Something More than Us Creates Our Connection

I'm temperamentally suited to using a Senko-type worm. That paid off yesterday, as I caught three bass, two of them pretty nice ones. No northern pike caught, though one about 22 to 24 inches followed my plug to the squareback on my first cast. Brenden caught two yellow perch and a small pickerel. 

It's odd to favor Senkos here. I've never had any discomfort pitching a jerkbait the entire outing on other occasions while on foot, but from the low vantage of being seated in the canoe, it got tedious and awkward for me. Brenden threw a large spinner for the most part.

The invisibility of pike impressed us as strange. Wood in the water, some pads--cover wasn't everywhere, though common. You'd think we'd see some nervous water and fish. Brenden theorized that for whatever reason, the pike were down in the eight- to 12-foot depths. He thought that would more likely be the case in the summer, though. Water was 69 degrees. Besides, on the way in after sundown, I trolled a sinking jerkbait through that deep water and never got hit.

I described the smallest as an "average stream bass," the first one I caught, which hit next to some sticks in the water, shallow. The second one, maybe 14 inches but very heavy-bodied, hit hard & fast next to a fallen tree's shallow end. Once hooked, it ran so fast out into the depths that I thought it was a pike. The third came when 60 feet or so of muddy bank between cover interested me, as if a bass would move along it. My third or fourth cast, I felt my Yum Dinger get picked up in the usual way on a slow, deep retrieve. It leapt twice, maybe 15 inches or so. 

The Passaic stretches some eight-and-a-half miles between access points, but Brenden later pointed out that had we gone far enough, we might have come to trees in the water forbidding passage. Not only that. From the other side, there could be trees blocking passage further upriver yet, effectively creating an inaccessible flow. Unless you were to bushwhack, perhaps necessarily with a machete, or when the river is low enough, hike the mud at the edge you might sink into. 

There's bass back there for sure. And pike. We got well beyond the sound of traffic on I-80. I felt the weight of my concerns back home lifted off me. The surroundings fascinated me as a whole other system of shared interaction. The yellow of turning leaves signaling the inevitable passage coming of the rest of them. A flock of grackles fed themselves along the bank to our left, while an American egret alighted high up on the dead branch of a tree in the water, overlooking us and the flock I had just equated with Hitchcock. 

"The devil to the left of us and an angel giving us guard," Brenden said the like.

"Yeah," I said.

His words gave the scene transcendence. Even if we alone bestow such power on an environment, it no less moves us as something other. How can it be "we" without implying that something more than us creates our connection?

September Pike