The Fish's Eye: Essays About Angling and the Outdoors

by Ian Frazier

  I began to scout up and down the shoreline in Manhattan on bright fall afternoons. At a rotted wooden pipe that had the appearance of a large barrel extending into the East River at Twentieth Street, I saw alewives nosing against moss-covered pilings. More bait appeared in the semi-clear water in sudden relief against the dark background of a drowned car seat. In fact, from Twenty-third Street all the way down to the tip of Corlears Hook, just south of Grand Street, the East River depths glinted with shifting schools of bait. All the books say that where there’s bait there are stripers. I bought a nine-foot surf-casting rod and a spinning reel with twenty-pound-test line. I bought one-ounce white leadhead jigs with tails of white bucktail hair, and other lures. Stripers are known to move at dawn, to feed by first light. I woke up at four one morning and took the subway to Manhattan from my apartment, in Brooklyn—the first time I had ever approached a fish by going under it. “Striped bass,” the tokenbooth clerk said when he saw my fishing rod. I rode with transit workers in orange-mesh vests carrying sacks of tokens and accompanied by armed guards, got off at the East Broadway stop, and walked down to the East River in the late night of Chinatown. A starling’s raspy cry startled me. Police cars idled; clouds of steam from a steam tunnel crossed the street.

  At the southern end of Corlears Hook Park is a graffiti-covered brick structure about the size of a shed, which extends into the river. The structure has no windows—only metal vents on two sides. Maybe it is part of an airshaft for an underwater tunnel. Warm air comes from the vents sometimes, and people who fish here call the structure the Heat House. A good cast from the Heat House’s concrete apron can reach a tidal rip that forms on water ebbing around this corner of Manhattan Island. I set up my rod and tied on a lure by the light of a streetlight and went through a break in a chain-link fence. A man was sleeping on the concrete behind the Heat House, however, in the warm air from the vents. He had one shoe on, the other beneath his head. I moved to the walkway along the river upstream and began to fish there. The bottom of the river must be a cluttered spot—I hung up lure after lure. At first light, gulls began to fly by. I heard the rattle of shopping-cart wheels as a bottle-and-can-collecting guy appeared. The man behind the Heat House woke up and left, and I took his place. I was casting the bucktail jig about fifty yards to the tide rip, retrieving with short, quick pulls. Truck traffic on the Manhattan Bridge had slowed to a standstill, and on the bridge’s lower level the bright beads of the D-train windows slid back and forth. Occasional passing barges sent wakes sloshing along the shore. The first jogger went by, singing tonelessly with his Walkman. At almost the moment of sunrise, about four minutes past seven, I felt a strong resistance on my line. I thought at first that I was hung up again. Then the resistance began to move. I pumped and reeled, gaining line. I still wasn’t sure what I would pull out of there—an infant car seat, say, would have been only a mild surprise. But then the resistance was pulling, jerking. In the murky water I saw a flash of white, then stripes—a striper! It was about two feet long, and bent my rod double as I tried to hoist it out. Then there it was, slapping around on the concrete.

  Striped bass are in many respects the perfect New York fish. They go well with the look of downtown. They are, for starters, pinstriped; the lines along their sides are black fading to light cobalt blue at the edges. The dime-sized silver scales look newly minted, and there is an urban glint to the eye and a mobility to the wide predator jaw. If they could talk, they would talk fast. Although really big stripers take on a noneck, thuggish, rectangular look, ones this size are classically proportioned—fish a child would draw. I unhooked mine and picked it up with both hands. All muscle, it writhed; a sharp spine of the dorsal fin went into my hand, and—thump, bump—the fish was back in the water and gone. A woman jogger doing leg-stretching exercises on the fence looked at me unsmiling, as if I were a fish abuser. Generally, when I fish I am in the woods, standing in weeds or mud or sand. Hauling a fish into the city like this made both city and fish more vivid—as if a striped bass had suddenly arrived flopping on my desk. A few casts later, I hooked another. It was about the same size but fought harder, and I had more trouble getting the hook out. Scales scraped off on the concrete as I held the fish down. I was too high up to reach the water and so could not rinse the slime from my hands. I let the fish go; here a striper must be thirty-six inches long before you can keep it. (Also, because of the danger of contamination from PCBs and other chemicals, the State Department of Health recommends that people eat little or no fish caught in New York Harbor.) I broke down my rod and walked back to the subway and got home in time to take my daughter to school.

  I wanted to catch more and bigger stripers. I got striper fever. I read outdoor columns about stripers in newspapers and picked up angling newsletters in tackle shops and called recorded fishing tapes at a dollar forty-five a minute and talked to closemouthed striper anglers. In a tackle store in Bay Ridge, several striper anglers trading stories dropped their voices and leaned toward one another as I approached. Striper anglers have big, gill-like necks, wear clothing in layers, and yawn ostentatiously in daylight. They are famous for their divorce rate; the striper is a night creature, and its pursuers must be, too. I fished for stripers all this fall. Mostly, I went to Sandy Hook, the expanse of barrier beach bent like a crooked arm from the Jersey shore at the southern approach to New York Harbor. Sandy Hook is visible from Brooklyn, and from Sandy Hook you can see the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the lower Manhattan skyline, and the sunrise on the windows of apartment buildings in Brighton Beach. People have caught many big stripers at Sandy Hook; it is among the prime striper-fishing grounds on the East Coast.

  I knew nothing about fishing in surf. At first it feels funny to park in a beach parking lot (Sandy Hook’s beaches are all part of a national recreation area), put on chest waders, rig up, walk to an ocean stretching thousands of miles to Spain, and cast. My first day, I fished along the beach for several miles, using a swimming plug bigger than many trout I’ve been happy to catch. Casting it was hard work. I didn’t know for sure how far into the ocean I should wade. A big wave knocked me down onto one arm. I climbed back on the beach and saw a sign in the distance. I thought perhaps it warned of dangerous surf. I walked over to it. It said:

  ATTENTION.

  BEYOND THIS POINT

  YOU MAY ENCOUNTER

  NUDE SUNBATHERS

  The wind was blowing hard, lifting sand in smoky wraiths and rattling it against pieces of plastic trash. A half-buried strip of photographic film flapped rapidly with an industrial sound; it had dug a sharp-edged trench beside itself. The temperature was about fifty degrees—not nude-sunbathing weather. As I continued, however, I passed a trim bronze naked guy accompanying a clothed female, then a trio of old guys strolling along in hats, sweatshirts, dark glasses, sneakers, knee socks, and no pants. One guy said hello. I said hello back.

  Mostly, I fished in the hours just before and after dawn. Sandy Hook, maybe twelve air miles from my apartment, is about an hour and a quarter away by car. I drove across Staten Island and through Jersey in light traffic, listening to radio programs with few commercials, sometimes following into a toll booth the four-wheel-drive vehicle of another striper angler. The millions in their beds on a full-moon night in October may not know that the beaches nearby are lined with hundreds of striper anglers, mostly men but some women, looking seaward as if awaiting an invasion. Darkness makes them more solitary. Anglers rig up by their cars’ overhead lights and walk to the beach thirty feet apart in silence. I passed many anglers in the dark but never exchanged a word. When you can’t really see the ocean, you hear it and smell it more. On clear mornings, dawn came up full and sudden, like houselights in a theater, and the sun followed along behind. Venus was bright on the horizon to the northeast at 5 a.m. On cloudy mornings, dawn was dull, with occasional surprises: a red sun would pop up on the horizon, chin itself on a low ceiling of gray, and disappear for good; or, though the horizon stayed dark, silvery light would gl
isten on the water, and from a break in the clouds, celestially high, beams from the sunrise would spill down.

  Sometimes the waves were like high hedges. Sometimes the sea just sat there and swayed; then, all of a sudden, a breaker would whump and the foam would be up under my arms. I cast and reeled, cast and reeled. A moment came when I could see my lure in the air as I cast, and a later moment when I could make out its succinct splash. The birds woke. If the tide was going out, gulls by the thousand occupied the exposed sand. A gull picked up a clam, dropped it to break the shell, failed, and kept on trying. Flocks of little gray-and-white shorebirds—sanderlings?—stayed right at the waves’ edges. Long combers ran the birds back up the beach like the flat of a hand pushing crumbs. As waves rolled to the shore, they made white broken shells on the bottom hop up into them with a sort of vacuum-cleaner effect. Pieces of shells bounced from the waves’ tops. I sometimes hooked a shell or a piece of clam but (at first) no fish of any kind. After full daylight, the anglers began to give up and came walking back to their cars. They wore yellow slickers, red-and-black-checked hunting caps, camouflage coveralls, Penn State sweatshirts. At the ends of their lines dangled swimming plugs, popping plugs, rigged eels, sandworms, bloodworms, gobs of clams the size of baseballs. Some guys said the fish weren’t here yet, or the mullet hadn’t arrived to draw them, or the water was too murky or still too warm.

  One morning I brought peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches and bottled water, and stayed. By eight-thirty, along the whole expanse of beach I could see only one other angler. As I watched, his rod bent. I walked toward him and saw him land a big fish and let it go. When I got near, I began to cast. I had switched to the same leadhead jig that had worked in the East River; most of the white paint had been scraped off it by now. At once, I felt a hard, unmistakable hit, and the line went tight. Briefly, the fish took line, and, briefly, I hoped it would be big. The line was going right into the near-vertical side of a wave; at the base of a following wave I saw a swirl from the tail. I backed up the beach and slid the fish out of the foam and into a rivulet the ebbing tide had cut in the sand. It was a striper, good-sized but still not legal, hooked at the hinge of the jaw. I held it up and the other angler yelled, “Way to go!” I set it back in the surf.

  At a tackle store in nearby Atlantic Highlands, amid sand spikes to hold rods on the beach, lead-loaded priests for clubbing fish, spiked cleats for climbing on jetties, bottles of fish scent to spray on lures, basins of wildly wriggling eels, and snapshots of stripers bigger than a six-year-old child, I talked to a veteran striper angler named Frank. He worked there and had caught some of the fish in the pictures. He gave me a number of tips, among them the fact that stripers love bad weather—the worse the weather, the more the stripers like it. As a result, one afternoon I fished in a storm that descended from the north, covering the city and its lights like a fire blanket. I had to adjust my hat to the tightest fit, and when the rain hit my eyes it hurt. Wind blew spray from the wave crests like dust behind a car, and it rolled pieces of foam along the sand, where they dwindled in a blink. Whitish-brown foam covered the sea farther out than I could cast. Near some sunken rocks, I lost a lure, and accidentally put my next cast in the same spot. Reeling in fast to stay off the bottom, I felt a hard tug. The line started moving up the beach, I went with it, and the next thing I knew I had a striper on the sand at my feet. I hardly looked at it, in all the rain and spray: it was like something blown in by the storm, like a fish left in somebody’s pants after a dousing in a cartoon. And, unfortunately, it was another “short,” as the striper anglers call them. The bells of a buoy clanged and clanged. On the dim horizon, in the Ambrose Channel, a three-masted sailing ship in silhouette slowly headed for New York.

  The striped bass never did show up in any numbers in the surf at Sandy Hook this fall, as near as I can tell. Striper anglers stood in the parking lots with their waders folded down around their middles and groused. Guys trudging back from the surf through the beach-plum bushes had similar expressions of frustration. A few talked about last year, or another year, and how the stripers were chasing bunkers in the wash at their feet, how the bluefish ate until the bait was coming out of their mouths, how some mornings every guy came home with a fish. This year, striper fishing was said to be good in the surf at Montauk, and in Staten Island Bay, and at Cape May, farther south in Jersey. But not, for some reason, here.

  Striper season on the coast of New Jersey remains open all winter. The wind was blowing trash cans around on my street the last time I went out. On the Verrazano Bridge at 4 a.m., the car felt like a plane flying in turbulence. Street signs were shaking back and forth and flashing their reflections. As soon as I turned onto the road that runs along Sandy Hook, salt spray began to streak the windshield. I drove slowly down to Parking Area F, and as I got close, my headlights picked out the waves lurching from the dark like shrouded beings in a horror movie. They were mobbing the beach: there was no beach—just waves breaking so fast as to have no rhythm at all. The wind was trying to shout them down. I walked to take a closer look, and a speedy long surge chased me back. I decided I wanted to be in the car. As I backed out, a comber broke over the sand barrier and came down into the parking lot. I turned up the car heater and headed for home. People say the stripers will return again in May.

  (1994)

  FISHING WITHOUT DAD

  My father did not fish. Unlike many non-anglers, he never even hefted a rod or tried a cast just to see what it was like. I never saw him with a piece of fishing equipment in his hand. He sometimes gave me advice about other sports; he was a research scientist and self-taught mathematician who liked to look for unexpected solutions to problems. For a while he entertained a theory that the next world record in the sprints might be made by a man trained to run on all fours, and once or twice he had me try to run on all fours on the front lawn. But on the subject of fishing he was silent. It just made no sense to him at all. The closest we ever came to fishing together was when I was ten or twelve and would fish from the pier by my grandmother’s cottage on Lake Erie, while he occasionally sat and watched with the benign incomprehension you give to a dog worrying a leather toy on the rug. And if I ever caught something, he would croon, in pitying tones, “Ohhhh—let it go.”

  We lived in a small Ohio town that began to turn into a suburb upon our arrival. When I was sixteen, I fished one summer evening in a man-made pond in a housing development near town. I cast a willow-leaf spinner—an Abu-Reflex Shyster, with yellow bucktail hair and a yellow body with black spots—into a patch of water so weedy I could never have retrieved the lure if a largemouth hadn’t hit the moment it landed. I reeled in, along with a bushel of weeds, the biggest bass I had ever seen. I could have fit a fist and a half in its open mouth. I showed it off around town and then brought it home on my stringer. Dad said, “Ohhhh no … is it too late to put him back?” When I told where I’d caught him, Dad said that that pond had been dug about the time we moved to town, and that the fish had probably been planted then and had probably lived in town as long as we had. Soon I felt as if I had hooked and killed one of my elementary school classmates. Guiltily, I cleaned the fish in the back yard. In the stomach I found a good-sized duckling—a brown blob with two perfectly preserved, delicate, orange webbed feet.

  As long as no fish were actually caught, Dad tolerated fishing, but hunting he disliked and opposed under any circumstances. My parents were not too crazy about even toy guns; real guns were out of the question. I was not allowed them, or a BB gun, or a bow and arrow. The only arm I carried was a slingshot—the brand name was Wham-O and I owned a succession of wooden Wham-Os. I learned that you have to get pretty close to something pretty small to do it much damage with a slingshot. My hunting success was limited mostly to frogs. To compensate, I subscribed to outdoor magazines and read them closely. Disappointingly, they never had stories about people in my situation; on the contrary, they always seemed to have stories about a boy’s first hunt with his dad, or about
a boy at last catching a bigger fish than his dad’s, or about a dad and a boy going to fish the old fishing hole one last time before the dad or the boy went off to war. These stories increased the regret with which I often regarded my dad, a mirror of his own regret that I had little interest in science or in helping him fix the car.

  He loved to travel, and picked remote destinations—the more remote the better. Towing a camper trailer, our family drove all over the western United States and Canada for three weeks or more every summer, camping out. By coincidence, this took me right by some of the great trout rivers I had read about in the magazines. I sat in the back of the station wagon looking out the side windows at each river we passed. In Yellowstone Park I became kind of frantic as we drove over or along the Firehole, the Madison, the Yellowstone. Finally Dad said, “Oh hell, why don’t we just stop and let the kid fish?” I was slightly taken aback—he did not often swear, he had never before referred to me as “the kid,” and I had never thought of myself as a kid in the first place. I thought I was like him, only younger and smaller.