There is nothing more boring than other people’s dreams, so I try to forget most of my own. Life’s waking nightmares are vivid enough. But I’m dogged by one I had the other night. I was standing in a favorite fishing hole up to my waist, attempting to release a largemouth bass I’d just caught. Slow on the trigger, I’d missed the lip-hook. So my fly had lodged deep down his gullet. As I struggled to work it free with hemostats, trying not to injure the fish, hands grew out of his pectoral fins, gripping my wrists, as he patiently awaited his fate.
I woke up with my heart pounding out some thumping, jungle arrhythmia. What if fish had hands? Could I spend all this time doing what I love to do most, catching-and-releasing them? Thank God they don’t. A good break for me, a bad break for the fish. Anatomy is destiny.
I’ve written about catch-and-release fishing in these pages before, almost exactly 10 years ago. Since then, I’ve caught 13,005 more fish on a fly rod and have let them all go. I know the precise number, because I’ve counted and recorded each one. They say fishing is cheaper than therapy, which my wife suspects I’m in need of. Though after tallying up the tabs for rods, waders, boots, flies, gas, and convenience-store junk-food on my runs, I’m not so sure. But it’s given me a lot of time to think about this seemingly pointless blood pageant I participate in, and why. With another decade gone, I haven’t come up with anything better than a weak paraphrase of Thoreau: Some men count fish all their lives without knowing what it is they’re counting.
Non-fishing friends often look askance at you when you tell them how many fish you catch without eating a one. “Oh, you’re just a sadist, then,” they say. They call me “fish molester,” “fish torturer,” and worse, as though my fly rod and I amount to some piscatorial Abu Ghraib. I tell them I like to eat fish just fine on occasion. But Mrs. Paul has already done the dirty work for me. Why commit felonies when misdemeanors bring you more pleasure?
I’m free to just fish. I don’t have to kill them, clean them, cook them, or take their PCB loads into my bloodstream. I can just hold something beautiful and wild for a second, before turning it loose to be fruitful and multiply. Maybe I will even catch its children and grandchildren down the line, before evolutionary calculus kicks in, and it finally dawns on the progeny that a woolly bugger isn’t actual food. The fish, in the bargain, gets a good human tale to tell to his fish kin, scaring the bejesus out of them. Maybe fish like to be scared a little, the same way people do. Fear reminds us that we’re still alive.
The science is divided on whether fish feel pain. But from my hands-on experience, I safely assume they don’t relish being caught. While I enjoy communing with them, they seem like they’d be perfectly willing to go it alone. But even if fish had the neocortex and microcircuitry to guarantee they feel pain, it’s nothing like the pain I feel when I can’t catch them in deepest winter or when life presses in.
I don’t know what it says about me that I always feel closest to God when I’m giving His majestic creation a lip-piercing. But the book of Hebrews states plainly that without bloodshed, there is no redemption. Jesus himself was a bit of a catch-and-release story. The Romans thought they had Him good and dead; then three days later, the tomb let Him go. Not for nothing were at least five of Christ’s disciples fishermen, including his two favorites (Peter and John). So I rest confident that He’d forgive this minor blasphemy.
As for counting and logging all my escapees, I can’t say what it amounts to. Except that each of those marks on a page represents a fleeting window of time. One in which I was looking neither forward nor back—I was just looking. It’s my favorite kind of time, since it’s the time we have the least of. String enough of those moments together, and a good fishing moment becomes a good fishing life, irrefutable evidence of what Roderick Haig-Brown called “living a life, instead of enduring it.”
I’m not pretending that fish can save our souls. But on some days, they come close enough.
