Merry Fishmas! '20

Independence Day

Exposures - April & May 2020 / "The One That Got Away"

COVID-19 quarantining enforcement began in NJ (Mar. 16th) about three-weeks before I planned trips to a number of typical early-season shorelines in search of April stripers.  I can't say that any of the public beach parking lot closures that I encountered affected gaining access to desired stretches of sand.  Thank goodness for that, as surf fishing offered some small sense of normalcy to - gratefully - enter one's life for a given retreat of time.    

As seen at a popular marina and state park.

Just as in 2019, Bunker were again packed along the shoreline of the Raritan and river systems of the Navesink and Shrewsbury during early-March.  The above photo was taken on April 7th.  On many outings the schools were so thick, that snagging seemed unavoidable even on the slowest of retrievals.  

A keeper-sized striper found cruising the Raritan's shallows of April.

(L-R) Sirius and Orion in the southern sky (Venus out of frame) - reliable companions appearing after sunset throughout April's outings waded along shallow shoreline.

The 2% waxing crescent caught setting between open slivers of covering cloud on April 24th.

A surprise Weakfish landed on May 6th (6-inch shad, for comparison).

"You cannot cast anywhere in the river without the conviction that it’s drifting over fish.  That you may know better counts for nothing in the overpowering impression of possibility, one of the pleasant illusions from which an angling life is built."

One of the notable and invigorating striped-rewards I delightfully returned to the nighttime tide's of May.  Measuring 38", this fish proved to be a tame warm-up to my haunting hook-set made just three casts later. 

"The slack felt terrible.  I cursed myself and milled around stupidly, trembling with a spike of adrenaline I no longer needed.  The worst part of losing good fish is that you cannot release them.  They tailwalk across the back of your mind for days."

Christopher Camuto - A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge (part IV - A Moveable Feast) 

I traced my fingers over the barrel swivel, running them like a set of antennae feeling for feedback over some length of lifeless monofilament to a chafed and severed leader’s end, staring at it in disbelief as my mind agonizingly tormented whhhhhyyyyy?!!  Just seconds earlier, I was bracing extraordinary rod leverage from a sprawled footing that adeptly skittered over loose sand and gravel to anchor myself as the champion benefactor to a remarkable inheritance of finned-fortune.  Just minutes earlier, a startling instance, largely unexpected and altogether abrupt, physically triggered that responsive instinct of my tactile sense from somewhere within the cavernous depths of ink-black tidewater funneling seaward, as tell-tail tugs telegraphed headshakes landward through a thread-thin communication line of braided polyethylene fibers, abducting its recipient of all lapsing idleness.  Her message delivered, clear as day.  As if rocketed to commitment from zero to sixty, some single-most uncommon specimen of striped-fish possessed a wader-clad disciple afflicted of the night-crawling obsession to wrangle from the vantage of a deeply-bowed stick of straining graphite.

Lightning struck.  Suddenly, I was some surf fisherman some-where, nestled riverside under a cool, overcast blanket of night pressing calmly of its southwest breath of springtime exhalation, one obscuring an otherwise nearly fully-formed lunar face of midnight illumination, grappling to tame one of Morone's ancient matriarchs.  Vying, with each horizontally-held retaliation of exploited, medium-heavy-rated rod backbone cantilevered over running water, pressing from a ribcage-digging placement of counterbalance, pulling at a runaway locomotive evading down-current.  Watchful of my spool spinning and dumping more line than I’ve ever seen.  Panicking that this fish may not stop running.  Worrying about having enough line.  Concerned about having to retrieve so much mainline against a turning tidal flow that is advancing in egress.  Sweating for every foot of taut-sounding, hardwound reclamation of line regained with every ratcheting pump and reaching nod to this unrelenting down-tide pressure by spurt of cranked reel handle.  Focusing intently through the otherwise sheer excitement of imagining the size of such a fish, so as to ultimately make sight of her visually-arresting fins of fascination emerging topside, of a standing saw-tooth dorsal and broom-sized caudal outlining her bathtub-size of a body illustrated of those seven laterally-running stripes of incessant inspiration painted permanently of any surfcaster's dreams.  Grunting between breaths to the forcibly-pulling exertions of this fittest female veteran of survival, weighty of a mass amassed in having successfully outswam the perils of predation encountered during living a long-life of lifelong marathon coastal migrations, estimated by feel to be tipping a scale measuring nearly two-decade’s time.  As an angler struggling to suppress a leviathan’s underwater locomotion for an uplifting encounter of her surface-breaking belly of white and eye-popping embodiment of size symbolizing the sport’s thirty-thousand unanswered casts, that if only subdued unto riverbank reed and grass, would prove to justify reward of an astonishing length and worthwhile wait.  Such never-before-measured double-digits of distinction pronounced of the sacred sounding “f” and studied mouth agape under headlamp as one’s "personal best."  A moss-green and golden-shouldered trophy won of a lifetime at playing the game of tides.  Such was the turn of outgoing on May 5^th that proved to be the imminent mile-marker of opportunity for me, if only...... 

Three casts prior to what felt like snagging the waterway's bottom, I landed a hefty 38" fish after a modest and (to that point of the outing) fulfilling fight.  Her maneuvers of escape were ordinary and her strength exhibited nothing outrageously noticeable in difference as compared to the many generous 35”+ fish I skirmished of past seasons and years.  Solid, for sure.  A good fish just has that feeling.  Some line was taken, but a strong rod brought it to net quickly. 

Still beaming of happiness at landing that first fish, and knowing that it was early May and I had staked claim to the right place at the right time, I fervently cast-out for another sweeping drift.  Retrieve, aim, launch; then another.  Retrieve, then the following drift that, for a split-second, and entirely common and expected from this location, felt caught on an obstruction, but obstructions don’t suddenly animate and move!  A few rapid head-shakes let me know that the sudden stoppage to my paddle-tailed presentation was otherwise alive and entirely hell-bent on towing line from my leaning over the lazily ebbing tide's riverbank.  The submarine made, for all practical purposes, very near, virtually-unyielding and unending runs down-tide.  Four of them.  My reel emptied of 40-lb-test Sufix.  The beautiful hissing of drag was interrupted only by a seat-of-my-saddle sense of urgency necessitating one recruited, quasi-panicked, index finger’s applied pressure.  Touch-release, touch-release, touch-release until the might of mass could be slowed to finally stop-still.  I felt the fish’s sheer weight anchor in the tide, like an unmovable stone to my rod’s maxed-out coaxing.  Every straining muscle within me knew, undoubtedly, that this was the fish of a lifetime.  I would gain line and she would take all of it back, and then some.  Leveraging, readjusting, repositioning, huffing, and grunting of breath.  More than once, I subtly, if not desperately, pressured the fish to some nano-second limit beyond which I felt comfortable in doing, precariously, if not foolishly, risking a total-loss to the name of stupidity or tackle failure, but gambling so in knowing that the tide's gaining flow would only counteract my challenged topside pressure, held frozen for minutes and paused of possible retrieval, to the sinking sensation of this bulging kite held open underwater and unmoving down-tide. 

Ten minutes time brought the genuflecting arc of a pulsing, medium-heavy rod tip to the waterline at my feet.  Still, no color was made visible.  I only imagined at how big this striper was going to appear at any moment to my widened, awe-struck eyes.  A 5-gallon bucket-sized head?  A wide, broadside body displaying a distended belly?  A broom-sized tail surrendering to the surface, motionless to the current’s on-flow?  Is this fish inches from 50”?  Maybe it is a 50!"  It made that 38" feel like child's play 15-min ago.  It’s crazy to guess length, but it feels 35lbs. easy, all-day-long. I dunno, wouldn’t be surprised to know it’s 40lbs or more. 

This was my night of all nights.  A shining triumph as a Jersey surfcaster.  In under a minute’s untamed time yet remaining, in less than ten-feet of water, was the biggest fish I had ever hooked.  And again, it nearly felt as if I was attached to the bottom.  Not physically; I knew the fish was free of obstruction.  I felt her swirling side-to-side below.  She was just a mass of dead-weight, resisting to rise, like something stuck in-place.  I applied loads of upheaving pressure, as cautiously as possible.  My uppermost eyelets briefly submerged themselves in building the shape of a deep arch stretching downward to draw her upward.  This was it, the twelfth round.  I would gain a few feet, and then lose it.  I was never totally "in control" per se, rather I was greatly influencing her whereabouts to a point that led her directly underneath me.  She didn't feel as though she was entirely finished either, rather, regaining breath, inhaling the oncoming life-blood of saltwater through her mouth, flushing it over her gills as if priming a shot of gunpowder for her tail.  As luck had it, I made it this far, against all sharp or protruding odds down-tide and by the holding grace of a single, barbless-hook embedded somewhere in (or to) her jawline just securely enough.  I feared another run with the tide would only benefit her escape.  What’s more, at this point of elapsed time, I didn’t trust that I could confidently turn her from and against a deep-run within the tailwind strength of down-tide flow. 

I now know what a big fish feels like.  What amazed me throughout all of this, was that my finned-prize never surfaced once, either in a single, fighting tail thrash, or exhaustive bout of listing and rolling fatigue.  She held deep the entire struggle, with what I could only envision, as a result of having physically engaged with, were her head and shoulders held steadfast into the current, employing use of her downright heavy weight and broad body pitched like a sail against oncoming flow to compound resistance exercised against me.  I cannot say that I ever once felt the fish roll-over or ascend toward the surface. 

I don't hold any regrets in how I fought the fish.  I was 95% of the way to smiling like I never would have before for a fish.  In a last-ditch effort, I can only imagine that she thrashed her large tail, scouring nose-down along the bottom in a fleeing burst below me, further chafing the line drawn from her crimping maw, severing the 50-lb. monofilament leader on some heart-stabbing hurdle of rock or debris strewn over the riverbed.  Whatever it was, she found it, leaving me stood-up on this especially intoxicating night of Cinco de Mayo with a feeling of sinking-loss in having broken-off our blind date before ever appearing to chance eye-to-golden-iris-eye.  Talk about a hangover…. 

A Multitude Of Fins - Live For Five!

Stirring awake one hot June morning, after passing hours of the night atop a tidal riverbank, auditioning molded rubber lures for any furtive fins stalking within a convection of current sweeping under my feet, I rolled over to scribble a few sentences onto a small fold of paper I was using as a bookmark to a bedside read.  I knew if I didn’t, the dreamlike thoughts could escape the moment.  So I jotted to print certain particulars of the previous outing, although not those quantitative details that typify a trip log - moon, tide, temperatures, wind, weather, surf condition and height, bait presence, et al.  All I noted were a few number of otherwise hazy phrases that loosely illustrated how pleasant this one outing spent under an open night sky made me feel.  The seventy-degree air temperature, the gentle southeast breeze, and the peace of solitude I experienced in having quietly existed for some hours within the trustful surrounds of Nature, all while doing nothing greater than simply observing, listening, breathing... and fishing.  

Only revealed in rearview from the advancing chariot of time could I ever know how those few written reflections were to benefit as the creative-kindling, as embers of words awaiting to someday ignite what would become a conflagration of keyboard composition consuming page after blank page of ever-amended and lengthened, word-processed revisions and subsequent final drafts.  To that effort, I humbly embraced the act of writing as a means of creatively expressing my imagination, this newly-directed, gratifying personal obligation, or otherwise experimental endeavor of mine, to express in the form of a short narrative that of my fondness for a most-special fishing locale, chronicling how one particular evening spent fishing from there seemed to wed and weave in my mind the many memories of exceptional and bountiful catches raised by net over the years and seasons, further recounting many of the social elements realized of gathering there, whether impromptu or planned, of friendships nurtured, laughter erupted, or uncommon confessions spilled.  Those esteemed expectations wrought of vivid anticipations, the fish, as star-lit solitude allowed one's own mind to be released in free-thought.  From this, The Pulse of Existence was born.  My memoir that exposed this angler's deep reverence for the Striped Bass, from the perspective of pursuit, striking fight, landing, and release of a fine specimen.  I printed a hard copy.  It circulated between a few hands, yet nearly a year-and-a-half passed before I considered targeting an appropriate, or rather, appreciative audience by authoring a blog, and hurdling any hesitation of sharing such elaborate fishing-writing, publicly. 

My first post went live on May 26^th, 2015.  Truth be told, it felt good!  Soon after, a second story jumped alive to page, then a third assembled from prospering paragraphs, and then dozens of other experiences and perspectives unexpectedly came to be titled as published posts.  Apparently, I had something I felt I could share, about surfcasting the sandy beaches and rock-piles (both, tragically, as we knew them) of central New Jersey.  I enjoyed channeling this outlet of writing, at times, at-length, over a single inspiring feeling I may have experienced as a result of being outdoors, angling, often as it relates to our fishery's very nucleus of affliction and locus of addiction, our splendid swimmer - Morone saxatilis. 

I never expected mass appeal. My style has proven to be quite wordy, sinuous and considerably tedious to follow at times, is often lofty of expression, is habitually guilty of run-on sentences, excessive comma and hyphen usage, and clearly abuses (purposefully) the form wax-poetic!  My only intention, and single hope however, remains the very same as it was five-years earlier -  to encourage some small degree of relatable satisfaction to the readership of a fisher who sacrifices their time visiting.  That one may enjoy setting their hook into browsing and reading, imagining what they too agree to be the storied words mirrored of their own similar experience, salty circumstance, or register of opinion. 

Thank-you, for being a visitor, and reader!

Celebrating Five Years of writing inspiration favored from the many memorable experiences surfcasting has served to "littorally" enrich my interactions with Nature!  To many, many more.. for each of us who know the telling-tide so very well and spiritually value the rush of surf at one's feet as their "home away from home."

(I photographed this birthday-party-hat-wearing mount 16-years ago (June 2004!) while inside the bar room of the Harborside Grille located on First Ave. in Atlantic Highlands, NJ.)

Attention Anglers 2020

It’s as if the “unsinkable” year of 2020, while steaming forward of its steadfast wake, one left over a decade wide in advancing untold economic growth and personal prosperities, suddenly collided course with an unseen obstacle, shuddering the lives of billions as this vessel of everyday innocence suddenly and ominously halted way, and if not in some manner immediately, slowly yet surely, began listing.  And while this hazard was not nearly as recognizable as the perceivable threat of a mountainous iceberg to the approach of a ship underway, to an absolute contrary, some undetectable body in the form of a microscopic virus jeopardizes to capsize the health and well-being of humanity just the same.  Lives are suddenly, and literally, at stake in this overwhelming current of distress. 

Global infection of individuals has surpassed 1.38-million positive cases, with nearly 380,000 in the U.S. and as of this writing, 2,545 in Monmouth County, NJ (my county of residence).  As such, The NJ Fish & Game website, out of an “abundance of caution” (the COVID-19 catch-phrase in advocating sound public policy) has linked to their homepage a social distancing advisory poster seen below.  Clearly, there exists no stretch of open beach, or edge of pond, however distant or remote, where the proximity (within 6-ft?) of a neighboring angler makes such remoteness of outdoor sporting destination any less uncertain of viral risk than grasping a retail business's door handle or supermarket's shopping basket during these unprecedented times of pandemic the world, and likely your hometown, is at once plagued.  With no therapeutics to alleviate ailments of infection, or a vaccination to prevent infection, government has made it abundantly-clear as to their intentions in mitigating the spread of this coronavirus – steering clear of others.  Everywhere. 

Let’s all hope for the best.

April 3, 2020 - "Consistent with Governor Murphy's orders that all New Jerseyans practice social distancing in order to limit the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19), anglers must fish alone or with immediate family members and cannot fish in groups of any size (no matter how small), either on land or by boat. A minimum six-foot social distance between anglers must be maintained at all times.  Anglers MUST NOT congregate in parking areas, boat ramps or at popular fishing locations. Conservation Police Officers, New Jersey State Park Police, and DEP staff are actively monitoring our parks and natural areas to ensure that individuals enjoying our natural resources are maintaining social distance. Any groups encountered will be instructed to disperse to maintain social distance, and if they do not comply, tickets will be issued by law enforcement."

2020 NJ recreational minimum size, possession limits and seasons.  Take note: Striped Bass regulation is 1-fish per angler, measured 28" to less than 38".  Bluefish harvesting for the private/shore angler has been reduced (FINALLY) to 3-fish, no minimum size.  

Quotes from Ted Leeson's "Jerusalem Creek"

An angler learns the water piecemeal, beginning in each new spot by shrinking even the largest river to the compass of a cast, measuring out the boundaries of a space that, for a time, exists to the exclusion of all others.  What lies inside so fully captures your attention and engages the senses that whatever takes place outside those borders is beyond awareness.  This contraction of the world, concentrating it to a local and immediately present space, sometimes furthers the catching of fish, but beyond that it is, simply in and of itself, one of the best parts of fishing.  A good fisherman can create such spaces anywhere.

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Everything in a spring creek, the constancy of temperature and flow, the chemistry of the water, the meandering shape, the streambed geology, terrestrial and aquatic plants, zooplankton, insects, crustaceans, predators and prey – all condense to one trout holding in a shady bend.

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To wade a freestone stream is to walk on the crust of the earth; step into a spring creek and you may find yourself knee-deep, and still sinking, in loose suspensions of sand and silt that make it difficult to say what or where the bottom is.  A spring creek has boundaries but not barriers; at its edges, the water does not suddenly stop but shades to wetness in tangles of roots and rootlets and in masses of half-submerged watercress, and then becomes mud that trails off to dampness in the soil beyond.  In there somewhere, dry lands begins.

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Fishing, like fish, and like much in the natural world, flourishes at the edges of things, and on a good spring creek, there are trout almost everywhere.

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Nature is nowhere inherently beautiful; we only invest it with beauty – a fact that by no means reduces the power or pleasure we feel, but one that raises questions about why we distribute those investments unequally.

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Water is an ancient emblem of spiritual purification, and its symbolic power to absolve is as old as the need to be forgiven.

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A spring is the past unearthed, issuing from a crack in time.  In its waters old stories are told, a disclosure of hidden workings flowing like an open vein or welling up to the skin of the earth like blood in a bruise.

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There is no essential difference between the intimacy of occasion and the intimacy of place.  They share the same secret interior, and it has never appeared to me that it could be otherwise.

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It is a truism among anglers that the deepest affections attach to first waters.

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Fishing becomes a form of memory, and memory a form of return.

(On fishing first waters, treasuring the unique familiarity, memories created, experience gained, and depth and richness of association rooted as a result of angling such a location.)

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Fish the places that other anglers overlook.

(On inexperience, or learning to employ that “scrap of wisdom” learned of reading the published writing of angling “masters.”)

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The rock remembers and writes its history on sheets of stone, imprints it in fossils pressed like leaves in the pages of an old book, etches its story in the cursive of a spring creek inscribed on a valley floor.  The land is memory and the water is remembering, breaching time to unearth the past.

(On the topology and geology of an eroded valley floor, carved of running water, exposed “half a billion years high” of “all the landscapes it has ever been” as stratified layers of stone sediment.)

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I still value above all the kind of fishing day that passes in the alternating rhythm of being alone and being in company.  Both solitude and society are improved on a trout stream.

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I’ve always imagined that viewed from a height, our movements had a certain antlike quality to them, the stoppings and startings and brief touching of antennae, each individual creature moving with at least distantly discernible purpose, while any logic of their collective activity remained a mystery.

(On the “thoroughly and happily disorganized affair” of “wandering up and down the stream looking for good water,” passing one by one, the individual fishing companions of your party's outing, scattered over the length of a waterway.)

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Possession, even if it is only symbolic, lurks deep in the heart of every angler, or at least those who are any good at it.

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In fishing, you can be shown how to cast, to set the hook, to maintain a tight line and play a trout – but these are only mechanics, and their mere implementation cannot be called fishing any more than vibrating air can be called music.  The fishing exists elsewhere, in the cracks between these other things or somewhere underneath them: in the capacity to imagine in three dimensions, to infer the details of current and streambed from the character of the surface; in finding fish and reading their moods from the language of position, attitude, and movement; in sensing the take of a nymph or interpreting the drift or drag of a dry fly; in always having another idea; in a hundred other subtleties so automatic that you come to regard them as instinct, and only in retrospect realize that there was a time when you did not know them. 

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Every fisherman reinvents the sport in just the way every child reinvents the language or every storyteller the story each time it is told.  To fly fish a spring creek is to rediscover the modern origins of the sport, to recapture the logic of its form by reproducing the circumstances that first gave it shape.  It is the reinvention of a method precisely calibrated to a place, the redrafting of an architecture, not merely through imitation but by rebuilding its very rationale.

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The trout struck in an unnecessarily violent slash-and-turn rise that left us mutually astonished.  I had never seen such a thing happen before; the thrill was stunning and electric – like being struck in the zipper by lightning – and even now, the surface take of a trout still generates this same sensation, though in somewhat lower voltages.

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I do not fish for them deliberately but am delighted whenever I catch one, not because of their rarity but because they are a reminder that the past is not necessarily gone simply because it’s behind you.

(On the scarcity of natural existence of the most “beautiful of all trout species,” brook trout – fontinalis, “of the springs” – “the only species of freshwater fish I know of that would not look out of place among the phantasmagoria of a coral reef.”)

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Depending upon your point of view, it is a sign of maturity or arrogance or decadence that there comes a point in an angling life when a fisherman abandons the quest for size and numbers of trout and insists instead only on their difficulty.  The brown trout obliges.

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When a brown trout levitates from the streambed, slowly and balloonlike, and drifts downstream eye to eye with your fly, you get the distinct and uneasy impression that it’s not just looking, it’s thinking.

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As each fly fisherman reinvents the sport, so the sport in turn invents each fisherman, its particulars shaping the outline of the angler he will one day be, piping the tune that first set the atoms of the brain to dancing.

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If you don’t care about catching fish, you have no business fishing in the first place.  I do have my vanities, but catching a lot of trout is not one of them.

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Trout are loveliest when viewed from above, where the brilliance of their design and the logic of camouflage is most apparent.  A fish in hand is like a jaguar or zebra in a zoo – out of context, its patterning is an absurdity – but against the background of its habitat, the coloration and markings are unexpected genius.

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I have hooked my share of large fish, and my share has been, in all justice, small.

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During the course of every angling life, the image of a few, particular fish are inscribed on the fleshy tablets of the brain.

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Each angler, I think, constructs from the stuff of his experience a Platonic trout stream that winds through the landscape of his imagination, the place against which all others are measured, the water he hopes to go to when he dies.

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There are big trout here, but not many, and they are not the kind you simply fish for; they are the kind you mount a campaign against.

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Fish care nothing for your self-esteem.  It is one of their best qualities.

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If individual trout snub you, a trout stream itself is nothing if not an endless series of second chances.

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All streams flow backward, and reflected somewhere in the surface of every river you fish are the images of those first places.

(On a philosophy of life, and a life spent fishing, in that the body forms we occupy are an “architecture of our own recollection,” our memories of angling waters and places, ones that we “can never leave.”)

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Even the most genial of anglers can get pretty testy if you start talking out loud about their favorite waters, particularly when many of those places are obscure and have so far escaped the calamities of a reputation.

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In many places, fishing the spring creeks depends upon the dexterity with which you can climb over, wriggle under, or slip through barbed wire and the ease of conscience you can summon on the private property beyond. 

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To look to the natural world for moral instruction is a dangerous business at best, for much of what you find there is antithetical to the best impulses of human culture.

(In nature, “the strong dominate the weak, charity and sympathy have no place; infanticide, thievery, self-interest, and opportunism are commonplace.  The dynamics of the natural world are neither evil nor ethical – they are morally unaligned, merely the ongoing adjustments by which things are made to work; they simply are what they are.  Nature is an excellent teacher, but it teaches mostly about itself.”)

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A good fishing partner is the human equivalent of home water.

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To fish home water with home companions is to inhabit one of the most agreeable of all spaces.

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For better or worse, one’s personality, life experiences, and general makeup assert themselves indiscriminately, and there is no reason that fishing should be spared.  The sentimental drunk, in my experience, is still sentimental when he’s sober, and I’ve never seen a fistful of Valium, a dose of the spirit, or a pool full of rising trout transform an asshole into Mother Teresa.

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There is an angling maxim, one I have seen attributed to everyone from Confucius to Herbert Hoover, that claims the hours spent fishing are not deducted from one’s allotted span of life on earth.  And though I put no stock in the sentiment, as with many adages the truth resides less in the statement than in the perception that gave rise to it, and I suspect that this sense of being located outside time is familiar in some form to nearly everyone who has ever fished. 

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Like most fishermen, we gauged the excellence of the water by the number of fish we took, which is a poor yardstick to begin with and particularly so when wielded by poor fishermen.  Looking back now, I suspect that this water was well supplied with trout of the usual two varieties: the kind we could catch, which were scarce, and the kind we could not, which were abundant.

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Like many fly fishermen, I enjoy watching another angler fish nearly as much as I enjoy fishing myself, and on some occasions even more.  It is the most contemplative version of something I find contemplative to begin with, and its rewards lie in the observation rather than the action.

(Especially, as the author upholds, “if that someone is any good, watching him lay out a cast and drop the fly and work the water feels very much like fishing, even though you’re not holding the rod.”)

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Rituals, even those of loss, are by nature an affirmation, and their significance is cumulative.  In ours, meaning grew along a trout stream; the landscape gave rise to ritual that in turn conferred a kind of sanctity on the land.  And this is what it means, I think, to know a place by heart.

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It takes time to know a trout stream, but if you visit one often enough to learn at least some of its secrets and idiosyncrasies, you begin to fish the water not only with a greater expectation of success but with an increasing sense of affectionate familiarity, even on those days when the trout hand you your hat.  After a time, this fondness gives way to a feeling of proprietorship about the place, which at its best shows itself in a paternal kind of protectiveness.

(On attachments to certain, specific waters, and the “step from passion to possession,” especially “when one angler discovers another fishing ‘his’ water, not water that belongs to him, but to which he feels entitled by long association.  Fishing is essentially a utopian occupation, and this (feeling) is its natural extension.”)

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In some cases the number of frighteningly large trout occupying an unbelievably small area of water gives the fishing a kind of artificial, staged quality, like professional wrestling.

(On fishing private water, both “the kind you pay to get on and that rarer and more mysterious kind that no money can buy access to, that you get on only by knowing someone or knowing someone who knows someone.”)

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“Each man kills the thing he loves,” writes Oscar Wilde, and one need look no further than some of the best-known rivers in America to see just how this paradox works.

(On “preserving the resource” and “crowds of fishermen that can hammer a place just by being there, no matter how well-intentioned and careful they may be.”) 

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To regard a place with wild trout as having some measure of environmental integrity may just be another form of self-delusion, but in the end I am a trout fisherman and cannot help but believe that trout express something about the land.  There is a narrow line between indifferent resignation to a diminished world and appreciating what gifts still remain.

(On the author’s assertion that “there is no such thing anymore as a nonpolitical trout.  Every fish is one that easily might not have been. Each one exists by sufferance, by virtue of a land-use restriction, a stream-saving deal, a lawsuit, court injunction, state or federal land designation, a regulation or statute or someone’s goodwill.”) 

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The creek runs clear, curling through the meadow, the current carving patterns in the water as varied and shapely as the grain in wood.  Spring water spooling through the throat of a pool fans out in the glistening fleck and medullary ripple of quarter-sawn oak.  In shallow flats, submerged weeds rumple the surface to a twisted confusion of humps and burls, knots and whirlpools, like a plank of bird’s-eye maple.  

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More than any other type of water, a spring creek makes you appreciate the fact that distortions are an immense advantage to the fisherman; the pure and plain truth is always the hardest to manage.

(On the fact that a spring creek does not “hide your presence, or your want of skill, or faulty presentation, or the inadequacies of tackle or miscalculations of method, paring away anything that might disguise your mistakes and carelessness and incaution.  A spring creek is nakedly simple, and that is precisely where the difficulty lies.”)

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Luck and happenstance are always a part of fishing, though for the most part, I think, in small and subtle ways that an angler never notices.  But the aim of fishing is to fish well, and the aim of fishing well is to make chance count for as little as possible.

(On “preserving the illusion that we are agents of our own success, that we have orchestrated the whole affair” – of successfully hooking a fish – “that it willingly and predictably responds to our own ideas about how it ought to behave.”  That is to say, a hook-up wasn’t a fluke or accident.)

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For well over an hour (we) hook eight-inch trout on every second or third cast.  It is remarkable how this kind of fishing, fast and effortless, can so rapidly lose its charm.  We labor to this very purpose, and when a rare moment delivers the thing we have hoped for, our interest fades.  It is another of the fisherman’s peculiarities that bewilder the nonangler, and I am sometimes puzzled myself and left wondering just what we want out of all of this.

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You seize those occasions that look like justice because you never know whether another one will come along.

(On the rarest of times when it’s relatively impossible to NOT hook a fish.  Think, blitz conditions from your perspective as a surfcaster.) 

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Old places, even those you once knew intimately and still remember well, sometimes possess a surprising weight when you return to them.  The weight that you feel exists in the present, not in the past.  You can call it nostalgia or sentimentality, but it is really a kind of mourning, and you are the one who has died.  The person you were then no longer exists.

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A trout stream might be therapeutic at times, but it is not finally a form of therapy.  In the odd and unbidden moment, it may surrender some insight, but if you fish for enlightenment, you better be sure first that you can stand the glare.

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Imitation is not the principal end of fly fishing, only a means.  The goal itself is deception, the perpetration of a lie, and the more you consider that the trout is not the only creature deceived, the closer this idea comes to the heart of fly fishing. 

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It is not enough to catch the fish – we must know why.

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A trout fly is only a story we invent, a tale spun on a hook shank from the imperfect materials at hand, ordered according to our best guess, an explanation of what we think we understand about a world.

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©2002 (The Lyons Press)