At The Club: an Over-Seas Member

                                                   Braving it out at The Flyfishers'Club.
                                                           69 Brook Street, London,
                                                                      October 2019.

Transcription of a Paper Letter from One Old Fisherman to Another

 

Dear Richard,

   Yup, I agree. There is so much out there to make us feel bad, such a variety of things, so much that we cannot change. I guess that we must resort to a holding action; that is, trying hard to keep as cheerful as we can in the face of it all. Which is to say that we must not let the bastards get us.

   One day last week, two new “fishing magazines” came in the mail. I sat down with them only to end up tossing them away in deep discouragement. It felt to me like our fishing’s gone to the dogs.

   We’re bombarded in every field sports publication by the many and frantic efforts to get kids out there fishing, to teach them, convert them, instruct them even in their school rooms. The movement has gone evangelical, impassioned, and frantic.

   My hunch is that it’s all in vain, that these newer generations will never fish as we have fished, let alone think of fishing as we have thought of it. The new “tackle” clutched in their hands will not be a fly rod, but a blackberry or an iPhone. That kid, standing there on the corner is receiving or sending another text, not dreaming of a way to get out and catch a trout. 

    Still the hue and  cry is to get those damned kids out of the malls and away from their devices and out fishing-- if not for their own good, then for the good their names, added to the rosters and the polls, can do in the ongoing politics of sport-- but even more, for the greater good of corporate profit.

    I think the battle is lost.

   I think the effort to convert kids is at root disingenuous. Our motives are impure. At the deepest level what we want is to recruit kids to support the “industry” of angling: the manufacturers, the shops, the guides.    Already the  “industry” is slipping downward on the graphs of our tough times. We look with dismay at that kid walking the mall who carries the entire world electronically in his hand. He angles the world at will and almost for free. We old-time anglers simply can’t compete and can only stand by and wish we could yank that cell phone from his hand. We want him to memorialize that “barefoot boy with cheek of tan”,* with a cane pole and can of worms sauntering down an old dirt road to the old fishing hole. But that kid is gone forever-- as are his country parents. There is no rural America left where a kid can discover the field sports in his own sweet way.

   We have to realize, I think, that for the first time, perhaps, in the history of human culture, kids do not much want to live the life that their parents lived. You and I may have had our spates of rebellion and wanted things different from our old folks, but their way remained the same safe way of life that we knew and wanted for ourselves. We lived within continuity and tradition.

   Not that these kids today know what it is they want instead of what they have, but it clearly seems not to be the model that their parents represent. Going fishing with Dad hasn’t the appeal that it once had. Other social constituencies have come to understand this, but not the angling community in which thinking about social issues has never been a long suit. The capitalization and incorporation of youth as an important market looks to be  total, with the field sports bringing up the rear

   When we were kids, we lived closer to what we could see was the source of our daily bread. We understood what our dads did for a living to  support us. And we tended to respect it. If Dad fished, it must be a good thing: such was the dynamic of our culture.

   But not any more. So little is actually manufactured, so much is only computed in obscure offices that our lives have tended to become abstracted from a productive, work-a-day substantial reality. We become digital in our satisfactions and leave the rest to China.

   And, as if this were not enough, demographics are running against all the field sports; ethnicities on the rise are not those where commonly a tradition of field sports is honored let alone practiced. I fear that we are in the late days of our angling tradition. 

I am, neverthless, yours,

   Gordon 

* John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Barefoot Boy” (1885) defined and immortalized this  fundamental American  symbol.

in the collection of Mrs. Claude Albrighton of Boulder, Colorado

An Epistolary Essay in Defense of Sorrow

         
Dear Professor of Chemistry and Distinguished Physician,
    Dear Claude and John, I feel I must babble some sort of response to your recent concern for me, your devoted old friend who poses as a critic of whatever crosses his mind. We must be off on a stroll, three old “doctors,” hand in hand, talking of many things. Which of you is the Walrus and which the Carpenter I must leave you to decide, but I am stuck in the formula as the simple old oyster: ready to comment on your shoes and ships and sealing wax…  nothing on your cabbages and only a touch or two on a king.
     Is it possible to write to you as in a letter like this and make it do double-duty as a column to blog on The Bouldercreek Angler? We shall see.

IN MEMORIUM

 Upon the Sudden Death in the Night

 on a Road near Saratoga, Wyoming
on September 3, 2010

 of

 Adrian Bantjes

Distinguished

   Professor of History

   And Historian of Angling

at

 The University of Wyoming

He who learns must suffer.

And even in our sleep,

pain that cannot forget

falls drop by drop upon the heart,

and in our despair, against our will,

comes wisdom to us

by the awful grace of god.

Aeschylus

Agamemnon  l.179ff

Edith Hamilton, translator

He was my friend and colleague

A Critique of American Fly Fishing in Two Parts

      

                                PART I

                                    IN THE BEGINNING           

    In the beginning, in colonial America, in that agrarian, rural community, where fauna were still in balance with flora and both reconciled to the vagaries of local geologies and climates, there had to have been an idyllic landscape that offered those early Americans a marvelous promise of fish and game-- of both sport and provender.

    The good and beautiful earth lay at almost every doorstep, easier for those early folks to enter upon than for us today to drive down town.

     And that is what has become of us. We are all down town in the center of things most all the time and doing quite nicely, thank you.

    But, back then, in that once upon a time, fishing was close to home, by foot or by horseback, and intimately connected to the household economy. And it was free.

    A new politics and a new economy in a new land appeared to promise that freedom of access and supply of nature’s bounty in perpetuity. There was no need to hurry and so the technology of the field sports developed but slowly. A solid wood fishing rod with a fixed horsehair line was more than adequate; and two open barrels, side by side with hammer locks, did nicely on bird or beast.

     Once upon a time, in order to enjoy, have success, and advance in the sport, fishermen went fishing close to home, usually for a few hours only. They went casually, and at little expense. A journey to a remote camp in  the  woods was a considerable undertaking and rare.

     Today, our angler regularly finds himself in the air or for days on the road, on the way to distant, often exotic territories to find the same satisfactions, and accomplishment he used to get at home-- now with a new sense of urgency if not anxiety.

     Urbanization is the great villain and moving force fueling this shift. The city has drawn our anglers into its service and some might say “bondage”. It has forced  “nature” and its pleasures farther and farther a-field and kept us in our offices. Kept us starved for fishing.

    So, what have we done? In our hours off, we have joined clubs, certainly Trout Unlimited. We have read the magazines and doted on the videos, in those hours stolen from the urban machine. A bit of “virtual” angling must often suffice.

    Then comes what once was called  “vacation”, today more flexible, less formal than the locked-in conventional two weeks of Julys-past when there were no cell phones or texting, to keep the job vibrating or ringing in our pockets. In any case, there still is time to get away and fish. Half an hour on the computer sets us up with destination and transportation. And off we go to a week in Alaska, or, as I do in my dreams, off to The Rio Grande in Patagonia. We pretty much bet our fishing season on those few days away.

   Where in the past, fishing was more relaxed and easy- going, now it is marked  by a sense of urgency. Angling success becomes urgently necessary in a new, less forgiving, way.

    The dark side of all this is to increase the expense of it. The fishing is no longer free: it costs. Sometimes a lot.  The water is likely to be private and  privileged as once it was for an aristocratically wealthy few. The rest of us have always had to depend on  free and public waters. We have been the undecorated anglers who en masse have paid the bill and kept the sport alive.

   This  en masse, we, the  anglers of the working day, since the burst in popularity of fly fishing in the mid 1980s, have enjoyed more disposable income for recreation and developed keen interest in issues of the environment. And today we are wetting our waders in the finest rivers and lakes in the world, right  along with our aristocratically wealthy betters of  the older tradition.

    And so our fishing has been transformed in our time. It has been driven by an historic irony that what we have always loved, we could readily get at home, we now chase quite cheerfully half way round the world to find it.

    Nor do we do it alone. The adventure to new and uncharted fishing, with the least possible chance of failure, requires help. And so here comes a key factor in the revolution that has overtaken our angling:  The Guide.

                                             PART II

                AND THEN THERE WAS THE GUIDE

    The meteoric rise of the Guide finds us caught in another vexing irony: that now it requires two people to catch any  given trout-- where once we did  it alone, by ourselves, and solitary. Now we do it in the company of an assistant, an instructor, a protector, caterer, and a boss.

     The angler who at one time we looked upon as a self-sufficient, internal sort of person, we now find transformed into a pupil, dependent upon a guide for instruction, landing his fish, selecting his flies, providing safety, lunch, and the conventional conversation of  the facilitator, of one who is paid to be always encouraging. His conversation becomes a lingua franca-- or guide-talk.

    Guides are an interesting lot. They are more often than not, superior young men and women, smart and capable of deep feeling, even delicacy of feeling.  But, their conversation in the service of their profession, made of current slang, and excessive effusion, grows automatic and repetitive,They feel they must keep the client’s spirits buoyed up at all costs. It’s guide-talk talking.

   Guides are often young men and women who have chucked the values of the middle class, what they call the “rat race”, and are content to live quite simply, on not much of a yearly income-- just as long as they can be allowed to fish! Fish a lot.

   They may have had a bit of college, but not enough to spoil their innocense. Instead they tie the finest flies the world has ever seen, cast the farthest, and achieve supremacy in every one of the delicacies that attend on angling skill and gear.

    They live the life that the rest of us dare not. But they depend upon us for alms. Their culture-hero is that unhappy man Thoreau in his shack by Walden Pond.  Their ideology is an uncritical devotion to Catch and Release. All of them were born under the star of Trout Unlimited. They tend to agree with each other on most every issue and so tend to sound alike, think alike, and dress alike-- always on the youthful side of maturity.

     As an occupational class, they tend to identify first with the owners of the water, then the fly shops, and lastly with the fish. The fee-paying client becomes their necessary suppliant.

    Out on the water, the guide becomes the one who “knows” and therefore is the one who “decides”-- and later, back in camp,  it is the guide who most vividly  establishes the  narrative of the day and reports on it. His narrative will often be exploited as an advertisement for his  boss, the owner.

    The guide’s reports are devoured by angling media  and become an extension of it. This becomes the stuff on which the virtual angler feeds.  He becomes a consumer of a product as commercial as any other. The client is voracious, always wanting more of the same and always something  new. He pays and so must be fed.

    Sport has indeed become an industry, business.

   In the end, it is the language of angling that suffers. The distinguished literature of angling takes a drubbing as it becomes amorphous, repetitive, and commercial.

    What is lacking is big personality and a clear voice. Before this contemporary rise in the popularity of angling and all the attendant writing about it, it was not difficult to tell the difference between the writing of giants like Ted Trueblood and Ray Bergman. Both wrote about the same subject, but with a nuanced tracing of personality, imagination, and sensibility that is the hallmark that separates literature from mere word-grubbing. I believe it fair to conclude that the guides as a professional class have absconded with the literature of angling and have made it their own. Our language has been made to pay.

                                                  ~~~

    At a book signing, once, I heard John Gierach say that for him it was the writing that came first and was most important. Then came the fish and the fishing.  Such is the primal way: first an irresistible need and craving to speak and only then to cast about for a congenial subject matter-- like angling.  Were I not writing this essay about fishing, I would surely he haranguing you about something else.

   

A Test Blog with a Piscatorial Musing

    If you are a subscriber to my blog, I wonder if you received an email alerting you to this trial posting…. In other words, is the system working for you?

     In order that this posting not be altogether without substance, let me report that recently I over-heard Piscator saying to Venator:

   “Contemporary fly tying is ingenious to a fault and superbly skilled: in these respects it has never been equaled. But the new generation of flies,” he said, “are rarely beautiful-- in the old, aesthetic and traditional way of flies.” He went on to say that there can be no doubt but that the new flies are more effective in the water than the older, now antique dressings. But, he sees the new flies as a drab and faintly melancholy spectacle with even duller names. Few if any would he want to rush home to duplicate. He would have to look long and hard to find that rare one, which might be for him like the poet Yeats’s yellow-haired girl whom only God could love for herself alone and not her yellow hair.

Male and Female Created He Them

                     

                    Hamlet and Lisbeth

                                        Caveat

    Whether or not you have read Shakespeare’s Hamlet, you know the character, the man. Hamlet lives in our blood stream. We have all, in one way or another had to cope with his disruptions of our lives. We can’t avoid him; he’s everywhere. He has been elemental on the Periodic Table of our thought since Shakespeare discovered him. Now we have discovered his shadow, Lisbeth.

    You may or may not have read the sensational three Swedish novels about crime and attendant horrors by the late Stieg Larsson and so may want to dodge this diatribe in which I propose to compare and contrast Hamlet with Larsson’s main character, Lisbeth Salander. To know one is, I think, to know the other.

   Like Hamlet, Lisbeth, is also out there among us. Be warned.

                              ~

   As in electricity, there is no value assessment attributed to  the factors, positive and negative, there should be no such values attributed to my suggestion that Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is the post-modern negative of the early-modern positive Hamlet.  They are opposite sides of the same narrative coin.  Hamlet came first on the waves of a new era:  Lisbeth at the end of one, of what many feel are dark, angry days on the verge of socio-cultural recession. Both these powerful characters are structural markings of our literature and subject of our endless, if lurid, fascination-- and dreaming.

   I should like to suggest a fist-full of comparative qualities that these two important figures of our imagination define. I wish to offer some bit of support for my free-swinging assertion.

                               ~

 ~Hamlet and Lisbeth are preeminently models of the  alienation of young people. One a prince, the other a nobody-- and both Nordic.

 ~Each is a kind of dream-life for the reader-- the same set of dreams over and over again.

 ~The dream of Hamlet is the old dream of the perfection of brilliant, clear youth and all its entitlements.

 ~The dream of Lisbeth Salander is also the old dream, the panic-dream of the dark, dangerous female side of things, the diamond-carbon brilliance of her funereal persona in a minimalist body-- and our frightened male’s attraction to it.

 ~ Both of these “moderns” are badly injured in their life-experience.

 ~ Both emerge from dangerous, unwholesome family circumstances.

  ~Each dreams of  a father, a  father who is playing havoc in their lives.

  ~Hamlet dreams of a great father who appears to demand his self-destruction.

   ~Salander dreams of a monster-father on the prowl to kill her.

   ~Both want to love and be loved, but they cannot trust in it.

   ~And so both become “ironists”. They see the world as a ghastly system of ironies.

   ~They are expert in their particular “modern” technologies: Hamlet in his revolutionary university ideas, Salander as a past-master of the computer and all its extra-legal resources.

   ~ Hamlet has “connections” outside Denmark at the university at Wittenberg; Lisbeth belongs to an international underground of powerful underworld  hackers.

    ~Both are intellectuals on the razor’s edge of their times.

    ~Whatever else they are, both are brilliant.

    ~Both have a “global” consciousness and are at home nowhere.  They are sojourners in the poisonous environments that they once called home.

    ~They know every thing that’s to be known. They know our secrets.

   ~ Each lives in emotional turmoil.

    ~Unimaginably terrible things dog their every step.

    ~Both are cruel and ready for any violence.

    ~Sexual violence is one of them.

    ~They are killers.

    ~They hate categorically, each in his/her own new way.

    ~They are solaced by their crimes.

   ~ By definition, they are vengeful. They prowl about looking for revenge.

    ~They feel that they are at the center of things and appointed “to set it right” with their rough justice.

  ~ The madness attributed to them becomes a real possibility. Madness as strategy, or therapy.

     

                                        ~

     In the end, both Hamlet and Lisbeth Salander work a sort of salvation, a transformation of the horror  of their circumstances.  Hamlet will be “saved” and given new life by his  narrative, the  “story of Hamlet” that  Horatio will  live to tell to the ages.  Salander will live on in her money, on her stiletto heels and under a blonde wig-- in the millions upon millions of kronor she has stolen from an exposed criminal corporate giant she has destroyed, now a suicide.  It is a two-headed coin. Either way we win, with a good story or with the cash.

    But night or day, big or little, they are much the same character. Too dangerous to mess  with. How interesting it is that we are so drawn to them both and yet would find living with either of them unbearable.