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

by Ian Frazier

  And of course, then, I didn’t catch a thing. Uninformed reading had given me wacky ideas about trout fishing. I was using a spinning rod, a clear-plastic casting bubble, and a large Woolly Worm. It may be possible to catch a fish with such a rig, but I never did, not so much as a chub. None of the fishing played out as I had fantasized. At Fishing Bridge over the Yellowstone I saw a boy reel in a cutthroat trout and stab it with a sheath knife while drinking from a can of grape soda. I caught nothing at all in the great trout rivers of the West. Trout took on a mythical quality, like the snow leopard. Once, in the Bow River in Banff National Park in Canada, I was casting a red-and-white poplar-blade spinner in a tea-colored pool when suddenly, as the spinner approached through the underwater scenery, a big, swift, intent trout followed. I became unhinged and jerked the lure; the fish dematerialized; and I had to sit down against a tree. I then cast in the pool about a thousand more times, without result. Finally, I got the inspiration of removing the large Lake Erie sinkers I had been using on my worm rig and instead cast an unweighted nightcrawler hooked just once in the middle. The worm unfurled and drifted down in the currents like a silk scarf in a draft, and a rainbow trout instantly appeared and inhaled it. I yelled in triumph and Dad came running, expecting disaster. I showed him the fish and had him photograph me with it. In the photo, taken from a distance away, you can barely make out a fish not bigger than my hand.

  Catch-and-release angling became popular just in time, as far as I was concerned. I had started fly-fishing in my teens, mainly because I thought a fly rod and reel looked so cool. I used to draw fly rods on my school notebooks the way other kids drew cars or fighter planes. But at first I caught even less fly-fishing than I had with my spinning rod. In Ohio I caught bluegills and bass in farm ponds, and on a family trip to Alaska I caught a lot of grayling; but still no trout. I had excuses—lack of skill and instruction and opportunity, loss of focus caused by late adolescence and the sixties. The truth is, I didn’t catch a trout on a fly until I was twenty-five. A friend in Massachusetts took me to fish a brook with a series of beaver ponds, and I cast a Mickey Finn with an eye of real jungle-cock feather into a pool by the bridge where we had parked, and I felt a small strike, and I cast again and hooked an eight-inch brookie, and I went nuts but somehow landed the fish with my line draped and tangled among the bushes like popcorn ropes at Christmas. In following years I caught more trout, and bigger ones. It was actually a slight disappointment to learn that trout could indeed be caught just like any other fish. The more and bigger the fish, the louder the voice of my father in my head, and the more guilt I had to ignore. It was a great relief that as I became a more competent fisherman, fly-fishing opinion shifted in favor of letting the fish go.

  My father died some years ago. If I had fished with him, I would now miss him on the stream; but, as I never did, he is still with me as much as ever. I often fish with friends, but I grew up fishing alone, and I still like to fish alone. When I do, the sense of my father as present in his absence is especially strong. If I get skunked, I reflect on the satisfaction he would feel that I had not injured anything today; and if I catch a fish, I sometimes see it through his pitying eyes. I have heard of a malady that sometimes comes over hunters when they kill a deer. I don’t recall ever reading about a similar condition in fishing, but I get it—a sort of lunker fever, an odd emotional state that sometimes sweeps through me after I catch a big fish. I hold the fish in the shallows and move it gently to revive it and I talk to it and I get dizzy with the sensation of being in a moment that neither of us will forget. I tell the fish that I didn’t mean to shake up its day and that I hope it will be all right and that it’s a wonderful fish and that I hope it will never get caught again. And I feel scarily close to the fish’s complex life that went on before and that will go on after, and close to my anxious, uncomprehending father, wherever he may be. When the fish and I are both more even-keeled, I take my hands away from its cold, nerved sides. Seconds pass; we realize we are no longer attached. I hear my father’s “Ohhhh—let it go” as the fish swims away.

  (1995)

  BIG FISH, LITTLE FISH

  Most angling stories involve big fish. For a fish to be literary, it must be immense, moss-backed, storied; for it to attain the level of the classics, it had better be a whale. But in fact, mostly that’s not what we catch. Especially when first learning the sport, we catch little ones, and we continue to catch them even when we gain more skill and know how to find and fish for big ones. In the retelling, the little ones are enlarged, or passed over as if mildly shameful. There’s just something not flattering about the contrast between overequipped us and a trophy that would fit with five others in a King Oscar of Norway Sardines can. You rarely read a story in which the author catches a fish of five inches—it’s as if a fisherman’s numbers don’t go much below twelve. A recent euphemism is “fish of about a pound.” When I hear of a slow day on the river where the angler is catching fish of about a pound, my mind corrects that estimate to “nine inches, tops.”

  I’ve told my personal big-fish stories so often to myself and others that now I may remember the stories better than the events they describe. The little fish I’ve caught remain unglazed by myth, and if I do happen to remember them, they are perhaps in some ways more real than the big ones in my mind. Once, on the Yellowstone River, a pocket-sized rainbow trout startled me by coming clear out of a patch of riffle water to take a dry fly before it landed, when it was still about a toot in the air. Little rainbows are more vivid in color; this had a line like a streak of lipstick on its side. In a rivulet next to a campsite in northern Michigan, a friend and I heard small splashes one night as we sat around the fire. When we investigated with a flashlight, we saw a spring peeper frog swimming on the surface with one leg gone and fingerling brown trout slashing at him from below. Near the campsite ran the Pigeon River, a brushy stream full of browns. During a hendrickson hatch, I waded with great care toward a little sipping rise in a place almost impossible to cast to under tag-alder branches—just the sort of place you’d find an eighteen-inch fish. I hung up a fly or two, and broke them off rather than disturb the water. Finally, miraculously, I laid the fly in the exact spot; a four-inch brown hit so hard that his impetus carried him well up into the alder branches, where he remained, flipping and flapping and complicatedly entangling the line. Once in a river in Siberia reputed to hold farel, a troutlike game fish, I found instead millions of no-name silvery fish about the size of laundry marking pens. They were too small to net, but would take a fly; I caught fifteen or more, and a Russian friend wrapped each one whole in wet pages from her sketchbook and baked them, paper and all, in the campfire coals. We took them out and unwrapped them and ate them steaming hot, with river-temperature Chinese beer.

  Little fish make my mouth water, like the mouths of the hungry cave-guys in the movie Quest for Fire when they see a herd of antelope across the plain. A seine net full of smelt looks delicious, almost as good as a dozen golden deep-fried smelt with lemon wedges on a plate. In Ohio we used to eat little fish by the mess—as in, a mess of bluegill or a mess of perch. My cousin and I used to catch white bass by the dozens in Lake Erie in the Painesville harbor, right by the docks of the Diamond Shamrock Chemical Company, and then take them back to his house for fish fries, which no doubt left certain trace elements that we carry with us to this day. Once, I was fishing for shad in the Delaware River with a friend and somehow snagged a minnow only slightly bigger than the fly itself. I showed it to my friend, examined it, and popped it in my mouth. His face did that special deep wince people do when they watch you eat something gross. But the taste wasn’t bad—sushi, basically, only grittier.

  When I went to Florida on a family vacation as a boy, I was disappointed to find that no tackle shop carried hooks small enough for the quarry I had in mind. Like everyone else I went out on the bottom-fishing boats in the deep water over the wrecks and the reefs. I cranked up a cobia longer than my leg, and a man from Clevel
and in a scissorbill cap caught a shark which the captain finally had to shoot with a handgun. On later trips I remembered to bring small hooks and a spinning rod light enough to cast morsels of shrimp with no sinkers. In the quiet shade beneath the new overpass at the Key West charter-boat basin I fished for triggerfish, Frisbee-shaped fish with sharp dorsal spines and pursed, tiny mouths. They fought hard, turning sideways to the line and soaring among the pieces of rock and the mossy bases of the pilings. From the boardwalks of docks and next to highway bridges I fished for mangrove snappers, grunts, porgies, and unidentified fish with colors luminous as an expansion team’s. At a boat canal near our motel I spent hours casting to needlefish, little bolts of quicksilver on the surface that struck the bait viciously again and again without ever getting themselves hooked. If I happened to be near deeper water, sometimes the dark shape of a barracuda would materialize, approaching a little fish I’d hooked and then palming it like a giant hand. The moment the rod folded with his weight, the ease with which the line parted, the speed with which the rod snapped back were as much of the monster as I wanted to know.

  At times, catching even a single little fish has been far preferable to catching no fish at all. Often I have landed my first with relief, knowing that at least now I can say I caught something. One afternoon four friends and I rented boats to fish a Michigan pond supposedly full of bluegills and large-mouth bass. In twenty man-hours of determined fishing, between us we did not catch or see a fish. One of us, however, drifting bait on the bottom, did catch a clam. About the size of a fifty-cent piece, the bivalve had closed over the hook so tightly that it required needle-nosed pliers to dislodge. Of course it was of no use to us other than as a curiosity, and did not dispel the gloom with which we rowed back to the jeering locals at the boat-rental dock. But it did reveal its usefulness later when we reported to friends and family about the day. They asked how we did, and we said, “Well, we caught a clam.” Such a statement will always set non-fishermen back on their heels (You caught a clam? Is that good?) and defangs the scorn that awaits the fishless angler’s return.

  I look for fish in any likely water I see—harbors, rivers, irrigation ditches, hotel-lobby fountains. Every decade, maybe, I spot a long snook lurking in the shadow of a docked sailboat somebody’s trying to sell, or a tail among the reeds at the edge of a pond that connects itself to a body that connects itself to a head improbably far away, or a leviathan back and dorsal fin breaching just once in the Mississippi that even today I can’t believe I saw. More often, I see nothing, or little fish. The two are not so different; if a big fish is like the heart of a watershed, little fish are like the water itself. I’ve taken just-caught little fish and put them in the hands of children watching me from the bank, and the fish gyrate and writhe and flop their way instantly from the hands back to the water, not so much a living thing as the force that makes things live. I’ve spotted little fish in trickles I could step across, in basin-sized pools beneath culverts in dusty Wyoming pastures, in puddles in the woods connected to no inlet or outlet I could see—fish originally planted, I’m told, in the form of fish eggs on the feet of visiting ducks. One of the commonplaces of modern life is the body of water by the gravel pit or warehouse district where you know for a fact not even a minnow lives. The sight of just one healthy little brook trout, say, testifies for the character of the water all around, redeems it, raises it far up in our estimation.

  Near where I used to live in Montana was a brush-filled creek that ran brown with snowmelt every spring, then dwindled in the summer until it resembled a bucket of water poured on a woodpile. I never thought to look in it, or even could, until one winter when I noticed a wide part, not quite a pool, by a culvert under an old logging road. Thick ice as clear and flawed as frontier window glass covered the pool, and through the ice I saw movement. I got down on my knees in the snow and looked more closely; above the dregs of dark leaves and bark fragments on the creek bottom, two small brook trout were holding in the current. Perhaps because of the ice between us, they did not flinch when I came so near I could see the black-and-olive vermiculate markings on their backs, the pink of their gills when they breathed, the tiny red spots with blue halos on their sides. They were doing nothing but holding there; once in a while they would minutely adjust their position with a movement like a gentle furling down their lengths. Self-possessed as any storied lunker, they waited out the winter in their shallow lie, ennobling this humble flow to a trout stream.

  (1996)

  IT’S HARD TO EAT JUST ONE

  Showing off for the bridesmaids at my sister’s wedding reception years ago, I caught and ate a large black cricket. Later I mentioned the incident in a book I wrote. At a talk I gave recently, someone who had read the book asked if the story was true. My sister happened to be present, so I pointed her out and told the questioner he should ask her himself. All heads swiveled to look at her where she was sitting by the aisle in the back row. “He eats bugs,” she explained shortly, her lip curled in understated disgust.

  Well, I do. Not all the time, of course, but sometimes, when the opportunity is at hand. And I don’t think of them as bugs but as whatever specific kind of insect they happen to be. My friend Don and I are the only people I know of who have eaten insects until we were full. Those were brown drake mayflies, snatched from the surface of a northern Michigan trout river just as they hatched from their aquatic form into winged insects. They appeared in great numbers, and the fish went crazy chasing them, and somehow that afternoon instead of fishing we joined in. I could understand why the fish were acting like that: If you’re into mayflies, it’s hard to eat just one. I would not go so far as to call mayflies delicious, but they do have a satisfying crunch and a taste like the soft part at the bottom of a stalk of grass.

  This wasn’t something I started as a kid, to gross out rivals on the playground. When I was growing up, decades ago in northern Ohio, you didn’t experiment too much with what you ate. You had your peanut butter and jelly and your meat and potatoes, and that was about it. I didn’t even have pizza until I was fourteen. A year or two later, my cousins moved to a fancy Connecticut suburb of New York City and at Christmas sent back sophisticated presents from the East. For me, my aunt chose an assortment of gourmet snacks I’d never seen before, including a box of chocolate-covered ants and bees. They came in cubes of chocolate wrapped in red foil or silver foil, depending on the insects inside. I waited awhile before giving them a try. I didn’t even know for sure if I was really supposed to. It was an unusual present for a grown-up relative to give. But I was a teenager, and the time the 1960s, and the unusual seemed to be happening every day. So what the heck—the taste was chocolate, mainly, with a chitinous crunch to it and a slight bitterness underneath. The important lesson I learned was that you can eat quite a lot of ants and bees and still be fine.

  Like many discoveries of the sixties, this one had been made before. Throughout history, we humans have eaten bugs. Although they have been out of fashion in our recipes for a while now, that wasn’t always so. Archaeologists who study diet in pre-Columbian America say that in parts of the West at certain times of year, grasshoppers appear to have been the staple food. The terrifying dark clouds of hoppers that descend on Western farms may have meant breakfast in earlier times. Frontier travelers in the nineteenth century reported that Indians liked to eat insects and knew how to fix them. A man named Edwin James who traveled in the Rockies in 1820 said that Snake Indian women collected a certain kind of ant from anthills in the cool of the morning when the insects were easier to catch, put the ants into a special bag, washed and cleaned them of dirt and bits of wood, put them on a flat stone, crushed them with a rolling pin, rolled them like pastry, and made them into a delicious (to the Indians) soup.

  Then of course there’s the insect-eating in the Bible. The dietary laws in the Old Testament book of Leviticus list as foods forbidden to eat not only the rabbit and the pig, but also such unlikely table fare as the osprey, the pelican, a
nd the weasel. “Flying, creeping things,” i.e., insects, are also generally unclean and forbidden. But a single verse makes these exceptions: “Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.” As loopholes go, that’s pretty good-sized; it suggests the lawgiver was responding to a real demand. The most famous wilderness dweller of the Bible, John the Baptist, dressed in animal skins as he wandered about preaching the coming of the Messiah. His food, we are told, was locusts and wild honey. The wild honey is not a surprise, but note his choice of insect. Even living off the land, John the Baptist kept kosher—a wild man, but still a good Jewish boy.

  The truth is, aside from that black cricket and the chocolate-covered ants and bees, and aside from some night crawlers (annelids, technically not insects) that I sliced up and fried to leathery inedibility, and aside from one or two others I have forgotten about, the insects in my diet have almost all been mayflies. If you know nothing about mayflies, it may be hard to understand their appeal. The “fly” in the name, for starters, is misleading; they are nothing like the house or bluebottle variety. Mayflies spend most of their lifespan underwater as swimming insects called nymphs. Their presence in a river or other freshwater is a good sign that it is well oxygenated and passably clean. They range in size from an inch and a half to almost pinhead small. Mostly in spring and summer, they come to the surface, hatch from their nymphal forms into winged insects, mate, lay eggs, and die.

  Sometimes they hatch en masse, like seniors graduating or couples marrying in June. A hatch, as it’s called, is one of those events when, beneath nature’s customary inscrutability, you can hear her saying, “Par-r-r-r-r-ty!” Mayflies start to pop up on the surface of the river—first one, then a few, then more, then hundreds of them floating downstream like runaway cakes off a conveyor belt in that episode of I Love Lucy. New creatures in a new environment, they’re dazed, and their wings are damp, and in the moments before they get their bearings and fly they’re the best free lunch a fish ever had. Trout of all sizes, from minnows on up, begin to feed with a growing sense of exultation that soon draws even the wise and reticent big guys from their cover. I’ve seen trout pursue mayflies with splashes and fillips and show-offy flourishes of the tail, just for joy. Swallows come swooping down and take the mayflies as they float, and dragonflies hit them in the air with a little crunching zip. Robins zigzag overhead, braking so suddenly when they catch one in mid-flight that their feet skid forward in front of them. In webs along the bank, spiders wake up to a sudden windfall and hurry to subdue the captives. In the spring air, the new mayflies float and shimmer like soap bubbles. The whole scene usually makes me want to get busy and catch some fish; sometimes it makes me want to just lay back my head and open my mouth and let the bounty fall in.