Two Thirds Water finale

The last installment of excerpts from my essay on my love of fly fishing.

These days I fish often in the salt water of Long Island Sound, and I feel a kind of completion here, a coming home to the sacred center of what has been such a passion for so long.  To fish the ocean, to pay attention to its many moods, its currents and back eddies, its tidal fluctuations, is to fish the primordial waters, the first waters, the big water.  I remember a fisherman telling me once, as I bragged about a 20 inch trout I’d landed, “In the sweet water you talk inches; in the salt we talk pounds.”  But size of fish is not the primary difference between salt and fresh waters.  Always when fishing in the salt, I’m somewhat fearful, overwhelmed by the prospect of fishing in a body of water harboring things that could eat me.  

Recently while fishing the warm water outflows at the Millstone Nuclear power plant in eastern Connecticut an angler reported that something very large took hold of a ten pound bluefish he was fighting, dragged it around for awhile, then let go.  He speculated that it was a shark or a seal, but this past summer a friend was catching mid-sized blues off a jetty, and was about to land one when a striped bass of unreal proportions emerged and engulfed the entire two foot long fish, made a screaming 30 second run, and let go.  Fellow kayakers regularly report Jaws-sized dorsal fins appearing behind them and tagging along curiously for a good long time before finally deciding to go away.  Enormous, other worldly ocean sunfish, 6-10 feet in length, occasionally make appearances.  Acres of stinging jelly fish may suddenly be bouncing off your shins, riding the outflowing tide.  In the dead of night, the water might magically glow brilliant green whenever you dip your paddle in as you move through a bloom of phosphorescent algae.  Then there’s the bizarre and most common of all fish, looking more like some strange, Jurassic bird, the sea robin with his hidden painful stinger, or the tenacious gator blue who won’t let go of your popping fly, who watches your every move, his eyes as capable above water as they are under water, his many small, triangular teeth quite literally sharp as razors….  The saltwater is teeming with danger, with evolutionary intensity.  Fishing these waters, we come to know them intimately, and thus we come that much closer to an important facet of ourselves, for we are surely the most dangerous, the most powerful and deadly product of the process of evolution that had its origins in the sea. 

…A National Geographic magazine several years back tells of breakthroughs in evolutionary theories of whales.  Unlike the first ocean-bound animals that  struck out onto land, their fins eventually evolving into the arms that now allow me to cast a fly, the legs that so often take me back into the water—whales, it is argued, headed back into the sea.  Their legs became fins again, their nostrils slid further and further back on their heads, so eventually they had to push their humped backs into the air to breathe.  As I paddle silently through the pre-dawn surf, my paddle feeling like an extension of my arms, the kayak an extension of my body, I feel as if I, too, am evolving, or perhaps de-evolving. 

…One of the most simple, but for me, astounding things about the ocean is that you stick your toe in here, say on this beach in Connecticut, and you are connected to this whole spinning sphere.  Launch your boat here, head east, keep going, and you’ll hit Europe eventually.  It’s an unbroken link, a connection I can’t quite find a way to express in words.  I remember seeing the ocean for the first time as a child, peering out and realizing, amazed, that the other side was far, far beyond the reach of my eyes.  Finding sea lice on the stomachs of the spring’s first river stripers, large tuna and dorado being taken within a mile of shore during warm summers, a friend finding a juvenile permit in the Thames River in Connecticut that somehow found his way here from the tropics, knowing the bluefish have “left” for the year, heading for the Carolinas and beyond, to spawn in whatever unknown depths they vanish to….  All these things and so many others speak to the feeling of connectedness I get when I fish in the salt.  Those who have fished the Gulf Stream know what I’m talking about all the more acutely.  You can spit in the water off Havana and know that some infinitesimal part of you will end up in the UK.

…True, all water finds its way back to the mother ocean, but when you’re fishing a small bass pond, like the one I fish here with some regularity, hemmed in by the bulbous hill known as Sleeping Giant, the trees leaning in on all sides, the outflow an impassable, tiny stream, you don’t feel a part of the Earth’s encircling oceans.  You feel islanded, isolated, and while there’s certain comfort and familiarity in that which I frequently seek out—you know the fish are there and they’re not biting just because they don’t want to—there’s also a sense of isolation and removal.  In the salt water, I take great joy in knowing the striper who is having his way with me and will eventually straighten the hook on my 1/0 streamer may well have had his way a month ago with an angler on a river in Maine hundreds of miles away.  

…When I return to the water, de-evolving, finning hard (paddling) into a ripping tide, steadying myself on slime-covered rocks along a jetty while the surf pounds into me, I, like Nick Adams in the Hemingway’s story “Indian Camp,” feel quite certain I’ll never die.  With so much intensity of life, that reaches so far—all around the world—surrounding you, how could you feel any other way?  Standing knee deep in a fast moving trout stream, I’m struck with the sensation that it’s rushing so fast on its way home, to the sea, where it will rise into clouds, salt free and fall earthward, again.  

We begin as tadpoles.  As anglers, we continually edge our way backwards, stepping into a simpler self every time we immerse ourselves in water.  And it’s a singular thing, this, the water of the rains and snows, the water of the rivers and lakes, the water of the ocean, all continually, as continually as the tides cycling through, flowing from one location to another.  Heraclitus pointed out that a river was always the same, yet always changing.  Yes, but you could just as easily say it is simply always the same, since the change is such a constant and since the river that flows by you one instant was born up out of the very ocean it is fast on its way toward rejoining.  

We are mostly water, the earth two-thirds water.  Anglers know everything I’m reaching toward in this essay without saying any of it.  It’s why we sneak away with just an extra hour between picking up the kids from daycare and finishing a work project and get in a dozen casts, then step back into our lives.  It’s why we wake in the dead of night and slip out so as not to wake the kids, wife, dog, forgetting coffee even and drive shoreward in darkness.  It’s why we find ways to buy new gear and spend hours perfecting and tinkering with flies.  It’s why our neighbors yell out to us as we practice casting across our lawns—“now I see why you don’t catch many fish; try it in the water next time.”  It’s why there’s a Lefty Kreh, a Bob Clouser, John Gierarch, Nick Lyons, Lee and Joan Wulff…thousands of unsung guides and fishing masters who make fishing their lives.  It’s why there’s the guide I met recently here in Connecticut who has spent countless hours observing marine species and has designed and tied flies only he and a handful of people know about that are often more effective than any I’ve ever fished.  It’s why there are magical bonefish guides, like Bonefish Cordell on Bimini in the Bahamas telling me how, as boys, they’d walk along the beaches having a contest to see who could spot the most bonefish.

Water makes it possible.  Over the centuries it has sculpted the trout’s soft-as-baby-skin sleekness, the bonefish’s ghostly shape (an evolutionary extension of the ghostly-white flats it inhabits), the northern pike’s camo skin and torpedo quickness, the striped bass’s powerful, broom-like tail, the blue’s intense eyes, our own hunger to catch hold…. Stepping into it, we step into ourselves.  

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