Anglers
travel a long way to find a seemingly inexhaustible supply of big, wild,
gullible fish, but unless you’re trying to feed a village for the winter,
there’s no reason to catch a boatload.
After five fish in a row you can say you’ve figured it out; at ten
you’ve made your point; and somewhere short of twenty a sense of unease
develops that could easily blossom into embarrassment. The trick is to enjoy the spectacle and then
quit while it’s still fun.
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Fishermen
claim to love the sea-run fish for their size, but what we really love is the
unimaginable size of their lives.
………………
Back
home on my desk was a detailed list of things that would all take too much time
and cost too much money but had to be done anyway, and I was happy to be on a
distant river ignoring my life.
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A fish
hit hard on the inside of the main current and was into the backing before I
fully grasped the idea that I’d hooked a steelhead. By then it was halfway down the run, where I
could see the guide reeling in and backing out of the river to avoid fouling my
line. This felt like a heavy fish (they
all feel heavy at first), but with any luck, time would tell. I settled into the precarious sense of
well-being that you don’t have to describe to another steelheader and can’t
describe to anyone else.
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The way
we use it now, “wilderness” is a word that has more to do with emotion than
with a specific definition. Saying
“wilderness” is like saying “great singer,” which could mean anyone from
Luciano Pavarotti to Johnny Cash. But
one thing it can mean is a region that’s still so vast, wet, roadless, and
remote that you need a floatplane to get around in it.
………………
I’m
still one of those anglers Thomas McGuane once described as “searching less for
recreation than for a kind of stillness.”
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Fishermen
on the water are always aware of how others are doing, even though we make a
show of seeming not to notice.
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The
intelligence of trout is overrated, but once they’ve been caught and released
often enough, it must start to dawn on them that their once-carefree lives are
now plagued by booby traps. Even when
you end up hooking a confidently feeding trout, you can’t shake the feeling
that he wasn’t entirely fooled by your fly.
You’ll see the fish slow down, rise cautiously, hesitate, and then nail
the fly as if he were trying to snatch something out of a fire without getting
burned.
………………
Every
body of water has its idiosyncrasies.
Learning them takes time and attentiveness, but finally leads to the
rare and useful sense of knowing where you are and what you’re doing.
………………
Trout
often live in beautiful places, and if you feel like stopping to look, you
should. It’s not like you’re wasting
time. Soon enough you’ll be back to scanning
the surface of the lake the way a general surveys a battlefield.
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There
are few prolonged flawless performances in fishing, but a handful of trout
caught in the same careful way are enough.
They make up for a whole day’s worth of blown casts and flushed fish,
and maybe even for a lifetime spent chasing trout. After all, that’s why we fish: for those days
when it goes right and you think, this is all I could have hoped for.
………………
Since
fly-fishing is a solitary sport, it’s hard not to think of other fishermen –
collectively, if not individually – as the enemy. The best advice you can give either a
fisherman or a writer is: don’t do what everyone else does. Avoid clichés.
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Locals
have a certain disdain for out-of-town fishermen. They understand that we do a lot to support
the local economy by renting rooms and buying groceries and trout flies, but
they’d really rather we just stayed home and mailed in the money.
………………
We
caught fish for a while and were then left with the prospect of a few slow
hours, which is pretty much the standard profile for any day of fishing. None of us is any more philosophical about
this than the next guy, but we have gotten past the pipe dream of nonstop
action.
………………
Sometimes
before going to work, a cabinetmaker will quizzically heft and stroke an oak
plank as though he’s never seen a piece of wood before. Likewise, a certain kind of fisherman can
watch a run for the longest time before tying on a fly and making a cast. This is a universal ritual of craftsmanship:
take a deep breath; don’t rush; erase preconceptions. Or maybe they’re both reminding themselves
that mastery of anything is sometimes a matter of seeing the silver lining in
what a less creative thinker would consider a disadvantage.
………………
The
days when you could think of the natural world as immutable may well be coming
to an end, and regular fishing trips are now like blue jeans: just when they
start to get nice and comfortable, the knees blow out. The only alternative to living with regret is
to go looking for new water.
………………
My guide got the net under him.
He was a big double-handful with an orange belly and white-bordered fins
wearing the universal dumbstruck expression of a caught fish.
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Trout have their passing moods, but salmon seem prone to something
more akin to manic depression: violent one minute, catatonic the next.
………………
Trying to catch a salmon is like playing with a cat: the rules
change without notice, and your problem is often nothing more than a failure of
imagination.
………………
He was amazed that he’d had a close brush with such a fish. He was naturally heartbroken about not
landing it, but also saw it as an adventure in possibility, so he’d been
fishing with that vision in mind ever since, not really believing he’d hook
that same fish or another like it again, but not entirely resigned that he
wouldn’t, either.
………………
Fly-fishing isn’t as hard as some make it out to be, but it does
demand your full attention, so if you’re worried that your investments are
going south or that your wife is cheating on you, chances are you won’t fish
well. It sounds like heresy, but there
really are days when you should have stayed home to take care of business
instead of going fishing.
………………
I almost always fish better with friends or when I’m alone and
unobserved than when there are strangers around – especially strangers who stop
to watch or, worse yet, train a camera on me.
………………
Fishing is still an oddly passive-aggressive business that depends
on the prey being the aggressor.
………………
I find it a constant struggle to live with the kind of simplicity
that eliminates struggle. All I can do
is keep reminding myself that Lee Wulff once said, “the last thing you should
change is your fly,” which is good advice that’s easier to follow when you
don’t have five hundred flies to choose from.
………………
(On canvas fly fishing vests “with twelve
pockets on the outside and eight more on the inside, each with more pockets
than the previous one in case I needed them, which I somehow always did.”)
Nature abhors an empty pocket.
So does the tackle industry.
………………
Sooner
or later, everyone who writes about fishing gets around to talking about why
they do it. In the real world, those who
fish already get it, and those who don’t couldn’t care less. It’s not exactly a secret society or
anything; but really, if you want to talk about the trip of a lifetime to some
remote river, don’t waste your breath on someone who doesn’t fish.
………………
A lifetime of fishing runs through your mind when you look at new
water.
………………
King salmon are appallingly strong.
It sounds overwrought to say that you can feel the ocean in a hooked
salmon, but there’s no other way to put it.
The fish has your complete attention, and you believe you’ll remember
every second of the fight with unnatural clarity, right down to the
pewter-colored sky and the cool drizzle on the backs of your hands. But memory survives as a series of snapshots,
some of which get misplaced, so although I still clearly remember the fish in
the net, I’m now no longer sure how it got there.
………………
(On the excitement of cradling a king salmon “the
size of a ’52 Buick’s chrome bumper” countered in the bewildering moment by an
opposing disappointment - or electronic misfortune - of discovering that each
of three trip cameras are plagued with dead batteries.)
The four of us stood there with current whispering around our
waders, reminding ourselves that the salmon is not the photo of the salmon,
which will never quite stand up to the living memory anyway. The salmon is the salmon itself, here and
gone so fleetingly that half an hour later you’ll wonder if it was even real.
………………
Two mornings and two provinces later I’d board the first of two
small planes with pontoons instead of wheels, and the rod tube would begin to
seem less like an awkwardly shaped object I had to lug around and more like the
key to the universe.
………………
(On the love of travelling by car through America’s
Mountain West. “Even though the
distances can be daunting, the destination sometimes days away...” the author
reminds himself “that tourists make this trip for its own sake.”)
Driving anywhere in the West is like traveling by hot-air balloon:
it takes forever to get anywhere, but you can’t beat the view.
………………
(On targeting any sea-run fish, and coming to appreciate
the grind of repetitive casting “as a kind of moral imperative” or a “reward of
persistence,” albeit a fisherman “never entirely comes to terms with the dead
spells in steelheading.”)
When swinging flies is unproductive, the accepted solution is to
keep swinging flies, fishing out every cast as if this were the one, because it
could be.
………………
It’s hard to describe the physics and tactics of landing a fish
beyond that when a fish does something, you do nothing, and when the fish does
nothing, you do something. It’s fair to
say that if you play it too hard, you’ll lose it, and you’ll also lose it if
you don’t play it hard enough. There are
those who say they fish to relax, but how can you relax when there’s so much at
stake?
………………
(On netting a “six-pound male brook trout built
like a cinder block with a humped back, wearing his best orange spawning
colors” on the George River in Quebec.)
This was a prosperous fish in his prime, and if he had a thought in
his head, it was only to pass on his blue-ribbon genes. After I released him, the French-Canadian guide
shook my hand as if I’d just won a Pulitzer Prize, which is more or less how I
felt.
………………
I went down to look at the river and stood there wondering how I
could so dearly love something that’s really just an example of water obeying
the laws of physics.
………………
Like everyone else I know, I had plenty of things to do besides go
fishing; I just couldn’t think of any of them at the moment.
………………
I’m standing just upstream of the lodge owner, watching him throw a
spoon four times farther than I can cast my fly and feeling a little
nervous. His cast is high and across the
wind so that the trailing monofilament describes a graceful, parabolic
curve. As one of only four fishermen in
who knows how many thousands of square miles, I’d feel really stupid if we got
tangled up.
………………
It is almost impossible to explain to someone who doesn’t fish, but
every angler understands that if you don’t retrieve a fly as if it matters,
then it no longer matters.
………………
(On fishing for char at the edge of the
Canadian Arctic tundra.)
I’ve eaten lots of fish in lots of places, often as fresh as it
comes, but the char from this river are the best I’ve ever had. Given the cost of getting here and back,
these fish constitute the most expensive meals I’ve ever eaten, but that’s
somehow beside the point. The point is
that if there’s one fish in the river, there are more, so a mess of them for
dinner suddenly looks more promising.
………………
“There’s a nice fish.” The
comment seems so out of context that it doesn’t register at first. I haven’t been paying attention, and although
I just made yet another cast on autopilot, I don’t know where my fly is,
either. I frantically scan the water in
front of me. It’s perfectly transparent
for the first twenty or thirty feet, but beyond that it’s the same opaque gray
as the sky and stippled with raindrops.
I make the first strip in some time that’s lively instead of languid,
then two shorter ones, and the fly stops as definitively as if I’d hooked a
log. I make a short, hard set, and the
fish bores off back toward the main current, angling downstream. I get two fingers into my reel spool to act
as a soft break and begin backing out of the water so I can chase the fish
downstream. My legs are stiff enough
from the cold that they don’t seem entirely under my control, but I manage to
get out of the river without falling. I
can’t believe I’ve hooked a fish. I’m
also painfully aware that I hooked this one by accident while daydreaming, so
in some pure-sports sense I probably don’t reserve it, but I want it
anyway. Of course you naturally want to
land every fish you hook, but you want it even more when you’ve come a long
way, frozen your ass off, and were convinced up until ten seconds ago that you
were in the process of getting skunked.
………………
After a
certain point everyone’s life is informed by loss. It’s not surprising, but it’s still a
surprise. The permanence of it feels
like a life sentence, and there’s always an echo of selfish regret: if there
was anything that could have been made right, it’s too late now, and it always
will be. For one
thing, Mom now joined the growing number of dead people in my address book
whose names I don’t have the heart to cross out and who may eventually come to
outnumber the living.
………………
It’s hard to describe, but there’s a specific feeling of finality when the fishing is done for the day.
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