There had been signs, probably more than I wanted to see. Sometime around my midfifties, I began to notice that a certain urgency, a fire-in-the-belly kind of energy that had driven my fishing since I was a child, had begun to abate. It was subtle at first. Calling it a day an hour or two early. Not making that extra effort to wade across to a prime lie. Shrugging more than cursing when a big one slipped the noose. If you’ve never fished, you might write this off as simply “growing up,” or the aging process, with its inevitable diminishing of hormone madness. But for me, it was deeply bothersome, bordering on alarming. Since the age of three, I had literally been unable to look at a body of water (that is, any water more than six inches deep) without wanting to fish it. The whole mystery of life was there, in those elusive, beautiful creatures that lived below the surface, with their quickness, their vibrant energy, their color and force and perfect form. I had to have that mystery, or whatever was behind it, and this was beyond hormones or simple curiosity: I was born hooked, and had always depended on fishing to restore whatever the rest of life took away. Yet the evidence was mounting. Something was changing, and a huge unknown was looming. . . .
Then, a not-so-subtle event. After a very difficult fall day on the Conservancy section of the McCloud River, I accidentally left my fly rod on top of my truck, not realizing the mistake until I was already out on Squaw Valley Road and halfway back to town. If you know backcountry dirt roads, you know that anything left on the roof of a vehicle isn’t going to stay there long, so it meant a long hour’s drive back in (and another out) to search for a nine-foot needle in the dark that may or may not already have been found or run over by other anglers. The motel room beckoned in the distance. A hot shower, a glass of wine, a football game I had mentally earmarked as must-see. I saw myself taking my foot off the brake and driving on toward Mt. Shasta, and the shock was immediate and deep. What the hell was wrong with me? It wasn’t just the loss of five hundred buck’s worth of gear.
From that point on, though, you could say I was alerted to the situation. The lost-rod incident wasn’t easily forgotten, not unlike the various health scares many of us begin to bump into after age fifty or so. It got my attention and became an anchor point for further observations on every trip thereafter. I needed to see what was really going on.
Fortunately, the news wasn’t all bad. Yes, there were far fewer twenty-fish days . . . in fact, almost all of them . . . but there was also a relaxation of sorts that was allowing some new things to appear. It was as if abandoning that fly rod had settled some inner argument that I didn’t even know was going on. Maybe it was time to start letting go of some things? I was OK with catching fewer fish, with quality instead of quantity, and felt much less competitive toward others I met out on the river. Getting skunked was still unacceptable to my gut, but it passed more quickly and was easily placated by one or two nice ones, even if they were the only ones that day. I also noted I’d become more patient with fly tackle and the incredible mess it can create just by missing a hook set or flubbing a back cast. As with fishing in the rain, once you stop trying to stay dry and comfortable, it’s not bad or even unpleasant. Turn and face the bird’s nests and sloppy loops and spending ten minutes rigging up just to lose it all on the next cast, and most of the difficulties not only melt away, but turn into an excellent exercise for one’s attention, with all the benefits an activated attention brings.
Then another event, quieter, but also loud with significance. I’d spent three very long, cold winter days swinging flies for steelhead on the Trinity without so much as a bump. It was time to go home, but I decided to try one last run, having recently discovered that the secret to a bearable skunk is to fish as well and intensively as one can, and if the fish gods don’t smile . . . well, at least one’s conscience can be at peace with the effort. So I waded in without much expectation, though secretly still hoping that maybe this last-ditch effort might redeem the trip. Just one grab would do it, and the run I was in had produced many times before. I was casting well by that point, effortlessly putting the fly right where it needed to be and smoothly swinging through the drift, switching seamlessly from casting hand to downstream hand. Briefly, I noted it was odd that after three days of doing this, I was just now noticing what a wonderful thing it is simply to cast a line, to be in a river, to be part of the overarching silence and stillness of a solitary winter’s day. And then there it was. There I was . . . simply fishing, poised in some perfect balance between activity and receptivity, wanting absolutely nothing other than to be there, in that moment. Best. Skunk. Ever.
Of course, fishing isn’t the only thing going on in one’s life, and it would be unfair and just plain wrong to measure the whole by a relatively small part. All the traditional rites of decline were upon me now, the physical ones being the least of my worries. I had spent almost all of my fifties being so insanely busy. Intensive job, the Great Recession nearly bankrupting our company (with years spent digging out of the hole), two kids in college, and a pro bono construction project for a nonprofit eating up nearly every weekend for nine years When I finally looked up, I was sixty, and it was time to think seriously about retirement and even more seriously about where all those years went. Why was it that in my thirties I had managed a major fishing expedition at least once and often twice a month and for the last ten years was lucky to get in one or two a year? I’m sure many older readers who have already passed these stages know what I mean. There’s an emptiness when one realizes the road ahead is much shorter than the one already traveled — until something rises up, hitches its pants, and decides that, well OK, if that’s how it is, let’s get clear about priorities.
Bucket lists are often conjured at such a moment, but I wasn’t interested in fantasies. No, something about that experience on the Trinity still haunted me, something about the simplicity, the directness and clarity, the inhabiting of life in the moment. The one thing I was sure of (certainty being a rare commodity in later life) was that I didn’t want to wake up in another ten years and wonder where they had gone. There weren’t enough decades left for that. I needed some kind of help that I’d many times received, but never quite knew how to ask for. It was mostly ineffable, not in the province of words, yet some part of me knew it, had known it for a long time . . . maybe all my life . . . and knew that for whatever reason, fishing was a messenger and that I needed to listen.
Over the last five years of my preretirement, I mostly fished alone. My main fishing partner, a man I’d grown up with and fished with for over fifty years, was having the same time problems I was having: too many responsibilities eating up too many weekends. From having fished together twenty-five to thirty days a year, we had to scramble to find two or three. And there were the typical later-life array of health problems, aging parent problems, taking care of business problems . . . not to mention blindside zingers from vehicle breakdowns, wife maintenance conflicts, and grown-child events such as marriages, grandchild births, moving days, and other must-be-theres that inevitably seemed to happen during major insect hatches and fish runs and the one weekend of the winter when the South Fork of the Eel was fishable. Etc, etc, etc. As Robert Frost said, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Old Bob spoke for all of us, trying to get free for a fishing trip.
If this sounds like an oddly skewed value system, you may well be correct; I felt more than a little unsettled and sometimes remorseful that “my time” had to be so resentfully shared with family and life obligations. Fishing, after all, is not the most important thing, but during the pressures of midlife, one grasps for straws, sometimes with too much avidity.
And as the final days of my career and plans for the months thereafter began to arrange themselves, it was clear that the solitude would continue. Despite having an uncluttered schedule on my end for three full months, my buddy wasn’t able to sign on for any of it. I would be going it alone again, and faced with that prospect, I suddenly understood all the benefits of fishing with someone else. The added energy, the on-the-spot exchange of both practical and psychological experiences, and the plain old fun factor . . . yes, it was definitely worth getting out-fished nearly every time out. Still, I had to wrap my head around the fact that sooner or later, we all fish alone. If not literally, then . . . well, you know. The temptation to set fishing trips aside in favor of some better moment was very strong, but I didn’t take the bait. My chronically aching body very helpfully reminded me, on a daily basis, that there was no “better moment.” There’s now . . . take it or leave it.
Then, another unusual help appeared. During the summer leading up to my get-out-of-jail date, those invisible gears meshed again, and I inexplicably backslid into a bout of bass fishing with conventional gear. In the fly-fishing community, people are often shot on the spot for even mentioning words such as “spinning rod” or “plastic worms,” so it was more than a shock after more than thirty years of longrodding to find myself dragging out dusty tackle and perusing forbidden catalogs. It seemed at moments I was under some kind of black spell as I sought out a lake near my place of employment that had a booming population of young, eager largemouths and went there with rod thrust defiantly toward the heavens a half dozen times after work over a couple months, catching many, many fish and frankly enjoying the hell out of it. It was like reading a comic book again after wading through some Dostoevsky masterpiece, a guilty pleasure without any guilt at all, and it put the “re” back in “recreation.” Or as I’d once read in a book of Eastern philosophy: “The way down is the way up.” However it all came about, it was exactly what I needed, and by summer’s end, I was tanned, rested, and ready to return to fly fishing with a new head of steam.
As things played out, over the first three months of my retirement, I managed one major fishing trip per month. I won’t burden you with a blow-by-blow summary; frankly, the fishing itself wasn’t that interesting. The autumn rains were late, the water levels were too low and clear, the salmon, steelhead, and brown trout runs were sparse or delayed, and the hatches were subdued. I caught a few fish, even a few big ones. On the whole, though, it was some very mediocre fishing. But the background question was strong, gathering even more urgency and pushing forward, revealing itself in a whole series of seemingly small impressions that evolved into meaning and significance as time passed. If you’ve always had a place in the back of your heart for Thoreau’s pithy observation, “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after,” and haven’t dismissed it just because it’s ended up on greeting cards and T-shirts, then you may be interested in the flavor of these incidents by which we begin to recognize ourselves and find our ways.

. . . A long riff le on the Klamath below Happy Camp, sprinkled with half-pounders and small, acrobatic adult steelhead. Finally connecting with these white-hot bolts close to the ocean, making each hookup a direct plug-in to the Pacific’s power and vitality. And suddenly, while playing a fish, realizing that this wasn’t just for me. That some part of the energy would pass through me, to anyone else I met that day, to those back home to whom I would tell the story, and even to those who would never hear about this. An impersonal energy — fish and fisher only the conduits — that had to move across the earth, coming from somewhere, going somewhere. Not a philosophical concept, but a tangible, verifiable fact of energy in movement. So that when another senior angler (even more “senior” than me) showed up in the run, I was happy to step aside, show him the productive slots, and even lend him a couple of flies. This movement of energy was clearly more important — that it spread and be shared. Who knew where he would take it, who it would touch? I left him to it with no looking back. . . . A cold, rainy night camping on the McCloud. Up early, partly to get a jump on the day, mainly because my arthritic pains had been enhanced by the weather and sleep was impossible. Shivering in a dark, dripping dawn by a weakly hissing lantern running out of gas, trying to make coffee and eating a cold hardboiled egg. And for a moment, two things coming together: that this was true misery and that there was a strange joy in it, all at once. Not knowing that a truer misery awaited when, after a two-mile hike downriver to the end of the reach, a major leak below the waterline of my waders allowed a hundred-year flood in my pants. There was nothing to do for it but strip down, wring out long johns and socks, and wave at all the nice people (where had they come from?) who passed by on the trail and grinned knowingly, assuming I’d fallen on my face in the river. But then it came again: that interplay of forces confronting one another, the misery and a suddenly free happiness. There was something there when these strong sufferings approached one another and got close. Something just out of reach of the mind and its tiresome need for definitions and explanations. I had the strong impression I was being shown something.
. . . Approaching one of the few productive runs accessible by foot on the lower Sacramento, one relied upon for years, but now even less accessible, requiring a half-mile trudge through woods and gravel tailings and the sadly inevitable homeless encampments. As I finally pop out of the blackberries onto the riverbank, I’m confronted by one of those stark memorials, usually found planted by roadsides where an accident has claimed a life. Apparently someone has drowned here recently — a white cross like bleached bones against the late fall colors — and a silence opens up in me, deep in the chest. Having almost drowned several times myself over the years, I feel something real. Not some lip-service tip of the cap to mortality . . . to someone else’s mortality . . . but a finely vibrating awareness of its reality, the simple fact of it. It’s not that it can happen, but that it will. So . . . so how to face the day now? I see I don’t know. No, it’s more clear now that I can’t know, that I’ve arrived at a scale of awareness far beyond my pay grade . . . at least, for now. I wade in and fish the run and catch the only trout of the day, directly in front of the cross. And then I leave. And then I drive home.
Later . . . months later . . . some pieces began to fall into place. If my concerns had been prompted by fear because the passion for fishing seemed to be failing, that was clearly not the point.
I didn’t and haven’t concluded anything, but eventually it occurred to me that I was simply starting over. Sixtysome years of fishing, driven by one kind of interest and pleasure and one level of meaning, had circled back around to the beginning, though obviously not on the same plane as my boyhood frenzy. Why fish now? What had changed? Maybe something very small. . . .
For myself (and possibly for some other older anglers), it begins to come down to a feeling: that one’s love of fishing, like everything else in existence, is in movement, is changing, and that one needn’t be bound so much by the past. Perhaps passion is just the first step of a long process, and having done its job, moves on. Perhaps there now begins to appear a different measure. As with the starlight in the night sky, how it gets there and where it’s going and what it means or doesn’t mean . . . none of that need diminish the wonder, the question, the inner silence that begins to grow and proves not to be empty at all, but full of life and more questioning and a subtle, rich joy. On the contrary, now I’m free to go fishing again and to trust . . . deeply trust . . . wherever it takes me next. And if a fish or two gets caught along the way, I won’t complain.