The
year 1967
chanced A.J. McClane to
huddle over the rackety hammering of a typewriter some evening. A Renaissance man of the angling world was
steadfast in a silent recollection, save a soft parade of fingers triggering an
alphabet of keys into provoking the mechanical, striking sound of typebars as
they transcribed his storied, four-plus decades of angling tenure onto
paper. With each thought, words
assembled into sentences, as return by each carriage return branded to page
that which merely bled from his veins of experience, and with it, the testimony
of a life appeared to multiply upon the eclipsing memoir before him as if
spontaneous generation were at all possible.
What he must have humbly pulled from the roller embodied the hallmark of
one life’s experiences in having fished 140
different countries in a remarkable variety of fresh and saltwater
environments. It was his unyielding
defense, answered complete. He titled his piece of writing “The Song of the Angler.” At last imprinted to paper, was a single
man’s articulate attempt at detailing what he witnessed in color and
experienced in sensation as ample rationale in elucidating elemental
justifications to a question posed of non-anglers - why fish?
For
McClane, angling was as natural as breathing the air that surrounded him. There
was never the hint of any why. He knew of no better reason not to.
Whether
you will agree with all, most, some, or none of McClane’s reasoning is entirely
up to you, the individual angler. That, is the entire premise of his plea. That angling, and what it meant to him, spooled solely upon the reel of his
own heart and twinkled upon the arbor of his eyes. Its story, a retrieval of ritual and people
and places and favor he held dearest. Yet,
similarities of interest, pursuit, or experience overlap in the largest sense,
such that each individual pair of hands clenching at the lower-end of a rod
with eyes set asea or those cast downstream through the curves of towering
canyon or impasse of snow-capped mountain or vista of infinite plain, over
rounded river rock and wind-combed leafy limb, before babbling or whitecapped
water, blazing sun or star-studded sky, each will have understood those
indisputable, universal musical notes we hear emanating from the symphony of
life as being one immersed with Nature. What
genre of music one chooses as an
angler is entirely self-determined.
Perhaps,
it is only the angler himself who
knows exactly why he angles, but for
each rising of the rod tip, there sounds yet another note of music
enjoyed. Plucking at the heartstrings
are those “caudal confessions, tides of
talking, and angles of life” awaiting to flood through the angler’s
eyes. His ever-lasting, magnificent
score, the song of the angler.
………………………………………………………
(excerpt)
People
often ask me why I enjoy fishing, and I cannot explain it to them because there
is no reason in the way they want meanings described. They are asking a man why he enjoys breathing
when he really has no choice but to wonder at its truth. There are pundits who
believe that the rod provides an outlet for our hostilities, our frustrated
egos, or our competitive instincts, or that it symbolizes the primitive
feelings of a man in his search for food, ergo the need to kill. To a degree I believe all these qualities
exist in every participant in any sport, and if so, healthfully so, as it is
far more harmless to vent one’s spleen on a trout stream or a golf course than
on one’s fellow man. However, if this
assumption is logical, then the rationale of angling is still without explanation.
Angling
is a robe that a man wears proudly. It
is tightly woven in a fabric of moral, social, and philosophical threads which
are not easily rent by the violent climate of our times. It is foolish to think, as it has been said,
that all men who fish are good men, as evil exists on all of life’s paths, but
I would argue that life is a greater challenge than death, and that reality is
as close as the nearest river. Perhaps
an exceptional angler doesn’t prove the rule, but then anglers are exceptional
people.
What are the rewards of angling? A dead fish?
A trophy? At some point perhaps, but then it takes years to become an
angler. There are tidal marks in our
development. In the beginning, when one
is very young and inexperienced, fish are measured in quantity. Then, only quality becomes important. Eventually even record fish lose their
significance unless they are of a particular species, and ultimately the size
doesn’t matter provided they are difficult to catch.
Psychologists
tell us that one reason why we enjoy fishing is because it is an escape. This is meaningless. True, a man who works in the city wants to
“escape” to the country, but the clinical implication is that (no matter where
a man lives), he seeks to avoid reality.
This is as obtuse as the philosophical doctrine which holds that no
reality exists outside the mind.
Perhaps
it’s the farm boy in me, but I would apply Aristotelian logic – the chicken
came before the egg because it is real and the egg is only potential. By the same reasoning the fluid content of a
stream is nothing but water when it erupts from a city faucet, but given shores
it becomes a river, and as a river it is perfectly capable of creating life,
and therefore it is real. It is not a
sewer, nor a conveyor of barges and lumber, although it can be pressed to these
burdens and, indeed, as a living thing it can also become lost in its
responsibilities.
So if
escapism is a reason for angling – then the escape is to reality. The sense of
freedom that we enjoy in the outdoors is, after all, a normal reaction to a
more rational environment.
Who but
an angler knows that magic hour when the red lamp of summer drops behind
blackening hemlocks and the mayflies emerge from the dull folds of their
nymphal robes to dance in ritual as old as the river itself? Trout appear one by one and the angler begins
his game in movements as stylized as Japanese poetry. Perhaps he will hook that wonder-spotted
rogue, or maybe he will remain in silent pantomime long into the night with no
visible reward.
That,
Professor, is why anglers really
angle.
- A.J. McClane (1967)
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