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Virtual Angling

I was leaning my elbows on the bridge rail watching the water glide under me and spread into a wide slow pool. It was that dusky time of day halfway between afternoon and night when summer trout streams begin to rouse themselves. I was late for supper, but I was married to a fly fisher and would be forgiven.

The low-angled sun slanted through the overhanging willows spreading a mottled patchwork of shadow and light upon the water. Some undulating pale mayfly spinners were dapping their abdomens on the surface, and now and then a few smaller, darker mayflies came drifting along—either the leftovers from a mid-day hatch or the heralds of an evening event to come.

Some cumbersome craneflies and neon damsels and fluttery caddisflies were flapping around the streamside shrubbery. Swallows and waxwings were swooping over the water. Soon the bats would come out to play.

Directly below me, in a patch of sunlight in the cushion behind the middle bridge abutment, a brown trout was finning just under the surface. I guessed he’d go fourteen or fifteen inches, a really nice fish for this particular New Hampshire stream. Periodically he’d sidle into the current seam. His dorsal fin would break the surface, his head would twist to the side, and his mouth would wink white, and then he’d ease back into his cushion. Eating emergers, I guessed.

Three other fish were lined up along the bank downstream from a sweeper on the deep left side of the pool. They were barely dimpling the surface—the kind of riseforms that sometimes betray really big fish, but could just as easily be made by two-inch chubs. I guessed—or preferred to believe—that these were trout. Sipping spinners, I figured, though it might’ve been ants or midges. I’d try a spinner first.

Down where the water quickened near the tailout two or three smallish fish kept splashing. A high-floating caddis skittered over them would do the job.

But my attention was focused on that nice brown behind the abutment. He’d be the trickiest one to catch, and he was therefore the most interesting. He was coming up regularly—about once a minute. A serious feeder. Assuming I figured out what he was eating and found a good imitation in my flybox, I’d need to cast it way up under the bridge to get a drift along that current seam, and to do that I’d have to wade nearly to the middle of the pool, where, I happened to know, the water would be lapping the tops of my waders. But unless I was standing in the right place, a braid of current at the bottom of the trout’s cushion would grab my leader and drag my fly away from his feeding lane.

Even from the middle of the stream, the only way to beat the drag would be with a puddle cast. I’d have to tie on an extra-long tippet, drive it up under the arch of the bridge on a tight loop, and stop it abruptly. If I did it right, the tippet would land in loose coils and the fly would drift draglessly right along that trout’s feeding lane, and if I’d tied on the right pattern, and if I’d timed it right, the fish would slide out of his cushion and drift back under my fly, and I’d see his back arch and then the swirl as he took it and twisted away, and I’d raise my rod tip and feel the fish’s strength and energy surge up the line and through the rod to my hand.

“Hey, mister. Lookit that. There’s a big fish down there. See it?”

I nearly jumped off the bridge. “You shouldn’t sneak up on a fellow like that,” I said.

He was a kid, twelve or thirteen years old, I guessed. He’d leaned his bike against the bridge and was now standing beside me, up on tiptoes, elbows on the rail, squinting down at the water.

“Of course I see the fish,” I added.

“I wasn’t sneaking,” he said. “You just weren’t paying attention. I think I coulda exploded a bomb under you and you wouldn’ta noticed. You were like totally in a daze or something.”

* * *

My father took me with him from the beginning. When we went fishing, I was his partner, not his kid. I took my equal turn rowing the boat, paddling the canoe, or running the outboard motor, just as I tied my own clinch knots, baited my own hooks, and unsnarled my own backlashes.

Eventually I figured out that Dad had important life-lessons in mind, but at the time I understood that taking turns was simple and obvious fairness: Everybody, even fathers, would rather fish than paddle. It never occurred to me that some parents would let the kid do all the fishing, any more than I could imagine a father never bringing his kid fishing with him.

When I got older, my father abandoned his equal-time-with-the-paddle policy. “Just grab the rod, get up there in the bow, and don’t argue about it,” he’d say when we launched our canoe.

“We should flip for it,” I’d say.

“I told you, don’t argue. You’re supposed to honor your father.”

“We’ll swap ends later, then.”

“We’ll see.”

As often as not when I figured it should be his turn and suggested it was time for him to fish and me to paddle, he’d say, “Nah. You go ahead. I’m having fun.”

After a while, I came to realize that he really was having fun. He liked maneuvering the canoe to give me an easy cast at a good-looking spot along the bank of a bass pond or a current seam on a trout river. He got a kick out of it when his guiding efforts paid off in a fish.

“It’s just as much fun as fishing,” he claimed. “It doesn’t matter which of us happens to be holding the rod. Either way, I feel like an equal participant. It’s not me or you casting the fly and hooking the fish. It’s us.”

“Fishing in your imagination,” I said. “Virtual angling.”

“Well, sure,” he said. “Once you’ve packed away some experiences, it doesn’t take much to roll out the mental home movies and to spark the muscle memories. When I see you holding a bending rod, I can feel it. When I watch you cast, the part of my brain that guides my casting arm is doing it along with you.”

When he became too infirm to go fishing, my father insisted that I narrate detailed reports of all my angling adventures, great and small. He liked to hear about a summer evening on my local bluegill pond just as much as a week on an Alaskan salmon river. He’d close his eyes when I talked, and if I skimmed over some detail, he’d interrupt me. He wanted to know how the river smelled, how the breeze riffled the water, how the trout sipped the mayfly spinners, how the mist rose off the stream.

And if I did it right, I could tell that he was feeling and smelling and hearing and seeing it all for himself.

I used to think my father was odd. Who else would truly enjoy watching somebody else fish as much as he enjoyed fishing himself? How could a man who knew he’d never go fishing again genuinely love hearing other people’s stories the way Dad did?

Well, we’re all virtual anglers. We daydream of fish and rivers and hatches when we tie flies, when we take showers, when we drive automobiles. We join clubs and watch videos and attend shows. We devour catalogs and pamphlets. We hang around fly shops. We buy lots of stuff. We read magazines.

I know for a fact that you read books about fishing.

* * *

In the last months of his life, when I visited him, I usually found my father lying in his sickbed with his eyes closed and a little smile on his face. I’d sit beside him, poke his shoulder, and say, “Hey. You awake?”

His eyes would blink open. “I was fishing,” he’d say.

* * *

As the kid and I watched from the bridge, that nice brown trout eased into the current seam, drifted backward, humped his back, twisted his head, and ate something.

“See that?” the kid said. “Too bad you don’t have a pole with you.”

“I’ve got a rod in my car,” I said. “I don’t go anywhere without my gear.”

“So whyn’t you go catch that fish, then?”

I tapped my temple and smiled. “Because I already did.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Huh?”

“Virtual angling,” I said.