An airport porter saw me standing with rod tube at the curb and knew just where I should go for fat catfish up to three pounds that eat liver and worms. He would be there himself as soon as he could, but for the time being, he’d be glad to imagine me sitting on the shore of a lake thirty miles south, taking one whiskered fish after another. Surely, I would do well.
I went north and did well with brookies, instead, then east for rainbows and browns. He would have savored every one of them, I think. He sure did look pleased when he wheeled the cart away.
Resonance. Empathy. Identification.
I met myself moving away on the Truckee River one late afternoon, seeing me slight and gray, wrinkled as a tortoise, but slower still as I edged through long grasses down to a riffle where, bent with scoliosis, I cast for two hours over a caddis hatch. I didn’t have many such days left. Believe me, I made the most of that one.
Met me again, twelve or fourteen years old now, dangling a nightcrawler under a bank on the Owens, squatting as I turned pages of a hardcover edition of The Red Pony, no kidding. . . .About 1968, page eighty-four of Native Son, I hooked a five-pound carp on the Salt River outside Phoenix, believing it was a bass for five exciting minutes, soiling the book with carp slime when I returned to it next cast.
As a twenty-year-old, I talked to me, grizzled, and smiling and twice that old, outside the Cow Palace in San Francisco. With an awkward pride I told how I had dashed across the Trinity River in a float tube to release a steelhead from a steel stringer. Almost two decades before, I had insisted that a Clear Lake park employee examine fifteen crappies and bluegills I had kept because of their open tumors, eyes sealed over with opaque film, grossly humped bodies. He’d refused because “‘You’re not a biologist” and because “water testers are coming in October,” so on that June afternoon, I slung the fish across the floor of his air-conditioned office, then gave him the finger when he swore he’d call the cops. “As a conservative Republican,” wrote a man in a recent letter to my local paper, by way of placing himself and his ideas within a context of people, philosophy, history. “As an obsessed fisher,” I suppose I should try by way of doing something similar. And I would have a constituency: of boys hurling out bobbers with bolo casts, bass anglers covering rocky points stone by stone, midge fishers staring along glistening tippets in the morning’s half light.
Not so absurd, these pursuits, even from the perspective — now — of a fly fisher. Why, several years I was an incorrect guest at parties of a certain profession and there discovered, in the kitchen beside the jug wines, a rockcodder, yes, and he had human speech. He fished his Boston Whaler off the Bolinas reefs, Duxbury, calculating currents and weights, the spawning seasons of the great gray lingcod. We argued not about tactics, but whether it was better to fish solo or with a fast friend. “Male bonding,” said the other guests, speaking through smug half smiles, as if they understood something. But we were too busy, too pleased to have each other, to bother them. We had the common ground of water, and though he was altogether wrong about absolutely everything, his heart was in the right place.
Resonance. It’s a fine thing to fish alone, even for a lifetime. It’s fine also to turn a page and find this: “for other anglers whose eyes are going with age, and who are still trying to tie size 20 hairwing flies, I’d like to share this tool which you can buy at any drugstore.” It’s fine to lean on a counter and hear about brown trout somebody fished over for three hours and caught, or didn’t, a happy thing to see somebody else absorbed completely in a pursuit you share, feeling the tension in their arms as they poise for a strike you can feel and even celebrate as the line tightens I’ve sworn aloud when a stranger missed a fish I wanted him to have.
Because, of course he or she wasn’t such a stranger after all.
Religions do it. Communities, other sports — all Mudville groaned together when Casey struck out. Fishers are a fair-sized tribe, or collection of the same, even if consisting of many solitary players. We have our differences, naturally. We split into factions for good reasons and petty. We have serious problems, at times, sharing resources, yet it’s reassuring to see a light I recognize in someone else’s eyes, to shake my head in appreciation of how a lingcod attacks a bullhead in the shallows, imagine a maw snapping shut. “Bleak” is the name of a tiny fish that excites anglers on the Thames. For weeks I stalked jungle streams for an ikon klee, finding my only satisfaction in the grins of Malay farmers who hoped I caught one and who would have applauded if ever I did. I’ve shared thrill and frustration with a Bora-Boran friend named Ke-ke, as we trolled up a marlin bigger than our boat.
Fishers need share no spoken language to understand each other. The pursuit itself casts a shadow on the wall that others so inclined will see. Often enough, our prophets or gods fish for souls, but we mortals put our faith in waters, aspiring to a catch worthy of our station.
This Meander first appeared in our September/October 1995 issue. We are reprinting it because it is worth reprinting.
