Thomas McGuane - The Longest Silence

Walton tells us that “angling is an art” that, like “mathematics, can never be fully learnt.” However, “as no man is born an artist, so no man is born an angler.” Therefore, some instruction is in order. In general, fishermen should conduct themselves as “primitive Christians, who were, as most anglers are, quiet men and followers of peace.” He excuses his contemporaries slightly by adding that primitive Christians were “such simple men as lived in those times when there were fewer lawyers.”

Today’s reader, who is himself three-fourths river water, can accept that the world of fish is the “eldest daughter of the creation, the element upon which the Spirit of God did first move,” and from whose abundance all living creatures originally proceed. We can live with this. It is close to factual as we currently understand the world. The angler deep in a river intuits his nearness to the primary things of the earth. And Walton tells us that while God spoke to a fish, He never spoke to a beast, and that when He wished to prepare man for a revelation, He first removed him from the hurly-burly of cities so that his mind might be made fit through repose. A learned Spaniard is quoted as saying that “rivers and the inhabitants of the watery element were made for wise men to contemplate and fools to pass by.” There are rivers of every kind on earth, he says, even one which runs six days and rests on the Sabbath. And of course, four of the Apostles were fishermen. Walton adds with some prescience that if we would live on herbs, salads, and fish we would be saved from “putrid, shaking, intermittent agues.” Indeed, he who has the urge to angle would do well to set out both physically and spiritually, not just with rod and creel but with “wit … hope and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself.” The angler has everything to gain. He cannot even lose a fish, “for no man can lose what he never had.” But by skill and observation he might still hope for success — first by becoming enough of a naturalist to make a dozen imitation insects to see him through the seasons of the year. And if he is sufficiently skillful and observant, he will own “a jury of flies, likely to betray and condemn all the trouts in the river.” He may also carry with him a bag containing the hooks and silks and feathers to imitate unforeseen insects, or to pass time of a “smoking shower” under the nearest sycamore. He is after all seeking a fish “so wholesome that physicians allow him to be eaten by wounded men, or by men in fevers, or by women in childbed.” In fact, Walton’s fish regularly pass in and out of mythology with their enameled spots and colors, “march together in troops” like the perch; pike hunt like wolves and tench minister to other fish which are ailing. Some are driven by hatred of frogs, others, like the old trout, possess a mournful intelligence and acute sense of mortality. The angler who understands such things may betake himself to steepletops and, with his rod and line, angle for swallows.

Walton reminds us, as we daily remind ourselves, that it is terrible to resolve whether happiness consists in contemplation or in action. But he contents himself in telling the reader “that both of these meet together, and do most properly belong to the most honest, ingenious, quiet and harmless act of angling.” Walton anticipates modern riparian conservation in recognizing the need for controlling weirs and illegal nets by public policy with the forceful reservation that “that which is everybody’s business is nobody’s business.” This is, of course, the tragedy of the commons, which deprives us daily of our window on nature.

As modern naturalists have come to do, Walton relates the lives of various fish to all the things around them: weather, insects, worms, the seasonal habits of townspeople, the tides of the sea, the budding and blossoming of plants, the dispersion of cities during plagues or religious wars, the follies of anglers themselves. Most of all, angling, to Walton, is about being fully alive: “I was for that time lifted above earth, and possess’d joys not promised in my birth.” Beside rivers, we seldom fill our minds with “fears of many things that will never be.” Here, “honest, civil, quiet men” are free from dread.

The angler’s day begins humbly, wherein he differentiates between the various dung — cow’s, hog’s, horse’s — as he searches for “a lively, quick, stirring worm,” perhaps in old bark from a tanner’s yard. Or, competing with crows, he may follow the plough through heaths and greenswards. Finally, he may cultivate a dead cat or raid a wasp nest for its grubs. But his day becomes a soaring event in the mysteries of sea and stream, milkmaids reciting Christopher Marlowe, hours among the “little living creatures with which the sun and summer adorn and beautify the river banks and meadows.” At times, The Compleat Angler resembles Pliny, or a medieval bestiary, so ravishing and inexplicable does our author find his microcosm. What is this grand beast? “His lips and mouth somewhat yellow; his eyes black as jet; his forehead purple, his feet and hinder parts green, his tail two-forked and black; the whole body stained with a kind of red spots, which run along the neck and shoulder blade, not unlike the form of St. Andrew’s cross, or the letter Xmade thus crosswise, and a white line drawn down his back to his tail; all of which add much beauty to his whole body.” Answer: caterpillar.

The technocracy of modern angling has not been conducive to the actual reading of Walton. Today’s fisherman may own The Compleat Angler as an adornment, but turns to his burgeoning gadgets for real twentieth-century consolation, staring at the forms of fish on the gas plasma screen of his fathometer or applying his micrometer to the nearly invisible copolymers of his leader. In Walton’s words, his heart is no longer fitted for quietness and contemplation. Even in the seventeenth century there was need of a handbook for those who would overcome their alienation from nature. In our day, when this condition is almost endemic, it requires a Silent Spring or The End of Nature to penetrate our stupefaction. The evolution of angling has reached a precipice beyond which the solace, exuberance, and absorption that has sustained fishermen from the beginning will have to come from the way the art is perceived. And here, learned, equitable Izaak Walton, by demonstrating how watchfulness and awe may be taken within from the natural world, has much to tell us; that is, less about how to catch fish than about how to be thankful that we may catch fish. He tells us how to live.

THE VOLCANIC LANDSCAPE, the cool fog from the sea … this must be Iceland. I walked out of my small hotel on the northeast coast of the country. A large river, milky with glacier melt, flowed beneath us in a shallow canyon. From among a church and some houses around the hotel, an old man appeared, hobbling toward the estuary on ski poles and following a small black hen. They traveled at the same speed and eventually disappeared over a low hill, first the hen, then the old man, to the edge of the sea.

Another fellow came out of the hotel and struck up a conversation with me in English. A nervous sort, he kept touching his lips. “Of fish, I prefer their heads. I go to the store, I buy only the heads. I cook them and then I suck out all the little parts.”

That night, I found myself dining with some English salmon anglers. One, a florid, lively man in his sixties, was telling me of the recent death of his mother who had always been bored by salmon fishing. On the Alta, where his father had persuaded her to fish for one day, she caught a fifty-pounder and never fished again. This year, as she lay on her deathbed, her son sat by her side. She was only occasionally conscious as her life ebbed away. At the end, she opened her eyes and gazed at him. “You’ll never catch a fifty-pound salmon,” she said, and died.