49 Life Lessons Through Fishing

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“From one perspective or another, all our lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem larger”
-- D.J. Waldie (from Holy Land – A Suburban Memoir)

If you are reading this introduction (and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that you are) chances are pretty good that you are avoiding some other task that you are supposed to be doing. As this book is about fishing, my psychic powers tell me you are more than likely a fisherman or fisherwoman. This alone tells me you are, very likely, a mild procrastinator. I’ve been procrastinating for over four months to write the opening paragraph for this introduction.

This is one of those books that started out as one thing and ended up another. All in all, it is a book is about fishing. Catching fish is at its core primitive. It is simple and satisfying and edible. So this book is really about finding joy in something simple.

If you look at your own life and try to remember those moments when you truly felt joy, its likely something simple; a meal your mother made; the warmth of the sun on your body as the clouds move past - those little things that remind you that sometimes just living and breathing is quite often good enough.

In one way or another, we are all addicted to the next “this.” Our mind constantly races forward to find new stimuli to fill the seemingly bottomless appetite the human brain has for new bytes of enticing data. This appetite for new stimulating data, dribs and drabs of images, sounds, tastes, smells, sensations – this now defines our over-paced lives. The next “this” might be an email, a taco, a text message, the skirt swaying on a woman walking down the sidewalk, the latest news on CNN, a new car ad, a better wine, a faster wi-fi, a more ergonomic magic marker, it really is a never-ending “this.” So when my mind is racing and I’m in the mode of racing on to the next “this” – I try to stop and remember that I, am also “this.”

When you are fishing you are simplifying the next “this” to catching a fish. When you don’t catch fish you can view the activity as a form of meditation whereby you didn't catch a fish. As long as you don’t mind the trunk of your car filled with fishing rods, reels, tackle boxes, and apparatus that can poke holes in your hands, feet and the ears of small children, you might actually begin to enjoy the activity.

If you need to learn how to fish, you should be able to accomplish that by reading this book. If you read this book, and then spend at least a year going fishing every weekend and you have still not caught a fish, send me an email or a letter, or personally hunt me down on the streets of Bernal Heights in San Francisco and I will refund the price of the book. If you are still not satisfied, I will take you fishing until you catch a fish. If you are still not satisfied after that -- then I truly have no use for you. You should take up another hobby or become active in local politics because it is quite probable that you are not only incompetent but just plain uneducatable. Frankly, I’ve seen even the dimmest of wits catch a fish.

* * *
I started fishing at my Grandparents’ house at Lake Lashaway in East Brookfield, Mass. It was a man-made lake with quaint little cottages. Back in the 60’s it was a weekend playground for families from Worcester, Springfield and Boston who tooled around in Chris Crafts, fiberglass outboards and little sailboats during the day and lit citronella candles and mosquito coils at night. Kids ran around the lakeshore eating popsicles and swimming out to floating docks. At night they played kick the can and caught fireflies in Hellman’s mayonnaise jars. In the winter, the lake froze over and was a place for ice-skating, snowmobiles and occasionally ice fishing. My grandfather’s neighbors included a construction man who made his fortune from the Interstate Highway act of the 1950’s, and an heir to a barbershop hair products dynasty.

The group of neat houses where he lived was called “millionaires row” in comparison to the other more modest cottages on the north and east sides of the lake. If there were “millions” from my Grandfather they have been long spent by other family members, because I have only seen evidence of a few hundred thousand bucks, but nevertheless I like to hold on to the image of a past linked to a “millionaires row” however tenuous – a pathetic human habit of linking oneself , even tenuously, to the illusion of wealth or status.

My first fishing rod was a translucent fiberglass stick with a cheap open face reel bought at a five and dime called “The Fair” in East Brookfield. My first fish was a tiny bluegill, you can see it in the picture above (if you look very carefully between my father’s legs). My twin brother Kevin on the other hand (literally) caught an impressive smallmouth bass of about 15 inches, it is nearly as long as his leg. If you look at the face and body language of the main characters you can observe a range of emotions including envy, fear, anxiety, compassion, and equivocation.

We are 3 years old in the picture and I’m pretty certain my lifelong obsession to catch more and bigger fish stems from the events captured in that Kodak moment. This obsession with fishing didn’t drive me to drink and/or take drugs very often, and didn’t break-up my marriage as I pretty much screwed that up without interference from anyone. It never landed me in jail (there was one night in jail after being busted in a bungled police stakeout – but I’ll save that for another book). But the genesis of this burning desire to catch fish I can find no other explanation than the picture above.

For the rest of my youth, catching fish seemed to haunt the outer reaches of my awareness. Whenever I passed a body of water it gripped me -- I wanted to know what lurked beneath. If you are a fisherman you know exactly what I’m talking about. If not, well, you may understand it a little better if you can make it at least half-way through this book.

Back in the 1980’s When I lived in New York City I would wake up at 4:45am on Saturday, walk to the subway in the dark, buy a ticket on the Metro North and board a train at Grand Central Station and make my way to the tony Fairfield county suburbs in Connecticut, then I’d rent a car at the Avis office which was in walking distance from the Stamford train station, and I’d make my way to some stream, inlet, or river.

I’d unpack my fishing gear, assemble the fishing rod and reel and begin to cast a lure or begin whipping my flyline over the water with a sort of Gomer Pyle-like faith that a fish would somehow impale itself on my hook. I did this casting motion over and over – obsessively, weekend after weekend, like a woodpecker banging his noggin against a tree.

During winter months I spent most of my time indoors -- tying flies, cleaning reels and flyline, reading fishing magazines, fantasizing about women that worked in my office and tending to the tools of my hobby.

Sounds like a fascinating life I know – but you started reading a book that was clearly about fishing (you didn’t expect to hear about me having a threesome in the ladies room of the Ritz with Susan Sarandon and Gwen Stefani).

I did this as often as I could in the ten years I lived in New York. Eventually, I got out of New York. I realized that if I didn’t leave New York City by the time I turned 30 I’d be one of those sad-ass son-of-a-bitches you see walking on a summer night in the West Village wearing beige shorts from the Gap, a wrinkled polo shirt and blue Doc Martens with the toes all scuffed up from walking up too many subway stairways.

So, I moved to the West coast -- San Francisco. In Northern California there is no break in the fishing year – Summer and Fall is trout in the Sierra, Winter is Steelhead on the coastal streams, Spring is time for surf perch in the ocean and Striped Bass in the bay. For my first five years living in San Francisco I did just that. I fished with religious fervor and I am not exaggerating – truly like the proverbial "man possessed." In the East I’d been forced to tone down my obsession with fly fishing – Easterners are suspicious of anyone who gets too deeply involved with any activity that doesn’t somehow generate deposits in a 401k account.

In the West, as an obsessed fly fisherman who spent nearly all my waking hours outside of work fishing or driving alone for many hours to remote places on a topographical map to go fishing, I was viewed in the same light as your average San Francisco 49er fan, wind surfer, mountain biker, gay activist, Tai Chi practitioner or fill-in-the-blank fanatic -- pretty much your run of the mill Californian.

People in the West didn’t make strange faces when I said I spent the weekend fly fishing for native rainbow trout in the foothills near Copperopolis. The usual response was a nonchalant “that sounds like fun” or the more practical "Didge yah catch any?" In New York people didn’t want to hear about you watching trout rise to mayflies as the sun set over the Housatonic, or what else you did over the weekend, unless it involved some compass-direction-town in the Hamptons or the address of a new niteclub, where the key attraction was being excluded.

In the West I could pursue my passion without hearing snide comments from pretty much anyone. Then, as sometimes happens in life, there was a turning point. I was describing “catch and release fishing” -- the act of catching a fish and releasing it back into the water, supposedly unharmed -- to someone who didn’t see the point of the activity. Her response to my poetic description of catch and release fishing was “so its kind of the like kicking someone in the shins and walking away.”

The simple brutish analogy of my previously enlightened policy of “catch and release” put my hobby it in its ugliest light. About a month later I laid down my rods for a long rest and gave up catch and release fishing for a long spell.

Eventually, I picked up the rod again but it was with a new goal: to catch a fish and eat that fish. I stripped away the bogus trappings of fishing and flyfishing as a pseudo-religious pagan ritual and let it become what it was for me as a kid. It was hunting fish with a line and a hook – it was primitive and satisfying, yet to some in the fly fishing community it was heretical and unenlightened.

There is a movement among fishermen to elevate the trout to the level of deity -- to worship the trout and its habitat and to consider every trout the way a Hindu priest considers the sacred cow. Many believe that nearly all trout waters should be designated “catch and release” -- this doesn’t seem right to me as there are some streams that can afford a little culling of the population. All things unchecked can run amok.

The rivers and streams of the world would be better served if more children and adults were taught the simple rudiments of catching, cleaning, cooking and eating a fish. This full involvement in the process would help everyone understand the cold hard truth about the food chain and to appreciate the difference between a meal caught and a meal bought.

Our oceans, streams and rivers are in decline and commercial fishing is just one of the culprits. I am not saying we should abandoned commercial fishing, it has been a means of feeding societies for millenia. The recent demand for seafood has spawned some practices straight out of science fiction books -- fish farming, computerized trawlers, hi-tech fishfinders -- as well as mechanized long-line fishing that has devastated our fish stocks and imperiled our ecosystems. If you don't believe me just ask Al Gore or any local commercial fisherman out of New Bedford, Newport, or Key West. They all tell the same stories.

Sportfishing is a less efficient means of catching fish. It generates more money for commercial fisherman who make the transition from commercial to sportfishing, and it drastically slows down the wholesale strip-mining of at least some stretches of our waters. Dozens of environmental organizations have joined forces with sport fisherman and they agree, when it comes to saving our waters --sportfishing is the answer.

While the appetite for sushi, salmon, tuna and even tilapia continues to grow each year, we've got to find alternatives to these foods. We could start by eating lower on the fish food chain -- herring and sardines are fantastic when cooked properly. A salmon, tuna or swordfish caught under new fishing guidelines (no nets or long lines) would be the kind of treat it was when I was a kid (and there weren't sushi restaurants at the local mall). Unless the seafood industry can make greater assurances of the preservation and long-term viability of their commercial fishing practices, serious federal and international regulations will need to be instituted and enforced or there is going to be a large hole in the bottom of the sea -- as the little ditty went from my soporific Connecticut childhood.

* * *

Note to the reader:

Each chapter heading begins with a specific fishing trip - the river, stream or body of water, the town (or nearest town) and date. The place and date provide a reference point as you may be familiar with the local terrain or maybe just the gestalt of that particular point in time. For me the dates are points in my development as a fisherman. From each fishing trip I induce or extrapolate a spiritual lesson (in some cases the term "spiritual" may be a stretch -- but you get the idea).

The fishing journal entries are left in their raw state – unedited and sometimes random, with strange punctuation, grammar and references to what I had for lunch, people I met along the way and the conditions of the river, lake or sea. In reliving my progression as a fisherman and a human along this path I invariably digress and veer off to comment on subjects where I have little or no pedigree. In that way I am like the millions of writers before me who spend countless hours trying to make sense of the insignificant chain of events that we affectionately call life.

Letort Spring, Carlisle

Legendary piscator Vincent Marinaro landing a trout at Letort Spring Run, 1950’s -- a mint copy of Vincent Marinaro’s fishing classic In the Ring of the Rise now sells for up to $400.

June 27, 1992, 10am
Letort Spring – Carlisle, PA
Entered the stream near city park and baseball fields. Stream was silty. Lots of trout, all cruising, no risers, difficult fishing. Silt makes wading difficult. Beautiful native browns.

This is my first entry in the fly fishing journal. Like most beginners I don’t have much to say about the subject. My field of knowledge is limited by my lack of experience. There are two noteworthy lessons here. I chose an access point that was readily accessible, also known in most endeavors as the easy route. The easy route can yield smaller rewards. This can be expressed in a mini-max chart that has been used for decades in business management.

Given four possible scenarios based on effort expended and reward gained – you generally try to achieve the maximum reward with the minimum effort. This is called the “mini-max” or more commonly known as conserving your energy. In the scenario at Letort Spring I did so many things wrong I fell into the fourth quadrant – outputting maximum effort for the absolute minimum reward. It is interesting how often we unwittingly find ourselves in the fourth quadrant.

The first problem is my choice of Letort Spring. This is a legendary trout stream, I had read about it in many fly fishing books and the legends of American fly fishing honed their craft here. Vince Marinaro and Joe Humphreys discovered these streams long ago and understood them to be the equivalent of the famed “chalk streams” of England where fly fishing was born. The streams have large underground limestone springs that controls the pH of the waters and helps breed lots of food for trout to feed upon. The limestone springs also control water temperatures making it ideal for trout in the cold winters and hot Pennsylvania summers.

Having only a few years of serious fly fishing under my belt, tackling this stream is the equivalent of a first-year Hebrew student attempting to translate the Dead Sea Scrolls. I was woefully under-prepared for the challenge and so focused on the one single-minded goal of catching a trout, I ignored all preparation and patience necessary to the task.

When I said the stream was silty what I really meant is that I hastily waded into the water, stirred up a bunch of sand, silt and mud – scaring off any trout within casting distance and making the stream unfishable for at least 20 mintues. The desire to get into the water (a common affliction of flyfishermen) spoiled any chance at catching a fish.

If I had sat and observed the stream for only two or three minutes before casting, I might have found a nice spot to comfortably cast to a cruising trout. The chances are good that the trout would have still ignored my offering, but at least I would have allowed even a fleeting chance at catching a fish.

Most beginning flyfishermen lack the virtue of patience. Yet patience is the most essential quality to be a successful fisherman. St. Augustine once said “The reward of patience is patience.” Patience, most people feel is over-rated. Everything about our modern life flies in the face of patience being a virtue. Every gadget you buy, every program you download, every service you are willing to fork over hard earned cash for is generally a shortcut to eliminating your need for patience. In those moments when I attempt to imitate some sort of sage prelate, I lay that St. Augustine quote on my son Graham and his reply is “Kids don’t have patience so the reward of patience is no reward.”

At the time of my first trip to the Letort Spring Run I’d not yet read this aphorism of St. Augustine. Neither did I have an inkling that my odds of catching a trout would have been better had I sat Indian style on the edge of the stream chanting mantras and breathing through my third eye and waiting for a trout to leap from the water into my lap.

That I chose this particular stream to begin my fly fishing journal will be laughable to any experienced flyfishers. It is the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest in the annals of American flyfishing. Flyfishers literally travel from around the globe to test their skills by making a pilgrimage to fish here. This trip would stick in my craw for months, years -- in fact for over a decade -- until after multiple cross-country flights, hang-overs, $500 in legal fees, a trip to Wal-mart to repair a hole burnt in my waders and prayers to all the known gods in the pantheon of fishing deities, I was able to conquer this stream on my own terms. But, more on that later...

Yellow Breeches

June 27, 1992
Yellow Breeches, near Carlisle PA
Down the road from Kings Gap after the fish hatchery. Jill caught a 13 inch brown trout on a prince nymph on a downstream drift.

I wanted to introduce my new partner to the art of fly fishing, expecting that upon her first outing that she, like me, would come up empty handed. In my mind, I figured I could keep her busy gently flipping the fly line back and forth, back and forth in this pastoral setting, while I charged downstream to the more fertile looking water (for some reason the water downstream always looks more fertile). Here I would hook, fight, land and release one of those beautiful Yellow Breeches brown trout I'd been reading about.

The great irony is that her detachment from actually catching a fish is exactly the approach that a flyfisher needs to be successful. There is a Taoist saying “bend and you remain straight,” and Jill’s disinterest in catching a fish allowed her to focus on casting and letting the fly drift and dart through the water for the longest duration possible. Fly-fishing is very simply a method of allowing your imitation bait on a hook to drift in the water so that a fish will see it and strike.

Most successful people, in any endeavor, have the ability to focus and concentrate by limiting or virtually eliminating the emotions of fear, doubt, worry, and impatience. Watching Jill’s slow casting and mending I was certain that it would produce nothing more than snags in the aquatic vegetation and bushes that lined the stream. I had occluded the possibility of her succeeding because I had faith in my abilities and dismissed her lack of abilities. My first mistake was having faith in my abilities; my second was dismissing her lack of abilities.

What I failed to notice at the time was her relaxed nature and joy at just being in the stream learning a new skill in a new environment made her at one with the environment. Jill was attracted to the beauty and imagery of flyfishing, not necessarily in flyfishing itself. I can’t speak for a woman’s mind, but it is my impression that many women, who are attracted to flyfishing, envision themselves stepping into a Monet painting in motion, at one with the scenery and nature.

Just as I was failing to notice how easily she was letting her nymph drift between the fluttering tufts of elodea and watercress, she let out a shriek, arched her rod and was fast on to a beautiful brown trout. I raced upstream to where she was holding the rod somewhat limply and shifting it from left to right as the fish pulled the wand to and fro. She said with some alarm in her voice “What do I do?” and I excitedly said “raise your rod.”

At this point I should note my ex-wife’s love for animals. She can get stray cats to come out from underneath the foundation of a fish factory just to sniff her hand. In fact, on a visit to my ancestral farm in Ireland on our honeymoon, she heard a little kitten mewling in the bushes and was able to extract it, convince me to bring it to my father’s cousin, Joe Mears, a 70 year old cattle farmer in the nearby town of “The Pigeons” (not making that up – you can look it up its near the town of Athlone).

Joe Mears somewhat reluctantly, but kindly agreed to the request and I’m happy to say that many years afterward, his two sisters – whom we collectively refer to as the nuns (because they are nuns) sent us a picture of the cat, now full grown and chubby with a storybook calico coat.

They had named the cat “U.S.” in Jill’s honor.

This is just one story, but I’ve come to call Jill the “cat whisperer” for her innate ability to tame even the most wild and abused of cats. She has a genuine rapport with all animals. I mention this, as it had probably not occurred to Jill that a beautiful brown trout with a hook in its mouth would be a much more cruel and visceral reality than she’d imagined.

Having watched me flail in the water to no effect on several other occasions, she likely did not expect to catch a real fish, as something just short of horror crossed her face when she looked down upon the thrashing trout with its cold eye and accusing gaze as it writhed, flopped and began to wrap itself up in the tippet and leader. I was able to get a hand on the leader, which must have allowed for some slack when I moved forward, as the fish shook free. The excitement proved too much to continue fishing and we decamped from the stream to go find a place to get lunch.

On the way I pointed out a cat that had recently been hit by a car on the side of the road – a thoughtless bit of commentary on my part. Jill was still thinking about the pain she’d caused that poor brown trout and my conjuring up an image of an eviscerated cat did not help matters.

Taking the logical tack used by other fishermen didn’t help either -- no amount of persuasion about “cold blooded animals”, “lack of nerve endings” and the like could soften the pain or persuade her that flyfishing was anything but a cruel and harsh blood sport with the only result being pain and misfortune to a creature more graceful and more innocent than any human being that might catch it.

At that moment I’d realized I would not have a fishing partner as my spouse – but like most things in life you justify your decisions based on many factors. It seemed like a small thing to give up in the scheme of what I assumed would be a lifetime union.

The institution of marriage is a series of falling in and out of love with the illusions you have about yourself and your spouse. Having like interests may not be essential to a marriage -- but it sure doesn't hurt.

Ashumet Pond, Falmouth

Kettle ponds from a satellite photo


July 3, 1992
Ashumet Pond, Falmouth MA (fished by canoe)
Winds. 150 acre Kettle Pond. No bass. Caught a number of yellow perch on Mylar minnows.

In memory I recall a deep pond set back in the woods on the south shore of Cape Cod. While Jill would not be my fishing spouse, I had somehow been given the consolation prize of her Uncle Alan.

Alan Shoolman is a Brookline born, Boston native who is an enthusiastic flyfisherman. Alan is one of the last of the breed of pre-war American gentleman who grew up during the Great Depression. Because of this he is more grateful for the blessings of life and more cautious around extremists, kooks and people with bad manners. He reminds you of the quietly debonair Hollywood leading men of the 40s and 50s like Gary Cooper or William Holden. A smart understated guy who also happens to possess one of those true Boston accents movie actors can never seem to get right.

Alan lives in Back Bay with his wife Barby and has a house at the Cape (Cape Cod for those born anywhere outside of New England). He is still an active business leader at the age of 75 and seems to have more energy than most of my contemporaries who are 30 years younger -- save my twin brother Kevin and my childhood friend Val who seem to have been born with some type of special turbo thrusters in their mitochondria that the rest of us are lacking – but more on them later. Alan had told me about these Kettle ponds months before, referred to geologically as Kettle Moraines, and he had wanted to fish more of them in his new Old Town canoe over the summer.

The Cape Cod kettle ponds are literally left-overs from the ice age. When the glaciers retreated they left behind boulders and icebergs, some icebergs were buried and insulated over time by rocks and dirt. Some of these buried icebergs melted and became kettle ponds like Ashumet. Because they are too difficult to drain as some of the glacial icebergs punctured the water table, they are nearly impossible to fill-in and turn into housing developments – so they persist only because Yankee ingenuity can’t figure out a cheap way around them.

We paddled around the pond in the canoe, Jill joined us as we were still early in our courting and she wanted to show me that she was still in this for the long haul and would brave seeing fish getting their mouths impaled – even if it was emotionally traumatizing to her.

There was very little structure in the shallow areas of the pond -- a few downed branches, some rocks, but mostly just barren bottom with little area for fish to hide. On the far side of the pond there was a floating dock where people likely sunbathed in the dog days of summer. Under that dock there was a massive school of small yellow perch. These fish were so aggressive they would attack a bare hook; any feathery material was an impediment to their single minded pursuit of devouring any flashy object in their reach. After catching a dozen or so, we tired of the pursuit and paddled back to the spot where we launched.

There is a lesson to be taken away from this trip. Even though it was not much for fishing – I was curious about the term “kettle pond” – so years later I looked it up and came across all the information about the geology of New England and the buried frozen icebergs and the near incomprehensibility that water trapped at the bottom of these ponds was likely 100,000 years old. People brag about vintage wine – how about vintage water. So while the fish did not produce much in the way of angling excitement, years later my appreciation for the geology of those ponds still fires my imagination. This is a trick I’ve learned over time – if where you’re at isn’t doing it for you – learn more about where you're at.

A little knowledge of geology can salvage the worst of trips.

Grews Pond, Falmouth

July 4, 1992
Grews Pond, Falmouth MA
Spin gear due to wind. Alan Shoolman caught one tiny smallmouth. Deep. Kettle pond, clear water. Scraped my legs on rocks/light rain.

This was the second attempt at one of the geological kettle ponds in Cape Cod. The interesting thing that I note about this trip was that I scraped my legs and there was a light rain. We didn’t bring the canoe with us today – likely due to the dreary weather.

Scraped shins are pretty common affliction among fisherman. Scrambling among rocks is part of the territory in finding the places where fish like to hide. Contrary to the images of fly fisherman in television commercials, standing knee-deep in smooth flowing rivers, fully protected with waders that go up to their chests, fly fisherman often fish wearing shorts and Tevas among sharp algae covered rocks.

Fishing waders are a modern invention that greatly advanced the sport of fishing. Free of the restrictions of a boat, waders allowed you to enter the water on its own terms and get close with nature without actually getting nature on you. The simple concept of keeping the water off your skin can ward off hypothermia for the better part of an hour, bulking up underneath your waders with long underwear or having insulated waders can keep you in the water for nearly half the day under the most brutal weather conditions.

We all like protection. Protection and preserving your comfort are the most basic human instincts after straight up survival. We all seek comfort, whether it is a better seat for our bicycle, higher thread count sheets, a new SUV, or the brand o ultra-soft f toilet paper my ex-wife buys that is the envy of her brother who lives in Portland (his ex-wife is still purchasing the 1000 sheet rolls of Scott Tissue that have been in restrooms since I was in Elementary school in the 60’s).

To keep things simple and to avoid hauling around waders or slogging around and over boulders and rocks with what is really the sartorial equivalent of a clown’s oufit; often times fishermen do what is called “wading wet.” When I was a teenager wading wet meant Levis and a pair of old sneakers. It seemed slightly more palatable than stepping into the water on a cold May morning in the Connecticut River with bare shins. There were lots of weeds and other things in the river that you’d rather not feel as you slogged around in the murky water waist deep water.

In the summer, on a hot day, wading wet provides a nice relief from waders, which can make you feel clammy, hot and sticky if it is warm outside. Wearing nylon shorts and a pair of Tevas is a pretty low maintenance fishing outfit that is light and dries easily. The downside is that your skin is not protected like you are in waders.

While I’ve never seen statistics, I’m guessing that most fly fishing injuries are related to slipping and falling. The only fly fishing deaths that I’ve ever heard of are caused when a fisherman wearing waders gets swamped, meaning his waders fill with water up to the chest, and he gets swept away with the current, unable to free himself from the added weight of extra gallons of water he succumbs to the current and drowns. Chest waders filled with water are the equivalent of cement shoes – a good reason why people wearing chest waders should at the very least wear an elastic belt around their waists to slow the swamping process should they get dunked.

In the Gallatin River near Bozeman where Robert Redford filmed some scenes for A River Runs Through It, I once took a spill and was carried downriver about 100 yards. It is not a performance I’d like to repeat. I was wearing waders which filled up. Had I been wading wet I would have likely only been carried 10 or 20 yards down river and probably kept my dignity intact.

At Grews Pond that day, I was not wearing waders and the risk of that was evident in the skin on those rocks glacial erratic rocks that had been hanging around that pond for the last 12,000 years. In any event if there was a lesson about this day it would probably be you can travel lighter to increase your comfort, but it comes with greater risk. The other lesson is, if you don’t want to scrape the skin off your shins, don’t climb on slippery rocks wearing shorts and tevas.

This is the kind of advice that I dole out to 9 and 10 year olds on a regular basis now that I am a dad and over 40, but at the age of 28 when this journal entry was written I obviously had some lessons to learn. Probably a bit of sound advice would be “don’t do anything you would tell a ten year old not to do.”

Deep Pond, Falmouth

July 5, 1992
Deep Pond, Falmouth MA (Sam Turner Rd.)
Difficult access. Trout rising 10:30am. Large bass on west shore. Hits – no fish taken. Good pond. Try in future fishing deep. Not much cover, a few docks, should be fished early morning.

This was the last day fishing the geological kettle ponds. One line of this entry jumps out at me. “Hits – no fish taken. Good pond.” Only would a fisherman say that a pond is good where he didn’t catch any fish. In the mind of a fisherman, seeing or feeling evidence of a fish is the determining factor if a body of water is good or bad. A pond that yields only hits provides a challenge for the future and some assurance that fish can be caught there. This means this pond is tough. It requires a smart fisherman. Simple logic – if you go back there and conquer the fish, you are officially smarter.

Herein lies the one of the basic tenets of fishing – you will fail more often than you succeed. This is built into fishing. In tennis, you will generally hit the ball over the net in bounds more often than not. In baseball, even a mediocre player will get a hit 20 percent of the time. In golf, you may not get a par on every hole but at least you hit the ball on every swing (or almost every swing).

Fishing is built on the premise of failing most of the time. All the apparatus in fishing is designed with this in mind. The reel allows you to retrieve your failed cast, lures were created to repeatedly allow the fisherman to present his bait over and over with more efficiency in the realm of failure. Every statistic I’ve ever seen about sport fishing leads the reader to the conclusion that it is the least efficient sport known to man.

Yet this colossal ratio of failure to success seems to be fishings greatest attraction. Maybe it is the one sport where being a failure is not laughed at. Even the worst fishermen are viewed as kind and gentle souls even if they are a bit dunderheaded.

Another comment in the journal entry notes that we got there “too late.” This is one of the fisherman’s greatest of all excuses to justify failure. Had we only been their an hour earlier…rarely do people say “you should come an hour later” – except in the South – where coming an hour later means that the chef/mechanic/accountant/plumber/roofer/fry cook/etc will have returned from their morning of fishing will be there to serve you in “about an hour.” There are no half-hours south of the Mason Dixon line. Often times you will be instructed to “come back in a couple of hours” – which translates to “take it easy Yankee, go sit in your car, roll down the window, buy a Dr. Pepper, smoke a cigarette and observe the birds on the telephone wire for a spell.” The South after all has a certain expertise in dealing with failure.

One of my friend’s fathers once told me a story about a guy he worked with that was from the heart of Old Virginia. After enduring years and years of stories about Dixie, the Civil War and the finer points of Robert E. Lee’s battle tactics, he finally turned to his co-worker and said “You know, in New Jersey sometimes we go a whole six months without even mentioning the Civil War.” Of course he was immediately corrected – “You mean the war between the states” he said, maintaining that most endearing quality of the Southerner, adherence to the romance of noble failure.

Suffield side

July 17, 1992
Connecticut River, Suffield CT at Stoney Creek confluence
Fished up river from Stoney Creek. In water at 7:30 am. Jill caught first fish a 7 inch smallie. Water level is extremely high. Fished the shore line. Val took four or five smallies on spinning gear. Jill caught one or two more going upstream. Switched to spinning gear on upstream caught a 2 1/2 pound smallie on #3 Mepps, under tree branch on the shoreline. Photo taken.
Moved down river caught one smallie on Mylar piping streamer stripped quickly, allowed for downstream drift. The quick stripping yielded the strike. Moved to pool below runoff pipes. Val caught and lost a large striper using a popper. Caught 2 or 3 more stripers. Jill caught a large white perch. I caught a nice smallie. Failed to get a striper myself. Will bring popper with me next time.

This is my true home water. Home water has a special meaning, the smell of it, the feel of it, and the color of it. I fished this area of the Connecticut River three or four times a week in the summer months when I was a teenager – dermatologists from NYU, Stanford and UCSF can attest to this fact from the numerous moles, dysplastic nevi, and skin damage on my back and shoulders (back then you went shirtless and there wasn’t a product called sunblock there was only suntan lotion). There is a large island in the middle of the Connecticut River at Enfield called Kings Island. Early maps show it as Pynchons Island, I found a reference to Pynchon in an American Heritage article –

William Pynchon, at Springfield, Massachusetts, was the first Englishman to establish a thriving river trade; because of the rapids at Enfield he built, in 1636, a warehouse just above Windsor, where he could unload his shallops and pinnaces and move the goods overland to Springfield or transfer the cargo to flatboats poled by a dozen stout men who, their labors eased by ample consumption of West Indian kill-devil, braved the rapids and reached Springfield by water. Pynchon’s trade with the Indians was mostly in pelts, which he shipped to Boston. In fact beaver skins were such a common medium of exchange that when merchants struck the first coins or tokens, long before the issuance of government currency, that specie bore a crude image of the valuable little animal and the coins were popularly called beavers.

The island was likely a place where the stout men may have rested for spell and enjoyed the shade of the massive oak trees. I’ve read recently that some of the last remaining old growth forest in Connecticut is on King’s Island.

My history with Kings Island bears a short reminiscence. When I turned 16 years old my friends Scott Downs and Mark Ranta decided we would go over to Kings Island for a weekend camping trip. We couldn’t borrow a canoe, so we loaded all our goods into rubber rafts and a plastic dinghy and held onto the outside of the rafts and kicked our way across the river. Today this is the sort of stunt they would concoct for the cast of “Survivor”.

My birthday is June 24 so the timing was perfect for a camping trip. We had just finished our school year at Enfield High and the weather was in its early summer glory -- close to being one of the longest days of the year. The spring runoff on the river was still flowing strong, but had subsided over the past couple of weeks.

We drank too much beer and Mad Dog 20/20, ate only fish and potatoes, heaved our guts out and ran out of water. The stuff of teenage legend. I remember my legs hurt for days after the trip – probably a combination of the flailing kicking we did to keep from being carried down river, dehydration and a shortage of electrolytes after vomiting for hours on end.

Some great examples of fishing writers and their home waters would be Charlie Fox and Vince Marinaro on the Letort in Carlisle PA; Lee Wulff on the Battenkill in Vermont; Zane Grey on the Rogue in Oregon; Hemmingway in Key West, Charlie Ritz and the Risle in France – the list goes on. The Connecticut River from the Enfield Dam and the rapids below down to Warehouse Point would roughly map the northern and southern limits of my home water.

It is now noted for smallmouth fishing as well as stripers in the early summer. In May it was once heralded as the best Shad Fishing spot east of the Delaware River and can still be pretty good, though shad populations seem to fluctuate for reasons that elude climatologists, icthyologists, and any other sort of environmental scientist studying the patterns of fluctuations of our aquatic biomass.

Shad is a species both distinctive and revered in New England. John McPhee the prolific author of books on everything from Oranges to the geology of the Continental US wrote a book called “The Founding Fish” that chronicles the rise, fall and slow rise again of the mighty shad. A relative of the herring it is a large silver fish, which like salmon spawns in freshwater streams and rivers and spends its adult life roaming the ocean to make a mass anadramous migration back to its homewater to spawn.

Home water is always familiar, much like the home water that anadramous fish imprint upon when they are born in the freshwater, to that same water they return to spawn after a time in the larger more saline water of the ocean. There is an old saw perpetuated by writers that” you can’t go home again,” which is the accumulated wisdom of sourpusses and simpletons. Going home again whether to your home water or your home turf is one of life’s great pleasures. The problem people have about going home again is expecting things to look and feel exactly as they remembered it. If you only accept the surroundings on their terms rather than yours, the homecoming will always be sweet.