Memories are a major part of fishing.
— Ernie Schwiebert, Remembrances of Rivers Past
Interesting that we catch many fish in a life but only a few of them reach mythic, paradigm-shifting proportions.
— Robert DeMott, Angling Days: A Fly Fisher’s Journal
Why are you telling me this?
— Anonymous relative, interrupting Somebody’s second-best fishing story.
Occasionally we discover something about ourselves so obvious we can’t understand how we missed it. We’re baffled, or worse, when we realize that people who know us have simply presumed we were aware of a conspicuous “it.”
Example: Once I spent nine hundred thousand hours reading, rereading, repeatedly editing, and finally shepherding though publication the memoirs of an oncologist friend. The book of his lifetime, important to him. Somewhere in this process, I called him to ask “What about your mother?”
“What do you mean, ‘What about my mother?’ What about her?” he replied. “ What do you mean, what do I mean?” I said irritably. Forty years earlier, I’d lived at his family home for a time, watching a brain tumor destroy the mind of this lovely woman, once so full of grace. Not long after that, I’d ferried my friend back and forth from the Oakland Airport for his visits to her, two or three times a month, during his first year of medical school.
“I’m talking about her cancer. How it influenced your choice of disciplines. Made you an oncologist?”
An annoying silence was followed by a hollow sentence. “Oh my God. I have never thought about that. Never.”
Say what? Hard to believe, very — I still think he must have made a connection at some point(s), when his unconscious peaked out to peep, “And I will spend my life fighting this disease.”
Not according to him. Then again, we can’t underestimate denial, disassociation, suggestibility. Did people really not notice, for an eon, that the ocean’s horizon curves?
We will return to this, when the time is right.
Meanwhile, meandering on:
Here’s hoping no reader has yet caught the “best” fish of his or her life, however he or she chooses to define this measure. But many of us have already taken most of those we are destined to meet while drifting waters flowing through this corporeal plane. Not to be wistful: this only makes it easier to angle in more memory — a thousand yesterdays when we were there at the right time, so didn’t miss out.
It’s easy to remember firsts and biggests (so far). But other fish stories knit together millions of neurons for alternate reasons — entertaining, informative, mysterious, just odd. One-offs and outliers, they fall into no set, accessible category, so seldom appear anywhere near the top of search engine results. A few — God knows how many — may have been overwritten already or lie embedded in a program we no longer support.
Frankly, I find those possibilities unnerving. What gems slip away with age, along with lively images, active verbs, and the names of people of whom I am fond? If you also wonder about this, or suspect you might someday, you, too, might want to jot down notes about those prodigal tales that unexpectedly wander in from the cold. And when you do, consider examining these more closely than you have in the past, from a perspective that may have changed. Catch them as they come out of nowhere. Ask why they have stuck in your mind so long.
I did, last week. It happened apropos of nothing. At least nothing I recognized then or when I later began ruminating about it. This time I can’t blame it on shame for watching football when I should be out fishing.
One minute it’s a winter morning, cold, but clear. I’m sitting on a deck, soaking up pale sunlight that sifts though evergreens. Sheets of ice melt off a dozen cedar boards I replaced last summer; their varnish is still fresh. A medium-sized bird flits about in a treetop a hundred feet away. Brown, gray — it seems like I should be able to identify its species, but I cannot, nor can I divine its purpose as it leaps from limb to limb. Then —
No neat segue, but the transition’s seamless: suddenly my mind’s eye stares into an oval pocket of yellow light thrown by an L-shaped official Boy Scout flashlight. The glow illuminates the top three inches of a coffee-colored current an arm’s length from the rock where I crouch, flanked by a platoon of Cub Scouts watching intently. Like me, their eyes are fastened to the prick of monofilament entering swirling water.
They are cold. We huddle on the bank of the Salt River as the very last smears of crimson flood the cliffs of the Arizona desert wilderness rightly called the Bloody Basin. The boys are tense, too, totally absorbed. Weeks before, somebody’s mom convinced them that this second-class Boy Scout — that would be me, deputized as a subsubchaperone for their campout — could teach them something about fishing.
And that was the plan until the preparatory meeting the night before, when a perfectly groomed den mother — crisply uniformed, with hat, kerchief, and rows of badges — kiboshed the idea. According to her, fishing was at least dangerous enough to kill one or more of these tender Cubs, via drowning, snake or mountain lion attack, fatal hook impalement, tetanus or valley fever. Not only that, fishing was not covered by Cub Scout insurance (wrong, but she was sure), which meant every adult on the trip — she was not going — faced losing their houses to lawsuits when they returned, along with also facing charges of mayhem and manslaughter.
If wishes were horseshoes, I would have banged her with one. The chance to fish was the only reason I’d agreed to go. And, by God, fish I would, so I packed a small, secret kit, which I would use after dusk or before dawn, when nobody was looking.
So I hoped. But then I find this handful of Cubs laying in wait for me when I try to slip away after dinner. Whispered commands fail to dissuade them — “We might have to tell on you, which we don’t want to do” — so now I have to let them follow me, after swearing them to silence. That doesn’t work with beagles, either.
But they do try to mute an excitement not quite justified, given how faint our prospects really are. A hand line, hook baited with a piece of hot dog I’d rescued from campfire ashes, this weighted by my only split shot, which I know is too light for the job . . . I should have feared the only lesson they would learn was about frustration.
Nope. Instead, my eleven-year-old ego swells from their attention. Soon I’ve adopted the gravitas of Moses with his flock. Softly, but sternly, I assure them that the flashlight will draw a fish nearly to shore. For some reason, I am sure this is true, for reasons I explain.
Cormorants. Japanese cormorant anglers dangle flaming pots off their decks to attract fish for the birds to catch. Works every time.
Also, I tend a large goldfish pond at home. The pond has a subsurface lighting feature that attracts koi, in a casual way, and schools of more serious mosquito fish every few minutes prompt a vicious attack from one of the three bass I’ve stocked, these lords of my bluegills, catfish, and polliwogs. (The night this light shorts out I will learn my first lesson in electroshock fishing, after picking myself off the ground.)
It might have been ten minutes we waited, though it seemed to me more. Perhaps exhausted, probably a little frightened — though reassured by pals’ proximity — and certainly cold, the closest any come to mutiny are offers to augment my light with projections from L-shaped, brown, official Cub Scout tools.
I decline, kindly and with explanation. We don’t want to spook the fish soon to come.
And then . . .
The mono point in the meniscus moves. Upstream, slowly, deliberately. It pauses, moves again. The hisses of “Look, look!” sound like a broken steam pipe, though a small one. Finally, the mono point reaches the edge of the oval’s upstream penumbra. Then —
In a single violent moment I snap my wrist, hurl my arm upward, squat thrust until I’m on tiptoe. Coiled spring. Rocket launch. Less energy has torn oaks out of the ground, snapped anchor lines, pulled swords from stones.
Of course, I’d not warned my Cubs to expect anything like this. (This was my first time at this, OK?)
Sopranos or altos, it’s fair to report that the shrieks of prepubescent boys are pitched to cripple bats. And that is exactly what my choir seemed to do as an eleven-inch channel catfish flew over us in an arc, hung a moment with dark tail and fins flapping, then plunged into the midst of my terrified flock.
It did not calm them when I began shouting “Watch the spines! They have spines!” as I hurled myself onto the dark spot whence came the sound of a slapping fish — whereupon I instantly, appropriately, and far too foreseeably impaled my palm on a dorsal.
Taking the long view, this created not one, but two “teachable moments.”
First: “Don’t any of you ever say that word!” I hissed with emphasis, already afraid one of my protégés would rat me out. “Do you understand me!”
A moment of silence fell to a kid who whispered “Right.”
“Right,” agreed Cubs 2 and 3, though I felt number 2’s voice lacked long-term commitment.
Silence again, then Cub 4 — a bright-eyed boy, destined for greatness — said earnestly, “Because we have to wait until we’re Boy Scouts to say it, isn’t that true?”
It would have to do, so we moved on to our trophy.
I showed them its spine, how to hold it correctly, pointed out features most appreciated once “shock and gross” wore off. Sleek, smooth, lightly speckled on its sides — unlike bullheads and flatheads, channel cats blend function and form in what an unbiased observer would call “art.” Pan-size, caught from clean streams, they also sauté into my favorite freshwater meal. As to their barbel “whiskers,” up close, they looked more curious than wicked. And wouldn’t they be useful at the dinner table, I suggested helpfully, when Mom urged you “ just to taste” her latest casserole?
We trekked home happily. If I was chastised for leading innocents astray, I don’t remember.
But I’ve remembered the rest. A couple of times in the last fifty years, but probably not for twenty. Why would I? An eleven-inch catfish, caught on a hand line baited with hot dog from a desert river at dark: not exactly epic. So?
Why did this adventure stick, when thousands — tens of thousands? — have long since left my hard drive?
What prompted its appearance one bright winter morning moment while I stared at a flitting bird?
Finally, why, days ago, did I not simply shrug off images of canyon and kids, mono pricking a yellow oval of light. Did I imagine it had significance for readers or me?
A brief survey of possibilities:
My theory that a fish in muddy water would be attracted to light playing just off the bank? Aside from cormorant fishing and observations of a goldfish pond, I’d never heard, seen, or read about anybody doing anything like it. I haven’t since then, but it made sense, sort of. If I didn’t understand the process of extrapolation, this success was exciting enough to amplify an eagerness to experiment while fishing that has never, ever, left me and may be the reason that one day fly fishing would appeal most of all.
Eleven was not my favorite age. School: no joy. Home: ah, well. Sometimes I played good baseball, but that was strictly a summer thing. A runt, all my friends were “older” than me, bigger, and most were meaner, if not wiser, so I feared I would remain miniature forever. I had no sense that cool would rise on me on any horizon, level or curved. In short, I couldn’t think of a reason anybody would think they could learn from me; as far as I knew, nobody had.
Except, now, a handful of Cubs, one dark hour at the Bloody Basin.
Call both of those long-delayed, minor epiphanies, as in “I never though of that.” But what about the prompt? I decided I didn’t know and didn’t care.
Then I knew, and cared some.
A day of two after my wading down memory lane, I was finishing up reads of two books due for magazine reviews; The Tug Is the Drug, by Chris Santella, and Fish On, Fish Off: The Misadventures and Odd Encounters of the Self-Taught Anger, by Stephen Sautner. Both are filled with first-person essays about fish — not just the big ones or the most exotic — and about people of many kinds and adventures that sometimes go way back in their lives. Sautner, in particular, insists that it’s not just our triumphs that we should celebrate and share with others, but the failures and foibles — and yes, sometimes the obliquely angled epiphany — that might resonate or remind. A Santella story did that for me, partly me because it’s set in a “hippie house” — also the smoking den of a master fly tyer — located a few blocks from where I was living at the time.
And then I got it. I’d been reading these guys’ stories when my Cubs and catfish paid a surprise visit. Other authors’ memories had opened me up. I had missed it, but I’d been primed.
Reader, I hope you might be, too.
