My father did not fish. Unlike many non-anglers, he never even hefted a rod or tried a cast just to see what it was like. I never saw him with a piece of fishing equipment in his hand. He sometimes gave me advice about other sports; he was a research scientist and self-taught mathematician who liked to look for unexpected solutions to problems. For a while he entertained a theory that the next world record in the sprints might be made by a man trained to run on all fours, and once or twice he had me try to run on all fours on the front lawn. But on the subject of fishing he was silent. It just made no sense to him at all. The closest we ever came to fishing together was when I was ten or twelve and would fish from the pier by my grandmother’s cottage on Lake Erie, while he occasionally sat and watched with the benign incomprehension you give to a dog worrying a leather toy on the rug. And if I ever caught something, he would croon, in pitying tones, “Ohhhh—let it go.”
We lived in a small Ohio town that began to turn into a suburb upon our arrival. When I was sixteen, I fished one
summer evening in a man-made pond in a housing development near town. I cast a willow-leaf spinner—an Abu-Reflex Shyster, with yellow bucktail hair and a yellow body with black spots—into a patch of water so weedy I could never have retrieved the lure if a largemouth hadn’t hit the moment it landed. I reeled in, along with a bushel of weeds, the biggest bass I had ever seen. I could have fit a fist and a half in its open mouth. I showed it off around town and then brought it home on my stringer. Dad said, “Ohhhh no … is it too late to put him back?” When I told where I’d caught him, Dad said that that pond had been dug about the time we moved to town, and that the fish had probably been planted then and had probably lived in town as long as we had. Soon I felt as if I had hooked and killed one of my elementary school classmates. Guiltily, I cleaned the fish in the back yard. In the stomach I found a good-sized duckling—a brown blob with two perfectly preserved, delicate, orange webbed feet.
As long as no fish were actually caught, Dad tolerated fishing, but hunting he disliked and opposed under any circumstances. My parents were not too crazy about even toy guns; real guns were out of the question. I was not allowed them, or a BB gun, or a bow and arrow. The only arm I carried was a slingshot—the brand name was Wham-O and I owned a succession of wooden Wham-Os. I learned that you have to get pretty close to something pretty small to do it much damage with a slingshot. My hunting success was limited mostly to frogs. To compensate, I subscribed to outdoor magazines and read them closely. Disappointingly, they never had stories about people in my situation; on the contrary, they always seemed to have stories about a boy’s first hunt with his dad, or about a boy at last catching a bigger fish than his dad’s, or about a dad and a boy going to fish the old fishing hole one
last time before the dad or the boy went off to war. These stories increased the regret with which I often regarded my dad, a mirror of his own regret that I had little interest in science or in helping him fix the car.
He loved to travel, and picked remote destinations—the more remote the better. Towing a camper trailer, our family drove all over the western United States and Canada for three weeks or more every summer, camping out. By coincidence, this took me right by some of the great trout rivers I had read about in the magazines. I sat in the back of the station wagon looking out the side windows at each river we passed. In Yellowstone Park I became kind of frantic as we drove over or along the Firehole, the Madison, the Yellowstone. Finally Dad said, “Oh hell, why don’t we just stop and let the kid fish?” I was slightly taken aback—he did not often swear, he had never before referred to me as “the kid,” and I had never thought of myself as a kid in the first place. I thought I was like him, only younger and smaller.
And of course, then, I didn’t catch a thing. Uninformed reading had given me wacky ideas about trout fishing. I was using a spinning rod, a clear-plastic casting bubble, and a large Woolly Worm. It may be possible to catch a fish with such a rig, but I never did, not so much as a chub. None of the fishing played out as I had fantasized. At Fishing Bridge over the Yellowstone I saw a boy reel in a cutthroat trout and stab it with a sheath knife while drinking from a can of grape soda. I caught nothing at all in the great trout rivers of the West. Trout took on a mythical quality, like the snow leopard. Once, in the Bow River in Banff National Park in Canada, I was casting a red-and-white poplar-blade spinner in a tea-colored pool when suddenly, as the spinner approached through the underwater scenery, a big, swift, intent trout followed.
I became unhinged and jerked the lure; the fish dematerialized; and I had to sit down against a tree. I then cast in the pool about a thousand more times, without result. Finally, I got the inspiration of removing the large Lake Erie sinkers I had been using on my worm rig and instead cast an unweighted nightcrawler hooked just once in the middle. The worm unfurled and drifted down in the currents like a silk scarf in a draft, and a rainbow trout instantly appeared and inhaled it. I yelled in triumph and Dad came running, expecting disaster. I showed him the fish and had him photograph me with it. In the photo, taken from a distance away, you can barely make out a fish not bigger than my hand.
Catch-and-release angling became popular just in time, as far as I was concerned. I had started fly-fishing in my teens, mainly because I thought a fly rod and reel looked so cool. I used to draw fly rods on my school notebooks the way other kids drew cars or fighter planes. But at first I caught even less fly-fishing than I had with my spinning rod. In Ohio I caught bluegills and bass in farm ponds, and on a family trip to Alaska I caught a lot of grayling; but still no trout. I had excuses—lack of skill and instruction and opportunity, loss of focus caused by late adolescence and the sixties. The truth is, I didn’t catch a trout on a fly until I was twenty-five. A friend in Massachusetts took me to fish a brook with a series of beaver ponds, and I cast a Mickey Finn with an eye of real jungle-cock feather into a pool by the bridge where we had parked, and I felt a small strike, and I cast again and hooked an eight-inch brookie, and I went nuts but somehow landed the fish with my line draped and tangled among the bushes like popcorn ropes at Christmas. In following years I caught more trout, and bigger ones. It was actually a slight disappointment to learn that trout could indeed be caught just like any other
fish. The more and bigger the fish, the louder the voice of my father in my head, and the more guilt I had to ignore. It was a great relief that as I became a more competent fisherman, fly-fishing opinion shifted in favor of letting the fish go.
My father died some years ago. If I had fished with him, I would now miss him on the stream; but, as I never did, he is still with me as much as ever. I often fish with friends, but I grew up fishing alone, and I still like to fish alone. When I do, the sense of my father as present in his absence is especially strong. If I get skunked, I reflect on the satisfaction he would feel that I had not injured anything today; and if I catch a fish, I sometimes see it through his pitying eyes. I have heard of a malady that sometimes comes over hunters when they kill a deer. I don’t recall ever reading about a similar condition in fishing, but I get it—a sort of lunker fever, an odd emotional state that sometimes sweeps through me after I catch a big fish. I hold the fish in the shallows and move it gently to revive it and I talk to it and I get dizzy with the sensation of being in a moment that neither of us will forget. I tell the fish that I didn’t mean to shake up its day and that I hope it will be all right and that it’s a wonderful fish and that I hope it will never get caught again. And I feel scarily close to the fish’s complex life that went on before and that will go on after, and close to my anxious, uncomprehending father, wherever he may be. When the fish and I are both more even-keeled, I take my hands away from its cold, nerved sides. Seconds pass; we realize we are no longer attached. I hear my father’s “Ohhhh—let it go” as the fish swims away.
(1995)