More of a Complicated Practice

Pickerel are a fine gamefish that don't deserve slander. That's all we caught today, three for me, besides the six-inch smallmouth that struck my Mepp's Aglia. The pickerel fought hard. I thought the two larger ones somewhere around 19 or 20 inches were bigger than that. All struck a trolled Storm Hot 'n Tot. Another that hit the same lure I trolled was lost at the net, and I missed a hard strike, all of this action right about 11 feet deep on or near the drop-off from an extensive shallow flat. 

We were the second to get on Clinton Reservoir at about 6:00 a.m., and we left before 10:00 a.m. having heard several times either thunder or blasting, though it seemed to be thunder. The sun never really came out. I had spilled Parmesan cheese when I opened the refrigerator at home, which I couldn't get out of my mind. Couldn't find the dust pan, and I felt bad leaving the mess for my wife. I figured I'd get over it.

I did forget it once at Brian's house, but my mood felt troubled. Getting the boat ready to go after we arrived at the reservoir didn't shake that mood, either, though I kept mum about it. I embrace the fishing whatever the mood. It makes me think of what Joe Santiago once said on one of the NJ Multispecies podcasts, that you have to suffer for the fishing. (I think he said so, not Chris Pierra.) Whoever said it hit the issue on the nose, as I see it. Maybe dedication isn't entirely about the number of days and hours you fish; maybe it has more to do with your willingness in spite of such resistance as a mood that tells you you're wasting your time.

Really? 

A good friend of mine served as my writing mentor. He's the author of the novel Kite, published by Penguin Classics. I first got published at 16 without a mentor, but I felt very fortunate to have one during the three years I wrote poetry more and less every night after work. (For all that effort, only William and Mary Review accepted one submitted for publication, but that was Thomas Jefferson's alma mater, so not bad.) Ed finally told me, at the end of our acquaintance, "Write poems." Maybe he meant I should give up on the fishing. Whether or not that's true, he believed in me as a poet, but I had submitted to so many literary journals, I knew something was amiss with the mechanics of my writing. He wasn't telling me how to improve on that, so I figured that by persistent revision at writing fishing articles and essays, I'd get better control of the language. 

I have. Recently, I spent 10 minutes writing a poem. Another 10 minutes of revision later seemed to cinch it. Two weeks after that, I got an email from Swing the Fly magazine telling me that if it's OK with me, the poem will be published in the online version. Will $75.00 be sufficient?

I keep telling myself some day I should go back and work on the poems from those three years, but I believe only writing about fishing could give me the better grip on the workings of language. Nothing else returns me to the earth as fishing does, either. I could be exclusive about birding or hiking. I do both, but I could do nothing but--and be less involved in nature. Fishing is more of a complicated practice by which we engage the outdoors, and it is as ancient as any species of hominid that ate fish.

We both enjoyed the outing, and in addition to investing our attention on pursuing catches, took in the distance for wonder's sake. We heard fish break surface all the way across the reservoir, and we cast to some breaking surface near us. There's the sense that life will inhabit any space nature allows, but we caught all of our fish--besides that little smallmouth--along that flat we re-approached beyond the little island in the photo. 

The conflict between life as a fisherman and life as an artist is understandable, when I feel I've come short on the latter. I think it's worth mention that I'm not the only writer who has deeply enjoyed the life of fishing, although Zane Grey and Ernest Hemingway were monumental anglers, setting records and getting out to fish a staggering amount of days and hours, given their creative output. Grey was the first millionaire writer, and though his work is dubbed pulp fiction, I've read his writing on fishing and it's riveting. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature. The fishing these two figures did will make almost anyone feel they've come short as an angler, if they dwell on it too long. 

All I can say is I've loved fishing. I look at the photo above and know I still do. Always include the larger setting, including the inner landscape of your life, and let fishing absorb you so the aquatic earth reveals the creation in a religious sense, the sense of something that beckons to you despite everything else that trivializes life.

Cranberry Lake Pickerel