What is it about the confluence of being male, turning 40, fishing and the compulsion to write about all three? Is there some testosterone-tripped genetic switch that flips when a guy turns 40 that causes him -- like the force that drives spawning fish back up a river to where they were hatched -- to suddenly need to write simply yet poetically about noble, bedrock truths wrested from a big two-hearted river . . . or even a dinky, gutless creek? A certain kind of guy turns 40 and suddenly can't wait to max out his credit card acquiring thousands of dollars' worth of olde-timey trout-snagging gear, then drive at top speed to the nearest (or the most impossibly remote and inaccessible) river, creek, stream, high-speed drainage canal or ditch, wade into it, stand there in a pair of rubber pants and start waving his rod around while wistfully pondering the magnificence of God’s creation, the vicissitudes of life, the pratfalls of modern existence, the bittersweet lessons acquired as the wisdom of age is slowly and inexorably traded for the brash vitality of youth as a wily trout eludes capture in a dance as old as yadda, yadda, yadda . . . ?
And those are only steps one and two. Step three is squeezing a pencil or punishing a keyboard (preferably on a battered-but-unbowed manual Remington) to set down these plangent apercus in simple, declarative sentences that are supposed to have the powerful depth and unhurried, poetic cadence of a Montana trout stream, but which usually read more like random submissions from the Hallmark slush pile.
Publishers must have realized a few years back that greeting-card "philostophy" about fishing is one of those evergreen genres that will always sell. The audience for this kind of book is either endlessly gullible, so forgetful it can read the same book over and over again without realizing it, or endlessly renewed as each year’s batch of newly-minted 40-year-olds decide fish are probably the best guides through the shoals of middle age.
There's a subgenre of books about sports that belong in this endlessly replicable category, too. In the United States, they're always thoughtful ruminations on the essential qualities of the American soul as expressed through baseball. They’re gentle, lyrical, self-consciously poetic and a lot like baseball itself: slow-moving, frequently dull, take way too long to get to the point and seem like they're a lot more fun to perpetrate than they are to consume. Sadly, however, books about baseball as a metaphor for life in the United States of America aren't punctuated by people trying to sell hotdogs, beer, peanuts or anybody playing choruses of "Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye)" on a wheezing Wurlitzer through a crummy PA system.
In Canada, it's hockey books. You can slap just about anything about people chasing a puck around on a slab of ice and hitting each other between a pair of covers and it’ll earn out its advance and probably turn a profit. Without hockey books and government largesse, there wouldn't be a Canadian publishing industry. As baseball books aim to serve as a mirror for the American national character, hockey books aim to locate and limn the Canucklehead soul. Canadians invented an entire sport so they could box wearing skates, and that's supposed to indicate something about the essential nature of Canadians . . . although what it seems to indicate is that they're lousy boxers who'd prefer to be figure skaters, and figuring out what that indicates is probably a job for a clinical psychologist.
Americans get characterized as being bellicose and overbearing, and the sport they define themselves with is a pastoral, bucolic game that moves very slowly and in which there’s no physical contact. Canadians, quietly, internally proud of their "peace, order and good government," their international status as postwar referee/peacekeepers and their legendary politeness find their essential nature in a sport where dopey thugs with rage-management problems are celebrated and players who skate well are derided variously as "fancy," "European," or "gay."
But we were talking about fish. Books in which fishing is presented as a means to understand male aging are legion, with more appearing every year. This idea that the greatest truths of human existence can be grasped while waiting for a fish to try to swallow a fake bug on a string has been around for a long time. The first book of its kind was, of course, The Compleat Angler, written by Izaak Walton and first published in 1653. Three hundred and fifty years later, it's still in print. In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, the last two chapters of which are the first and second halves of "Big Two-Hearted River," which also uses fishing as means to greater truth and insight, but less prescriptively than Walton. Fifty-one years passed. Retired English teacher Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It appeared in 1976.
I haven't read The Compleat Angler. In Our Time and A River Runs Through It are both fiction, and they’re both by people who know how to write, and how to write something worth reading and how to connect with a reader without it mattering whether the reader even likes fish, let alone fishing. There should be a requirement that anybody who wants to write about fly fishing except in a purely instructional way should first have to read both Maclean’s and Hemingway's work on the subject. And — what the hell — Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing In America, too. After that, if they think they can do better, they can have a shot at it. But an editor ought to make the final judgment.
But that rule’s not in effect, unfortunately. So after Maclean's book, 18 years went by, and, in 1994, Howell Raines — apparently bummed for some reason about being The New York Times’s Washington bureau chief, wrote Fly Fishing Through The Midlife Crisis. Nothing wrong with that. Fishing helps you, you want to write about it, go right ahead. But then Anchor published it, and suddenly every middle-management Babbitt moping about having peaked five years earlier without realizing it attached himself to the thing like a lamprey. A friend of mine came up with a much better title for Raines’s book: Caught In My Fly.
(And now that Raines has quit the Times, he’s — what else? — gone fishing. Maybe Rick Bragg’s out there with him, both of them waggling their rods around, snagging each other's shirts with their lovingly hand-crafted Creagle McSquintly's Wee Hours Boofer Bear™ lures, swilling George Dickel from hip flasks as they work out the details for a co-written book: Reelin’ In The Years: How Two Soggy Crackers Got Caught, Cleaned, Pan-Fried and Eaten Before They Knew What Hit Them . . .and it's more likely an eager, anonymous kid will bait Bragg's hooks, cast his lines, reel his fish almost all the way in, then summon Rick to actually jerk them out of the water and into the landing net.)
In 1995, novelist/screenwriter Paul Quarrington wrote Fishing With My Old Guy, explaining it this way: "I have a theory about the transitional nature of a human life, how one needs someone to facilitate passage, how this is often accomplished by an elder under the pretense of imparting the minutiae of some art or craft. Some anglers, near the end of their days, have acquired that knowledge, which they can then share with the young ones. Fishing is an area that can, even in this decidedly unmagical day and age, still produce magi. I call them Old Guys."
Others call them Elves, Curmudgeons, Mugwumps, Codgers or Coots. Some call them "Grandpa."
No less a personage than faux-folksy radio raconteur Stuart Maclean, Canada's own Garrison Keillor manqué, deemed Quarrington’s fish story "a book of great heart. It is also a book that will make you laugh out loud, and when everyone is asleep and you are still reading, you will nudge the person beside you and say, 'Are you awake? Can I read you one more thing?'"
At which point, said person will snarl, "I am now, and no you can't. Please. No more twee crap about bits of fishing tackle with names that sound like Tolkein characters. No more wry observations. No more avuncular chuckling, eyebrow-cocking, twinkling or wistful gazing into the middle distance. One more word about fish and the men who love catching them too much and you’ll be sleeping with them.”
But the thing must have sold better than anything else Quarrington wrote, because by 2001 there was Fishing for Brookies, Browns & Bows: The Old Guy's Compleat Guide to Catching Trout. And it’s probably just a matter of time until The Even Older Guy vs. The Trout: This Time It’s Personal.
Until then, baffle yourself with Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life by Mark Kingwell. The Penguin catalog copy says, "The philosopher who wrote Better Living: In Pursuit of Happiness may have found something better than Plato or Prozac — fly-fishing. The family joke was that Mark Kingwell would skip 'The Weekend' — two days of trout fishing with his father and two brothers. Fishing is stupid, believed Kingwell, scarred by his earlier, dismal experiences with the sport. When he finally agrees to accompany his father and brothers, he huffs, 'I will sit in the back of the boat reading The Critique of Pure Reason, but I will not fish.' What a difference two days make. Over the course of the weekend, Kingwell comes to understand fly-fishing's appeal, and he learns that it's not just about the fish. A celebration of male companionship and the one that got away, Catch and Release is a wonderful slice of life from an unlikely angler."
"Slice of life"? Well, I'm sure its a slice of something, although probably not life, at least, not as most of us would understand it. Never mind that the copy's tenses meander all over the place, or that it seems to promise a celebration of a male companion that got away, or that it describes remaining perfectly still and quiet and holding a rod as a "sport" (if fishing is a sport, what does that make chess?) . . . ponder instead how strenuously Kingwell is striving to turn himself from an overweening, self-consciously "with it" philosophy professor into a tenure-limpet, clinging to his suburban satellite campus sinecure: One minute, he's repurposing his unresearched, subjective musings into books offering Introduction to Philosophy, E-Z-Read-R Classics Illustrated version. An instant later, he's written Squeeze and Release: Caught In My Fly II (or, if you prefer, any of the following:) Still Waters, Deep Thoughts: The Comfort Of My Rod, Maybe Dick, Leviathan (“What? Who’s Thomas Hobbes? Really? Damn!”), The Fishin’ Semiotician, Ikhthus Agonistes, or Live Bait: Musings Of A Hip Wader. From hipster doofus to crusty uncle in a single trout season.
The only time I've ever gone fishing and not figured there was something better I could have been doing was with my wife's uncle about seven years ago. His family started and ran a big commercial fishing operation in British Columbia for years, and he still goes out to catch salmon just about every day. (When he's not catching salmon, he's catching prawns.) Before I could marry my wife, we had to spend a day going after salmon with him; it was a west coast familial rite of passage. We woke up at four a.m., drove across town, were on the water by five a.m. or so and done by eleven, having caught a number of fish. His boat is a kind of minimal fishing machine, built to catch fish and do nothing else. That's exactly what it did, even on a morning where every other person he talked to on the radio was fishless, including a charter operator with a boat full of perplexed and increasingly annoyed tourists.
That kind of fishing I could understand, more so because it was the first step in a process that included smoking and eventually eating the fish as well as catching them, and because he’d dedicated his entire life to it, and it was inspiring to see somebody who voluntarily did in retirement something that had been his job since he was a kid.
But the trout kind of fishing where arrested adolescents hit 40 and decide the best way to spend their remaining time on earth is to match wits with fish, the kind that makes people reel in simple stream-borne truths and modest book advances for regurgitating hokey bromides in a damp idyll -- the appeal of that kind of fishing is a mystery.
"Well . . . a lot of madness has flowed under our various bridges since then, and we have all presumably learned a lot of things . . . and my feeling for national politics is about the same as my feeling for deep-sea fishing, buying land in Cozumel or anything else where the losers end up thrashing around in the water on a barbed hook."—Hunter S. Thompson, "The Great Shark Hunt," Playboy, December 1974
