Dear reader. Take a moment to read the transcript below. Take two moments to recover — steady on — then ask yourself: Is this what you want for our future? Because it’s only too likely, unless we act. But I warn you now: This will begin a major project, maybe, to which you may contribute if you wish, I’m thinking, unless it gets out of hand.
To that end, what follows here are topics, barely touched, on which you, too, may wish to expand. A writ-on-napkin outline for an opus, and more.
September 27, 2053
To: Legal Department, St. Jo Hospital of the Holy Dollar
From: Dr. [Redacted]
RE: Excerpt: Third Trimester Prenatal Conference with Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim
Doctor: Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim, we’ve run the tests. Little Jimmy will be born July 28 at 2:11 P.M., weighing eight pounds even. He’ll prefer to nurse from the left at an angle of 67 degrees — not unusual. Skipping ahead, at 10 months, he’ll develop a lifelong interest in lint and at two will gnaw the corner off Everybody Poops. In third grade, he will insist that “exceptions only prove that stupid rules don’t work good.” Expect a flirtation with radical Unitarianism in his early teens — not to worry.
Mr. Pilgrim: We’re Baptists.
Doctor: Now then, backing up a bit, you see this green line running until it dives off the chart?
Mrs. Pilgrim: Yes. Doctor, what is that?
Doctor: I’m sorry, but Jimmy’s first word will be “fish.”
Mrs. Pilgrim: “Fish?”
Doctor: And the second, “bluegill,” He’ll proceed to Oncorhynchus when he can manage the diphthong.
Mrs. Pilgrim: What about “Mommy” and “Daddy”?
Doctor: Perhaps. In time.
Mr. Pilgrim: What diphthong?
Mrs. Pilgrim: But Doctor, how can you be so sure? Can you spell this out for us slowly?
Mr. Pilgrim: Starting with the diphthong. . .
Doctor: Science, Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim. Because the hospital owns the imaging company, we tend to go overboard, as you’ll see by your copay. Meanwhile … this next screen shows Jimmy’s genome sequences. Notice these clear sections in his DNA? Those are not amino acid chains, but segments of two-micron-test Stren.
Mrs. Pilgrim: Stren?
Doctor: A monofilament fishing line, abrasion resistant and modestly priced.
Mrs. Pilgrim: Part of my high-fiber diet?
Doctor: Probably not, although there’s still so much we don’t know.
Mr. Pilgrim: Got that, ’cause I don’t believe any of this!
Doctor: I anticipated that reaction. And while I’d hoped to avoid showing these videos, since they’ve already gone viral on YourUterineYouTube.com —
Mr. Pilgrim: What?
Doctor: — per the release you signed when registering to vote . . . here’s Jimmy, shot in situ at 40 weeks.
Mrs. Pilgrim: He looks perfect! Only … what are those tiny wiggling things he’s reaching for?
Doctor: Sperm. A wayward school of survivors, perhaps. Or, well —
Mrs. Pilgrim: George!
Mr. Pilgrim: Later, okay? So what’s that round thing he’s holding out to them?
Doctor: An egg pattern, Mr. Pilgrim. Knotted to a protein leader — looks like a Horner Loop. Awfully clever, but my point is this: Jimmy has been angling his amniotic fluid since early on. And he still is. This sequence, shot last week — you see the umbilical cord in his tiny hand? The D-shaped loop it makes behind his shoulder?
Mr. Pilgrim: What’s he doing now?
Doctor: Roll casting. A way of presenting a fly when —
Mrs. Pilgrim: My Lord!
Mr. Pilgrim: What kind of syndrome is this!
Doctor: Mr. Pilgrim. In my profession we try not to stigmatize the innocent. Millions of perfectly nice people have syndromes. “Prenatal deviance piscatorial” is the accepted term for Jimmy’s condition. In lay terms… your son will be born to fish.
(Interview ends due to patient’s distress.)
Born to Fish: An Introduction
I’m not saying it’s common, much less universal. For every angler who finds the idea familiar enough to grin and nod, remembering his or her youth — or, perhaps, a latent, deeply embedded obsession that erupted later in life — there’s half a dozen more who credit their passion to family tradition or special mentors. A few will even insist fishing’s an “interest” that evolved over time into a “hobby” or entertaining leisure activity. Then, of course, there are those who take serious offense to this idea, rejecting a mechanistic interpretation of what feels to them like a purely spiritual quest.
But anybody who’s spent significant time on the water has witnessed an apparently normal child, fishing for the first time, lose him or herself on the bank; who, while dangling a line into water to catch lives observed or imagined, transforms forever, follows a worm into a mysterious wormhole from which they will never quite emerge.
It’s so obvious that some folks are “born to fish” that I shall declare this “True” when I am king. Since you, reader, are nearly as likely to be crowned, now’s the time for us to collect justifications for a royal proclamation, the same kinds of “facts” and “evidence” employed by other totalitarians, extreme religions, partisan politicians, and Supreme Court justices willing to declare enormous, anonymous to almost everybody cash donations to candidate proxies “free speech,” not “bribes.”
The point, of course, is to identify and protect a class of “otherly abled” individuals — “birthed fishers” — due the medical benefits, paid leaves, and sundry entitlements offered to people addicted to sex, gambling, and consumption of various substances, including those poor folks compelled to eat Crisco straight from the can.
Ultimately, I know many of you can add anecdotal proofs revealing how much you’ve suffered from society’s ignorance of the birthed fisher phenomenon. I look forward to your heart-rending stories: trials inflicted by indifferent parents, irate spouses, and employers who cannot fathom the visceral need to fish a midday Callibaetis hatch of two months’ duration. But let us begin by quoting authors whose words echo sentiments appearing in hundreds of works and that, spanning three centuries, have reached almost as many millions as are now blitzed by a bumper stickers and T-shirt that Americans now see every day: “Born to fish, forced to work.”
Angling is somewhat like poetry, men are to be born so.
— Izaak Walton
The Compleat Angler
Perhaps I should not have been a fisherman, he thought. But that was the thing that I was born for.
— Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea
Since I began to fish in the days before memory and have no consciousness of ever not fishing, the evidence is clear that I was born a fisherman.
— Nick Lyons
Bright River
There are places, invariably near bodies of water, where that sense of an unremembered past is particularly strong. Where you turn a corner and know for certain that you’ve been there before. Fishing, at such times, is an almost wholly symbolic activity, and to see the pluck and twitch of your line in current is to know a very particular anticipation. That somehow, in the connection with the invisible forms below, you’ll connect with your own deep history.
— Luke Jennings
Blood Knots
Talk about ethos: there’s a start. But let’s be honest with ourselves. “Born to” is not as simple as it sounds. Shrewd readers will instantly realize that to address the
“what, when, how, and why” rightly would require discussions of the most controversial issues confronting our species, a cornucopia of challenges presented by religion and spirituality, science and philosophy. Among these, and in no particular order: free will versus determinism; the theory of evolution; the most recent discoveries in genetics; also neurology, examining brain functions responsible for (we think) basic instincts, compulsions, memory, “aesthetic” appreciation, and (according to nonfishers) the ability to lie without shame. Luckily, the same shrewd readers will recognize a moment later that this is only a minor column in a fly-fishing magazine, where we like to keep things casual, relevant, and necessarily brief. The haphazard element native to this space is accidental, but liberating, allowing for leaps like this:
Birthed Fishers: Age of Identified Onset, Testimonials, and Theories
Not only is Jimmy’s case speculative, for now, it leaves critical questions unanswered. Since few people recall — or want to — their “primal scream,” what, if anything, would Jimmy remember of his early adventures . . . and when?
The truth is, Reader, we just don’t know. Few fishers remember their first steps, so it’s hardly a surprise if they’ve no recollection of trolling their basinets. Pending the results of royal research, all we have today are rare family stories, some from dubious sources, ambivalent, at best. My mother, for example. She dates my “unusually early interest in fish”— Mom has elegant manners, so would never say “intractable lunacy” — to an infancy corrupted by a three-page photo spread from Life magazine, circa 1953. She pinned that image of a blue, deep blue, blue-gray coelacanth, long presumed extinct, just above my crib. Although it was four-colored, not graven, “You worshipped it like a god,” she says wistfully. “Staring at it for hours and hours, your eyes open wide.” My mouth, she says, was pursed into a rosy, reverent, but possibly unattractive “O.” This observation suggests an imprinting process not my fault, although perhaps a little bit hers. (A Unitarian, as it happens, she must satisfy a need to believe that “everybody’s wonderful” while simultaneously accepting personal blame for exceptions to an idea shattered every second of human history.) Even so, I think Mom’s on to something. An essential paradox:
“Worship” suggests a spiritualism, profound and so primitive that it might be innate; and only but God knows how long, how often, and for how many billions of faithful fish images have served as sacred symbols. You see this even today. Fish emblems adorn thousands of Chryslers, also nonelectric or hybrid Fords and Chevys. On Toyotas and Subarus — all Subarus, I believe — this fish has feet. (Call it synchronicity, but with these it resembles nothing so much as a coelacanth.)
Obviously, that returns us to Mom’s description of an infant gazing over or through off-white prison bars, and “imprinting” on that photo of the ur fish in a purely instinctive process natural to ducklings, wildebeest colts, and a multitude of other animals whose young require nurture. For all these it creates a critical evolutionary advantage, of course, and while it’s easy to presume this process was inflicted upon me in error . . . what if it wasn’t? What if this image of a supposedly extinct species — surely one of Nature’s most ambivalent ever — was not the cause of my fishing obsession, but the catalyst? A trigger exploding an ancient, even primeval response?
If so, I would have only been an early victim, exposed before an average age most Birtheds put between 5 and 10, with a mentor or without, absent any encouragement at all.
I have never been aware of not being a fisherman. It is not a sport, nor a hobby, nor a pastime — it just is. There was no conscious awakening of interest as a child, nor encouragement by well-meaning relative or family friend. But there was a fascination, and obsession, with water from the day I first could crawl towards it.
— John Ashton
A Dream of Jewelled Fishes
Fishing simply sent me out of my mind. I could neither think nor talk of anything else, so that mother was angry and said that she would not let me fish again because I might fall ill from such excitement.
— Sergei Aksakov (1791–1859)
“Memoir,” translated by Arthur Ransome
My first fish was a brass-yellow carp (whistle trout) with scales the size of quarters. I was five or six at the time … but this single carp taken from the still waters of a small pond a quarter-mile above the Hudson River lit the fire for fishing that has been burning ever since.
. . . Though I probably didn’t know it until much later in life, a great deal of my interest in fish probably descended through my mother from my grandfather The fishing gene never surfaced in my younger brothers, Jim and Ed — though all three of us got the gene for wandering around.
— Joseph Heywood
Covered Water
Digression: On the Relationship between “Born to” and Expertise, as in None
Experience matters, of course. But not much, sometimes. Sadly, those born with the will don’t always have the knack.
All other divisions aside, I think in the end there are but two kinds of anglers — those born to fishing and those not. It has nothing to do with expertise, or determination or enjoyment. A born fisherman has a soul that wiggles, and though he may be temperamentally inclined to this species or that method, beneath it all is the simple, overriding compulsion to be connected to a fish. If need be, any fish, any way.
— Ted Leeson
The Habit of Rivers
Some men are born duffers; others, unlike persons of genius, become so by an infinite capacity for not taking pains. Others, again, among whom I would rank myself, combine both these elements of incompetence. Nature, that made me enthusiastically fond of fishing, gave me thumbs for fingers, short-sighted eyes, indolence, carelessness, and temper which (usually sweet and angelic) is goaded to madness by the laws of matter and gravitation. For example: when another man is caught up in a branch he disengages his fly; I jerk at it until something breaks. . . .
Then why, a persevering reader may ask, do I fish? Well, it is stronger than myself, the love of fishing; perhaps it is an inherited instinct, without the inherited power. I may have had a fishing ancestor who bequeathed me the passion without the art.
— Jeremy Paxman
Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life
Social, Economic, and Romantic Implication: “Birthed” as Outlier, Born to be Wild
In truth, I’d always been aware my obsession had isolated me from the other children who were only interested in cars, trains, dolls or war games in the schoolyard. All I’d ever wanted to do was to see more and more fish, glistening in the water, dancing in the waves, big fish, small fish. Colourful fish or fish that to the rest of the world the world might seem drab but to me shone like the sun. On and on, more and more fish, always seeking to complete a cosmic vision. It wasn’t the twitcher mentality obsessively ticking away at a list, it was something more than and still is. More like a dabbling in wonderment.
— John Bailey
Trout at Ten Thousand Feet
I think I fish, in part, because it’s an antisocial, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution.
— John Gierach
“Pike”
One evening I was awakened from a deep sleep by a weird noise coming from my husband, only to find out he was dreaming and he was a Dry Fly. I suspected then, and now realize, his dreams are not made up of wild crazy women, only episodes of his days of being in the stream.
— Jan Thousan
If fishing is interfering with your business, give up your business.
— Sparse Grey Hackle
Fishless Days, Angling Nights
Though the sport of kings, [fishing is] just what the deadbeat ordered.
— Thomas McGuane
Interruption and End Only for Now
September 27, 2053
To: Legal Department, St. Jo Hospital of the Holy Dollar
From: Dr. [Redacted]
RE: Excerpt: Third Trimester Prenatal Conference with Mr. and Mrs. Pilgrim (continued)
Mr. Pilgrim: Come on, Doctor, there must be something we can do?
Doctor: A counselor will speak to you about options that may help to delay onset. Phobias show promise, especially frequent and frightening awakenings by parents dressed as giant, luminescent mackerel, screaming at the top of their lungs. Then there’s avoidance techniques, such as moving to parts of southeastern Arizona. And while I know infant waterboarding sounds extreme —
Mr. Pilgrim: Doctor!
Doctor: — as does the early introduction of distracting pornography —
Mr. Pilgrim: I knew there was something! Mrs. Pilgrim: Doctor!
Doctor: — there are other ways to go. For example… did you know my wife’s also in her third term? Here, this is a photo of two of us on our honeymoon, casting for bonefish in the Bahamas. Alas, turns out our bouncing Bruce is a birthed golfer, I’m afraid.
Mr. Pilgrim: Golfer? Doctor: Why yes.
Mr. Pilgrim: But I’m wearing a Titleist Tshirt!
Doctor: Oh my, Mr. Pilgrim, so you are . . .
