As unnerving as this type of thing can be, it’s the natural downside of anything that is pursued passionately over any length of time. If worse comes to worst and I give in to my peevish irritation, make good my threat to quit, no one will be the loser except for me. But it’s one thing to give up something cherished through your own free will, quite another to have something cherished taken away from you by force.
Let me backtrack here to an incident that happened this summer. I was teaching at a writer’s conference, feeling, as you do at these things, that I was a minnow of some small knowledge pursued by voracious muskellunge hungry for same. To escape, I went fishing. A few miles from the campus is a surprisingly good trout stream, replete with pools and riffles that stay cold even in July. I fished it regularly for a week, got into some nice browns each morning (including a monster that broke off during a thunderstorm I had no right being out in—but that’s another story), enjoyed some Vermont scenery at its most pastoral, and in general had a delicious time. On the seventh day, though the water was just as perfect and clear, I caught nothing. Walking back to my car, puzzled, I saw a highway crew leaning over a bridge downstream of the stretch I’d fished; they had long-handled nets with them, and were leaning over the water to scoop up dead, colorless trout, tossing them into their truck as if they were cans of Budweiser thrown there by slobs.
The explanation wasn’t long in coming. A valve had been turned the wrong way at the municipal swimming pool six miles upstream, releasing chlorine and other chemicals into the river, killing upwards of fifteen thousand fish—demonstrating, among other things, how even the clearest trout stream is nothing more than another pipe in our municipal waste system; one twist of the dial and trout, mystique, and purity are all flushed away.
Now it seems to me this episode is both a perfect literal description and a perfect metaphor for the present condition of American trout fishing. There I was fishing that gloriously pristine river, oblivious to the fact the water that shined so brilliantly was in reality poisoned—that the browns I had caught earlier in the week and released so carefully were now being hauled off to the dump. We cherish our traditions, do the best we can to leave no imprint on the stream, and despite our best efforts the water is dying anyway, to the point where we realize how pathetic the enterprise has become, and fish less often, and eventually find excuses not to face this irony at all.
People whose backs are against the wall, pressed hard enough, will eventually lash out with their fists, and if there’s any good news to be had in the depressing roll call of environmental catastrophe, it is this: that lovers of nature, flyfishers among them, are beginning to fight back. I have a friend who spends many hours each week working on behalf of Trout Unlimited, traveling around the country spreading their message of wise and measured use of our fishery resources. I have another friend who puts his talents as a lawyer to use in suing those who would dam and harness every molecule of moving water they can find. Still another friend, while having neither the time nor temperament to work so aggressively, goes out of his way to contribute money to conservation organizations, and isn’t shy about lambasting senators, representatives, and wardens for the primitive fishing regulations still in effect. I have another friend—a real favorite—who does none of these things, but fights underground, pouring syrup into the tanks of bulldozers he comes upon deep in the forest, ripping out survey stakes, and in general making good use of those monkey-wrenching tactics made famous by the late, great Edward Abbey.
There are those who would shake their heads at my last friend, counsel moderation, but I am not one of them. It is clear, after a century of lip service to “conservation” matched by environmental disasters of unparalleled scope that the time has come for those who care for natural beauty to think in terms of revolution, consider using the guerrilla hit-and-run tactics that are a prelude to any full-scale revolt. While it’s certain the bulk of measurable results are being garnered by friends one and two, supported by the dollars of friend three, it’s equally clear it’s time to start adopting the tactics of friend four, to see whether civil disobedience might not be more effective. The environmental movement needs its radical left, and not only that, but a radical right, an organization that would fight with the same fanatic devotion for the fish lobby (with over seventy-five million fishermen on this continent, how formidable it would be!) with the same fanatic devotion as the NRA fights for the gun lobby.
Me, I’ve torn down my share of survey ribbons in my day, finding the little shredding tug as they come apart to be among nature’s most delightful sensations. But still, at my age, in my circumstances, I haven’t yet grown into the radical I aspire to become when my courage matures. Those who write of nature in this country are given a different task: to carefully explain what it is in beauty that is worth saving, and thereby give those who fight in the trenches a clearer sight of what they defend.
Add that to the list of devastation wrought by developers and highway builders and politicians and our own wasteful sloth: that even someone who writes about something as innocent as fishing must adopt the vocabulary of apocalypse and confrontation, deviate as far from the pastoral style of a Charles Cotton—patron saint of fly fishing—as our threatened streams differ from his untroubled Dove. To be written honestly in this day and age, a fishing book has to acknowledge the threats squarely, or hide behind a nostalgic obscuration—has to take on an edge, as it were, and sacrifice a portion of its lyricism to the hard blade of truth.
A portion—but not all. If nothing else in this book, I hope I’ve conveyed the delights flyfishers can find in the practice of their incredibly simple, incredibly sophisticated art. Here at the end it seems appropriate to be quite explicit about what prompts me to spend a good portion of half the year trying to convince trout and bass and pike the bauble I am floating across their narrow cone of vision is in reality a morsel of food—to make, as an affirmation of faith, a list of the reasons I fish. For convenience, I will separate out the constituent motives, and not only that, try to rank them in order of personal importance, but only with the disclaimer that in fishing, like life, everything comes in one overwhelming jumble, lists and categories be damned.
Why, then, fish?
1. Geographic Discovery
A real surprise for starters, a very personal reason, and one I didn’t appreciate the force of until I sat down to make this list. Simply stated, the prime motivation for my fishing is to explore rivers, lakes, oceans, and ponds—explore them, in my small way, like La Salle or Champlain or one of those early explorers whose eyes had first crack at this continent; explore with a global kind of curiosity the small hidden corners of the world.
In practice, this works on two modest levels: my continually wanting to try new rivers, not so much to discover whether they have any fish, but simply to see where they go; my returning again and again to familiar water, to explore it a little further, try that pool that’s always been a little too remote. The first has resulted in many happy discoveries of places I would never have seen without fishing as my ostensible purpose (for instance, the wild scrub forest of Cape Cod, which I stumbled into in my pursuit of its elusive salter trout); the second, in my continual amazement at how the familiar can yield so much that is brand-new (yesterday on the Waits, again stumbling, I came upon a small tributary that doesn’t appear on any map).
I have a deep curiosity about land and waterscape, which, trace it back far enough, probably has something to do with the infant Wetherell’s delight in exploring the steadily expanding boundaries of cradle, bassinet, nursery, and yard. It’s almost impossible to exaggerate the adult dimensions of this delight; I want to swallow terrain whole, sink my teeth into it, so when I travel, even to a stream half a mile away, I’m possessed by a restlessness and curiosity that both propels me and leaves me drained. It has another, sadder effect: it makes me a much worse fisherman than I would be if I could linger with more patience. Sure the trout are rising right there in the pool ahead of me,
but what is that compared to the allure of the canyon or waterfall that might be around the next bend?
Closely allied to geographic discovery is the exploration of time; indeed, it would be more accurate to speak of the space-time continuum in all the above. Time of day is one of the things a fisherman learns best, in all its subtle shading, from that first riverine curl of gray in the east that comes before true dawn, to the slow clockwise spin of the Great Bear over a bass lake in total dark. Even here I can tune the list finer: of all the times of day, it is dusk—summer dusk—that interests me most, and I often go fishing simply to immerse myself in some, let its settling curtain bring the gentle shadows and increasing stillness I love so well.
2. A Role in the Natural World
Going fishing to be “outside,” going fishing to see “nature.” These are familiar explanations for something more subtle, the compelling reason I put second on my list, but which could equally be first. In this industrialized age of ours, man—only a few generations removed from coaxing his living from the farm, the forest, or the water—is sick to death because of the artificial divisions he has established between himself and the natural world. Anything that gets us past these divisions is worthy of passionate pursuit, whether it be the flowers of the suburban gardener or the birds of the amateur ornithologist.
What is special about fishing in general and fly fishing in particular is that the pursuit of fish alone, with no other object in view, brings with it all kinds of attendant marvels, from sights of hawks and ospreys and foxes, to the more intimate miracles of tiny wildflowers and insects that to anyone but a flyfisher and a trout would be invisible (I think of Thoreau’s phrase, “All this is apparent to the observant eye, but would pass unnoticed by most”). Just being outside in nature is not as good a means of discovering nature as it is to ask something of it; we have to pose specific questions to nature for it to answer; we have to sharpen our senses to search for trout, and, sharpened, those senses are available to take in the mysteries our duller selves would miss.
But to put the motivation more clearly, I can do no better than to quote the naturalist Henry Beston. Asked what understanding he gained from his year alone in the “outermost house” on the dunes of Cape Cod, he replied: “I would answer that one’s first appreciation is a sense that the creation is still going on, that the creative forces are as great and active to-day as they have ever been, and that to-morrow’s mornings will be as heroic as any in the world.” This at some level is what every fisherman learns when he spends time on the water, and the spirit of this in our pessimistic age is intoxicating and one of the prime reasons that makes us fish.
3. Tactileness
There’s almost nothing that feels as good against the skin as water, which is what all those beaches and water slides and hot tubs and pools and showers and bathtubs are all about. Even the most sedentary bait fisher will dangle his bare toes over the rowboat to establish contact with its coolness, and one of the consistent delights of fly fishing is to be immersed in this element at varying depths. It’s a hard pleasure at times, to be sure; to stand chest deep in an April river slightly over freezing is something only a masochist would find pleasure in, but even here, the numbness in the body creates a sharpness in the mind, and lets you know, as few other tingles can, that you are alive.
But usually it’s much better than that. A May river on the back of one’s legs, cooling pleasantly through the wader fabric, supporting by its force, lightening by its buoyancy—if there’s anything as sensuously rich it’s only the same river in July, when the waders are gone and the current comes directly against bare legs. Add to this a breeze against the neck, a fishing breeze from the south carrying with it the earthy damp of fiddlehead ferns, the slippery firmness of a trout against the palm, the dust of mayflies blowing against your cheek during a good hatch, the pleasant, loosening tug on the shoulders caused by casting . . . there can be few pastimes that in their normal execution feel as good as this.
4. Fish
Anyone who’s come this far with me will know I admire fish greatly, spend a great deal of time longing to be connected to one, study their habits and habitat with a good deal of attention, and the only thing to do here is explain why I haven’t listed them first on my list. For me, the fish is not the be-all and end-all of the fishing process, though I feel like the Mad Hatter in writing this down. I have an intense curiosity about fish, but it has its limits, while the first three listings come without bounds.
That fish are hard animals to love (love, say, like I love swallows) will come as no surprise to anyone who thinks about it; their cold-blooded status creates a barrier our mammalian solipsism finds difficult to bridge. Then, too, they are quarry; to even the most sophisticated of anglers, the strictest conservationist, the most devoted catch-and- releaser, they are quarry, something hunted, and while respect, insight, and empathy can flourish in the hunting process, it’s a perversion of the term to speak of love. No matter what fishing represents to us, to fish it’s a grim life-and-death struggle, and though I’ve caught my share of fish that winked at me, I’ve never seen one that smiled.
I have a passion for fishing, a lesser passion for the fish themselves. But passion is passion, and if fish aren’t first in my motives, they are still high up there on the chart. If catching fish involved none of the first three entries, but meant instead you had to wade foul urban alleys beset by rats, I would still pursue them intently. Land a good trout or bass, hold it for a second on the wet skin of your hand, and you have, in one compact bundle, as beautiful and bewildering a combination of opposites as it’s possible to imagine; strength and litheness, fragility and toughness, intelligence and obtuseness, fastidiousness and voraciousness, boldness and stealth. And even if you’re not as fond of contradictions as I am, what other creature comes close to a fish in color and fluid grace? Offered a shot at reincarnation, I would opt for being a trout without any hesitation at all—a wild twelve-inch brook trout, say, at home in a small brook that made me slightly bigger than my peers, living out my days with detachment and a certain world-weary wisdom that would perfectly complement my size.
Perhaps I would be a better fisherman if I didn’t admire fish so greatly; I’ve never been able to turn them completely into objects, never been willing to apply any science to them, preferring, like the stars, that they swarm about me with their mysteriousness intact.
5. Texture of Memory
Number five now, but climbing higher with each year. More and more I fish to reestablish contact with places, times, and events I have in memory; so present fishes for past, as it were, and when a memory takes hold hard its current flows up the line and lives in all its intensity again. Fifteen years ago, this wasn’t the case—I simply hadn’t fished long enough, my experiences were too scattered to take on any texture. It takes five or more years’ fishing the same water under a variety of conditions to create a dense enough association that your fishing becomes enriched; fishing the Waits, I think of the young man I was ten years ago wading into the same river without knowing where any of its trout were, hardly knowing where to look; fishing Franklin Pond above my home, I think of springs a decade in the past when I caught trout that even now stand out vividly enough in my recollection that I can picture every spot. The time my wife bailed a leaky rowboat three inches from swamping, while I, sitting oblivious in the stern, fought and landed a five-pound largemouth; the patient way my mother used to take me fishing at our Connecticut summer home when my father was working; a slow, lazy trip down a bass river with two good friends, eating carrot cake on a sandbar under a warm summer rain. I remember these hardly ever when I’m not fishing—it takes being on a reminiscent body of water, fishing in a similar evening light, to bring the memory back, and this explains the allure of familiar water, the reason we never tire of it though we fish it again and again.
6. Literature and Tradition
Saint Peter, Dame Julian Berners, Leonard Macall, Gervase Markham, Izaak Walton, Charle
s Cotton, Sir Edward Grey, George M. L. La Branche, G. E. M. Skues, Edward Ringwood Hewitt, Theodore Gordon, Dolly Varden, William Scrope, J. W. Hill, Huck Finn, Plunket Greene, Patrick Chalmers, H. T. Sheringham, John Burroughs, Queequeg, Eugene Connet, John Taintor Foote, Eric Taverner, Preston Jennings, Ernest Hemingway, Zane Gray, Caroline Gordon, the Darbees, A. W. Miller, Odell Shephard, Robert Traver, Nick Lyons, Norman Maclean, Arnold Gingrich, Ed Zern, Roderick L. Haig-Brown, Pogo, Red Smith, Angus Cameron, Ted Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Lee Wulff, Charles Ritz, Paul Young, Charles Fox, William Humphrey, Vincent Mariano, et al.
7. Art and Craft
Art is not a word to toss around lightly, and it’s important to remember fly fishing is not an art in the same way painting the Sistine Chapel is, or writing The Charterhouse of Parma. The kind of patience a fisherman needs is similar to that of the artist—a passionate, active patience, the kind that knows when to search and when to wait—and of course imagination and talent also play their part. The art of fly fishing, though, leans more toward the craft side of the term; we speak of the art of holding a runner on first base, the art of putting, the art of fishing a size-twenty-eight midge, when the word craft would work better. Fly fishing differs from most sports in the almost infinite variety of art-crafts that come into play even routinely. There’s the art of fine rod making, the art of fly-tying (here if anywhere the word art means ART), the art of casting, the art of reading a river, the art of hooking a trout in fast water, the art of playing a heavy fish.
A River Trilogy Page 32