In a recent issue of this magazine, I read an editorial that made a passionate case for taking kids fishing to introduce them to an “activity as old as humanity” and help infuse the sport with new blood. I couldn’t have agreed more, recalling how I got my own start at the age of eight when my father, an avid angler raised in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, put a rod in my hand. At first, I protested that I’d rather stick with my Louisville Slugger, but when he suggested an outing to Hempstead Lake, the only freshwater fishery near our Long Island home, I was eager to go along and try out the darn thing.
The lake held trout, and still does, but we were after largemouth bass. I remember staking out a spot on a mossy concrete abutment that extended into the water. In his excitement, my father failed to realize how dangerous the footing was for little boys like me and my brother, who promptly confirmed it by slipping and falling into the drink. While my father was busy rescuing him, I felt a hard tug on my line and reeled in an “electric eel” as we called it back then. The eel wriggled and squirmed, but I didn’t dare touch it, terrified I’d be jolted to death as in a horror movie. The lake still holds dangers, I discovered, although they’re different now. A recent post I read on the Internet bears the headline, “Three Teens Injured in Machete Attack at Hempstead Lake State Park.” We never returned to Hempstead Lake, and that was fine with me, but I was soon dragged to Paradise Lake in Minnesota for a family vacation, where I met several cousins I never knew existed. I thought they were very strange. They all had weird hobbies such as collecting geodes or building ham radios, not a baseball fan among them. To a sophisticated Long Islander, they were hayseeds, so I avoided them and threw crab apples at a tree trunk instead, pretending I was on the mound for the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. There wasn’t much else to do. I was too young to play canasta with my aunts and not old enough to take up whittling like the geezer who sold his figurines of Indians from the back of his pick-up.
Every morning at first light, my father woke me and asked if I wanted to go fishing. Sleep is never so sweet as when you’re a child, and I’d have to fight the gravitational pull of my bed, where I kept a sheet over my head to stop the mosquitoes from eating me alive. Most often I roused myself, and I was glad I did. Those early hours on the lake were pure magic. In my suburb, the natural world was domesticated, largely invisible except for the odd robin or blue jay, but here ducks and coots dabbled for food, geese passed overhead, dragonflies took wing, and frogs croaked in the rushes and lily pads. For the first time, I sensed how all things are interconnected, every creature joined together in a living, breathing web.
The fish were also on the move. We seldom caught the huge pike or walleyes my father lusted after, settling instead for stringers of crappies, perch, and sunfish in such generous numbers a photo might’ve been captioned, “Massacre at Paradise Lake.” But the absence of trophies hardly mattered. I’d learned how fishing makes an angler more aware of the intricacy and beauty of nature, an experience I set out to recapture when I landed in San Francisco as a young man and bought my first fly rod, a workhorse Fenwick I relied on for many years. The rod felt delicate compared to my clunky spin gear, and the gossamer leader seemed to further reduce the distance between me and the web of creation.
That insight proved to be accurate. As a spin angler, I’d always watched a stream for any sign of trout, a dimple or a rise, but fly fishing opened my eyes to the entire landscape, as if I’d been fitted with a wide angle lens. I still watched for those dimples and rises, but I also saw the insects the trout were feeding on, lovely mayflies or big stoneflies, and developed an amateur’s interest in entomology, the sort of hobby my cousins in the Midwest might’ve adopted. This wasn’t merely an academic pursuit. I wanted to catch more fish. Matching the hatch was more difficult than I anticipated, though. Not only did I have to identify the hatching insect, I had to guess at its size and find an artificial to roughly imitate it. An angler could stand in a cloud of bugs as I often did and still get it wrong, but to get it right was a thrill. When I first managed the trick on the Yuba, I hooked a tiny six-inch rainbow. The poor trout was as startled as I was.
I became so obsessed with fly fishing I drove everybody crazy. I cast flies to trout in Lake Merced, San Pablo Reservoir, Bon Tempe and Alpine Lakes, and every other body of water in the greater Bay Area. In Sausalito, I stood on the rocks by the harbor and cast streamers to rockfish. Once I caught enough to cook a bouillabaisse, only to find the flesh tinged with engine oil when I gutted them. That was another lesson I learned — the web of creation must be protected. (The bay’s in much better shape now, I believe.) I cast poppers to largemouths at Lake Berryessa, hauling in a four-pound lunker, and smallmouths in the Russian River. I cast dries to catfish in the sloughs of the Sacramento Delta, a stupid idea from the get-go, and to carp at a friend’s farm pond in Sonoma County, donating the two behemoths I caught to a restaurant owner in Chinatown. All this amounted to a process of discovery. Fly fishing led me to places I might never have explored. The big casino, of course, was the Sierra Nevada, where I began to venture when I exhausted the local options. And even now, long after the fact, I can’t properly describe how sublime I felt when I first saw the Trinity Alps. I hadn’t expected such majesty. In my denuded childhood suburb, there were no mountains. That the Trinity River ran nearby was almost too good to be true. For three days, I camped by the stream and did nothing but fish for trout. Every care I brought with me from the city disappeared, put into perspective by the water’s flow. In part, I was escaping from a relationship gone sour, and I swear the Trinity cured me, reminding me that life is all catch-and-release in the end.
A day’s fly fishing still has the same calming effect on me. Indeed, it’s surprising how my love of the sport has endured when so many other things lose their luster over time. I still get excited as a kid, too, at the prospect of wetting a line. Last summer, while attending a college reunion in upstate New York, I fell to talking with a guy I never knew when we were students. He turned out to be a fly fisher. Better still, he’d packed a couple of rods and intended to try Bradley Brook not far from the campus the next morning. Would I like to join him? It took the better part of two seconds for me to sign on. Bradley Brook was small by our western standards, but it was a pretty stream chockful of little browns and native brookies who rose readily to any attractor fly. I wished I’d found my way to it as an undergrad instead of squandering so many hours at the Colgate Inn with a beer and a novel by Hemingway.
But hindsight is always better and so on. What remains to be said is that children can and will take to fishing if they’re given half a chance. It does require patience, though, and it can be a hard sell as it was for me with a friend’s son. Dan was about ten when I was delegated to show him what a good time he’d have as an angler, and he liked the idea well enough, but the reality of waiting for a fish to strike the fly I helped him cast was daunting. After ten minutes, he decided to go for a walk, and it was then that a nice trout inhaled my BWO. I shouted to Dan, who ran back and took over the rod again, every fiber of his being trembling as he played the fish. He’s a grown man now, lives in Redding, and loves to fly fish the upper Sac. As an angling instructor, that’s what I call success.
