The Literary Fly Fisher

The heat in the Inland Northwest has been brutal this summer, and it has made fishing on my home waters pretty challenging. The reason I like fly fishing, however, is the fact that it requires one’s participation in the wider, non human world–the world that so many call “nature.” And, of course, there is much more to nature than rising fish. For instance, huckleberry bushes surround our cabin and run up the mountain behind it. In fact, the bush pictured below is right next to the spot where I beach the canoe, between the lake and cabin. So, while my mood could be better, after having my fly snubbed by the local cutthroats, turning from the beached canoe toward hundreds of ripe huckleberries is a great consolation.

I describe fishing and berry picking at my cabin as a form of “participation” in the wider world because they both involve real, physical engagement with the living environment. This engagement blurs the lines between “nature” and myself, which is one of the reasons I try to avoid the former term. It is true that most Americans now live very anthrocentric lives, but, even in urban centers, distinguishing what is “natural” and what is not is a difficult task. Thinking similarly, the 19th century romantic, Henry David Thoreau, actually described huckleberry picking and eating as sort of socializing that takes place between humans and “nature” (see quote below).  Traditional Native American friends, seeing the non-human world as a much more personal place than most of us, leave offerings to or attend ceremonies honoring the plants from which they take berries or other items. All of this explains why, for me, finding those berries upon returning from a fishless paddle around the lake is more meaningful than you might guess. And it doesn’t hurt to get rid of those berries before the bears come looking for them.

Following, you can read Thoreau’s thoughts on huckleberries:

“What means this profusion of berries at this season only? Nature does her best to feed her children, and the broods of birds just matured find plenty to eat now. Every bush and vine does its part and offers a wholesome and palatable diet to the wayfarer. He need not go out of the road to get as many berries as he wants, of various kinds and qualities according as his road leads him over high or low, wooded or open ground: huckleberries of different colors and flavors almost everywhere, the second kind of low blueberry largest in the moist ground, high blueberries with their agreeable acid when his way lies through a swamp, and low blackberries of two or more varieties on almost every sand plan and bank and stone heap.

“Man at length stands in such a relation to Nature as the animals which pluck and eat as they go. The fields and hills are a table constantly spread. Diet drinks, cordials, and wines of all kinds and qualities are bottled up in the skins of countless berries for the refreshment of animals, and they quaff them at every turn. They seem offered to us not so much for food as for sociality, inviting us to a picnic with Nature. We pluck and eat in remembrance of her. It is a sort of sacrament, a communion—the not forbidden fruits, which no serpent tempts us to eat. Slight and innocent savors which relate us to Nature, make us her guests, and entitle us to her regard and protection.”

Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits: Thoreaus’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript, ed. Bradley P. Dean (WW Norton & Company, 2001), 52.

I write this post late at night, in a boat, at sea. The boat is my brother-in-law’s. He, his sister–my wife, and all their family are from Central Europe. A love of of large waters and all things maritime runs in her family. In her father’s house is proudly displayed an old, official document honoring her great grandfather, a sea captain, for rescuing an Imperial vessel in the Adriatic Sea. Her father, himself, built his own sailboat, after the collapse of Communism, and races it very successfully. And a few years ago, after deciding the Danube River was too small for him and/or his boat, her brother rented a slip in Croatia, and now captains his own boat on the Adriatic.

Personally, I prefer mountains and clear running streams to massive rivers, lakes that cannot be seen across, and oceans or seas. And in many other ways, we inhabit the world rather differently, aside from the fact that we all love my wife and young daughter immensely. In fact, when visiting Central Europe, I now sometimes leave the family to go fly fishing for trout in Transylvania with Romanian friends. Or, I fish more locally for trout or asp with Hungarian friends.

During our current visit, my wife, and daughter, and I have joined  my brother-in-law and his wife for a trip to Croatia and a few days on their boat. My in-laws, as usual, are kind and generous hosts, and it is amazing to see Dalmatia from the sea instead of from the road.

As it happens, I have been reading Herman Melville’s 1851 whaling epic Moby-Dick or, The Whale. I read the fist pages during my late-night train ride to Romania to fly fish, and I have continued to read the book after rejoining family. In those first pages, I came across a long passage of Melville’s that has led me to recognize that I have another love in common with my in-laws, besides that for my wife and daughter. We all love water. Whether that water is small or large, running or still, sweet or saline, we love water. Indeed, in Melville’s words, we see the “key to it all” in “rivers and oceans.” Following is that long passage containing those words.

Here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill- side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine- tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee- deep among Tiger- lilies— what is the one charm wanting?— Water there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.