On Fishing

Thoughts on Fishing and What I Gain from This Activity

When asked about my attachment to fish and fishing, I’m often hard put to answer. Although I enjoy nothing more than trout fried up in butter on a cast iron skillet over a campfire and am grateful for their life-force entering me, it’s not because I need to eat them. I fish because something in me fundamentally changes at streamside. On the water, when there is little to do but wait—alert, yet relaxed—marvelous events unfold. Mysteries enter me as I open to a world otherwise missed in work-a-day life. It’s a dreamworld unlike any other.

Mesmerized by the cyclical homecoming of salmon, I will, at times, wade right in among them and swim with these living symbols of home and return, brushing up against the spawning salmon, captivated by that ultimate biological imperative, driven by the need to return. Many fish return home, overcoming great obstacles in order to spawn in the streams of their birth, to then simply die and be washed into logjams and complete the cycle. Dust to dust, silt to silt. It is a drama that has me hooked.

Salmon leave home early, as tiny smolts, exposed to a gauntlet of predators at every stage of their migration. Even as adults, toughened by years out in the open sea, they still get snatched by seals, sharks, and orcas on their way back into shore, then by bears and man as they move upstream to spawn. Less than one percent survives to eventually reappear in the streams of their birth to spawn. Yet, what a homecoming it is to behold. The salmon have a way of suddenly appearing and disappearing, out of the deep blue like the grin of a Cheshire Cat. One moment—a clean, empty river—and the next, a frothing orgy of large spawning fish with terrifying hooked jaws; at this stage, their mouths become bizarrely disfigured, teeth sticking out every which way. When spawning, they no longer need their jaws to eat, yet, they do need them as weapons; slashing at everything around them, establishing dominance, they chase the smaller trout into deep pools and out of sight.

Bodies of water and their rivers of fish are a truly foreign realm, where we are but the most temporary of visitors. As I glance into the world of fish, with its own physiology and rules and an emotional life that I will never share, their disinterested distance is fascinating. We matter little to the fish, except as predators to avoid. My world here, above the waves, seems, in large part, to be ordered, recorded, managed, documented, confirmed, verified, catalogued and somewhere totted up, preserved on a hard drive and numb. It is a breathtaking gift when the sacred unexpectedly shows one of its myriad faces—coming in from that mysterious other place to break the spell. When I peer into the water and a salmon emerges, I awaken from the circuitous worries about money or how things are going to hell in a handbasket. I feel blessed. One moment the salmon is just an unremarkable shadow in my peripheral vision and in the next, a flashing window onto a parallel, timeless world.

Night Fishing

Night fishing changes the context, the equation, completely. It is a proposition fraught with frustration—yes. But it holds out potential, for both landing outstanding trout and for revealing a clandestine world, that blinded by daylight, and in too much of a hurry, we hardly even see.

When the scorching heat of summer days no longer lets up with nightfall, the ensuing steamy nights turn silt beds into incubators of the largest mayflies; Hexagenia limbata—the fabled giant Michigan mayfly—once universally called the Michigan caddis—and always a promising story. These are two to three-inch mayflies and a substantial food source for any predator on the river—above the water and beneath.

When conditions are just right, the ‘hexes’ begin sporadically hatching throughout the day, increasing towards nightfall. Around dusk, males begin to swarm over the desirable combinations of silt and gravel, while flying females, in their gathering hundreds of thousands, become an unbroken river of insects, flying above and mirroring the watercourse—separating like the water below to flow around islands and rejoining to form a single current. When the stream encounters swarming males, the air fills with copulating insects and, soon afterwards, females heavy with egg sacs begin to bounce along the surface, dropping eggs that will sink to the bottom and attach to appropriate substrates to again set in motion the next three-year cycle. The entire watershed is keyed into this primal drama. Early on, waxwings and kingbirds take their share of the mayflies to feed their hungry broods, while spiders work the bushes. As the sun goes down, flycatchers cede the air to swallows and swifts, who, in turn, retire before the nighthawks and bats of the night—all of them steadily harvesting from the swelling ranks of mayflies, whose whispering wings are amplified in the parabolic reflector of trees arched over the river. The mating frenzy increases, and smaller trout are recklessly splashing and chasing the insects which are in turn bounding across the stream, depositing eggs.

By now, we fishermen have scouted our pools and wait in the sedges, quietly evolving a relationship with the insects sucking our blood; stinky cigars help, and a beer makes it easier to relax while being dined on. But calming down to a meditative state does the most good. Mosquitos remind me of wolves, who walk past placidly grazing moose, and make eye contact to locate the one who is afraid to meet their gaze. As I stand in the cattails, up to my knees in water, surrounded with a humming mass of ravenous mosquitos, wildlife documentaries come to mind—films that record the defeated wildebeest calmly observing lions feeding on its hindquarters.

The silt-dwelling mayfly nymphs live for several years before they shuck their skins, gills and even their oral and excretory organs to become single-minded adults whose only purpose is to procreate before their life energy runs out and they fall spent on the waters. There they become spinners, helpless morsels of food swept down a gauntlet of feeding fish to meet the inevitable destiny of their ephemeral lives. It is now well after dark, and the larger vigilant trout have come out of their log jams and undercuts to feed on the floating banquet. Fishermen are working hard to cast their flies to these prize catches, across currents and logs and into feeding lanes that are no longer visible. All this is performed while making false casts in the dark—a delicate ballet to get the fly out where it needs to be—a marriage of actions hard to accomplish in the daytime. Casting requires a delicacy, allowing the line to stretch out on the backcast to an equivalent distance as must be reached on the forward cast. The line is then whipped forward and must straighten out just above the water so that the fly can settle down gently enough, so as not to disturb the water and put down the still cautious fish. Since there are thousands of bugs on the water, the likelihood of any one single man-made fly being snatched is slender. It can be frustrating to fish a bug soup, with gear snagged in trees while fish splash all around. Even when the fly does end up on the water, it usually floats past actively feeding fish, untouched, time after time.

It is when the mayfly spinner fall begins to slow down, coming to an end, that the greatest opportunities for the persevering fisherman present themselves. Larger fish that have keyed into the food source are no longer as careful. We, too, have had time to settle into the rhythm of the river and relax enough to slow down and cast well. There are fish in backwater eddies, quietly sipping at dying mayflies—but with a resonance echoing behind that delicate disturbance of the surface film, that speaks of body mass. The night is dark, and the feeding trout are nearly invisible. Minute reflections on riffles and echoes from the splashes of one’s own feet help determine distances. Clues, by which one orients oneself, are at the very edges of perception and force one to trust the most minimal of sensory information, to make the leap of faith and become intuitive, suspending judgment while half-suspended in the buoyant water and feeling with flexed knees the river through one’s feet, differentiating solid bottom from drifting and unstable sand, stepping over logs as they come up, anticipating the strengthening current and going into the shallows, hugging the bank as that swift current creates unstable sands at the edge of a deep pool—deep enough to ‘float a hat’, strong enough to sweep a careless fisherman into the bend, under some logs and a bad conclusion to an adventure. I’ve been out at night, breast-stroking through deep water in heavy chest-high wading boots and heavy water-logged clothing. Once is enough.

Nights have come though, when I have embraced the situation to the extent that I have walked the river in an awakened state, supremely secure, an integral part of the full drama. In those hours of darkness, my fishing has made a quantum leap into realms that sound improbable—reminiscent of those that Eugene Herrigel describes in “Zen and the Art of Archery”. Herrigel illustrates the discipline during which the master archer/priest enters a dark room—where a single candle stands before a target. He deliberately draws his bow, and in a fluid motion, without stopping to take aim, releases the arrow at the moment when he knows he must. He snuffs the flame out with the first arrow, then continues to fire his arrows, hitting and splitting the preceding arrow, until, there in the dark, he has one by one shot and splintered all the arrows in his quiver.  This is how I feel on a good night when the gods of the river are with me.  I am fully present in spirit and mind, no duality, no observer. Just me and all creation - chirping, swirling, feeding, breeding, dancing, dying in an orgiastic night of magic, while I make casts I could ordinarily not accomplish even in daylight.  When I do return to see the river by the light of day, I realize that I made long accurate casts between cedar sweepers and up against a tangled mess of briars hanging from the bank, where I pulled a magnificent fish from an improbable shallow behind a log. Such a night is a gift to carry with me to the grave.