Kingwell - Catch and Release

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Table of Contents

PENGUIN BOOKS

CATCH AND RELEASE

Mark Kingwell, a critic and professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, is the author of six books, including The World We Want (2001) and Practical Judgments (2002). He is a contributing editor of Harpers Magazine and has written for The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, and the Utne Reader.

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didnt fight.
He hadnt fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
the frightened gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of the jaw,
and then I saw
that from the lower lip
if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnelsuntil everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

ELIZABETH BISHOP

Acknowledgments

Angling, said Izaak Walton, is a brotherhood. We might better say that it is a community of interest, a chosen family. This book is about families both chosen and natural, and my thanks are owing to many members of the large group of people I am lucky enough to include in both. I have depended on the interest of many of them during the time of writing, sometimes more than they know.

The manuscript grew, in fits and starts, out of an article that was originally published in the Saturday Post section of the National Post (20 July 2002). My thanks to Mark Stevenson and Dianna Symonds for the generous space and excellent editing of the initial piece, and to Sara Borins for suggesting I expand it in this form. Some parts of the book also first appeared in Queens Quarterly (Spring 2002; Fall 2002) and Purple (Spring 2001; Spring 2002). My thanks to Boris Castel and Dike Blair for their support. A few sections were also delivered as public talks, and I thank audiences at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Metro Toronto Reference Library, the Arts & Letters Club of Toronto, Humber College, Horizons of Friendship in Kingston, and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver for warm receptions.

At Penguin Canada, Cynthia Good displayed her usual infectious enthusiasm for what will, sadly, be my last book for her; and Diane Turbide did the same for what is, happily, my first with her. My agent, Emma Parry, is all a man could wish for in a literary friend and advocate, not to mention a charming companion for evenings spent in longstanding Manhattan drinking establishments. Angie Blake, Todd Ducharme, Julia Joern, Ceri Marsh, and Leanne Shapton offered encouragement, insight, gear, and good company. Julian Siggers gave me access to his enviable library of fishing books and expert counsel on dry-fly tactics. John Broere was an incomparable guide and patient teacher, tolerant of mistakes and generous with praise.

Some readers will be interested to know that Julian has a picture of a four-pound brown trout he caught on the Grand River in Ontario using a Tupps Indispensable dry fly. I did not witness this feat and so cannot verify it directly, but I can report without qualification that it is a very impressive photo. And so, when I caught a fish on the same river, not quite as big but my first brown trout and first river fish, Julian was good enough to take the picture that graces the inside flap of this book. He and John; who got me there, somehow conspire to make me look like a much more competent angler than I really am.

Sincere thanks go to Paul Slovak, my editor at Penguin U.S., whose interest in this book allowed him to overlook the fact that I promised him an entirely different one. Robert Hickey and Helen Reeves at Penguin Canada secured permissions and generally made my life easier. Allyson Latta offered judicious copy editing. My University of Toronto colleagues Douglas Hutchinson and Graeme Nicholson told me some old and not particularly funny philosophy jokes that nevertheless proved useful. Molly Montgomery reminded me to look back, linger, and listen for Elizabeth Bishop as well as John Donnejust one of the many things I have come to cherish about her.

Finally, without my brothers Sean and Steve Kingwell, my father Gerry Kingwell, and the inimitable Fred Hawkshaw, companions of the original and now annual Weekends, there would be no book, and I would probably still think fishing was stupid. I had thought to dedicate this work to them. But somehow I feel that would give them an inflated sense of their own merit, maybe even lead them to think they can fish. Instead I will dedicate it to the woman who, in her different ways, loves us all: my mother.

Well, maybe not Fred.

This Book Is Not About Fishing

Angling may be said to be so like mathematics,
that it can never be fully learnt.

Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler

The first and most important thing you need to know: this is not a book about fishing.

Yes, its true that there are some stories about fishing, also some fishing lore, in what follows. Its also true that I have shown some modest talent for fishing, following a somewhat rocky initiation into the sport. But I would be the last person to claim I know what Im doing.

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