Blow Winds, Blow

Some excerpts from another fly fishing essay.

Storm clouds approaching, Cat Island, The Bahamas Photo by the author

Despite what my wife might tell you, fishing is hard work.  Or, rather, fishing the way I like to do it is hard work.  If you don’t come home exhausted, dirty, your gear or waders or canoe or kayak needing some tending or repair, your muscles spent, as if you’ve just played a hard-fast game of pickup basketball or soccer—and, for me, if you don’t scribble in your journal about your harrowing adventure, making notes for a possible essay…then you’re doing something wrong.  

Recently, I spied a group of seagulls working hard to naked-eye visible splashes and boils from two hundred yards away, and I high-tailed it out there in my trusty kayak.  I found myself in a toilet bowl of four foot waves, the full running tide and wind playing hard at a game neither was ever going to win.  Then something was tight to my trolling popper, and whatever it was, kept turning the kayak broadside, making me take on water.  I landed the ten-pound bluefish, soaked and nearly up to my ankles in water and paddled hard back toward the safer waters without tossing my fly back in, despite the breaking blues now everywhere around me.  I watched them out there hammering small bait in the turbulent waters, fishless for the rest of the day, glad I had caught one in such conditions but not crazy enough to give it another go….  

…In Maine, I’ll never forget my buddy Steve rejoining me after fishing upstream for a few hours, and how his face was swollen with noseeum bites, his eyelids practically closed shut.  “I think I’ll use that extra head net, now,” he said….  

…I’ve yanked bass hooks from deep in my forearm, puffed madly at cheap cigars to keep the swarming black flies at bay, felt the river knock my feet out from under me, my waders start to fill.  I once fell off a small water fall and landed on my rod, breaking it neatly in half as I tried to descend to a trouty looking pool.  I’ve suffered endless weeks of poison ivy and picked the smallest, nastiest ticks imaginable from the edge of my hairline.  I’ve gotten desperately lost on logging roads in Maine and jungle roads in the Yucatan, flirting with getting stuck, stranded miles from nowhere in the midst of the unforgiving jungle heat and humidity, the relentless, biting insects.  I once sprinted at my full-on anaerobic threshold to chase a hotel shuttle bus down, banging away at its side, still sprinting, to get it to stop because I had forgotten to take my travel fly rod out of the luggage rack.  On the Farmington River, I once fell flat on my ass and nearly up to my neck in fast water while wrestling with a nice brown trout, somehow held onto my rod, and landed it soaked right to my skivvies, with a bruised ass bone and then the long, miserably cold ride home, the heat on full blast the whole way barely staving off hypothermia.  

Fishing well is hard, dangerous work any way you slice it, and that’s just fine with me.  If I’m not sweaty and dirty and scratched and bruised, if my hands don’t smell fishy, and I’m not yearning for a shower and a cold one when I get home, it just doesn’t feel right…. 

…If you don’t agree, just try it…

…Head down the “road” south of Tulum, Mexico, into the heart of the Si’an Ka’an biopreserve.  What the hell, do it in the rainy season, when the road is a series of twenty-foot long puddles, and you can’t tell where the really deep ruts and car-disabling rocks are hiding beneath the muddy water, so you have to get out and probe each one’s depths with a branch first to chart a course through the invisible boulders and ruts….  But the flats and mangroves that await you are brimming with snook and tarpon, bonefish and permit.  And when you feel that first backing-reaching run of a good bonefish, it will feel all the more satisfying. 

Forget charters and guides; buy yourself a kayak and launch it into the Long Island Sound and paddle hard into the midst of some marauding bluefish and feel them take hold and start towing you out toward the shipping channel in the harbor, a six-story high tanker chugging along, oblivious to that speck of yellow coming its way far below….

For me, physical exertion, risk, danger are all part of the package.  When I tell people who don’t fish that I am an avid fly fisherman, they often respond with something like this:  “Oh that’s great.  It must be so relaxing to be out on the water a lot.  I used to fish, some.  I’d like to try it again.  I need some calm, contemplation in my life.”  That’s usually when I describe a bluefish blitz and tell them that blues have been known to bite fingers clean off with their numerous triangular, razor-sharp teeth, their remarkably strong jaws that have evolved to chop baitfish to pieces…. 

As Shakespeare’s King Lear sinks further and further into madness, he utters these famous lines—and for me, I hear them bellowed out with all the appropriate power and rage James Earl Jones can muster in one of the Shakespeare in the Park, New York City productions:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world…
…Rumble thy bellyful! Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire…!

While I surely don’t long for the world to exact quite this amount of untamed rage on me (I’m not that crazy, yet), especially if I’m out in the middle of a favorite Adirondack lake in my not even 16-pound kevlar and carbon canoe—still I will always remember the day I high-tailed it to shore across that lake, paddling hard, leaning forward to fight the steadily increasing wind, digging the blades of my paddle in hard, staying as low as possible so as not to become a beacon for an “oak-cleaving thunderbolt,” a jet-black sky, that “all-shaking thunder” bearing down on me fast….  I got to shore just as the big first drops of the storm fell down hard, the sky “spitting fire,” lightning nearly coinciding with the thunder.  I left everything in the canoe and sprinted to my car as what seemed “hurricanoes” spouted to wait out the worst of the storm, grateful to have another story to tell, something more to write about, but knowing my wife would simply roll her eyes, wondering why I came home earlier than expected.   

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