I’ve been described by a few mental-health professionals over the years as having obsessive tendencies. I never exactly doubted the assessment, but I also never really understood it until I started fly fishing. My dad tried to get me into the sport when I was younger, but my teenage brain deplored the whole thing. It requires a hunter’s patience and attunement to your surroundings. Lacking actual bait, you have to try to create an impression of foods that fish like to eat, guessing where they like to hang out and what they might want to be eating at different times of day and in different seasons. It seemed tedious. And the reward — more than catching a ton of fish is a sort of soft-focus state of poised relaxation, totally losing yourself in a piece of water. But I didn’t understand any of that until I was in my late 20s.
I finally figured it out on a hidden stretch of a mountain river in New Hampshire, a place full of wild and hungry brook trout — and after a week I developed an obsession in the fullest sense of the word, something that made me feel whole and made me feel insane in almost exactly equal measure. Soon it was all I wanted to do, and all I read or thought about when I wasn’t doing it. Any emotional setback in my life — a bout of anxiety or a relationship problem — would trigger a consuming need to disappear to a river. I’d almost always come back feeling fresh, settled, repaired. I was lucky, in that I was single and footloose and had little interest in the oppressive (and expensive) gear culture the sport is known for. But I was still traveling constantly — to Montana, Quebec, the Sierra Nevada which cost a ton of money, disrupted my work and annoyed my family. I was living in Brooklyn at the time, trying to write and realizing that I was doing no favors to my career or emotional life by fleeing for weeks every time my desire to fish got too intense to ignore.
So one day I took my rod, walked a few blocks down to a little pier jutting into the harbor, and chatted a bit with the voluble neighborhood bait fishers about tides and what sorts of things fish get into beneath the surface of New York’s great estuary. The next night I went back and hooked a nice striped bass. I rarely keep the fish I catch, but I ran off carrying this one to my local, to announce my triumph and receive a couple free drinks as congratulations. This, at least, was something you couldn’t do after fishing in a remote mountain stream.
I realized that I could fish every day, even while living in New York. Anyone could. It turned out that my book editor, whom I already knew to be a fellow f ly-fishing obsessive, had been staking out a spot on the Bronx River, a place where he could fish for carp regularly without jeopardizing his career or neglecting his newborn. I caught a huge brook trout in a little creek running by a Toyota dealership on Long Island. I had a Tinder date in which we went fly fishing in Prospect Park and then got happy-hour margaritas at a place on Vanderbilt. I met a skeptical friend uptown for drinks and suggested we fish a bit in Harlem Meer beforehand. “I get it,” he told me after seeing a little panfish rise to his fly after one of his first-ever casts. “I don’t know how to explain it, but I get it.” I went to visit my parents, and this time it was me dragging my dad to a muddy little river running right through Cincinnati, just a short hike from my childhood home. It was the first time I fished with him as an adult, and he got a nice smallmouth.
I live in Los Angeles now, just a few miles from the often-mocked Los Angeles River, and I’ve learned to hunt its monster carp the same way I learned my favorite trout streams: by losing myself, exploring its cement-walled canyon, seeing what frightens fish and what makes them feel comfortable, observing what’s around that they might like to eat. (Carp, it turns out, are partial to floating mulberries.) Fishing helps me see the river, the local reservoirs, the lake in Echo Park, as vital parts of the city’s environment, not just incidental products of urban effluence. I look for hunting egrets to tell me where the fish are active, and I note with pleasure the thirsty cottonwoods and hummingbird sages growing along a waterway that looks from the freeway like a sewage trench.
At water level, you see the river both as it is now and as what it could one day be. The bare concrete channel coming out of the Valley gives way at Griffith Park to sedimentary islands; beds of invasive giant cane share space with native willows and tiny purple bursts of feral amaranths. I pick their leaves to eat as a snack. Cormorants and hawks hunt from above, and every so often I’ll be greeted in Spanish by a lonely horseman, out for a dusk ride from one of the stables in Glendale.
I may not be seeing otters or elk, but I get to hear stories from the guys who have made a home in the riverside cane beds, and who often have useful tips on where to find fish. I’m still deep into an obsession, but the pleasure of urban fly fishing is that you don’t have to be obsessed at all to pursue it. You just bike to the park, wave to the picnickers barbecuing in the grass, throw a cast and forget for a few hours about anything that isn’t the living water in front of you. Then you change your shirt and head off to meet a friend for dinner.
James Pogue is the author of Chosen Country: A Rebellion in the West. His story here was published under a different title in the New York Times Magazine.
