I used to fish in the East River in New York City. Lots of people do. On a sunny fall day its almost-clear waters glint with baitfish, which sometimes boil to the surface when chased by deeper-swimming bluefish and striped bass. Fly-casting saltwater streamers, I hit streetlamps with my backcast. On October mornings I flung heavy leadhead jigs with a surf-casting rod far into the oceanic currents under the Manhattan Bridge. I penciled my fishing in among work and family responsibilities. I could be fishing for stripers on the Lower East Side before sunup and get back to Brooklyn to take care of the kids by breakfast time.
It would have been bad if I had been late. Angling lore is short on advice about this aspect of the sport: basically, your family and friends would prefer that you didn’t do it. There’s a deep lonesome willfulness to it that just isn’t sociable at all. I find that even when family and friends join me, they want to fish where I don’t want to, in a way I don’t want to, beginning and ending when I don’t want to. I remember reading once about a guy who drove taxis in Boston in the winter and spent
the rest of the year living in a station wagon out West somewhere so he could fish completely distraction-free. I believe that is the kind of angling holiness one should aspire to. Unfortunately, it would destroy any emotional life you had in about seventeen days. A trick of angling as important as wet vs. dry or the Leisenring Lift is how to pursue the sport satisfactorily without making your family too mad. In former times, maybe we would not mention this dilemma, for fear of appearing wimpy; but nowadays we can admit that’s just the way it is. A good solution I have found is to fish as I learned to in New York—right in town.
All cities don’t have fishing as good as New York’s, but they should. People like to live near water, so they and fish are natural neighbors. If a city or town has shoreline but no fishing of any kind, something’s wrong. How can you trust a place like that? The fishing doesn’t have to be fancy or pristine, so long as it exists. For example, I thought more highly of Cincinnati after a recent trip there when I strolled along the strip of shore between the Ohio River and the concrete cliffs supporting the Riverfront Stadium parking garage and I met some still-fishermen, and one told me that a few nights before he had caught a near-record blue catfish at that spot. I asked what he had used for bait, and he said half a White Castle french fry.
When I moved from New York, I chose a small Western city where the fishing is great. Sportfishing here is a medium-sized industry with a multiplicity of fly shops and guide services and hotel packages for anglers. In late summer they pour off the connecting flights from Salt Lake City or Minneapolis-St. Paul, fishing fever in their eyes. But evidently what they’ve been dreaming of all year in their perhaps congested hometowns isn’t the productive stretch of riverfront I know
about next to the lot for Les Schwab Tires, where the outdoor address system occasionally rasps, “Horst, you have a call on line one.” No, they want to get away from Les Schwab Tires and its highway-strip ilk, understandably, so they head for wilder places not far off. This means that in town, even at the peak of the season, often you can cast to rising fish for hours without another fisherman to be seen.
Not that the river or its banks are deserted. For starters people live here, off and on, and set up mini-camps in the bushes. Once, I came out of a slow pool pinstriped on its surface with the reflection of power lines overhead and nearly brought my wading shoe down on a washcloth, toothbrush, and tube of toothpaste laid out neatly in a row on a shoreline rock. I’ve encountered clothes, and occasional furniture. On hot days, people set up lawn chairs in the shallows. Weekends, crowds of floating recreationists on inner tubes or rafts go by practically every five minutes. An angling friend says that if the fish in town stopped feeding every time a floater went by, they’d starve to death. I have been offered beers, and plenty of advice, from the passing flotilla. A guy speed-paddling a canoe almost ran me down. And then there was the woman in the bikini on an air mattress going over the little falls at the weirs. My friend once fished all the way through the city limits from west to east and wrote a series about the experience for the local paper. He was stopped in his upstream progress by policemen in chest waders searching for a murder suspect who had ducked out the back way of a motel and holed up on a little island in the river. They caught her, and she got life in prison. I think of her every time I fish there.
My favorite place these days is out by the golf course on the edge of town. Last summer I caught one of the biggest trout of my life in the deep water at the riprap below the seventeenth
green. I had gone out for just an hour or so, in an idling mood, intending to fool around with a lightweight rod I hadn’t used in years. Grasshoppers were everywhere, so I found a beat-up hopper in the fleece of my vest, tied it on, and cast to some rises upstream. It sank; there was a turmoil under the surface, the line pulled tight, and a rainbow made a long horizontal leap toward shore. Then he did a kick-turn like in a swim meet and sped for the deepest water in mid-river. Immediately the fly line—I had no backing—shrank to a few coils left on the spool, the rod tip was dowsing toward the surface like mad, and I was splashing downstream among the riprap. For a while he held still, the line vibrating. Two people drifted past in a raft, and the fish suddenly jumped high next to it and fell back broadside with a whumping splash like a thrown dictionary. More minutes followed. Finally he came swooning to my net, and I took him to a triangular-shaped piece of water among the rocks and measured him against my rod, which he seemed to be about half the length of. I revived him there, balancing him upright with my fingertips, almost embarrassed at my luck, at his size, at the otherwise-ordinariness of the day. Golfers continued to play, oblivious, not ten feet above me. They were talking about whose turn it was to putt; one said, “I think you’re away.”
The next thing I knew, I was home. My wife and children were doing just what they had been before I left. My wife says she can tell at first glance or by the sound of my voice whether I’ve caught a fish, so she knew I had. But how to convey that I’d caught a personal-record, immense, tail-walking wild rainbow out there by the seventeenth green? I tried; the commotion attracted the children: “What happened?” “Daddy caught a big fish.” “Where is it?” “He let it go.” “Oh.” And
they returned to Darkwing Duck. An advantage of fishing someplace far from home is that there’s plenty of time, during the anticipation going and especially during the recap coming back, for a big fish to assume its proper proportions in your mind. When I had pictured catching the biggest trout of my life, I hadn’t expected it would arrive unremarkably in the midst of daily occurrence, like the mail.
Rivers with good fishing are prettier than rivers without. Sometimes I have passed by pieces of water I knew were dead, and I could hardly stand to look at the fraud of light glittering on their ripples. But knowing how many fish this river holds causes me to keep a respectful eye on it as I’m doing errands nearby, even when the possibility of fishing is remote—in winter, when the river is a conveyor moving odd lots of ice, or when the temperature suddenly drops to 20 below and wraiths of steam hop from it, or when a cold spell lasts for weeks and it almost freezes over, leaving a crevice in the middle through which you can see the fast-flowing water below. Then, after ice-out in the spring, the river picks up speed until it’s running ten miles an hour of brown torrent bank to bank, so full it piles back on itself in rapids of brown foam, and the glare off its surface reminds me of several recent news stories about those unfortunates it has drowned. Then the swelling subsides and the water starts to clear, and again people peer into it like kingfishers from the pedestrian walkways along the bridges.
This river, and another that runs into it nearby, made the level valley the city sits on. They used gravel, which they now cut their way through. In town, the roads and buildings are up on the gravel banks, and the river is below; the arrangement suggests the verticality of ecosystems and the dependence of the high upon the low. You’re reminded of this at almost every
corner, where someone has painted stencils of fish on the sidewalk above the storm drain, along with a warning that whatever goes down the drain ends up in the river. Always, the end of a fishing day in town means a climb up from the river world into paved civilization. I often fish by an industrial gravel pit where various machines stack river gravel into heaps and onto trucks. When the wind is right, dust blows from the pit onto the river, leaving a slick; during the day, the noise of engines rises and falls. But the banks are twenty or thirty feet high, the water is deep and slow, and the trout are in the twenty-inch range.
Last summer I went there many nights after dinner. This is a pool that everyone knows about, so the fish see a lot of anglers. Even the whitefish and squawfish here are selective and the rainbow trout’s knowledge of fly patterns is postdoctorate. One evening I tied on fly after fly while rises splashed like hailstones all around me. That kind of can’t-win-for-losing situation is addictive to me, and I kept at it until full dark. Then the rises began to taper off, and bats went by clicking like Geiger counters, and a manifestation in the air above gave me a start, until I connected it to the silhouette of a heron rising into the lighter sky above the tree line. I climbed back to my car trailed by minor rockslides, and I took off my waders and vest and headed for home. Now points of red shone from the radio towers on the peaks encircling the valley, and a glow from the city spilled upward onto the mountains like light from an orchestra pit before the curtain goes up. I drove slowly through the warm air with the windows down. The hiss of a lawn sprinkler announced the outskirts of a residential district; less-important traffic signals had been switched to flashing mode. When I pulled into my drive I saw that lights were still on in my children’s bedroom. I had missed reading
to them, but would still be able to say good-night. I felt a complex pleasure, the sort that is said to be provided by following rules of meter and rhyme. Here, as everywhere, ecosystems interlocked.
(1999)