THERE’S MORE TO FISHING(Than Catching Fish)

“Moby Dick” was not a fish, nor was the Biblical leviathan that swallowed Jonah. Izaak Walton “loved to kill nothing but fish,” as he records in “The Compleat Angler”-- in his case trout that lurked in the streams of 17th-century England-- and Hemingway, of course, had his “Big Two-Hearted River.” Man’s pursuit of creatures living in watery bodies has engendered some of the finest tales, legends and lies in literature, and will undoubtedly continue to do so until the last fish, either fresh and salty, succumbs to man’s rapacious stupidity.

If we accept that wild fish will someday rise for a fly only in rivers running through our imaginations, then fishing’s finest literature will most certainly become even more valuable in baiting our vicarious adventures. Already the library is vast and various, with author-fishermen like Roderick Haig-Brown, Norman Maclean, Lee Wulff, Ernie Swiegert; in the Northwest, Patrick McManus,  Dave Hughes; novelists Tom McGuane and David Duncan--and many more.  They write of humor and how-to, as well as putting the fishing experience into a timeless and romantic lifelong endeavor that, if you’re lucky, grabs the spirit and holds you forever somewhere alongside riffles, drifts and deep, quiet pools.

As I grow older and remember past years of fishing trips, I find myself less eager to flail and splash about, instead preferring to sit contentedly and read of other fishermen’s travails while letting them remind me of my own.  Tom Alkire, an old friend and Portland journalist who, like myself, is growing older and perhaps wiser, has written a fine little book that encapsulates one fisherman’s experience, and in doing so has captured and conveyed the sport’s (some might say “religion’s”) universal mystique.

As Alkire professes, “This book is not about how to catch fish or where to catch fish, but it is about fishing. It is about the other parts of the fishing life that comprise the complete angler. It is about the time we spend thinking fish. It is about fish of memory, fish of the imagination. It is about the friendships that grow with the fishing days, about getting to know your home waters and distant waters, about the food and drink at fishing camp, about fishing truths and fishing lies, about the workings of the natural world, about fishing as youngsters and fishing as old men, about fishing nights in front of the fireplace and how fishing and life are intertwined as the strand of monofilament in a well-tied blood knot.”

The author has organized his narrative into subtitles that convey the seasons of an angler’s life; beginning with “The Sociable Angler,” and concluding with “The Aging Angler” and, lastly, “The Fireside Angler,” which is where I find myself most of the time now . As I age and recap my adventures by a figurative fireside, I recall my father and grandfather before me, enthusiasts, both of them, but neither the greatest of fishermen, by the way. But great storytellers: my grandfather’s heavily accented tales hearkening back to waters of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, my late father’s recalling Oregon’s once-pristine, more bountiful streams before the onrush of population,
logging and pollution.

Photo:  Bob Pool

I concur with Alkire on aging’s inevitability: “Another mark of the agiing angler is that he stretches out his fishing pleasure by fishing less. This is all the divine scheme of  life as the older angler cannot physically wade up and down the river from morning to night in search of fish. His legs won’t stand for it
and neither will his back, heart or other parts of the deteriorating physical plant . . .But that’s all right,” he adds, “He doesn’t want to rush about, he enjoys sitting on the bank watching the water, taking a nap, not hurrying as a youngster hurries from run to run to cover as much water as daylight allows.
And the older fisherman probably is the better angler for it.”
Paraphrasing a friend (and myself), Alkire writes, “ ‘I could still do it, but I just don’t want to.’” 

“Connecting to the natural world,” which means getting yourself miserable in the pursuit of fish (who are already wet and cold) -- “ ‘Fisherman’s luck:’, a fishing companion used to say to me, ‘A wet butt and a hungry gut’”-- is another of Alkire’s most valuable acknowledgements. In his chapter, “The Naturalist Angler,” we explore the ways confronting the out-of-doors and its many moods and weathers.

I recall a fishing trip with Alkire on Oregon’s Deschutes River, sleeping out in the open and being awakened by a loud “KA-BOOM!” as he opens this chapter: “The thunder exploded before you could say  ‘one-thousand one.’ We not only heard this one, we felt it, rumbling through the air, through our inconsequential flesh into the greater density of the earth underfoot to be absorbed without a murmur: an angry Zeus hurling thunderbolts, Thor swinging his magic hammer. . .” and like that, with rain, wind and an expected dip in the icy river the next day that caused a Native American onlooker to laugh uproariously. 

Alkire is true to his other theses as well, covering “homewaters;” family, friends, food, dress; even including an interesting chapter, “The Untruthful Angler,” which many non-fishermen might rightly consider the crux of the whole business. “Why anglers in particular are so often such bald-faced liars always has been a perplexing question,” Alkire concedes, acknowledging that other sports have their truth stretchers. “But anglers toy with the truth in ways incomprehensible to other human endeavors,” he writes. “It is a rare eighteen-inch trout that when confronted with a bona fide tape measure actually measures eighteen inches. It is a rare remembered fishing trip that actually was fishless. And it is rare to ever get a truthful answer to the innocent streamside question: “How’s fishing?”-- (Though one often hears, “You should have been here yesterday.”) 

One is tempted to go on quoting from Alkire’s delightful observations, to the extent that neither he or his publisher, Portland’s own Frank Amato, might appreciate. Though he has taken some unfriendly fire from a critic on the city’s Big Paper, a woman  who accused Tom of not acknowledging the ladies as she might have him do, he replies with a roll of his eyes and a quiet chuckle of frustration, before mentioning that “Fishing With an Angle,” the very first treatise on fishing, written in the 6th century, was composed by an English nun, “Dame” somebody, whose name I can never remember.

 (OMED - Illus: a typical Oregon Big Paper literary reviewer)

A man of integrity, Alkire is a husband, father, former scout master, and a writer whose book will have you anxiously anticipating the return of spring. Read it by the fireside and languish in his words hopefully:  “You yawn and look at all the magazines and books and maps that you haven’t yet touched tonight. But it’s late and winter is long and there will be time for more fireside angling tomorrow.”

Text(C) 2001 Paul Pintarich  Some of the graphics are hot links.