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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.
-- 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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