Why does the angler angle? (excerpt from "The Song of the Angler")

The year 1967 chanced A.J. McClane to huddle over the rackety hammering of a typewriter some evening.  A Renaissance man of the angling world was steadfast in a silent recollection, save a soft parade of fingers triggering an alphabet of keys into provoking the mechanical, striking sound of typebars as they transcribed his storied, four-plus decades of angling tenure onto paper.  With each thought, words assembled into sentences, as return by each carriage return branded to page that which merely bled from his veins of experience, and with it, the testimony of a life appeared to multiply upon the eclipsing memoir before him as if spontaneous generation were at all possible.  What he must have humbly pulled from the roller embodied the hallmark of one life’s experiences in having fished 140 different countries in a remarkable variety of fresh and saltwater environments.  It was his unyielding defense, answered complete.   He titled his piece of writing “The Song of the Angler.”  At last imprinted to paper, was a single man’s articulate attempt at detailing what he witnessed in color and experienced in sensation as ample rationale in elucidating elemental justifications to a question posed of non-anglers - why fish? 

For McClane, angling was as natural as breathing the air that surrounded him.   There was never the hint of any why.  He knew of no better reason not to. 

Whether you will agree with all, most, some, or none of McClane’s reasoning is entirely up to you, the individual angler.  That, is the entire premise of his plea.  That angling, and what it meant to him, spooled solely upon the reel of his own heart and twinkled upon the arbor of his eyes.  Its story, a retrieval of ritual and people and places and favor he held dearest.  Yet, similarities of interest, pursuit, or experience overlap in the largest sense, such that each individual pair of hands clenching at the lower-end of a rod with eyes set asea or those cast downstream through the curves of towering canyon or impasse of snow-capped mountain or vista of infinite plain, over rounded river rock and wind-combed leafy limb, before babbling or whitecapped water, blazing sun or star-studded sky, each will have understood those indisputable, universal musical notes we hear emanating from the symphony of life as being one immersed with Nature.  What genre of music one chooses as an angler is entirely self-determined. 

Perhaps, it is only the angler himself who knows exactly why he angles, but for each rising of the rod tip, there sounds yet another note of music enjoyed.  Plucking at the heartstrings are those “caudal confessions, tides of talking, and angles of life” awaiting to flood through the angler’s eyes.  His ever-lasting, magnificent score, the song of the angler.

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(excerpt)

People often ask me why I enjoy fishing, and I cannot explain it to them because there is no reason in the way they want meanings described.  They are asking a man why he enjoys breathing when he really has no choice but to wonder at its truth. There are pundits who believe that the rod provides an outlet for our hostilities, our frustrated egos, or our competitive instincts, or that it symbolizes the primitive feelings of a man in his search for food, ergo the need to kill.  To a degree I believe all these qualities exist in every participant in any sport, and if so, healthfully so, as it is far more harmless to vent one’s spleen on a trout stream or a golf course than on one’s fellow man.  However, if this assumption is logical, then the rationale of angling is still without explanation.

Angling is a robe that a man wears proudly.  It is tightly woven in a fabric of moral, social, and philosophical threads which are not easily rent by the violent climate of our times.  It is foolish to think, as it has been said, that all men who fish are good men, as evil exists on all of life’s paths, but I would argue that life is a greater challenge than death, and that reality is as close as the nearest river.  Perhaps an exceptional angler doesn’t prove the rule, but then anglers are exceptional people.

What are the rewards of angling? A dead fish? A trophy? At some point perhaps, but then it takes years to become an angler.  There are tidal marks in our development.  In the beginning, when one is very young and inexperienced, fish are measured in quantity.  Then, only quality becomes important.  Eventually even record fish lose their significance unless they are of a particular species, and ultimately the size doesn’t matter provided they are difficult to catch.

Psychologists tell us that one reason why we enjoy fishing is because it is an escape.  This is meaningless.  True, a man who works in the city wants to “escape” to the country, but the clinical implication is that (no matter where a man lives), he seeks to avoid reality.  This is as obtuse as the philosophical doctrine which holds that no reality exists outside the mind.

Perhaps it’s the farm boy in me, but I would apply Aristotelian logic – the chicken came before the egg because it is real and the egg is only potential.  By the same reasoning the fluid content of a stream is nothing but water when it erupts from a city faucet, but given shores it becomes a river, and as a river it is perfectly capable of creating life, and therefore it is real.  It is not a sewer, nor a conveyor of barges and lumber, although it can be pressed to these burdens and, indeed, as a living thing it can also become lost in its responsibilities.

So if escapism is a reason for angling – then the escape is to reality.  The sense of freedom that we enjoy in the outdoors is, after all, a normal reaction to a more rational environment.

Who but an angler knows that magic hour when the red lamp of summer drops behind blackening hemlocks and the mayflies emerge from the dull folds of their nymphal robes to dance in ritual as old as the river itself?  Trout appear one by one and the angler begins his game in movements as stylized as Japanese poetry.  Perhaps he will hook that wonder-spotted rogue, or maybe he will remain in silent pantomime long into the night with no visible reward.

That, Professor, is why anglers really angle.

- A.J. McClane (1967)

The Most Important Fish In The Sea

Once again, the quartet of seasons, remembered fondly of their respective months, and the three hundred and sixty-five individual risings of sun that seamlessly united each have all but fully-ebbed of our yearlong seaside pursuits and experiences, leaving much to be thankful for in the faraway footprints of sand we amassed in 2016 as surfcasters.  

All-in-all, it was a great year.  One whisked of finned-abundance adorned by various surf-sought species, both inshore and pelagic.  One tempered of routine clockwork in having timed tides with rod-bending hook-sets.  For me, it was especially highlighted by the predominant appearance of a high-quality, keeper-sized Striper stock, and with that, even a (released) personal-best of 40.5" and a haunting (barbless) hook-spit of a powerfully-running Striper of equal or better stature.  A season spent from bulkheads, rocks, and sand that I can only credit with such teeming predatory opportunities due to my observance of those very nervous schools of fish we so affectionately welcome upon our sight when scouting and casting from the wash of waves that distinguish the crashing bounds of another world.  Of theirs.  The mighty little Brevoortia Tyrannus.  Our Atlantic Menhaden, “the most important fish in the sea.” 

And with the Bunker’s bounty, it wasn’t just surfcasters, Stripers, and Bluefish savoring at their presence in respectably-sized pods.  I witnessed diving Ospreys and Gulls, harassing hunts by Dolphins, and full-on buffets breached of open-mouthed Humpback and Fin Whales.  What’s more, schools of juvenile Peanuts found summer-residence in our tidal rivers that rivaled the size of football fields.  All showcased an ecosystem of sea life, that when left unaltered by the economic and egregious consumptions spearheaded of mankind, appeared almost natural again.

The Menhaden will certainly always fall victim as a pawn to man’s endeavors, be it for livestock and aquaculture feed, pet food meal, or industries such as linoleum production and cosmetics, but I whole-heartedly credit those who fight incessantly, tooth-and-nail, for legalized harvest reductions of the biomass.  For sanity.  Voices like those heard from MenhadenDefenders.org who, collectively, as fishermen and biologists, advocate for causes beset of the fellow recreational angler by empowering delegation before various advisory committees seen before the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC).

Someone has to have the back of the moss-back.  Just like the 2016 season saw and the few years before, it’ll bring back finned-life to the surf that depends on this crucial ingredient to the ocean’s inshore food-pyramid and dramatic displays of predation.  Marine life, as it should be.  Without them, we’ll just be holding expensive sticks on the beach.  Save today’s Bunker, beach tomorrow’s lunker. 

The Most Important Fish In The Sea: Menhaden and America - a must-read by author H. Bruce Franklin (Island Press/Shearwater 2007)

Merry Fishmas!

This is a layout I put together today arranged in the spirit of the season and the Christmas holiday with us surfcasters in mind.  Best wishes to all for a safe and happy holiday season!  May 2017 bring us continued prosperity.

I hope there are others also who don’t mind rivers...

A River Runs Through It, written by Norman Maclean in 1976, is a 104-page semi-autobiographical account of the author’s relationship with his younger brother Paul and their upbringing in an early 20th-century Montana family in which "there was no clear line between religion and fly-fishing."  The story served as his first publication ever, which he penned at the age of 70.  As a “noted authority” on freshwater angling, his self-described “children’s story too long to tell children” was set upon the banks and freestone rocks of a river falling westward from the peak of the U.S. Continental Divide.  The passages of this novel are noted for his detailed use of fly-fishing descriptions and technique, seen both as a practicing avocation and a poetically-inspired art-form whisking in its graceful movements overhead.  For its principal nature of bonding two brothers with Nature and engaging the reader with a number of profound metaphysical questions only asked of the self while wading within a world of water and sounds and canyons. 

The following excerpts are those I paused to reflect upon or reread in curiosity and admiration after finding myself hooked by a larger-than-life simplicity written in prose or poetic aspect of an angling appeal painted in colorful imagery.  By a man’s chosen words, fished of his native waters and whispered from those surrounding mountains he knew so well.  Ultimately, by those confluences flowing where the two separate existences that are life and fishing are sometimes seen swirling and circling back upon themselves, trapped, suspended, or withheld, if only momentarily, within inspiring eddies of time.  I hope there are others also who don’t mind rivers.

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Below him was the multitudinous river, and, where the rock had parted it around him, big-grained vapor rose.  The mini-molecules of water left in the wake of his line made momentary loops of gossamer, disappearing so rapidly in the rising big-grained vapor that they had to be retained in memory to be visualized as loops.  The spray emanating from him was finer-grained still and enclosed him in a halo of himself.  The halo of himself was always there and always disappearing, as if he were candlelight flickering about three inches from himself.  The images of himself and his line kept disappearing into the rising vapors of the river, which continually circled to the tops of the cliffs where, after becoming a wreath in the wind, they became rays of the sun.

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Shockingly, immensity would return as the Big Blackfoot and the air above it became iridescent with the arched sides of a great Rainbow.

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Something within fishermen tries to make fishing into a world perfect and apart… many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and waiting for the world to become perfect.

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Fishing is a world created apart from all others, and inside it are special worlds of their own – one is fishing for big fish in small water where there is not enough world and water to accommodate a fish and a fisherman, and the willows on the side of the creek are all against the fisherman. 

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You can’t catch fish if you don’t dare go where they are.

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The cast is so soft and slow that it can be followed like an ash settling from a fireplace chimney.  One of life’s quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly becoming the author of something beautiful, even if it is only a floating ash.

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The body and spirit suffer no more sudden visitation than that of losing a big fish, since, after all, there must be some slight transition between life and death.  But, with a big fish, one moment the world is nuclear and the next it has disappeared.  That’s all.  It has gone.  The fish has gone and you are extinct, except for four and a half ounces of stick to which is tied some line and a semitransparent thread of catgut to which is tied a little curved piece of Swedish steel to which is tied a part of a feather from a chicken’s neck.

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That’s one trouble with hanging around a master – you pick up some of his stuff, like how to cast into a bush, but you use it just when the master is doing the opposite.

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What a wonderful world it was once.  At least a river of it was.  What a wonderful world it was once when all the beer was not made in Milwaukee, Minneapolis, or St. Louis.

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Out of the lifeless and hopeless depths, life appeared.  He came so slowly it seemed as if he and history were being made on the way.

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I sat there and forgot and forgot, until what remained was the river that went by and I who watched.  On the river the heat mirages danced with each other and then they danced through each other and then they joined hands and danced around each other.  Eventually the watcher joined the river, and there was only one of us.  I believe it was the river.

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…part of the way to come to know a thing is through its death.

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On a hot afternoon the mind can also create fish and arrange them according to the way it has just made the river.  The mind can make all these arrangements, but of course the fish do not always observe them.

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I did not know that stories of life are often more like rivers than books.  But I knew a story had begun, perhaps long ago near the sound of water.

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The fisherman even has a phrase to describe to describe what he does when he studies the patterns of a river.  He says he is “reading the water,” and perhaps to tell his stories he has to do much the same thing.  Then one of his biggest problems is to guess where and at what time of day life lies ready to be taken as a joke.  And to guess whether it is going to be a little or a big joke.  For all of us, though, it is much easier to read the waters of tragedy.

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A fisherman, though, takes a hangover as a matter of course – after a couple of hours of fishing, it goes away, all except the dehydration, but then he is standing all day in water.

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They had spent a year under water on legs, had crawled out on a rock, had become flies and copulated with the ninth and tenth segments of their abdomens, and then had died as the first light wind blew them into the water where the fish circled excitedly.  They were a fish’s dream come true – stupid, succulent, and exhausted from copulation.  Still, it would be hard to know what gigantic portion of human life is spent in the same ratio of years under water on legs to one premature, exhausted moment on wings.

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From where I was I suppose I couldn’t see what happened, but my heart was at the end of the line and telegraphed back its impressions as it went by.  My general impression was that marine life had turned into a rodeo.  My particular information was that a large Rainbow had gone sun-fishing, turning over twice in the air, hitting my line each time and tearing loose from the fly which went sailing out into space.  My distinct information was that it never looked around to see.  My only close-at-hand information was that when the line was reeled in, there was nothing on the end of it but some cork and some hairs from a horse’s tail.

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When I was young, a teacher had forbidden me to say “more perfect” because she said if a thing is perfect it can’t be more so.  But by now I had seen enough of life to have regained my confidence in it.

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“All there is to thinking,” he said, “is seeing something noticeable which makes you see something you weren't noticing which makes you see something that isn't even visible.”

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...it is not fly fishing if you are not looking for answers to questions.

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The voices of the subterranean river in the shadows were different from the sunlit river ahead.  In the shadows against the cliff the river was deep and engaged in profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over to be sure it had understood itself.  But the river ahead came out into the sunny world like a chatterbox, doing its best to be friendly.  It bowed to one shore and then to the other so nothing would feel neglected.

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Then the universe stepped on its third rail.  The wand jumped convulsively as it made contact with the magic current of the world.  The wand tried to jump out of the man’s right hand.  His left hand seemed to be frantically waving good-bye to a fish, but actually was trying to throw enough line into the rod to reduce the voltage and ease the shock of what had struck.

Everything seemed electrically charged but electrically unconnected.  Electrical sparks appeared here and there on the river.  A fish jumped so far downstream that it seemed outside the man’s electrical field, but, when the fish had jumped, the man had leaned back on the rod and it was then that the fish had toppled back into the water not guided in its reentry by itself.  The connections between the convulsions and the sparks became clearer by repetition.  When the man leaned back on the wand and the fish reentered the water not altogether under its own power, the wand recharged with convulsions, the man’s hand waved frantically at another departure, and much farther below a fish jumped again.  Because of the connections, it became the same fish.

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…the man had quickly raised his rod high and skidded him to shore before the fish thought about getting under water again.  He skidded him across the rocks clear back to a sandbar before the shocked fish gasped and discovered he could not live in oxygen.  In belated despair, he rose in the sand and consumed the rest of momentary life dancing the dance of Death on his tail.  The man put the wand down, got on his hands and knees in the sand, and, like an animal, circled another animal and waited.

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Then he told me, “In the part I was reading it says the Word was in the beginning, and that’s right.  I used to think water was first, but if you listen carefully you will hear that the words are underneath the water.”

“That’s because you are a preacher first and then a fisherman,” I told him.  “If you ask Paul, he will tell you that the words are formed out of the water.”

“No,” my father said, “you are not listening carefully.  The water runs over the words.”

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Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.

Ten Years Gone

Maybe, she was the first one finished that day.  Or perhaps, she was the last labor of love handled before a pair of hands paused to unpack a brown-bag lunch.  It could have even been that the work-clock struck “that’s a wrap,” and the family-owned builder’s doors closed upon having crossed all final touches that constitute their holy custom of hand-assembled creation.  After yet another saintly shift of men and women aligned, in the light, to bind blank materials into the bending-benefit experienced of anglers the world over.  An hour, in the evening, that sealed the ending of the ordinary for some, but rather birthed the extraordinary for some unknown some-one.  True, it may have simply been a setting of sun that was preceded by fifty-eight years (at the time) of those very same resin-ating, time-honored traditions of molding excellence and issuing parabolic-passports to other worlds-wet by cork-taping the fulcrums of fish-finding freedom, but it was of some achieving hour imprinted of October during 2006 when the hands of a craftsman carefully set aside the final and freshly-fitted standing-length of a gleaming, graphite-dream.  One aching to begin the arcing life.  A celebration day, that the expert craftsmen, engineers, and designers who all humbly huddle between those honored walls and work under that legendary roof in Park Falls fell inspired to anoint with a unique name for their newest, avid kin.  She was to be introduced as FJ00689.  Measuring at a respectable ten-feet in length and weighing a healthy eleven-point-four ounces, every adorned feature of her tapered figure embodied the handcrafted pride of inspired imagination braved from a workshop in Wisconsin. 

Whatever the case, I’ll never know.  What matters most, is that a star was born that day.  Of a star.  One rebirthed, to spiral wrap and layer as the integral element of her graphite backbone.  Carbon, reshaped as an agile authenticator of Newton’s third law of motion (for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction).  A slender and sleek super-model that demonstrated such with every loaded cast it rocketed from shore like an arrow fired into the sky from a drawn bow.  A veritable slingshot crafted of the very fabric of atoms that were formed through nuclear fusion as the reactionary byproduct of stellar nucleosynthesis once burning deep in the belly of a now extinct star.  Thus, to really fancy over it, one of the best rods on Earth was eventually distilled from those very seconds spanning the universe’s evolutionary infancy marking the beginning of scientific time.  So, it may have been a near-eternity in the making, but I obligingly learned that she was worth the wait. 

By her very nature, it only seemed fitting then, that this surfcaster grew to know his accomplice best under star-light, where she shined most-frequently of a bending-benefit.  Those untold and unforgettable outings seasoned of salt and sand when the battling-bow of her spine and straining genuflection before the giving sea and pulsing tip startled alive by turning-tugs pulling within the tumbling wave and my white-knuckle grip frozen unto her upper-handle of cork were those shaking slices of time won of a bonding virtue.  Those innumerable, intransigent instances of influence she beached forever onto the banks of memory. 

Ten years gone.  The thousands and thousands of casts.  Dare I even imagine how many miles have unspooled through her concentric holds of ceramic.  Those polished passageways which have effectively guided me before waters gin-clear and steely-gray and Jersey-green.  Each faraway heave or short fling, a toss that tickled her to speak of swish-sounds as spiraling braid spewed into those haunts familiar or spilled before latitudes new and mysterious and afar.  One then inhaling silently to take it all back in.  A night-stick, bending always for those slopes sandy and drumming of pounding waves or trickling of wash by the seaside.  Of the ocean.  The Hook.  Harbors.  Sounds.  Flats.  Inlets.  Riverside.  Atop an esteemed grassy-knoll.  Over hills and dunes far away.  Road-trips to the stone-strewn forefronts of submerged boulder fields.  Baptisms adventured of storied, east-coast meccas.  Montauk.  Islands.  Before the houses of the holy.  Nearest the stairways of surfcasting heaven. 

Beside angling strangers.  In the silent company of friends.  With friends no longer with us.  Alongside my father.  In the whisper of midnight conversation disrupted by laughter.  Among calls yelling, “they’re over here!”  Among points out to sea indicating, “they’re way out there.”  Under the informing swarms and swoops of feathered fishing-finding shrieks fluttering in-front in-range.  Posed in a fish-hoisting picture.  Balanced in-hand or rested over shoulder.  Broken down in-car or mounted upright to front-bumper.  Laid upon grass or settled over sand.  Always asked of one last cast.      

Among blitzes and between blow-outs of weather.  In drenching rain and season-ending snow.  Of good times, of bad times.  Snapped of line.  Snagged a many lure.  Gone lifeless to lost battles.  Beached beauties.  Substantiator of, the epic.  Chased bait-balls, pinpointed boils, cheered-on blow-ups, and aimed toward tail-slaps.  Pursued invariably under soaking summer sun and subtle shadow of autumnal moon and constellations of twinkling light and grey-colored, low-pressure bellies pressing of childhood imagination.

Through showers of salt.  The wearing and tearing.  Those drops, grazes, bangs, scratches, scrapes, chips, and crashes.  Tolls cast to time.  Freshwater wash-downs and soapy cleanings.  Safe, tucked-away leanings.  Inert winter hibernations.  Readying spring dustings.  An eventual reunion of two, agreeing sections.  The engagement proposal of a reel.  The rhythm of that first-cast made again.  All of that, and so much more.  A whole lotta love.  For the reverence of a rod held in-hand.  For a purebred.  A mid-western-made medicine.  An arcing elixir of graphite-fed adrenalin.  For dreams that may finally be witnessed in colors littoral and living.  You shook me.  Your song will forever remain the same.  Thank you.

They're Here

It happens one night during October.  When dreams are lulled to drift the reaches of your mind made by the whispers of water escaping from a surrounding sea.  By the siren of swells and rhythms that rise in swallowing wave from the silence of infinite blackness whence they came.  Time looms above, twinkling of its endless size, casting down her clearest of invitation to fall lost within the magnitude of a skyward-seizing moment.  To wander amongst the nebulae of dust powdering the very same pathway of discovery marked of fallen footsteps by untold generations of flesh come before.  To feel reduced in size, in order to gainfully grow.  For this celestial survey cast trillions of miles away across the existence of eternity.  At pinholes of light, like scattered grains of salt spilled upon the table of the heavens.  Of dark-adapted eyes conjuring revelations from concealment.  Of clustered constellations fabled and worshipped of seafaring ancients.  For the catching moment when distractions of thought and sight are lured by a streaking Orionid meteor raining rapidly from an expanse of the eastern abyss.  That cosmic-captive of billions-of-years whose fateful flash of escape only ricochets this rim of emptiness that is furthest of time’s origins billions of light-years away.  A profound pronouncement of presence only to vanish of its very presence in this world above a beam of eyes casting below, casting over all.  This chance encounter becoming of your sling of sight a breath of shining color from the vast black nothingness.  One witnessed as happenstance, shooting from the heavens.

Without warning, your rod bends hard and then you know.  They’re here.  Suddenly, immeasurable distances drawn of space and time instantly coalesce to exist only as the infinitely-small distance drawn of taut-line now separating you from the sight of breathing-color.  One of fins that may briefly, if not spectacularly, illuminate your night.  She too, has pronounced a presence, pulling from her expansive abyss, of a nomadic life invited only by this otherworldly nature of night.  One shining of streaking-colors shooting laterally amongst a vastness of spilled-salt looming over your whispering universe of sand.   One flashing at the epicenter of your own striking, celestial retrieval.  One witnessed as fortune, flopping from the starlit shallows.