I love the way a fish can suspend itself in the water, with nothing touching it, nothing even near to it, no fins moving. The fish just hangs there, floating in a universe of clear water. There is magic in it, a feeling that our senses are being fooled, a childlike abeyance of belief as we witness the impossible defiance of gravity. The fish, motionless, floats effortlessly, a planet in space, a diamond in the sky.
The bluegills at Cedar Lake were doing just that.
Cedar Lake Camp is a children’s summer camp and retreat center in the San Bernardino Mountains of southern California, just south of the much larger Big Bear Lake. If photographs of the area look familiar, it’s because more than 60 movies and TV shows have been filmed there, including “High Sierra” (starring Humphrey Bogart), “The Parent Trap” (the original 1961 version starring Hayley Mills), and several episodes of “Have Gun—Will Travel,” “The Roy Rogers Show,” and “Bonanza.” The lake itself is artificial, created when a small tributary of Metcalf Creek was dammed in 1928 by a long curved concrete wall built along what is now the northeast corner of the lake. We were up there for the annual Southern California Casting for Recovery retreat, our first time at this venue.
I had arrived early to find a good spot, a spot where my assigned partner might have a chance at catching her first fish on a fly rod. A walk along the top of the concrete dam brought me to the perfect location, a shaded corner of the lake with occasional holes in the covering of lily pads where a nymph could be dropped down into the bluegills’ universe. The bluegills were hanging there, waiting, floating. I knew they would hit whatever dropped in front of them. I returned to the Casting for Recovery check-in table to meet the woman who would be assigned to me, a woman in some stage of a battle with breast cancer and who, for a short time, and if I did my job well, might be able to forget about the cells in her body that were rioting.
Her name was Sarah, and her eyes shown darkly when she smiled. Her hair, short where it peeked out from under the head scarf that hid the effects of radiation and chemo, was the same dark shade. I introduced myself, and we chatted amiably for a few minutes, sharing background stories and interests until I disclosed to her my plan for sneaking away early to claim our secret fishing spot on the dam. She smiled at that idea, and I knew this would be a good day. Whatever I had in mind, she was up for it.
The fish’s universe always reminds me of the larger one in which we are all suspended for a short time, a universe containing so many miracles that we tend to forget about them as we focus each day on where our feet will go next. The planet Uranus is just one of many examples. Seventh from the sun and third largest in our solar system, Uranus is a giant blue-green marble that for some reason, unique among all planets, appears to spin sideways. Theory suggests that, because of the unbelievable pressure and temperature found there, it literally rains diamonds on the planet’s surface. When I read that, I was silence. What can you say in response to a universe where diamonds can rain from the sky, and where we, just a few planets over, are not even aware of it? It made me wonder what else I was oblivious to, blind to, missing.
I showed her how to string up the rod, doubling up the fly line and threading it through the first guide and then out through the others, pulling the leader along as an afterthought. I walked her to the water’s edge and started her casting. Sarah had not held a fly rod before, but she took to it quickly, and the casts we would need to reach the bluegills were short and easy anyway, more dapping than casting. When I felt she was comfortable with it, I replaced the piece of yarn at the end of the leader with a size 16 pheasant tail, one that she had selected from my fly box earlier, below a small split shot. We walked toward the dam.
The walkway on top of the concrete dam was separated from the water by a wrought iron railing to ensure our safety. It made a comfortable place on which to lean our elbows while we looked down into the green water just a few feet below. “There,” I said. “See it?” And she did. A small plump bluegill had ventured out from under cover of the vegetation into the opening below us, moving ever so slowly, searching. “You don’t even need to cast,” I told her. “Just let the nymph swing out from the rod, kind of like a pendulum, and when it’s over the clear spot in the water, lower your rod so that it drops straight down.” She did, and the bluegill took immediately. Before Sarah could react, the bluegill had turned its head quickly, setting the hook, and the fight, for the few seconds that it lasted, was on. The fish was so small that the fight ended with a simple hoisting of it up and over the railing where I could place my hand around it. I showed the fish to Sarah, who looked at it intently and for a longer time than I thought was good for the fish. She continued to stare at it. After a while, I suggested that we return the fish to the lake, and she agreed, reluctantly it seemed.
Variation among humans guarantees that there are differences in everything that we see, hear, and do. I think about this sometimes when I am teaching fly casting, this variation. Among other things, it means that my students might not see, hear, or even feel the same thing that I do when I pick up a fly rod. I have some experience with this variation in how we perceive the world. Because of eyesight issues, I’ve been subjected several times to the Van Orden star chart so that the optometrists could better understand what I was actually seeing. As stated in the online Review of Optometry (June 15, 2022, Drs. M. B. Taub and P. H. Schnell), “The Van Orden star probes the way we perceive, and mentally represent, the world around us.” What this means is that I need to incorporate different methods, different analogies, different approaches to learning to make sure that my teaching is effective, that I am reaching my students. I have to teach with the stars in mind.
The second bluegill was slightly larger, slightly more colorful, a small male in his breeding colors, his dark eyes shining, almost black, the universe reflected in them. We brought it up over the railing and she held it for a second, again with that same intensity, a look of confusion and longing. And then she burst into tears and turned her head.
“She had cried because she had to let it go, because it had fought so valiantly, because she might have hurt it, because she would never see it again, because all beauty is fleeting.”
She stood quietly beside me, her shoulders shaking, and I did not know what to do. I waited, listening to the sound of a Steller’s Jay, one of my favorite birds, in the distance. An article by Dr. Joanne Stolen summarized the Native American mythology surrounding this striking bird: “He is the message of hope in disrepair, and the will to live.” After a few minutes Sarah was able to speak again. “Sorry,” she said, as though she had any reason to apologize.
I asked her if she was OK, and she said that she was fine. “Do you cry often?” I asked. She said no, she really didn’t, but she was not expecting a fish to be so beautiful, so exquisite, so fragile, so alive. She was not expecting to fall in love again, and certainly not with a fish. She had cried because she had to let it go, because it had fought so valiantly, because she might have hurt it, because she would never see it again, because all beauty is fleeting. “But there are plenty of others,” I said. “Right here, just below the lily pads, there are hundreds. Look and you’ll see them.” She said yes, but probably not exactly like this one. And she was right. I took the bluegill off the hook as gently as I could, placed my arms through the bars of the railing, and lowered it into the water, holding it for just a second until it realized it was free and darted away, back into the green-black velvet safety of the lake.
“But why is it so short?” she said through more tears. I knew that I did not have answers that would help. “Life?” I asked. “I wish I knew.”
“No, you idiot,” she laughed. “The bluegill.” I started laughing too, and it helped. “They just are,” I said. “They’re just built that way. They’re just short fish.” And she continued laughing.
She said that her husband was having trouble dealing with the cancer, but that he was supportive and trying his best to help and was wonderful with the children. But something in the frantic pace of the battle over the past couple of years had removed from them the ability to see the beauty in small things, short things, things like bluegills.
“Do you think he’d like to learn this too, fly fishing?” I asked. “I’d be glad to meet you guys somewhere if you think that would help.”
“I’d love that,” she said.
She smiled again, and it began raining diamonds somewhere.
ABOUT CASTING FOR RECOVERY
Casting for Recovery is a nonprofit organization with a mission to enhance the lives of survivors and thrivers of breast cancer through wellness retreats that connect women to each other and nature using the therapeutic sport of fly fishing—all at no cost to the participants.
October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Breast cancer is the most common cancer globally with around 2.3 million new cases every year. It represents one in eight cancer cases in both sexes and a quarter of all cancers in women. (World Health Organization.)
