We like to think of the idea of selective trout; it serves our anthropocentricity to believe that we are in a duel of wits with a fish, a sporting proposition. We would do well to understand that trout and other game fish are entirely lacking in sporting instincts. They would prefer to dine unmolested and without being eaten themselves.
………………
All
salmonids must be saluted for bearing upon their collective shoulders the
burden of generations of contradictory theorizing as to what they want to eat
and how they are best persuaded to give up their lives and freedom.
………………
We have
reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity’s demands upon it,
when every fisherman will have to be a riverkeeper, a steward of marine
shallows, a watchman on the high seas.
We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out.
………………
The
motto of every serious angler is “Nearer My God to Thee.” Humans have suspected for thousands of years
that angling and religion are connected.
But if you can find no higher ideal than outfishing your buddies,
catching something big enough to stuff or winning a trophy, you have a lot of
work to do before you are what Izaak Walton would call an angler.
………………
Early
on, I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me how to look at
rivers. Lately it has been teaching me
how to look at people, myself included.
I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either technical
or geographical. The Bible tells us to
watch and to listen. Something like this
suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and
passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.
………………
Standing
on a boulder amid breaking surf that is forming offshore, accelerating and
rolling toward you is, after awhile, like looking into a fire. It is mesmeric.
………………
(On the author surf fishing after sunset from some
acquainted rocky shoreline of Sakonnet, RI)
I
looked out to sea in the last light, the white rollers coming in around
me. The clearest item of civilization
from my perspective was a small tanker heading north. The air was chilly. The beach where I had sunned myself as a
child looked lonely and cold. But from
behind me came intimate noises: the door of a house closing, voices, a lawn
mower. And, to a great extent, this is
the character of bass fishing from the shore.
In very civilized times it is reassuring to know that wild fish will run
so close that a man on foot and within earshot of lawn mowers can touch their
wildness with a fishing rod.
………………
At the
end of a fishing trip you’re inclined to summarize things in your mind. A tally is needed for the quick description
you will be asked for: so many fish at such-and-such weights and the method
employed. Inevitably, what actually
happened is indescribable.
………………
One of
the exhilarations of fishing new places lies in rendering advice into some kind
of obtained reality. Cast the fly, you
are told, right along the bank and the trout will rise to it. So you cast and you cast until presently you
are blue in the face and the appealing syllogism you started with is not always
finished. When it does not work, you
bring your vanquished person back to the dock, where there is no way to weigh
or measure the long face you have brought instead of fish. At the first whiskey, you announce that it
has been a trying day. Then someone else
says that it is nice just to get out.
Irrationally, you wonder how you can get even for that remark.
………………
It is
this sort of possession you look for when angling. To watch the river flowing, the insects
landing and hatching, the places where trout hold, and to insinuate the supple,
binding movement of tapered line until, when the combination is right, the line
becomes rigid and many of its motions are conceived at the other end. That stage continues for a time dictated by
the size of the trout and the skill of the angler. When the initiative changed hands, the trout
is soon in the net, without an idea in his head until you release him. Then you see him go off, looking for a spot,
and thinking.
………………
At a
number of places, birds were diving into schools of bait pushed by predatorial
fish underneath. There would be a patch
of rough water with a stream of birds trailing from it like drifting white
smoke.
………………
We skirmished
with a couple of schools of false albacore without success, casting from the
drifting boat into the bait, the albacore cutting through like fighter planes
in the clear water, succeeding through speed rather than maneuverability. With little opportunity to tease them into
taking, it was hit or miss. We missed.
………………
(On the remarkable and profound encounter of experiencing
a twenty-fish day)
Every
once in a while, angling provides an episode one can keep for life. It is not necessarily about big fish, though
it sometimes is, nor about great difficulty overcome. Rather, it’s a kind of poetic
singularity. Sometimes you’re even aware
of it as it’s happening.
………………
The
feeding of this big school of bass was creating what looked like a low breaker
traveling steadily over the surface. A
dark mass of bait like a shadow full of silver flashes moved ahead of the
disturbance. Along the entire front of
the wave, the length of it, were… mouths.
Above and all down its length hovered the terns whose forked tails
touched the water when they sighted bait, caught it and swept away.
………………
(On fighting - and losing - “the largest
resident trout I’d ever hooked” and “watching the hundred yards of line shrink”)
Then the
trout stopped. A single turn of backing
remained on the spindle at the center of my empty reel. Yet the fish had stopped right then and
there! It was like literature! He paused long enough for me to consider how
wonderful life could be when it had great literature-style items, such as coincidence
and fate and elegant ironies. Then, in
that moment of anti-magic, when literature is converted to the far more
familiar aspects of the land in which we actually live and breathe and spend
our days, the great trout turned and straightened my hook. I had so much line downstream that there was
still a substantial bow in my rod. I had
to reel it all in. I had to salute the
now-absent great fish who had made such short shrift of me. The more line I reeled in, the less bow there
was in my rod, and finally, with nothing to commemorate the fish except the
whispering river around my knees, my rod was nothing but a straight, dead
stick. But there was a terrific,
evangelical silence. It is a fact that
we are made almost entirely of river water, but the flesh that remains
organizes this spectral borrowing from riparian valleys and, rod in hand,
blesses our origins by counting coups.
………………
It
seems to me there are several schools of fly-tying: traditional, imitative,
defiant, and autobiographical.
………………
Fish
are suspicious of perfect imitations of the naturals. This quest to copy, to some anglers like me,
is not an interesting idea and may remind one of those superior grade-school
companions whose model airplanes made one’s own efforts such objects of
ridicule.
………………
One of
the most difficult accomplishments in fly-tying is to reexamine an established
category and do it better and more simply.
………………
(On traditional fly patterns, those that are especially
“simple yet madly difficult to tie”)
Any
sustained perusal of the fly books of the world should demonstrate that fish
have been remarkably tolerant of our follies.
Clearly, it is not what those long-gone or far-flung anglers offered the
fish, it’s how they offered it.
………………
There
is a sort of infatuation when an angler looks at flies. We look through pictures of flies much as we
search through our old high school yearbooks, a kind of a scanning process
until something stops the eye. The same
feeling is obtained when looking in the compartments of a fly shop or fly
box. An odd transference occurs in the
imagination. One holds up the fly and
thinks both like a fish and like a fisherman, and perhaps as a species of prey,
all at once; though maybe it is not thinking.
A convergence of emotion is sought, the unknowable conviction of a
sorcerer, the feeling that, yes, this will do nicely, a feeling that enlarges
as the fly is knotted to the tippet, held again to the light to further charge
one’s conviction, then off it goes at the end of a cast. If it catches fish, a wider smile opens
within. If it fails utterly, it is
subjected once more to the gaze at close range, the sorcerer feeling rueful. You ask yourself, how did I fall for this
one? Though you return it to your fly
box, you really want to throw it away. I
once lit one with a match.
………………
I try
to tie flies that will make me fish better, to fish more often, to dream of
fish when I can’t fish, to remind myself to do what I can to make the world
more accommodating to fish and, in short, to take further steps toward actually
becoming a fish myself.
………………
(On mortality; the struggle of survival as
witnessed in Nature; upon encountering a dead buck yearling in the spring grass
“nearly devoured by coyotes who had seized its intestines and backed them
several yards from the carcass”)
The
face of creation takes in everything with a level stare. When I was younger, manifestations of life’s
fury were comfortably free of premonition.
Now they bear a gravity that dignifies the one-day lives of insects, the
terrible slaughterhouse journey of livestock, and, of course, ourselves and our
double handful of borrowed minerals.
………………
(On “such things that may be accumulated in
memory and produce a renewable happiness”)
Here
and there were small glassy panels of undisturbed water, and in one of these
panels the end of my line stopped. I
lifted the rod tip and felt the weight that to an angler is not just weight. A rainbow trout ripped straight downstream
and with the full strength of the river on his tail, prepared to defeat me and
my tackle-fueled pyramid scheme. All the
pressure of slow fishing rested on the solid shoulders of the fish and I
stumbled and wallowed along behind, underplaying him, trying to remember if the
leader had any wind knots and knowing that the tiny, barbless hook was but a
faint connection. Still, I had managed
to detain this fish, and for the moment we were living in each other’s lives.
………………
When I
drive down through a ranch yard or walk across a pasture toward a stream, my
heart pounds for a glimpse of moving water.
Moving water has, all my life, been the most constant passion I’ve had.
………………
As soon
as I got in the river, I felt how very cold the water was. I’m always saying, though it’s hardly my
idea, that the natural state of the universe is cold. But cold-blooded trout and cold-blooded
mayflies are indications of the world’s retained heat, as is the angler, wading
upstream in a cold spring wind in search of delight.
………………
The
river whispered past this spot in a kind of secretive hurry. I got in and waded upstream, then sat on a
small logjam to tie on a fly. I was
suddenly so extremely happy, the sight of this water was throwing me into a
rapturous state, that I began to wonder what it could mean. I sometimes wondered if there wasn’t
something misanthropic in this passion for solitude.
………………
Across
from me was an old cabin. These old
structures along Montana trout rivers are part of their provenance, part of
what comes back to you, like the wooded elevations that shape and bend and push
and pull each river so that as you try to re-create one in your mind the next
winter, there is a point where you get lost, always an oxbow or meander where a
certain memory whiteout occurs. I am
always anxious to return to such a stretch and rescue it from amnesia.
………………
(As a Montana resident having lived for decades
on a remote, 200-acre ranch; “all the information about the world failing to
produce the feeling of the global village; the information only exaggerating
the feeling of isolation”)
I had
in my own heart the usual modicum of loneliness, annoyance, and desire for
revenge, but it never seemed to make it to the river. Isolation always held out the opportunity of
solitude: the rivers kept coming down from the hills.
………………
There
are times for every angler when he catches fish because the fish told him he
could, and times when the trout announce they are through for the day.
………………
I
wondered what it was about the edges of things that is so vital, the edges of
habitat, the edges of seasons, always in the form of an advent. Spring in Montana is a kind of pandemonium of
release. Certainly there are more
sophisticated ways of taking it in than mine.
But going afield with my fishing rod seemed not so intrusive, and the
ceremony helped, quickening my memory back through an entire life spent
fishing.
………………
“Sophisticated
angler” is an oxymoron. And if it
wasn’t, it would be nothing to strive for.
Angling is where the child, if not the infant, gets to go on living.
………………
(As guest on an annual trip with friends,
sleeping riverside in a small fishing lodge)
It is a
great pleasure for a family man to sleep in some building by himself once in a
while; I slept that night away in a kind of mock-bachelor bliss, the windows
wide open and the chilly mountain air pouring over my lofty comforter. My first home was made of logs, and the smell
and solidity of those structures restored my highly eroded sense of well-being.
………………
During
the emergence of the duns, I managed to catch several small but handsome and
always mythologically perfect and wonderful brown trout. I was swept by the perfection of things: the
glorious shape of each trout, the angelic miniature perfection of mayflies, and
by the pure wild silk of the Big Hole River.
For such things are we placed on this careening mudball.
………………
Though
drift boats have proliferated beyond reason, it is also a terrific way to see
the country while maintaining an air of purpose. As you float, the all-important bank unrolls
before you through the course of the day like a variegated ribbon of earth and
water.
………………
It is a
wonderful thing to be reminded of the variety of beauties displayed in the
quarry of trout fishermen. The brook
trout has a silky sleekness in the hand.
Browns always feel like you expect fish to feel; rainbows often feel
blocky and muscular; the brook trout exists within an envelope of perfect
northerly sleekness. He is a great
original, to be appreciated poetically, for he is not a demanding game
fish. Some of the most appalling arias
in angling literature are directed at this lovely creature, who was with us
before the Ice Age.
………………
I
intensely valued the stream-bred rainbows I’d caught, small-headed relative to
their breadth and wonderfully marked with bands of stardust pink. This unpurposeful note of festivity is
matched by their vital show when hooked, by their abandoned vaults for
freedom. The great privilege is the
moment one is released, when the small, strong fish moves from your hand to
renew its hold upstream. Then it’s time
to go.
………………
Any
river reminds us of others, and the logic of a new one is a revelation. An undisturbed river is as perfect a thing as
we will ever know, every refractive slide of cold water a glimpse of eternity.
………………
A cold
wind eddied down the river into my face, and I was ready to decide that to
everything there is a season and that trout season was over. Fall gives us a vague feeling that the end of
everything is near.
………………
Young
anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives. Time doesn’t seem to be of the essence and
somewhere in the system is what they are looking for.
………………
Current
is a mysterious thing. It is the motion
of the river leaving us, and it is as curious and thrilling as a distant train
at night. Things that pass us, go
somewhere else, and don’t come back seem to communicate directly with the
soul. That the fisherman plies his craft
on the surface of such an element possibly accounts for his contemplative
nature.
………………
These
waters, pouring from high in a Montana wilderness, are bound for the Gulf of
Mexico. The idea that so much as a
single molecule of the rushing chute before me was headed for Tampico was as
eerie as the moon throwing a salty flood over the tidelands and then retrieving
it.
………………
(That “less is more.” The author’s belief in
practicality, as opposed to any aggrandizement of gear or products deemed
purposeful for general angling success)
Getting
rid of stuff is a matter of ceremony.
The winter has usually made me yield to dubious gadgets, and I’m at war
with these if the main idea of fishing is to be preserved.
………………
Weird
rod weights reflect armchair fantasies and often produce chagrin on the water.
………………
As I
face new water, I always ask myself if I ought to fish with a nymph or
not. Camus said that the only serious
question is whether or not to commit suicide.
This is rather like the nymph question.
………………
Mortality
being what it is, any new river could be your last. This charmless notion runs very deep in us
and can produce a sweet and consoling inventory of all the previous rivers in
your life.
………………
Like
the trout, we must find a way of moving through water with the least amount of
displacement. The more we fish, the more
weightlessly and quietly we move through a river and among its fish, and the
more we resemble our own minds in this bliss of angling.
………………
Angling
doesn’t turn on stunts. The steady
movements of the habitual gatherer produce the best harvest.
………………
(On releasing a captured fish from the clutch
of one’s grip)
I love
the feeling I get when the fish realize they’re free. There seems to be an amazed pause. Then they shoot out of your hand as though
you could easily change your mind.
………………
The
middle of a bright day can be as dull as it is timeless. Visibility is so perfect you forget it is
seldom a confidence builder for trout.
The little imperfections of the leader, the adamant crinkles standing up
from the surface, are clear to both parties.
………………
The
shadows of afternoon seem to give meaning to the angler’s day on about the same
scale that fall gives meaning to his year.
As always, I could feel in the first hints of darkness a mutual
alertness between me and the trout. This
vague shadow the trout and I cross progresses from equinox to equinox. Our mutuality grows.
………………
The
selective trout is that uncompromising creature in whose spirit the angler
attempts to read his own fortune.
………………
(On new water, and his catch “in the final
light” that saves the day)
It was
another short, thick, buttery brown, and the fish that kept me from flunking my
first day on that river. It’s hard to
know ahead of time which fish is giving the test.
………………
In the
canyon the trout’s range of travel is bounded by falls, sudden declivities or
change of altitude in the slab rock. The
trout live above or below such a place; these are separate civilizations.
………………
We cast
our big, visible dries on the glossy rush, and quickly trout soar into focus
and vanish with our offerings. Rods bow
and lines shear through the water.
Handsome cutthroat trout are beached and released in the gravel,
wriggling back into deep water and flickering invisibly into the pale water
curtain.
………………
(On the author’s sentiment, regarding Montana’s
only “acceptable realpolitik” of its finned natural resource)
If the
trout are lost, smash the state.
………………
More
than any other fish, trout are dependent upon the ambiance in which they are
caught. Whether it is the trout or the
angler who is more sensitized to the degeneration of habitat would be hard to
say, but probably it is the trout.
………………
The
last chance you get at overall strategy in trout fishing, before you lose
yourself in the game itself, is during the period called “rigging up.”
………………
The river
is a fluid envelope for trout, occasionally marred by the fish themselves
rising to take an insect and punctuating the glassy run with a whorl that opens
and spirals downstream like a smoke ring.
………………
You can
walk in any direction of the compass from here and sooner or later you’ll run
into a trout. And you see, at some
point, that you will keep making that walk.
………………
(On jetties, the “great and successful places
for producing happiness”)
In some
ways, there is nothing like the society of a good jetty. The retirees, the down-and-out, the
economizing housewife, the driven boys, the exposure to the whimsy of all
weathers, the fickle divination of angling destiny falling where it would up
and down the length of the jetty, all contributed to a soap opera wherein each
hooked fish produced a mob of hopefuls casting across one another’s lines.
………………
(On fishing Key West in the 1960’s and 70’s, “a
great and corrupt gardenia of an island in a wilderness of shoals and mangroves
where we sometimes went from old wooden bars” and only hours thereafter “before
the sun came up” were “fighting several waves of sickness, off looking for fish
in the glare”)
I
remember the special horror of fighting wild tarpon with a bar-life muzziness
on my face and my clothes revealing beer stains, cigarette burns, and head shop
perfumes. Looking back upon those days
when nothing was expected of us and you could wait all day for a tide, live
like dogs, and look for fish with an unreasonable zealotry, I wonder at the
wisdom of making fishing “part” of my life.
………………
(On the transformation of Key West, once “a
goony bird island,” a “tropical, weather-blasted rock with humanity clinging to
it in suitable humility” that ultimately, “has always been changing”)
It
remains an odd pleasure to revisit these snapshots of the good times. There is nothing to compare to my years in
the Keys as a reminder that Janis Joplin had it right: get it while you
can. After that, it’s too late.
………………
What is
most emphatic in angling is made so by the long silences – the unproductive
periods. No form of fishing offers such
elaborate silences as fly-fishing for permit.
………………
To
permit, the fly was anathema; one look and they were gone. It seemed futile, all wrong, like trying to
bait a tiger with watermelons.
………………
(On permit taxidermy, specifically the fish’s
“low recognition factor” to non-anglers)
If you
have one mounted, you’ll always be explaining what it is to people who thought
you were talking about your fishing license in the first place.
………………
The fly
fell with lucky, agonizing perfection, three feet in front of the permit on its
exact line of travel. Without hesitation
the fish darted forward and took: the one-in-a-thousand shot. I lifted the rod, feeling the rigid bulk of
the still unalarmed fish, and set the hook.
And then the rod suddenly doubled and my leader broke. A loop of line had tightened itself around
the handle of the reel. I was ready for
the rubber room.
………………
Then
the fish was on the reel. I could
witness its wildly extending wake. At
150 yards the fish stopped, and I got back line. I kept at it until the fish was within 80
yards of the boat. Then it suddenly made
a wild, undirected run, not permitlike at all, and I could see the shark
chasing it. He hit the permit once,
killed it, and ate it, worrying it like a dog and bloodying the water. Then, an instant later, I had the shark on my
line and running. I fought him with
irrational care: I now planned to gaff the blacktip and retrieve my permit
piece by piece. When the inevitable
cutoff came I dropped the rod in the boat and, empty-handed, wondered what I
had done to deserve this.
………………
I had
whitened my nose and mouth with zinc oxide ointment, and felt, handling the
mysterious rods and flies, like a shaman.
………………
The
fish, six of them, were surging toward us in a wedge. They ran from 80 to 110 pounds, slow, dark
torpedoes. The big lead fish pulled up
behind the fly, trailed, and then made the shoveling, open-jawed uplift of a
strike that is not soon forgotten.
………………
Then,
once it had seen the boat, felt the line and isolated a single point of
resistance, it cleared out at a perfectly insane rate of acceleration that made
water run three feet up my line as it sliced through the ocean. The jumps – wild, greyhounding, end-over-end,
rattling – were all crazily blurred as they happened, while I pictured my reel
exploding like a racing clutch and filling me with shrapnel.
………………
We
followed, alternately gaining and losing line.
Then, in some way, at the end of this blurred episode, the permit was
flashing beside the boat, looking nearly circular, and the only visual
contradiction to his perfect poise was the intersecting line of leader
seemingly inscribed from the tip of my arcing rod to the precise corner of his
jaw.
………………
(On the author, having boated his 1st
permit “in the face of an ungodly number of refusals and countless unrewarded
hours”)
I was
persuaded that once was not enough. And
indeed it wasn’t. Thirty years have
passed and none of the magic of permit fishing, not a trace of it, has gone.
………………
A tide
book and a good memory are the first tools of the bonefisherman.
………………
The
difficulty in seeing fish gives the veteran a real opportunity to lord it over
the neophyte, gives him a chance to cultivate those small nuances of power that
finally reveal him to be the Captain of the Skiff. After that, the veteran can relax and radiate
generosity.
………………
(On bonefish, the “smallest and probably the
hardest to see” flats fish)
The man
who confuses angling with relaxation and lets his eye linger here will miss
nine out of ten fish.
………………
It was
as if the bonefish were in one room and I was in another: it was just a matter
of opening the door in between.
………………
As the
bonefisherman is sternly sophisticated by his quarry, his reverence for the
creature increases. Undeterred by toxic
winds, block meetings, bulletproof taxicab partitions, or adventures with the
Internal Revenue Service, he can perceive with his mind alone bonefish moving
on remote ocean flats in the tongue of the flood.
………………
I was
in that state of mind perhaps not peculiar to angling when things seem to be in
a steep curve of deterioration, and I had a fatal sense that I was not at the
end of it.
………………
We were
in a small tropical sea trapped between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The Gulf Stream, that great violet river,
poured northward just beyond my view, regulating the temperature of the
world. Once the moon was up, it appeared
as a fixed portion of the universe while the clouds and weather of planet Earth
poured over its face. I thought of all
the places and times in my amusing life I had looked to a full moon for even
one suggestion I could do something with.
Weather is one of the things that goes on without you, and after a
certain amount of living it is bracing to contemplate the many items not
dependent upon you for their existence.
………………
In looking for one fish you find another – and maybe, in the end, you find it all.
………………
My
glances for the net were premature. A
number of runs remained to be endured.
With a fish badly wanted, it is always simple to imagine the hook
pulling free, the leader breaking, the dead feeling in the slack rod.
………………
Facing
a lack of hard information, the angler feels the invitation to elaborate his
own sense of the fish’s presence. Which
is no more than to say you can face bravely those accusations of loafing when
you have ruined a month chasing tarpon, racking your brain to understand their
secret, sidling lives.
………………
Along
the starboard gunwale, flexed tight against it, is the big kill gaff with its
seven-foot hardwood handle, never to be used on a fish less than a world
record, thought the goal is to train oneself to release fish, too. Someday, when we have grown enough in the
fishing, the gaff will be nailed up over my desk, a rather handsome old souvenir
of barbaric times.
………………
I run
it up to 4500 rpm. Key West drops
quickly behind and finally clusters at the end of our long arrow of a
wake. There is a sense of liberation as
we run, civilization melting away while another country – mangrove keys,
shallows, and open seas – forms around us.
………………
We sit
down in the skiff, drifting under the dome of unsoiled marine sky. Guy hands me a sandwich and we have our
lunch, chewing and ruminating like cattle.
We are comfortable enough together that we can fall silent for long
periods of time. A flats skiff is a confined
place and one in which potentials for irritation are brought to bear as surely
as in an arctic cabin, but this comfort of solitude enhanced by companionship
is the rarest commodity of angling. Pure
solitude, nearly its equal, is rather more available.
………………
(On scouting Florida Keys flats for migrating
tarpon)
The bottom
is dark with turtlegrass and we look hard to penetrate its surface. At the same time we try to survey a wide
range and watch for the faint wakes that look like a thumbnail pulled gently
along under a sheet of silk.
………………
As they
approach, their above-the-surface presence of wakes and splashes is replaced
perceptually by the actual sight of fish as specific marine entities, individual
torpedoes coming at you. It is hideously
unnerving, if you care about fishing.
………………
The
fish were, in fact, traveling slowly toward us, rolling with open mouths and
looking like a nest of enormous baby birds awaiting a worm.
………………
The
fish is in the air, upside down, making a noise that reminds you of horse,
thunderous and final; your eye remembers the long white rip in the ocean. Then a short accelerated run is followed by
an end-swapping jump by a game animal that has pulled all the stops. At the third jump the run begins. The fourth jump would be better observed
through binoculars; the line no longer even points at the fish.
………………
Until
you acquire enough knowledge of flats fishing to convert this lack of
definition into the intricate and highly patterned habitat that it actually is,
the sport is little more than a series of accidents, and maybe not even that.
………………
Fighting
a permit is pure worry. I worried about
my knots and about the line to backing splice I’d done the night before. I worried about the hinging effect, after
hours of casting, on the knot at the fly.
I worried that fishing with a barbless hook had been taking
sportsmanship too far. I desperately
wanted to land this fish.
………………
I felt
the cool solidity and strength of the fish between my hands. I stood in the river for a long while,
holding her into the current and feeling the increasing strength in a kicking
tail I could barely encompass with my grip.
As she swam off the shelf, she pulled a three-foot bow wake.
………………
My
wife, less flatteringly, says that I am a salmon-steelhead whore. When I have phone calls to return and she prefaces
her listing of them with the suggestion that I get into my net stockings and
high heels, I know that anadromous fish are at issue.
………………
There
was a certain solace in having the majesty of a great river presumed as a place
of seriousness, if not solemnity. The
river was your great wife and the very hem of her skirt must be honored.
………………
I cast
for four or five hours without a sign of anything and rode back for lunch and
an afternoon nap. I wondered if I had
appreciated that fish the night before as I should have.
………………
(On sea-trout fishing the RÃo Grande of Tierra
del Fuego, Argentina, with trip companion Yvon Chouinard)
At last
I began hooking up. These fish were
beyond big. They were heavy and violent,
taking the fly with a brutish malevolence.
By the standards of two lifelong fishermen – and we had a hundred years
between us – we were so far into the zone that not even approaching night could
drive us out.
………………
(On subduing a twenty-five-pound Patagonian
brown trout)
Suddenly,
a fish ran my fly down, making an eight-foot rip in the silky flow of the
river. I could feel this one well down
into the cork of my double-hander. The
fight took us up and down the pool, and the weight I perceived at the end of my
line kept my anxiety high. Several times
I thought I had the fish landed when it powered out of the shallows. In the end, I never imagined such a trout
belly would ever hang between two hands.
………………
We had
the best fishing day we would ever have.
We were tired and vaguely stunned.
There was also a sense that wherever we’d been going as trout fisherman,
we had just gotten there today.
………………
The
world of the river became more enclosing, the hurtling power of the fish ever
more emblematic of the force of wild things and the plentitude of undisturbed
nature.
………………
I put
as deep a bow in the rod as I dared and began following the fish
downstream. I beached this big male on a
small point, beyond which I might not have been able to follow. His lower jaw was so hooked it had worn a
groove in the upper, and I was delighted to make certain this individual could
make his contribution to the gene pool.
………………
No one
in the world has wild, open country like the Russians, a possible
ace-in-the-hole on a strangling planet.
Poets and naturalists could have understood this so much more
comprehensively than I did, dragging my fly rod, but without it I probably
would never have gotten there or stood for a week in a river coursing through
the tundra to the Barents Sea.
………………
I’m
afraid that the best angling is always a respite from burden. Good anglers should lead useful lives, and
useful lives are marked by struggle, and difficulty, and even pain. Perhaps the agony of simple mortality should
be enough. But probably it is not.
………………
(On fish that “surge up and boil,” but “stop
without taking the fly”)
There is
a kind of anxiety that comes of knowing an interested fish awaits. You sense that fate has spoken: You asked for
it, here it is. There is a slight
feeling of dread. If the fish doesn’t
come back, there is reason to assume I have been at fault; if it returns, I’m
absolved.
………………
(Then, on a fish’s “leisurely inspection and
refusal” “feeling that this dismissal was perhaps final”)
This
time the refusal was slow and considered, amazingly so in view of the current
speed. In this kind of situation, you
are aware that you have unsuccessfully played another card and that the number
of remaining cards in uncertain but not unlimited. I made another cast and saw no sign of the
fish.
………………
(And ultimately, when the author “tried it
again, the fish’s nonappearance seemed emphatic”)
My
attempts to engage the mind of this fish to my advantage had failed
utterly. Using my own tackle, this
simple creature had turned the tables and driven me crazy. When I looked out at the river and imagined
beginning another long search for a fish, I was discouraged. So, like an old and chronic sinner gazing
into his Bible in hopes of a last-minute reconsideration by God, I once more
opened my fly book and peered within.
………………
When I
released her, she picked her way out among the boulders in an unhurried
progress to deep water. I found myself
at a great altitude yet with all of my life in which to come down. Indeed, as I write this years later, those
moments are inescapable and vivid. What
a thing to own.
………………
(On local folklore and superstition; “the
deficits of otherworldly auspices”)
He
would catch fish at a good clip, then become possessed by a “hoodoo.” A hoodoo
evidently is some sort of bird, or possibly a bat. When it settles, imperceptibly, between the
shoulder blades of the unsuspecting angler, it becomes impossible to catch a
fish. One can hook them, but they always
get off.
………………
He had
waded out to a thin spit of bottom where one could barely stand up and hooked
the biggest fish he had ever seen on the river.
After a long battle, the fish was within a rod’s length but would not
accompany him ashore, nor could he bring it to hand. At this stalemate, the man and fish faced off
for a long time, the latter making no further bid for escape and the former
unable to cross the deep trough to the beach.
A prolong acquaintanceship ensued, at the end of which the hook pulled
and the fish went to its next appointment.
Fate had dealt him a heavy blow.
………………
(Excerpts from “The Compleat Angler” by Izaak
Walton, first published in 1653)
“I envy
not him that eats better meat than I do, nor him that is richer, or that wears
better clothes than I do; I envy nobody but him, and him only that catches more
fish than I do.”
“Angling
is an art that like mathematics, can never be fully learnt.”
“Rivers
and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate
and fools to pass by without consideration.”
Angling,
to Walton, is about being fully alive: “I was for that time lifted above earth,
and possess’d joys not promised in my birth.”
Besides rivers, we seldom fill our minds with “fears of many things that
will never be.” Here, “honest, civil,
quiet men” are free from dread.
………………
The technocracy
of modern angling has not been conducive to the actual reading of Walton. Today’s fisherman may own The Compleat Angler
as an adornment, but turns to his burgeoning gadgets for real twentieth-century
consolation. In Walton’s words, his
heart is no longer fitted for quietness and contemplation.
………………
It is
not given to every soul pining for the natural world to be a naturalist. Most of us require a game to play, whether
hunting, bird-watching, angling, or sailing, and each create superb opportunities
to observe the weather, the land under changing light, the movement of water.
………………
(Although the “lore and advice” of The Compleat
Angler “are largely obsolete,” a universal and timeless truth is nonetheless
captured by its pages, as angling today “still demands immersion, from air to
water, from warm blood to cold, to a view of the racing universe and all its
stars through a river’s flowing lens”)
And
here, learned, equitable Izaak Walton, by demonstrating how watchfulness and
awe may be taken within from the natural world, has much to tell us; that is,
less about how to catch fish than about how to be thankful that we may catch
fish. He tells us how to live.
………………
We
stopped on a narrow bridge high over the stream to look for salmon. This is still something of a miracle to me,
peering from country bridges at sea-run fish.
We used to have more of these fish in America than anyone so we killed
them off.
………………
It is
surprising how much a steady current of the unknown adds to the excitement of
angling. In streambed hydrology the
fabulous secrets known to the fish are revealed to us only by experience.
………………
A
river, once you are out in it, has several kinds of sorcery that make you
wonder if you are truly doing things as you should.
………………
Coming
to know water offers the prospect of crossing a “shadow line,” beyond which a
profoundly satisfying sense of where you are, even what you are, enters your
soul, and you begin to fish with such simplicity and doubtlessness that it is
of little consequence if you fail to catch something.
………………
A great
fisherman should strive for equanimity in the face of achievement, and this
cannot be trafficked. Probably all who
write about fishing should be disqualified.
Most fishing writers have tried to show us how much smarter they are
than everybody else, creating an atmosphere of argument and competition.
………………
He
moved slightly. I had to assume
something had happened, so I lifted the rod and concluded I was either into the
fish or the bottom. My line bellied out
downstream briefly, then tightened as the leader sheared upstream.
………………
I told
myself that I would never land this fish and I was right. Ploughing around in the rocks, flinging water
everywhere, he liberated himself as decisively as he had taken my silly little
fly. I felt oddly content as I sat at
the bottom of the canyon, and willing to wait to fish again until I absorbed it
all, the idea of the streamlined shapes coming in from the sea, by the moon, by
the tide, by whatever mystery, up through the sheep pastures, bent on some
eternal genetic strategy. They know what
they’re doing.
………………
Fishing
is infinitely subjective and we sense, I think rightly, that all instruction is
unreliable. After a century of science
in materials and the design of fly rods, no generally accepted set of tapers
for a trout rod exists. There is more
objective agreement about cellos, fiber optics, and nuclear submarines.
………………
The
meaning of fishing lies more in its context than its practice: a day alone on a
remote steelhead river; floating with your child; fishing a lake with your
family when picnic preparations overpower the angler’s concentration; seeking a
fish whose race is threatened by your own or whose ancestral breeding grounds
have been lost to town crooks. Fishing
is sometimes about a disinclination to go fishing at all. An important part of life, maybe the most
important part, is the quest by each of us to discover something we believe to
be more worthy and permanent than we are individually. The truth which angling can lead to about our
place in nature is one such greater thing.
………………
The
dream of fly-fishing is one of simplicity, and most of us pursue it in the same
way: acquire a blizzard of flies and gear in the belief that you are casting a
wide net and that, at some point, you will get rid of all but the few perfect
items and angle in the dreamed-of simplicity.
For most, this pile grows until death brings it to a stop. What’s at work here has nothing to do with
necessity but rather with the elaboration of the dream that is fishing.
………………
Right
now, a large variety of magnificent reels is available to choose from. Most have one thing in common: they’re far
better than they need to be.
………………
The
backing on a reel usually dies of old age before it even sees the light of
day. Rarely does a fish go a hundred
yards, yet most reels designed for this purpose carry a quarter-mile of
backing. If a tarpon, permit, or
bonefish gets more than a hundred yards from you, your problems have nothing to
do with your backing.
………………
(A proposition, that the fly angler should
strive to eliminate “lost motion” so as to facilitate “smoothness,” one of the
many traits that ultimately “separate the men from the boys.”)
There
are always a few anglers blessed with genius and inspiration. But the angler who accepts both his gifts and
limitations, who recognizes the importance of keeping his fly in the water, who
abjures tackle tinkering once he reaches the river, and who strives to fish
coherently throughout the day will usually, finally, succeed. A late start in the morning prevents the fly
from fishing; a crooked cast delays a fly from fishing; fly changing, leisurely
meals and a forgotten bailing can all play a part in separating the fly from
its job.
………………
(On the plaquing, age-old question, “why do
fishermen lie?”)
I have
a hunch that most anglers do not wish to compete but have found no successful
way to avoid competition when fishing with others. (The angler) …may dispense with matters of
competition by lying about his results.
The most incredulous of his comrades have probably come by their
disbelief honestly: they’ve been lying, too.
A day if the life has been suitably taken in, and in this avalanche of
lies, a kind of truth has been served.
………………
Several
times I looked up and saw at a distance, his rod deeply bowed and his fly line
shearing an arc toward deeper water. We
were happy workers on a big bonefish farm.
………………
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© 1999 (Vintage Books) |
