Jake MacDonald - Casting Quiet Waters: Reflections on Life and Fishing

Introduction and this collection copyright 2014 by Jake MacDonald

Individual essays copyright 2014 by David Carpenter, Wayne Curtis, Ian Frazier, Charles Gaines, Marni Jackson, Kenneth Kidd, Jake MacDonald, Thomas McGuane, Ian Pearson, Annie Proulx, David Adams Richards, and Charles Wilkins

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ISBN 978-1-77164-024-4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-77164-025-1 (epub)

Editing by Stephanie Fysh
Cover design by Jessica Sullivan and Nayeli Jimenez
Text design by Nayeli Jimenez
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We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

FISHING IS AN age-old subject. The ancient Egyptians fished with hook and line in the Nile, the Romans used feathered flies to catch trout in hillside streams, and the fish story has been around almost as long as humanity itself.

The first book about fishing was published more than five centuries ago by an English nun named Dame Juliana Berners. Her Treatysse of Fyshynge wyth an Angle (1488) gives advice on everything from rod construction to streamside behavior. And her advice on many of those subjects is still good today: Looke that ye shadowe not the water, for that wyll fraye the fyshe. And if a fysshe be a frayde: he wyll not byte long after.

Over the years, uncountable thousands of fishing books have been published, ranging from how-to manuals and travel guides to memoirs and novels, so its of little help to introduce this collection as a fishing book. The concept arose in much the same way as one might decide to throw a dinner partylets invite some of the most respected writers at work in their fields to contribute a fishing story. As youll see, most of the authors decided to use the subject of fishing as an opportunity to pursue larger existential questions. This too continues the tradition that Dame Juliana established five centuries ago. Like her obscure treatise, this collection turned out to be as much about life as fishing.

Despite the comic reputation of the fish story and the common perception of anglers (and fiction writers) as helpless liars, readers may notice that very few of these stories are about catching the big one. Its a curious fact that anglers (and writers) seem little interested in stories of success. When anglers (or writers) are gifted by exceptional good luck, they usually keep it quiet, unless asked. They might tentatively offer to show a photograph or hang the mounted trophy in some cubbyhole corner of the house where it will gather dust and not get looked at. This has less to do with modesty than with the essential values of the sport: fishing is not about winningits about striving. If Hemingways Santiago hadnt persevered for eighty-four days without catching a fish, there wouldnt be a story, and we wouldnt have such compassion for him and for the great marlin that must die so Santiago can live. (At least he doesnt have to kill the moon.) Yet as every angler knows, fishing is a sport in which the odds ride with the house. And like Leonard Cohens gambler, every angler is looking for a card that is so high and wild hell never need to deal another. Of course, the perfect card will never show up. Every romance will end, and every hero will die. But the angler continues arcing his line out across the water, knowing that the reward is not in the catching but in the fishing.

Writers, like anglers, are forever trying to capture the ineffable, so the fish story comes naturally. The process of trolling the subconscious with sentence and paragraph is not so different from towing a lure through the unknown world beneath the surface of a river or lake. Both angler and writer toss lines, chase shadows, and spend countless hours wondering what might happen if they tried a different trick. Of course, one shouldnt burden the process with so much philosophical import that it becomes just another chore. The late, great fishing author Roderick Haig-Brown, of Campbell River, British Columbia, was at various times in his life a logger, a soldier, a Royal Canadian Mountie, a university chancellor, and a magistrateall serious and weighty professionsbut he wasnt a fan of the solemnity and hot air that inflates so many fishing books, and when he was asked once why he had devoted so much of his life to fly-fishing, he said, Ive thought about that quite a bit, and Ive decided that it was because I enjoyed it.

In a wilderness region of British Columbia there is now a mountain named after him; it serves as an enduring tribute to his two favorite pastimes, fishing and writing. Dame Juliana, being a lady of the cloth, took a slightly more religious view of the sport. But if by some trick of time and fiction she ever emerged from the misty forests alongside the Campbell River and strolled, rod in hand, with the hawk-nosed, pipe-smoking old magistrate to partake of a morning of salmon fishing, Im sure Haig-Brown would smile and nod his assent to her cautionary words on the real purpose of both literature and fishing: Ye shal not use this crafty sporte for the encreasing and sparing of your mony, but pryncypally for your solace, and the helth of your body, and specially of your soule.

JAKE MACDONALD

This has been adapted and expanded from a story that originally appeared in Saturday Night magazine

FIFTY MILES FROM Florida, lying athwart the Gulf Stream, Bimini has always lived off the bounty of passing ships. Long before the big yachts arrived, the island was a Prohibition rumrunning base, and in the nineteenth century, the islanders salvaged what they could from the frequent shipwrecks on the reefs off the north shore. The pirate Blackbeard briefly made it his base in the eighteenth century. Now, golfers and gamblers head for Nassau, but the big-game fishermen all go to Bimini, the Atlantic capital of marlin fishing.

In the early thirties, Ernest Hemingway took a fancy to the islanda cluster of three, really, but North Bimini, seven miles long and two blocks wide, is where most people live. I liked it as well as any other place Ive spent time in, he wrote. Except for the sleek private yachts that come over from Miami, it might be situated at the end of the world. There is, of course, an End of the World saloon on Bimini, with blender drinks, a beach-sand floor, and a backgammon table that has dice so worn and faded only the locals can read them. Parts of Islands in the Stream were written here, where Hemingway stayed in room number one at the Compleat Angler, a combination inn, saloon, and library well marinated in time and dreams. The walls are teak and the tables are old rum kegs. Its also the site of a modest Hemingway shrine, with photographs of the writer standing on the dock beside a strung-up tuna slightly taller than him. He has a drink in one hand and his arm is wrapped around the fish like a proud bridegroom on his wedding day.

Hem was not a beloved figure on the island. (Hanging beside the trophy photo are the words to a local calypso song about the writer, entitled Big Fat Slob.) When he got drunk, which was fairly often, he used to wander down late at night to Browns marina in his bathrobe and try to machine-gun the sharks that swam in close to shore. He seemed to like shooting fish almost as much as catching them; on his first trip from Cuba to Bimini, he was firing at fish from the boat when he accidentally shot himself in the foot and had to turn back to the mainland for medical attention. Theres an account of one Bimini fishing trip when he did catch a 514-pound tunanot all that big, but remarkably intact (sharks often eat the catch before the boat gets back to shore). Hemingway celebrated, then went down to the weigh scales where the eleven-foot tuna was strung up and began to punch it like a punching bag.