I do not fish.
I wish I could say this was a principled stance – that I oppose the catching or killing of other sentient beings for my entertainment or nourishment.
The truth is, I’m the squeamish type. I don’t like handling earthworms. I especially don’t like impaling earthworms on fishhooks. Nor do I like holding a gasping fish in one hand while extracting a hook from its cheek with the other. Nor do I fancy cleaning a fish – a verb that sanitizes the act of flaying and then yanking out the innards that we do not wish to consume.
I do, I’m ashamed to say, enjoy eating fish, especially fresh ones, lightly salted, peppered, garlicked, olive-oiled and grilled. Before my wife and I married in 2013, we sampled the fish tacos of various food trucks in Sonoma County, California, settling on one of them to cater our wedding supper.
So that’s me, the non-fishing fish eater. Then there’s my buddy Michael. Michael has fished forever. In time-honored fashion, his dad taught him. (My dad taught me to solve The New York Times crossword puzzle — in ink.)
So when Michael and I went camping in upstate New York, in the Rocky Mountains and in the High Sierra, Michael brought his fishing gear. I brought a book. While he poked around in his tackle box for the right combination of hook, sinker and bobber that would net him a rainbow trout for dinner, I sought a flat rock with a backrest where I could read and dangle my feet in the water.
To his great credit, Michael never played the Little Red Hen with me. Though I played no part in the catching, cleaning or cooking of the fish, I was an equal partner in consuming them.
I recall all this because I recently brought Michael and Kianush, a high school kid who helps Michael around the house and yard, to Bald Eagle Creek for a morning of fishing. While Michael and Kia fished, I, ever faithful to the rituals of Sunday morning, ate a bagel, sipped a coffee and worked my way through The New York Times.
For the first hour or so, I had more to show for my efforts than Michael and Kia did for theirs: I finished the word puzzles, the Book Review, the opinion section, the two news sections, Arts and Leisure and Business – and my bagel – while they caught zero fish.
To their great credit, neither Michael nor Kia seemed to mind. Yes, it’s a thrill, every time, to land a fish. But all true fisherfolk insist that they get great pleasure out of the entire activity – choosing and attaching the various appurtenances they carry in their tackle box, casting, reeling in and just being on the water.
For many of them, I suspect, fishing is a way of doing something while doing nothing: Yes, the birds, the breeze, the ripples, the fragrances are lovely. For a quarter-hour, maybe. To fish is to have an engrossing project while enjoying all those sensory delights. As the saying goes, “A bad day fishing is better than…blah, blah, blah.”
The sensory delights, by the way, were courtesy of Soaring Eagle Wetlands, a tract on Highway 220 near the village of Julian. I’d never heard of the place until a few weeks ago, when, while waiting to see a doctor about an aching wrist (X-rays were negative), I picked up a pamphlet touting local outdoor recreation venues as cures for what ails body and soul. Most of the places I’d heard of. Soaring Eagle was new to me.
Among the highlights: red-winged blackbirds, dinner plate-sized turtles and glossy blue tree swallows which, if you approach their nesting boxes, will swoop close enough to your head to make you feel like King Kong atop the Empire State Building, swatting at airplanes.
We pretty much had Soaring Eagle to ourselves until a kid from across the road, maybe 12 years old and wearing red Spider-Man pants, joined us on the fishing deck that overhangs the creek. So now we were three fishermen and one news junkie.
Michael ended the shutout, landing a pretty pumpkinseed fish, also known as a sun perch. He tried to hand the fish to me while he rummaged in the tackle box for his fish stringer. I demurred. Call me a lily-livered hypocrite, but I felt sorry for that fish.
Next, Michael reeled in a rainbow trout, about a foot long. Then it was Kia’s turn. Then Spider-Man’s. In the end, we took home three fish: the pumpkinseed, Michael’s trout and Spider-Man’s trout, which he gallantly gave to us.
Michael, in turn, gave the catch to Kia. And this lily-livered hypocrite went home and made fish tacos for dinner, not with the fish from Bald Eagle Creek, but from a local fish market.
