At a tackle store in nearby Atlantic Highlands, amid sand spikes to hold rods on the beach, lead-loaded priests for clubbing fish, spiked cleats for climbing on jetties, bottles of fish scent to spray on lures, basins of wildly wriggling eels, and snapshots of stripers bigger than a six-year-old child, I talked to a veteran striper angler named Frank. He worked there and had caught some of the fish in the pictures. He gave me a number of tips, among them the fact that stripers love bad weatherâthe worse the weather, the more the stripers like it. As a result, one afternoon I fished in a storm that descended
from the north, covering the city and its lights like a fire blanket. I had to adjust my hat to the tightest fit, and when the rain hit my eyes it hurt. Wind blew spray from the wave crests like dust behind a car, and it rolled pieces of foam along the sand, where they dwindled in a blink. Whitish-brown foam covered the sea farther out than I could cast. Near some sunken rocks, I lost a lure, and accidentally put my next cast in the same spot. Reeling in fast to stay off the bottom, I felt a hard tug. The line started moving up the beach, I went with it, and the next thing I knew I had a striper on the sand at my feet. I hardly looked at it, in all the rain and spray: it was like something blown in by the storm, like a fish left in somebody's pants after a dousing in a cartoon. And, unfortunately, it was another “short,” as the striper anglers call them. The bells of a buoy clanged and clanged. On the dim horizon, in the Ambrose Channel, a three-masted sailing ship in silhouette slowly headed for New York.
The striped bass never did show up in any numbers in the surf at Sandy Hook this fall, as near as I can tell. Striper anglers stood in the parking lots with their waders folded down around their middles and groused. Guys trudging back from the surf through the beach-plum bushes had similar expressions of frustration. A few talked about last year, or another year, and how the stripers were chasing bunkers in the wash at their feet, how the bluefish ate until the bait was coming out of their mouths, how some mornings every guy came home with a fish. This year, striper fishing was said to be good in the surf at Montauk, and in Staten Island Bay, and at Cape May, farther south in Jersey. But not, for some reason, here.
Striper season on the coast of New Jersey remains open all winter. The wind was blowing trash cans around on my street the last time I went out. On the Verrazano Bridge at 4 a.m., the car felt like a plane flying in turbulence. Street signs were shaking back and forth and flashing their reflections. As soon as I turned onto the road that runs along Sandy Hook, salt spray began to streak the windshield. I drove slowly down to Parking Area F, and as I got close, my headlights picked out the waves lurching from the dark like shrouded beings in a horror movie. They were mobbing the beach: there was no beachâjust waves breaking so fast as to have no rhythm at all. The wind was trying to shout them down. I walked to take a closer look, and a speedy long surge chased me back. I decided I wanted to be in the car. As I backed out, a comber broke over the sand barrier and came down into the parking lot. I turned up the car heater and headed for home. People say the stripers will return again in May.
(1994)
M
y 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, “Ohhhhâlet 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 spinnerâan Abu-Reflex Shyster, with yellow bucktail hair and a yellow body with black spotsâinto 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 ducklingâa 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 slingshotâthe 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 destinationsâthe 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 abackâhe 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 excusesâlack 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 itâa 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 “Ohhhhâlet it go” as the fish swims away.
(
1995
)
M
ost angling stories involve big fish. For a fish to be literary, it must be immense, moss-backed, storied; for it to attain the level of the classics, it had better be a whale. But in fact, mostly that's not what we catch. Especially when first learning the sport, we catch little ones, and we continue to catch them even when we gain more skill and know how to find and fish for big ones. In the retelling, the little ones are enlarged, or passed over as if mildly shameful. There's just something not flattering about the contrast between overequipped us and a trophy that would fit with five others in a King Oscar of Norway Sardines can. You rarely read a story in which the author catches a fish of five inchesâit's as if a fisherman's numbers don't go much below twelve. A recent euphemism is “fish of about a pound.” When I hear of a slow day on the river where the angler is catching fish of about a pound, my mind corrects that estimate to “nine inches, tops.”
I've told my personal big-fish stories so often to myself and others that now I may remember the stories better than the
events they describe. The little fish I've caught remain unglazed by myth, and if I do happen to remember them, they are perhaps in some ways more real than the big ones in my mind. Once, on the Yellowstone River, a pocket-sized rainbow trout startled me by coming clear out of a patch of riffle water to take a dry fly before it landed, when it was still about a toot in the air. Little rainbows are more vivid in color; this had a line like a streak of lipstick on its side. In a rivulet next to a campsite in northern Michigan, a friend and I heard small splashes one night as we sat around the fire. When we investigated with a flashlight, we saw a spring peeper frog swimming on the surface with one leg gone and fingerling brown trout slashing at him from below. Near the campsite ran the Pigeon River, a brushy stream full of browns. During a hendrickson hatch, I waded with great care toward a little sipping rise in a place almost impossible to cast to under tag-alder branchesâjust the sort of place you'd find an eighteen-inch fish. I hung up a fly or two, and broke them off rather than disturb the water. Finally, miraculously, I laid the fly in the exact spot; a four-inch brown hit so hard that his impetus carried him well up into the alder branches, where he remained, flipping and flapping and complicatedly entangling the line. Once in a river in Siberia reputed to hold
farel
, a troutlike game fish, I found instead millions of no-name silvery fish about the size of laundry marking pens. They were too small to net, but would take a fly; I caught fifteen or more, and a Russian friend wrapped each one whole in wet pages from her sketchbook and baked them, paper and all, in the campfire coals. We took them out and unwrapped them and ate them steaming hot, with river-temperature Chinese beer.
Little fish make my mouth water, like the mouths of the hungry cave-guys in the movie
Quest for Fire
when they see a
herd of antelope across the plain. A seine net full of smelt looks delicious, almost as good as a dozen golden deep-fried smelt with lemon wedges on a plate. In Ohio we used to eat little fish by the messâas in, a mess of bluegill or a mess of perch. My cousin and I used to catch white bass by the dozens in Lake Erie in the Painesville harbor, right by the docks of the Diamond Shamrock Chemical Company, and then take them back to his house for fish fries, which no doubt left certain trace elements that we carry with us to this day. Once, I was fishing for shad in the Delaware River with a friend and somehow snagged a minnow only slightly bigger than the fly itself. I showed it to my friend, examined it, and popped it in my mouth. His face did that special deep wince people do when they watch you eat something gross. But the taste wasn't badâsushi, basically, only grittier.
When I went to Florida on a family vacation as a boy, I was disappointed to find that no tackle shop carried hooks small enough for the quarry I had in mind. Like everyone else I went out on the bottom-fishing boats in the deep water over the wrecks and the reefs. I cranked up a cobia longer than my leg, and a man from Cleveland in a scissorbill cap caught a shark which the captain finally had to shoot with a handgun. On later trips I remembered to bring small hooks and a spinning rod light enough to cast morsels of shrimp with no sinkers. In the quiet shade beneath the new overpass at the Key West charter-boat basin I fished for triggerfish, Frisbee-shaped fish with sharp dorsal spines and pursed, tiny mouths. They fought hard, turning sideways to the line and soaring among the pieces of rock and the mossy bases of the pilings. From the boardwalks of docks and next to highway bridges I fished for mangrove snappers, grunts, porgies, and unidentified fish with colors luminous as an expansion team's. At a
boat canal near our motel I spent hours casting to needlefish, little bolts of quicksilver on the surface that struck the bait viciously again and again without ever getting themselves hooked. If I happened to be near deeper water, sometimes the dark shape of a barracuda would materialize, approaching a little fish I'd hooked and then palming it like a giant hand. The moment the rod folded with his weight, the ease with which the line parted, the speed with which the rod snapped back were as much of the monster as I wanted to know.
At times, catching even a single little fish has been far preferable to catching no fish at all. Often I have landed my first with relief, knowing that at least now I can say I caught something. One afternoon four friends and I rented boats to fish a Michigan pond supposedly full of bluegills and large-mouth bass. In twenty man-hours of determined fishing, between us we did not catch or see a fish. One of us, however, drifting bait on the bottom, did catch a clam. About the size of a fifty-cent piece, the bivalve had closed over the hook so tightly that it required needle-nosed pliers to dislodge. Of course it was of no use to us other than as a curiosity, and did not dispel the gloom with which we rowed back to the jeering locals at the boat-rental dock. But it did reveal its usefulness later when we reported to friends and family about the day. They asked how we did, and we said, “Well, we caught a clam.” Such a statement will always set non-fishermen back on their heels (
You caught a clam? Is that good?
) and defangs the scorn that awaits the fishless angler's return.
I look for fish in any likely water I seeâharbors, rivers, irrigation ditches, hotel-lobby fountains. Every decade, maybe, I spot a long snook lurking in the shadow of a docked sailboat somebody's trying to sell, or a tail among the reeds at the edge of a pond that connects itself to a body that connects itself to
a head improbably far away, or a leviathan back and dorsal fin breaching just once in the Mississippi that even today I can't believe I saw. More often, I see nothing, or little fish. The two are not so different; if a big fish is like the heart of a watershed, little fish are like the water itself. I've taken just-caught little fish and put them in the hands of children watching me from the bank, and the fish gyrate and writhe and flop their way instantly from the hands back to the water, not so much a living thing as the force that makes things live. I've spotted little fish in trickles I could step across, in basin-sized pools beneath culverts in dusty Wyoming pastures, in puddles in the woods connected to no inlet or outlet I could seeâfish originally planted, I'm told, in the form of fish eggs on the feet of visiting ducks. One of the commonplaces of modern life is the body of water by the gravel pit or warehouse district where you know for a fact not even a minnow lives. The sight of just one healthy little brook trout, say, testifies for the character of the water all around, redeems it, raises it far up in our estimation.
Near where I used to live in Montana was a brush-filled creek that ran brown with snowmelt every spring, then dwindled in the summer until it resembled a bucket of water poured on a woodpile. I never thought to look in it, or even could, until one winter when I noticed a wide part, not quite a pool, by a culvert under an old logging road. Thick ice as clear and flawed as frontier window glass covered the pool, and through the ice I saw movement. I got down on my knees in the snow and looked more closely; above the dregs of dark leaves and bark fragments on the creek bottom, two small brook trout were holding in the current. Perhaps because of the ice between us, they did not flinch when I came so near I could see the black-and-olive vermiculate markings on their
backs, the pink of their gills when they breathed, the tiny red spots with blue halos on their sides. They were doing nothing but holding there; once in a while they would minutely adjust their position with a movement like a gentle furling down their lengths. Self-possessed as any storied lunker, they waited out the winter in their shallow lie, ennobling this humble flow to a trout stream.
(1996)