Junk Layer…? Better not ask, or he might come through time to get me.