Thomas McGuane: The Longest Silence

I thought my father must have been a wonderful fisherman, but I wasn’t sure. He taught me how to fish in a rather perfunctory way on the Pere Marquette River in Michigan. In later years, and to my great distress, he got away from fishing except in a ceremonial way, making an annual trip to Boca Grande or the River of Ponds or Piñas Bay. He had given up ordinary fishing and replaced it with extremely infrequent high-profile trips meant to substitute in intensity what he lacked in time. This in angling is a snare and delusion. Angling is extremely time consuming. That’s sort of the whole point. That is why in our high-speed world anglers, as a kind of preemptive strike, call themselves bums, addicts, and maniacs. We’re actually rather quiet people for the most part but our attitude toward time sets us at odds with our own society.

After my father died, I was invited to spend a day fishing with his oldest friend, my so-called uncle Ben, an excellent angler. We spent a satisfying day looking for bonefish in three feet of winter water in the Content Keys. At the end of the day, standing on the dock, I asked, with some trepidation:

“Uncle Ben, was my father a good fisherman?”

He smiled and said, “No, Tommy, he was not. But no one loved it more.”

This to me is a conundrum. “No one loved it more.” Isn’t that enough? Who is the better angler, the patient bait soaker under the walls of the Seine, the black woman with the cane pole on Mobile Bay, the aging Russian bureaucrat on the River Volga, or the film producer on the Kharlovka or the flats of Ascension Bay? Let’s be honest: it could be any of the above.

Last winter, I was fishing on a small steelhead river in Oregon. It was one of those rare times when fly-fishing was by far the most effective way to catch a fish. I was looking across the river in the shade of wintry alders at a pod of bright fish thirty feet long. I was looking success in the eye. As I approached the fish, I was watched by a gear fisherman in rubber barn boots and a worn-out mackinaw coat. I was able to hook a fish and slide it away from the school, land it down below, release it, resume my position, and hook another fish. The gear angler grew agitated. I released that fish and hooked a third. With this, he shot to my side holding a long-handled net at the ready. “If you don’t want them, I’ll take ’em,” he said.

“I release my fish,” I said. “That’s just the way I like to fish.”

“Mister,” he said, “I’ve been trying to catch a fish for my old folks to eat for four days and I haven’t even had a bite. Can’t you let me have this one fish?”

Well, I thought about it. Most of these fish were of hatchery origin and it was quite legal to kill them. I didn’t look forward to it but I said, “All right.” A few minutes later the fish was in the net, a bright, wild, native male. My companion looked into the net and, before I could speak, said, “Oops, he ain’t fin clipped. That’s a native. Put him back.”

I released the fish and the two of us watched him swim away. We shook hands and went our separate ways in an atmosphere of fellowship. He was a man we could all talk to, a brother in angling. A man like this could take our side against the dams and subdivisions. He knew which ones were wild. If fly fishermen have an edge in this elaboration of soul that we resent hearing called a sport but are too timid to call an art, it is in our willingness to deepen the experience at nearly any personal cost. That is the reason we tie flies, not to save money through bulk purchase of hooks and feathers. That is why some of us cannot live without that breath of varnish from the rod tube when we rig up for another holy day. The motto of every serious angler is “Nearer My God to Thee.” Humans have suspected for thousands of years that angling and religion are connected. But if you can find no higher ideal than outfishing your buddies, catching something big enough to stuff or winning a trophy, you have a lot of work to do before you are what Izaak Walton would call an angler.

Recently I heard of an old friend saying that the two rules of life he followed were: don’t even tell your mother your fishing spots, and other fishermen are the number-one enemy. It is embarrassing to note the ring of truth these rules seem to have. But I think we’re going to have to rise above them. Sixty million disorganized fishermen are being hornswaggled by tightly organized and greedy elites. Last year, under the shadow of numerous environmental organizations locally headquartered, and against the wishes of 70 percent of its citizenry, Montana’s legislature undermined the best water quality laws in the Rockies and made them the worst. This, in the epicenter of North American trout fishing. Still, we cast a mistrustful eye on one another, like worn-out, secretive prospectors of last century’s gold camps. The world goes on without us, using our rivers for other than their original purposes. We really ought to get together.

I began remembering a time when my son and I were dropped at a small tundra pond in Alaska after a short ride in a beautiful Grumman Beaver that the owner had acquired from the Austrian forest service, which had owned it for thirty years and scarcely flown it. It was a zero-hours Beaver, the newest one in the world, an unimaginable prize in Alaska. Our short flight took us over the heroic spaciousness of the northern edge of the Katmai wildlife area, an area of truly fierce beauty. Nothing we’d ever seen prepared us for it. Our landing interrupted a bald eagle’s attempt to ambush a flock of young harlequin ducks, and the eagle angrily wheeled around behind us. Picture a pond as small and intimate as Walden with hundreds of miles of visibility in all directions, ground that quivered, mountains that looked like they predated the world itself, a sky that was a record of the North Pacific’s infinity of moods.

I didn’t realize tundra was so interesting. We got out of the float plane and began walking on an endless flower- and moss-covered pudding that trembled under our feet at first and then, as we got away from the lake, firmed up to about the consistency of a mattress. In its intricacy of gold, green, pink, and yellow, an outburst of almost incomprehensible botanic creativity, we lamented every footstep. This was land that seemed to never have expected human passage, a place made for the vast spatial needs of Alaskan brown bears and arctic wolves. We used a small raft to get around. My son and I, along with Don and Dave, an eccentric piano duo from a foothills town in the West, sat on the sides of the raft, wadered legs dangling in the water, and coasted along the small river on our way to fishing spots. As we passed high banks, I saw claw marks ten feet off the ground where the bears had feasted on cliff swallow nestlings. With fly rods in our hands, we had dropped through time. Fishing had given us this.

Early on, I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me how to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included. To the reader accustomed to the sort of instructional fishing writing which I myself enjoy, I must seem to have gotten very far afield. I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either technical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and to listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.

THE FIRST FLY ROD I ever owned was eight feet of carpet beater made by a company whose cork grips were supplied by my father. My father worked for a Portuguese cork company whose owners swam at Estoril and supplied our family with innumerable objects of cork, including cork shoes, cork boxes, cork purses, and unidentified flying cork objects that my brother and I threw at each other. In our living room we had large cut-glass decanters of Burgundy, long soured, and my brother and I would have a couple of hits of that vinegar and head for the cellar to throw cork.