The Longest Silence

Some Remarks

The sport of angling used to be a genteel business, at least in the world of ideals, a world of ladies and gentlemen. These have been replaced by a new set of paradigms: the bum, the addict, and the maniac. I’m afraid that this says much about the times we live in. The fisherman now is one who defies society, who rips lips, who drains the pool, who takes no prisoners, who is not to be confused with the sissy with the creel and the bamboo rod. Granted, he releases that which he catches, but in some cases, he strips the quarry of its perilous soul before tossing it back in the water. What was once a trout — cold, hard, spotted, and beautiful — becomes “number seven.” Perhaps he’s the winning run in the one-fly contest, or the fish that put the Czechoslovakians across the finish line ahead of the Americans in the world championship of fly-fishing.

Angling is a situation whose dramatic values are immediately charged by their context. The angler who, to the envy of his peers, has “gone fishin’ ” in that mythic sense that implies a non-return, soon finds himself alone in a leaden state of malaise and ennui. The spectacle of the angler gone native — that is in the miraculous event that he hasn’t staved off a coma by giving up fishing — is a study in torpor at close range, practically in laboratory conditions.

Many fishing books by what are known as experts seem filled with the longueurs and repetitions that incite the clever reader to cry, “Get a life!” Worst of all are the lamentations of the angler who has given himself entirely to the sport and feels that sportsmen up for the week or the season or the run only to return to jobs and family don’t understand him.

I’m afraid that the best angling is always a respite from burden. Good anglers should lead useful lives, and useful lives are marked by struggle, and difficulty, and even pain. Perhaps the agony of simple mortality should be enough. But probably it is not. As they say in South America, everyone knows that they are going to die; yet nobody believes it. Human lapses of this kind enable us to fish, fornicate, overeat, and bet on the horses.

Therefore, bow your back and fish when you can. When you get to the water you will be renewed. Leave as much behind as possible. Those motives to screw your boss or employees, cheat on your spouse, rob the state, or humiliate your companions will not serve you well if you expect to be restored in the eyes of God, fish, and the river, which will reward you with hollow waste if you don’t behave. You may be cursed. You may be shriven. You may be drowned. At the very least, you may snap off your fly in the bushes.

We like to think of the idea of selective trout; it serves our anthropocentricity to believe that we are in a duel of wits with a fish, a sporting proposition. We would do well to understand that trout and other game fish are entirely lacking in sporting instincts. They would prefer to dine unmolested and without being eaten themselves.

In my view, a trout that is feeding selectively is doing the following: having ascertained that many of the objects going by his view are edible, he decides which ones he can eat efficiently and which will do him the most good. Then, in the interest of energy conservation, and if the chosen food item is in sufficient quantity, the trout gradually transfers the decision-making process to something like muscle memory, to thoughtless routine. If the fly we cast fails to trigger that recognition or is not in the rhythm in which the trout is feeding, we get a no-sale. The base of difficulty from the angler’s point of view is the quantity of food items appearing before the trout. If he can key in and fill up, the angler may have a problem. That is why, even though it is full of fish, a bug soup like the Henry’s Fork has brought so many to tears or aged them prematurely. It is also why one or two fish on the Fork can make such a satisfying day.

In this, the trout is like the interstate motorist who, having engaged the cruise control, sleepily notes at the mouth of an obscure off-ramp a sign that reads FREE BEER. Most motorists would conclude somewhat abstractly that there must be a catch. The paranoid motorist would conclude that it’s an ambush. A few motorists, the dumb ones, might disengage the cruise control and pull off. Mike Lawson refers to slow-water smart trout as opposed to fast-water dumb trout. A dogged freestoner, I must prevaricate: the fast-water trout is an opportunist and his opportunities for observation are compressed by the turbulence of the conditions in which he lives. But even in faster water, the bigger fish dominate the feeding stations where a better look is possible: the long seams, the well-defined riffle corners with the isometrics of current well spaced, the luxury apartments of streambed hydrology. That’s why they are bigger fish. These are masters of the perfect niche, one designed to keep herons, otters, mergansers, and you from raining on their parade. The perfect overhanging branch so hard on presentation, so cherished by trout, is sometimes removed, pruned away by riverkeepers who do not seem to realize that the fish leave with the offending branch and that while the sport may then luxuriate in unencumbered presentation, it is for naught. If a fish is there, he is smaller than the fish that used to be there.

I once fished a small spring creek in Gallatin County with George Anderson, a stickler for accurate casting. With George at my side, I was blazing away at a steady feeder, proud of every cast. When George said, “I see you’ve decided to go with the shotgun technique,” I concluded I must improve. Since that day, many years ago, I have practiced. I keep a rod rigged and leaning against the house and I almost never doublehaul something into the weeping birch a hundred feet away. I frequently try to put the bit of red yarn in front of a robin’s beak at thirty or forty feet. I have even had a couple of most satisfying takes. Perhaps things would pick up if I went to a San Juan worm. At the moment, takes per cast on robins are close to those for permit on a fly. They’re not on long, but I’ve had some memorable moments where the robin backed doggedly, with the yarn, annoyed wings beating the grass, several feet, though not by any stretch of the imagination into the backing.

All salmonids must be saluted for bearing upon their collective shoulders the burden of generations of contradictory theorizing as to what they want to eat and how they are best persuaded to give up their lives and freedom.

These delights have sent me in search of second-class waters. I live near the great theme park of fly-fishing, the headwaters of the Missouri, but go there less and less. I spend more time on prairie rivers with their unstable banks and midsummer thermal problems. What do I find there besides a few fish who have been leading exceedingly private lives? I find solitude, which is not, take note, the same thing as loneliness.

We have reached the time in the life of the planet, and humanity’s demands upon it, when every fisherman will have to be a riverkeeper, a steward of marine shallows, a watchman on the high seas. We are beyond having to put back what we have taken out. We must put back more than we take out. We must make holy war on the enemies of aquatic life as we have against gillnetters, polluters, and drainers of wetlands. Otherwise, as you have already learned, these creatures will continue to disappear at an accelerating rate. We will lose as much as we have lost already and there will be next to nothing, remnant populations, put-and-take, dim bulbs following the tank truck.

What happens to the chronic smeller of flowers, watcher of birds, listener to distant thunder? Certainly, he has lost efficiency as an angler. Has he become less of an angler? Perhaps. This is why fishermen are such liars. They are ashamed of their lollygagging and wastage of time. It’s an understandable weakness. In some of today’s brawny fish camps, flowers and birds can raise eyebrows.

I thought my father must have been a wonderful fisherman, but I wasn’t sure. He taught me how to fish in a rather perfunctory way on the Pere Marquette River in Michigan. In later years, and to my great distress, he got away from fishing except in a ceremonial way, making an annual trip to Boca Grande or the River of Ponds or Piñas Bay. He had given up ordinary fishing and replaced it with extremely infrequent high-profile trips meant to substitute in intensity what he lacked in time. This in angling is a snare and delusion. Angling is extremely time consuming. That’s sort of the whole point. That is why in our high-speed world anglers, as a kind of preemptive strike, call themselves bums, addicts, and maniacs. We’re actually rather quiet people for the most part but our attitude toward time sets us at odds with our own society.

After my father died, I was invited to spend a day fishing with his oldest friend, my so-called uncle Ben, an excellent angler. We spent a satisfying day looking for bonefish in three feet of winter water in the Content Keys. At the end of the day, standing on the dock, I asked, with some trepidation:

“Uncle Ben, was my father a good fisherman?”

He smiled and said, “No, Tommy, he was not. But no one loved it more.”

This to me is a conundrum. “No one loved it more.” Isn’t that enough? Who is the better angler, the patient bait soaker under the walls of the Seine, the black woman with the cane pole on Mobile Bay, the aging Russian bureaucrat on the River Volga, or the film producer on the Kharlovka or the flats of Ascension Bay? Let’s be honest: it could be any of the above.

Last winter, I was fishing on a small steelhead river in Oregon. It was one of those rare times when fly-fishing was by far the most effective way to catch a fish. I was looking across the river in the shade of wintry alders at a pod of bright fish thirty feet long. I was looking success in the eye. As I approached the fish, I was watched by a gear fisherman in rubber barn boots and a worn-out mackinaw coat. I was able to hook a fish and slide it away from the school, land it down below, release it, resume my position, and hook another fish. The gear angler grew agitated. I released that fish and hooked a third. With this, he shot to my side holding a long-handled net at the ready. “If you don’t want them, I’ll take ’em,” he said.

“I release my fish,” I said. “That’s just the way I like to fish.”

“Mister,” he said, “I’ve been trying to catch a fish for my old folks to eat for four days and I haven’t even had a bite. Can’t you let me have this one fish?”

Well, I thought about it. Most of these fish were of hatchery origin and it was quite legal to kill them. I didn’t look forward to it but I said, “All right.” A few minutes later the fish was in the net, a bright, wild, native male. My companion looked into the net and, before I could speak, said, “Oops, he ain’t fin clipped. That’s a native. Put him back.”

I released the fish and the two of us watched him swim away. We shook hands and went our separate ways in an atmosphere of fellowship. He was a man we could all talk to, a brother in angling. A man like this could take our side against the dams and subdivisions. He knew which ones were wild. If fly fishermen have an edge in this elaboration of soul that we resent hearing called a sport but are too timid to call an art, it is in our willingness to deepen the experience at nearly any personal cost. That is the reason we tie flies, not to save money through bulk purchase of hooks and feathers. That is why some of us cannot live without that breath of varnish from the rod tube when we rig up for another holy day. The motto of every serious angler is “Nearer My God to Thee.” Humans have suspected for thousands of years that angling and religion are connected. But if you can find no higher ideal than outfishing your buddies, catching something big enough to stuff or winning a trophy, you have a lot of work to do before you are what Izaak Walton would call an angler.

Recently I heard of an old friend saying that the two rules of life he followed were: don’t even tell your mother your fishing spots, and other fishermen are the number-one enemy. It is embarrassing to note the ring of truth these rules seem to have. But I think we’re going to have to rise above them. Sixty million disorganized fishermen are being hornswaggled by tightly organized and greedy elites. Last year, under the shadow of numerous environmental organizations locally headquartered, and against the wishes of 70 percent of its citizenry, Montana’s legislature undermined the best water quality laws in the Rockies and made them the worst. This, in the epicenter of North American trout fishing. Still, we cast a mistrustful eye on one another, like worn-out, secretive prospectors of last century’s gold camps. The world goes on without us, using our rivers for other than their original purposes. We really ought to get together.

I began remembering a time when my son and I were dropped at a small tundra pond in Alaska after a short ride in a beautiful Grumman Beaver that the owner had acquired from the Austrian forest service, which had owned it for thirty years and scarcely flown it. It was a zero-hours Beaver, the newest one in the world, an unimaginable prize in Alaska. Our short flight took us over the heroic spaciousness of the northern edge of the Katmai wildlife area, an area of truly fierce beauty. Nothing we’d ever seen prepared us for it. Our landing interrupted a bald eagle’s attempt to ambush a flock of young harlequin ducks, and the eagle angrily wheeled around behind us. Picture a pond as small and intimate as Walden with hundreds of miles of visibility in all directions, ground that quivered, mountains that looked like they predated the world itself, a sky that was a record of the North Pacific’s infinity of moods.

I didn’t realize tundra was so interesting. We got out of the float plane and began walking on an endless flower- and moss-covered pudding that trembled under our feet at first and then, as we got away from the lake, firmed up to about the consistency of a mattress. In its intricacy of gold, green, pink, and yellow, an outburst of almost incomprehensible botanic creativity, we lamented every footstep. This was land that seemed to never have expected human passage, a place made for the vast spatial needs of Alaskan brown bears and arctic wolves. We used a small raft to get around. My son and I, along with Don and Dave, an eccentric piano duo from a foothills town in the West, sat on the sides of the raft, wadered legs dangling in the water, and coasted along the small river on our way to fishing spots. As we passed high banks, I saw claw marks ten feet off the ground where the bears had feasted on cliff swallow nestlings. With fly rods in our hands, we had dropped through time. Fishing had given us this.

Early on, I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me how to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included. To the reader accustomed to the sort of instructional fishing writing which I myself enjoy, I must seem to have gotten very far afield. I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either technical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and to listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.