Paul Schullery - The Fishing Life: An Anglers Tales of Wild Rivers and Other Restless Metaphors

The Fishing Life

The Fishing Life

An Anglers Tales of Wild Rivers and Other Restless Metaphors

PAUL SCHULLERY

Illustrations by

Marsha Karle

SKYHORSE PUBLISHING

Books on fly fishing by Paul Schullery

American Fly Fishing: A History

Shuptons Fancy: A Tale of the Fly-Fishing Obsession

Royal Coachman: Adventures in the Flyfishers World

The Rise: Streamside Observations on

Trout, Flies, and Fly Fishing

Cowboy Trout: Western Fly Fishing As If It Matters

If Fish Could Scream: An Anglers Search

for the Future of Fly Fishing

Fly Fishing Secrets of the Ancients: A Celebration of

Five Centuries of Lore and Wisdom

The Fishing Life: An Anglers Tales of Wild Rivers and

Other Restless Metaphors

Copyright 2013 by Paul Schullery

Illustrations copyright 2013 Marsha Karle

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62636-239-0

Printed in the United States of America

For Andrew Herd, angler, historian, and friend

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Fishing for trout, I have often thought, is a little more like life than actual living is.

Odell Shepard

Our tradition is that of the first man who sneaked away to the creek when the tribe did not really need fish.

Roderick Haig-Brown

PREFACE

I M SURE there are plenty of writers whose output slips into such tidy pigeonholes that a book like this is never possible, much less necessary. Mine doesnt. For the past thirty years or so, in a perhaps nave attempt to share the joys of the fishermans world with everyone else, I have scattered stories about fish and fishing in books and articles that were aimed at, well, everyone else.

I have always considered the integration of fish and fishing into my books about natural history, conservation, and other subjects a good and important thing. For one thing, writing across traditional literary boundaries prevents what Arnold Gingrich, the popular angling commentator of the 1960s and 1970s, once called hardening of the categories. But it has also also left me with the disappointed feeling that some of my very favorite fishing stories were missing the people Id most want to read them.

Im delighted, then, that thanks to the courtesy of some publishers and a fortuitous realignment of the copyright stars, this errant material, supplemented and I hope complemented with some items Id been saving up for such an opportunity, has become available for a book of its own. I am just as pleased to discover that these stories, essays, farces, daydreams, screeds, and ruminations so hap pily formed themselves into just the sort of quirky reflection on the fishing life that I hoped they would. Fishing has many moods not just good or bad, but whimsical, reflective, silly, inquisitive, lazy, demanding, and once in a while downright strange. As I hope this book suggests, I wouldnt have it any other way.

The Fishing Life

Introduction

ON MONSTERS

ONCE IN the mid-1950s, when we lived on the south Texas coast, my family went for a picnic along the Nueces River. My mother and sister didnt care much for fishing, but my dad and my older brother did, and I was just interested enough that they usually took me with them, if only to prevent me whining about not getting to go. Steve was about twelve, and I was seven or so.

I dont think we caught anything from the Nueces, but of all the places that we fished when I was small, the Nueces was the one that most formed my idea of what fishing could be not a way to gather food, or have fun, or get exercise, but a sort of quest. The Nueces, unlike everyplace else we fished where really big fish were just an idle dream or something we somehow knew only others would catch, had fish so huge that I was frightened to get close to the water.

We saw evidence of them along the shore. Fireplaces and picnic spots were littered with big, shiny, flat things in my memory, they were the size of Chevy hubcaps that I was stunned to discover were scales. I knew only the dainty little scales of bluegills, and I remember not fully believing that there could be a fish big enough to need more than one or two of these dinner plates per side. I had no idea.

We fished at a deep, wide, still stretch of river. I dont remember fishing at all, though I suppose I did. I do remember watching my dad a big, broad, and very strong man stand along the bank lobbing a hefty chunk of weighted shrimp or some other meat out into the current with his old casting rod. I remember the shore was dusty, and, like everyplace else in Texas, it was hot.

Mostly, though, I remember the gar. Alligator gar have grown to more than 300 pounds, more than nine feet long. I dont suppose the ones we saw were that big, but even allowing for the amplification of memory, they must have been four or five feet. Lets say five. Maybe six. Maybe Id better admit it: I still think they were at least ten. Out in the middle of the river, about as far as my dad could cast, one would roll every now and then, an immense churning turn on the surface, baring its dully glinting back for a moment to the bright Texas sun.

Even at that age, I had seen big fish. From the wharves near Corpus Christi, my dad had pointed out the moving fins of tarpon and sharks, and Id seen big hammerheads taken from the pier at Padre Island. But that was the ocean, where, given enough horizon, nothing looks too big. In the Nueces at that place, at that age, and at that distance the gar was more monster than fish. My clearest memory of all is of the moment following the fishs roll, when my dad would put his considerable muscle into a cast aimed right at the still-swirling spot where the fish had just surfaced. I was scared beyond words that he would hook the fish and it would pull him in.

Here was fishing with proof for the effort. When those big fish rose and pushed against the boundary between their world and mine, they very nearly fulfilled the fishermans dream merely by satisfying the hope we all have that there really is a chance, however faint, of catching a monster because the monsters were really there.

Memory of the gar came back to me many years later along a small stream in the Yellowstone backcountry. I was introducing two friends to some of the techniques of fly fishing, making a few casts to show them where to find fish and what to do about it. I stood at a long, still pool, where the water was a little murky and the far bank was thirty or forty feet away. Counseling my companions to watch closely, I cast a streamer across the stream at a downstream angle, so that the large fly splashed into the shallows along the far shore. I then began a series of quick, jerky retrieves, pulling the line through the guides and the fly back toward me across the deep pool.