Two Thirds Water pt. 2

The second of three installments of excerpts from my long essay on my love of fly fishing.

Aug 18, 2022

…And when I’m at long last fishing again, in summers especially, fishing often more than once a week, fishing the Long Island Sound for bruiser blues and classy stripers, and in late summer before teaching duties again intrude, hoping to tangle with the furiously fast false albacore, fishing small southern Connecticut streams I’ll never name for hapless native brookies and the too-well-known Farmington for big, well-educated browns and rainbows, fishing in an array of ponds, rivers for bass and pike and pickerel, and most recently in remote Adirondack lakes and streams, I feel back in tune again and always awed by water, any water.

…What I’ve come to realize is that perhaps I am always fishing, every minute of the day, even during all those years when fishing took a back seat. Fishing for some of us is the default setting. Those gears are always turning, and when we put rod in hand and step forth into water, we are just engaging them, putting the already running engine back in gear again. In the dead of winter, you slow down to be sure, when it’s cold enough for long enough, the engine coughs and sputters, but reading about it, hours at the tying vise, writing about it, running back through certain days and certain catches, keeps it going till the ice lets go and all the cylinders start firing again. Jobs and familial obligations chronically disrupt the journey, but you keep at it despite everything.

…For those of us who fish, water is beautiful and mysterious in a less abstract, or even symbolic sense than it is for many nature lovers or philosophers or theologians. While for Carl Jung water was the great symbol for the collective unconscious, and theologians discuss the significance of Christ’s first miracle, for me, fish and catching fish with a fly rod, are essential to its mystery…When I float upon the glass-flat surface of the Long Island Sound in my kayak, trying to tempt double digit blues feasting on huge menhaden with a huge foam popper fly, all of my senses are channeled through this singular need. I imagine them down there, spiraling around the terrified dense schools of menhaden (known as “bunker” in these parts), driving them like so many sheep to the stone jetty 20 yards away. Some bunker try to make a break for it, and they disappear in bloody swirls. That’s where I drop my fly and start it to chugging along, stop and start again, and a blue hits the fly so hard that I see the epoxied foam blast right off the hook and into the air, but he’s hooked and running off line at an alarming rate. When I try to put the screws to him, I can feel his tremendous head shake, and he simply careens off in another direction towing me along. Through it all, I am seeing the water’s beauty in a more immediate, immersive, pragmatic way.

…Water. The Baptists throw you right in. As a boy attending a southern-style Baptist church in upstate New York, my brothers and sister and I always looked forward to the baptisms down at a local pond. The pastor’s voice would grow louder, his southern accent coming out a bit more fully, as he grasped the slightly fearful donned in white robes and put their fingers over their noses, then his hand over theirs, and dunked them backwards, not unlike a dip in dancing, into the murky water. We were less moved by the high rhetoric of such occasions, more interested in the way they’d often come up coughing and sputtering, looking ridiculous with their hair all matted and dripping. Years later, reading Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “The River,” I realized that I, too, like the boy who plunges into a river where he’s witnessed a baptism, desperate to find the Kingdom of Heaven beneath its surface, was moved by the symbolic, sure, yet also by the immediate, visceral intensity of such an act. The boy ends up drowning, as he plunges under, and he feels as if he’s at last on his way…

And that’s a big part of it, too. Water is dangerous. God chose water above the other elements to destroy a decadent world. At least part of the reason for full immersion baptism, I’m convinced, is to feel that loss of control, to take in a mouthful and feel for an instant how easy it would be for it to take you back.

Fishermen live in constant respect and edgy fear of the waters they fish upon. We know all too well how mighty they are, of the many ways they might sneak upon us unawares. I’ve been clipped by ice floes while wading in rivers in early spring, quite nearly rolled out of kayaks far from shore, and, on more than one occasion, I’ve gone down hard on my tailbone in a fast-moving current and felt the icy chill fill my waders... Anyone who spends any amount of time fishing will, eventually, experience the unbounded force of water, and that’s, for me, an integral part of what makes fishing so fulfilling. We move upon it, through it, and when a fish takes, it does so on the terms of the water; it believes wholly that it is eating something that belongs there. To fish well is to become a part of the watery ecosystem you fish, to merge with it on some level.

…Where is this essay going? I guess I’m letting it flow—ebb and flow. Water isn’t about boundaries or logic or form. The sandbar I fished so frequently last summer was a different sandbar this summer, the tides and winds, the periodic winter storms re-sculpting it into something altogether new. Heraclitus famously noted that you never step into the same river twice, that while it appears constant, it is forever changing. Last year I fished small, silvery flies to imitate the peanut bunker who swarmed along the Connecticut coast, the surface rippling and alive with millions of them. A local name for them is rain bait, because when they’re around in numbers, their small splashes make it appear as if it is raining. This year, I’ve not seen any peanuts, but only the adults. Fat and heavy as a trophy trout, they school up just as they do when they’re fingerlings, circling by the hundreds, making the surface look as if some giant burner has been turned to high beneath them when the big blues start to chopping them to pieces from below. If I snag one of them by accident (sometimes, I admit, sort of accidentally on purpose), I usually only bring in a half of a bunker, and two or three blues often make quick work of that bleeding half within a few feet of the kayak. I chuck monstrous creations and try, often vainly, to convince the fish to hit my paltry feather and hair offerings when so much real, fat, chopped-up bloody and oily fare is on the table; and, yes, there are times when I simply give in and toss out a large bare hook and intentionally snag one and hold on. When a blue hits a live bunker near the surface, it is quite unlike the way they hit a fly. The rod will dive straight down, sometimes a dozen times before the hook finds jaw, as if someone is trying to jerk it out of your hands, and then when they are finally hooked, though more often than not I end up bringing in a hook with just a small chunk of bunker remaining, their fury is all the more intense. “Hey, I know this was food. I was eating it. How could it possibly have bitten back?” they seem to say. Ebb. Flow. Last year there were no big bunker.

…When the moon is full and high, I have trouble sleeping…I love to write and play guitar. I’m hungry, and especially now as age starts to bear down on me, I feel younger, more vital. I don’t care how flaky it sounds, the moon pulls us as strongly as it pulls the ocean, pulls the water in us, as if high and low tides are as continually vacillating within us as they do outside us. The Long Island Sound experiences particularly strong tidal fluctuations. Unlike nearby Cape Cod, for instance, where tides of 1-3 feet are standard, the tides in the Sound average 5-8 feet. The sandbar I love to fish on Sunday mornings, that can take me more than 1/4 mile out into the harbor, will six hours later be under six or more feet of water where I had earlier fished in surf not over my ankles.

Tides for someone new to the salt water scene are strange and remarkable. The trout fisherman in me is always astounded that the water you fished one way three hours earlier you are now fishing in the opposite direction. I love that moment when the tide is as full as it is going to get, everything bursting at the seams, the water pushing well up into the eel grass, high onto the sand, the current slowing, slowing, stopping—and with the new or full moon it fills fuller than full—suspended in the back eddies and coves until it starts to turn, and soon it’s ripping the other way, and I have to turn and start fishing in the opposite direction. I imagine a trout stream slowing, stopping, then running backwards. I can’t help but think of cars switching from left to right lanes, people doing everything they’ve just done like a camera run in reverse. I’m convinced that one whole tide is a cosmic “lub-dub,” a single twelve-hour-long heart beat, one earth-second.

And this ever-swinging of the tides, that back and forth rhythm of the earth that must have started as soon as there was something like an ocean and a moon to exert gravity on it moves within us as well…The ancient river where we began, those waters that delivered nutrients to us and carried away waste, that liquid part of ourselves that remains, the majority of ourselves—that ancient current—must still flow through us…We begin as tadpoles. We will return as dirt, ashes, but these will eventually get rained on or flooded out, leach back down into the deep earth and, like everything, ultimately find their way to water.

(to be continued)

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Two Thirds Water pt. 2

The second of three installments of excerpts from my long essay on my love of fly fishing.

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