The freedom to swim

The morning was damp and misty. October, 1988. A friend and I had driven through dawn to a place in northeastern Pennsylvania with a stream, a floor of matted leaves, and a soft morning of muted color. We stood on a small wooden bridge that arced over murmuring water.

“There are three things you need to know about fish,” C whispered. He had been quiet as we had walked from the car to the bridge. I was wearing some oversized waders bought the evening before at a Philadelphia Army-Navy store. C was wearing some gear that looked as if he wore it casually around his apartment.

He softly took a breath. “They like to eat, they like to sleep, and they don’t like to expend a lot of energy doin’ the first two.” My friend exhaled, as if he had reverently unburdened himself of a fundamental philosophy that had been solemnly passed down to him from prior generations. He gazed at the gently swirling stream. “Good luck,” he said. Then he moved off without a sound and, it seemed, without his shadow.

I eventually trudged off as well – just not where C had gone. My previous fishing experience had been in a dirty creek that arose from or drained to (it wasn’t clear to me as a boy) the rivers running around and past Philadelphia. As kids, we caught something we called sunnies, tiny fish that would rise to the surface if you dangled some corn on a hook into the water. A rod and reel were not necessary. Just some fishing line, a hook on the end of the line, and a single piece of corn on the hook. We could flip the sunnies onto the bank just when they opened their mouths to take the corn. We tried to do it without the fish getting the hook caught in its mouth.

This was different. This was careful, even meditative. This was totally foreign.

In his defense, C probably offered to teach me how to create an arc with the line and fly on the rod he had loaned me for the day. He may have even given me a brief lesson on land at some point or perhaps described the technique of fly fishing during our morning drive. I don’t recall exactly what I understood about fly fishing and it honestly doesn’t matter: I wasn’t there to catch any fish. Because when I saw C move like a cat through the marshy weeds, creeping almost motionless to the stream’s bank and then into the shallow water in one of its bends, I realized that I was out of my depth. So I turned and shuffled downstream, in the other direction, letting C have a chance to interact with any gilled life forms before they were so unfortunate to encounter me. I breathed in the morning air, I valiantly kept myself from tripping over the oversized waders (they were the last pair on the shelf at the Army-Navy store and were two sizes too big), and I slid into some water where I could see the stream bottom.

And I did my own fly fishin’.

A good fly fisherman can move a fly across and through a current of air that mimics an insect being buffeted by wind and landing ‘just so’ on a quiet circle of water. It is a thing of beauty. The fisherman is one with rod, line, and fly. A fish doesn’t have a chance.

A creek fisherman like myself should not try to emulate such majesty, especially on a morning as the one we were enjoying. A creek fisherman should not demean the beauty of the day and its moments by getting fly and line tangled in weeds, trees, and his own clothing. He should – and I did – find himself a spot of peace and wonder in a stream, coil up some line in one hand, and gently let the line drift from a spot not too far near his side to a place as far away as the coiled line wants and is able to go. A creek fisherman should not care that the fish aren’t fooled. He should not try to catch anything that he knows nothing about.

And I didn’t. The fish and I kept to ourselves. At least, that is, until I had watched the light change through a range of tone and hue. And also until I had pensively consumed a sandwich, beverage, and snack, and had listened through a small headset to some favorite guitar music on my recently purchased Walkman.

I caught nothing, cared about nothing, until I was as still and yet as fluid as the life forms that surrounded me.

The tug on my line was subtle; it took a few minutes for me to realize that it wasn’t the water or a rock or my imagination that was pulling at the rod that I forgot was connected to the fly somewhere downstream. It was a trout. When I reeled the fellow in, walking toward him as I went, I saw that the fish wasn’t caught on the fly and hook but was instead wrapped up inside a few circles of the line. He wasn’t hooked. He was lassoed. And his mouth was gulping at the fly just out of its reach.

The moment was serene and surreal. It was also sacred, in an unexpected way. The sun, which had crept high in the sky, bounced its autumnal wisdom across the backs of the rocks in the gurgling rapid, the ripples of the undulating water, and the scales of my lassoed fish. Carefully, I unwound the young being from its entrapment. I almost wanted to send him away with the fly he couldn’t get, as a souvenir, as evidence of the story he might later tell his own kind. I also sort of wanted to show C that, hey look!, somehow I had caught a fish. But I knew that wasn’t right, and it wasn’t correct.

The fish had caught me.

The startled trout and I stared at each for a moment that now feels more like three decades. Both of us felt a bit foolish. Neither of us winked. Then I opened my hands and we went our separate ways.

I never told C that I learned another thing that morning about what fish like. Yes, they like to eat and sleep, and yes, they don’t want to expend a lot of energy when eating and sleeping. But C, I know now that fish also like to do something else, a fourth thing that, like the first three, isn’t so different from us and the rest of human kind. They like the freedom to keep swimming.

It is magical how life catches and releases us.