“Man with Fish” by Rebecca Swanberg
“Rivers are roads which move, and
which carry us whither we desire to go.”
— Pascal
We’d been driving in silence for some time. Nothing was wrong—nothing we could point to. It was early autumn. The larch trees had begun to yellow, and there was new snow in the mountains. We drove with the top down and the heat on high. The cold air and artificial heat struggled for power—one moment hot, the next cold.
We were on one of our Sunday drives. There was no destination. We’d gone south on 93, out of Missoula, down the spine between the Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains. As usual, Max drove and I sat passenger.
He was in a mood, as he often was. Too much Reddit and ragebait, the news was too bleak, the job too jobby. It was an existential grumpiness. He drove to escape it. I would have liked to stay home and take up some unperceived space in our one-bedroom apartment, but I joined him for the drive. If he had to escape, I wasn’t going to be left behind.
I was in charge of music, and the music I chose had the big job of speaking for us. I played a band I knew he liked—Counting Crows. One of his favorites. It was worth my suffering if the music cheered him up. His lips began to move along to the lyrics. Do you see yourself in me? We’re such crazy babies, little monkey. I let my hand rest open near the console . . . God, we’re so fucked up, you and me . . . but he didn’t take it in his own, as he sometimes would.
Just ahead there was a sign denoting river access. He asked if I wanted to check it out, and I agreed. The access road was steep, unpaved, and knuckled with rocks and roots. We parked the car and walked to the riverbank.
By now, the sun was a narrow line of light on the river’s face. Clouds gathered heavily above us. The bright summer days were over. It was autumn, and soon it’d be winter. In the winter everything would feel forever long and gray. We’d been together for less than a year, so each season was our first. Did that also mean the summer of our romance was over? That we were entering the long, gray winter of disenchantment? I had the sense that the seasons had to be gotten through. That it proved something to have fought to the next one. Already, we’d put so much fight into our relationship, both of us resisting his suspicion that he “might not be cut out for domestic life,” that he “couldn’t hack it.” The thought that he was losing interest in our life and might soon go in search of another exhausted me—perhaps even more than the relationship itself.
No. We would trudge on. Together in his bug-eyed ’91 Miata convertible, our hair (equally long, his a little more lush) twisting in the Montana valley wind, soundtracked by Counting Crows, pointed away from whatever it was that chased him. I was determined. If we stayed together, at least then we wouldn’t have to trudge alone.
We removed our boots and socks, and rolled up our pant legs. I followed him in. The water came from a glacier, and was starting its return to ice. It closed tight around my skin. I felt my bones. I felt my blood. Then I felt nothing.
He ran ahead, balancing on river rocks and running across logs without looking back. Even from a distance, I could tell his mood was lifting. He moved loosely and with confidence as the space between us widened. I took a step, and a rock turned underfoot. I always stepped on the wrong rocks. I caught myself, stabilized, and pulled in a sharp breath.
“How can you go that fast,” I yelled, laughing. I was scared. “It’s so fucking cold.”
He turned back to look at me, his face full of boyish glee. He cracked a huge big-kid grin, and then theatrically adjusted his expression to one of pity and adoration. He shoved his lower lip into a pout.
“Oh, sweetie,”—when he called me sweetie, it was always with the same sweet voice. Oversweet, a voice we used alone together—“Is it too cold?”
“Kinda,” I said. Why was I also speaking in the sweetie voice?
It was too cold, not kinda too cold. But I didn’t want to ruin the moment, neither his nor ours. Cautiously, I continued. He watched me take a few steps, and then, satisfied that I’d be fine, he ran on.
“I grew up on the water, baby,” he yelled over his shoulder. “I’m a river man.”
I tried to find his source of vigor. Behind him the clouds broke down and fell back into the sunset. Against that distant light, he spread his arms for balance and ran across a fallen tree. I watched his silhouette and knew I would see this image when I thought of him, sometime in the future: a shadow balanced against the sunset. I was breathless but I fought the current, feeling the river close in around me. Keep up, keep up. This felt important, my ability to keep up. The sun slid down. I knew that if I stopped paying attention for even a moment, I would trip.
When I reached him, his face was full of abundance and gratitude. I’d been able to keep up, and this meant something, it was important. He kissed me.
I was determined. If we stayed together, at least then we wouldn’t have to trudge alone.
When I moved to Missoula, I was told I had to learn how to fly fish. There was “good water” five minutes in any direction. But I had little interest in the sport. It looked a lot like standing around. There were other things to do, things I already loved to do. Rocks to climb in Kootenai Canyon and Lolo Pass, horses to ride across the hills of Pattee Canyon, mountains to hike in the Rattlesnake Wilderness. Plus also a job—the reason I’d moved out there—working on a graduate degree and teaching undergrads. It was the same reason Max had moved there, and it was in that context that we met, became friends, and then slowly, intensely, fell in love.
Max was a fly fisher. In the beginning, when we could barely spend a moment apart, the necessary separation that fishing provided was romantic. He fished, I did what I wanted to do, and then we found one another—tired, windswept, desperate for each other.
But now we were starting to run out of ways to spend time together. I didn’t want to fly fish. But I loved him, and he loved to fly fish. So I decided to learn. I wanted to figure out why he loved it, what he loved about it. Or perhaps I wanted to associate myself with this thing he loved, in order to be closer to him—closer to his love. In order to be proximal to the object of his love.
As soon as I told him that I wanted to learn, I knew he’d been waiting for me to ask.
“You don’t really want to come fishing with me,” he said.
“I do,” I insisted. “You’ve never asked.”
He looked at me seriously, much more seriously than when I’d agreed to move in with him a few months prior, or when we’d nearly taken the highway exit for a Las Vegas chapel. His face—broad, strong-jawed and suntanned—was grave. He took a deep breath, and looked me in the eyes.
“Will you go fishing with me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Everything took on a new shine as my “yes” landed between us. He grinned, almost absurdly joyful. His cheeks rippled from the hugeness of his smile, and his blue eyes filled with childlike delight.
His Miata was in the shop, but he didn’t want to put off our first day of fishing. There was a sense of urgency. Maybe he feared I’d change my mind. That night, he rented a truck for next-day pickup and purchased my fishing license online. He printed the license and carefully cut it out, bringing the paper very close to his face while he did. His eyes went a little crossed. When Max was invested, he performed every action with intense focus. He slipped my license into his wallet, behind his own. We went to bed early and slept perfectly. All night we held one another, never too hot or too cold.
The next morning, we woke in the dark. He was tender and careful with me, like the morning after a fight. I opened the front door to feel the air. It was cold. Streetlamps shone in our alley, and beyond the mountains, the first flat blue light stained the sky. The grass was tipped in thin frost. I ducked back into our house and told him it was cold. A little whine of hope started up in the back of my head: Maybe we could stay home.
“Sweetie,” he said in his sweetie voice, wrapping me in an embrace, “I won’t let you get cold.”
He chose our outfits. A technical fleece for me, and for him, a red hoodie and a yellow baseball cap. Because his chest waders were leaky and I had none, both of us wore duck pants. His river shoes were old tight-laced Stan Smiths that smelled like hell from getting wet, drying out, and getting wet again. I had Chacos.
He called us a cab and paid for the rental. He was taking care of everything, like a real first date. He’d decided to take me to his favorite place out past Lolo on the Bitterroot. I’d been expecting a long drive, but we arrived in just over half an hour. This unnerved me. Often he was gone fishing for full days, and whenever he was, he felt a great distance away. Now I understood that sometimes he was only a half hour from home.
We made it to the riverbank by half past nine. The sky was mottled blue and white. I didn’t carry anything except my backpack with our sandwiches, sunscreen, and water bottles. He had the fishing rod and the net, which was slung over his back. Without hesitation, he stepped into the water and walked until it was up to his knees. Then he stopped and turned toward me, smiling, and shouted over the current, “Come on in, baby! Water’s nice!”
The river was a shock when I first entered, and it felt wrong to let my pants soak up the water and gain weight. They tractioned down on my hips. I waded to him, the bones in my feet groaning in the cold. He gave me a huge, perfect kiss.
“Let’s keep going a little bit. There’s a fork up here where I’ve had some luck.”
We walked together upstream. The river water was dark green and glossy toward the central channel, where it was deep, and a translucent yellow toward the shallow edges. Glossy green trees reflected onto the glossy green river, and their reflected spines shimmered in the current. The wetness traveled up the fabric of my pants and suctioned against my legs. Ahead of us was a funnel of blue sky, wedged between the treed hills.
After 15 minutes, we stopped at the fork in the river.
“We’re gunna stand here,” he motioned to the crotch between one leg of water and the other. “And cast where the waters meet.”
He stared into his little plastic fly box, trying to decide what fly to start with.
“Look around, baby,” he said. “What do you see?”
What did I see? I saw everything: I saw a bridge, I saw light on every dimple in the water’s face, I saw no people except the person I loved. I stared at him, while he peered up into the sky, full of pinlike insects. They darted around, sometimes landing in tiny rippled pools on the river. He motioned for me to lean closer.
“That’s our guy,” he whispered, pointing to a speck of wings on the water. “The trout are coming up like crazy for him. See?”
Now that he said it, I saw the occasional burps that disturbed the still line of water. He thumbed through his box and pinched at a tiny fly. Holding it up to the light, he showed it to me.
“What do you think?”
“Seems probable,” I said.
He got to work securing the fly. I watched as he wet it in his mouth and strung it, his hands deceptively nimble. How did he do it, with big hands like his? He worked the line through a loop of wire, pulling gingerly, staring very closely at his task, eyes crossing. The only way to say it was that he tied the fly with love. He tied it with care and devotion. Using a tool like a nail clipper, he clipped off the excess tail.
Once he got the fly threaded, he positioned his body so that he was shadowless. You had to be sure that no movement you made above was visible below, he told me. He asked if I wanted to give it the first go, but I declined. I wanted to watch him fish, I said, for research purposes.
“Okay, baby,” he said. “Then come stand over here.”
He motioned to his left side.
“Always stand on my left so you don’t get a hook to the head on my back cast.”
He began, first slowly and then with speed, letting out a little line. Then he pulled the line up and danced it back and forth, drawing loops against the sky. He followed the motion forward, as if he were hesitant to give it away. The fly landed gently in the water. It floated down the current. We were still, watching it float. I could see that he made fine adjustments in order to reduce his impact on the fly’s natural movement, or to give it some subtle signs of animation. When he ran out of line, he whipped the fly out of the water. The nylon caught light as he flung it back, and water drew off the line and skipped in the white sun. Then he started over. He pulled the line, slapped it down, and watched it glide like a snake in the water. He went a few more times and caught nothing. Then it was my turn.
I tried to follow the fly, but all I could see were sparkles of light. I began to shiver.
“Hold it like this,” he said, taking my hand in his and wrapping it around the handle. I resisted making a quip about holding his rod. He was very serious. He loosened my forefinger from the grip and placed that, like the barrel of a gun, down the rod. Then he planted my thumb on top of the handle. “Like you’re pointing your thumb right where you want the fly to land.”
He took the rod and he stood behind me.
He stayed where he was, behind me, with his hands on my hands on the rod, and showed me how to follow the trail of a fish.
“Go along with the current,” he said, “like you’re just a little fly who landed on the water . . . you’re being carried along by the current, yes, good . . . and you can make a little flick now and then because you’re a bug and you’re alive. Now start to let out just a little line, yes, gently, not too much . . . .”
I leaned forward, trying to follow all the way to the end of my range, as he’d done. With his help, I pulled the line down with my nondominant hand, ripping the end out of the water. The motion looked visceral, medical, like a burst stitch.
“Don’t just give it up, honey, you have to keep a handle on its backward pull, right, and just give and take the line, yes, that’s it baby,” he said, guiding my hand and controlling the motion. I had little or no role in our performance—it was almost as if he were talking to himself.
After he was satisfied enough with my form, he let me do it on my own. I was in a pleasant mood. I’d stopped feeling the cold and was enjoying the novelty of standing in a river. But after about four rounds, as the fly traveled down the seam once more, he gasped, “That’s a trout! Set the hook, baby! Get him!”
“How?” I yelled, frantic.
An intense wash of dread came over me. There was something out there, something on my hook. Maybe it would get away. Would he be disappointed if it did? So I should try to get it, though I didn’t really want it? Then he was behind me again, hands on my hands, and he jerked the rod up deftly. There was tension on the line. I looked back at him for reassurance, but he was staring straight ahead. His face was jubilant and focused. We were fighting, I realized. We were engaged in a very subtle war.
“Hold it up, like this, yes, don’t let go,” he said. We stayed there. He eased the pressure toward us. Removing one hand from mine and putting it on the crank, he said, “Now, can you let go with your left hand and start to reel with me?”
We reeled. In a moment the pressure lightened dramatically. Then I saw the trout. She didn’t seem to be resisting, at least not anymore. Max reached in and snatched her from the water with bare hands. What a beauty, he said, look at this, have you ever, you caught this, baby, look at this beautiful fish you caught. He told me to get the net off his back and I did. He gently lowered the fish into the net and then lowered the whole bundle into the water so the trout could recline there as we observed her.
Beneath her jaw was a deep red print of color. Her eyes were hollow black, with a ring of white around them as if they were glowing. She was freckled all over, and her freckles were black with white edges, like her eyes. The green fishing line pulled at her mouth. Max reached into the net and removed the hook. Then he lifted her.
Beads of water stood on his hands and cascaded off her shimmering flanks. He held her body knowingly, firmly, but with respect.
“Get a photo!”
I dried my hands and took a picture. In it, he didn’t smile, but stared with intensity at the fish. Then he hurriedly lowered her back into the net and gave her an intermission in the water. Now it was my turn to get a picture with our catch.
I bent, grasped her, and straightened. We had only a moment of stillness before she sensed my lack of control and slipped wetly from my palms. I laughed, and then heard the violent slap of her body on the water and flinched. She flashed away. I could see Max was disappointed. We’ll work on a gentle release, he said, don’t worry. He showed me my photographs. The first was as expected, my hands clasped around the trout’s body. In the second, there was air where the trout had been, a ghost of her belly between my hands, and she was mid-flight, her tail flexed in effort.
“You caught that,” he said. He prodded me lovingly in the chest. “You caught that, sweetie.”
But he’d caught it. Actually, I wanted to make a point of that—I hadn’t caught the fish, it wasn’t me, it was him. It was his eye that saw the fly go down, his hand on the rod, ripping us up to set the hook. Though I knew he was bestowing an honor when he insisted that I’d caught this fish, it felt, as he said it, like an accusation.
The first fish is terrifying because if there isn’t another, it’s the only one you got and now it’s gone. It was only after his second fish that he began to smile. And the second fish established the possibility of a third; the third a longing for a fourth. It went on like that for hours. My bones ached and my stomach growled. I remembered our sandwiches and wondered when he’d think of food. I fantasized about a shower, dry clothes, the warmth of our bed. When it was my turn to fish, I scanned the surface of the water. I tried to follow the fly, but all I could see were sparkles of light. I began to shiver. He noticed and he pressed a thumb against my lips, which he said were blue. He gave me his sweatshirt. The clouds were bearing down on the sun, and only the most distant reach of river was lit, shining, beaconlike. I longed for that distant reach. Every step I took was a fight.
“Honey,” I said, shyly, “can we go soon?”
He looked at me, surprised.
“Yes! Of course we can go, we can leave whenever you want,” he said. Then he thought a moment. “There’s just one more hole I want you to see.”
We walked 10 minutes and stopped at the bottom of a cliff. He examined the sky and the surface of the water, and chose a new fly to tie on. On his first cast, he caught a trout. I thanked the trout for her expedience, and began to look for an easy exit from the water. He released her, whispering see you later as he let her go.
Then he stood, dropped the fly into the water again, and began to arch the line back for another cast.
So, I thought. It would never end. His hunt would keep going, with or without me.
The sky was all gray now, crinkling like the current, and he was a small man out in a big river. I noticed more yellow larches than I’d seen at first.
“I’m getting out,” I said. “You don’t have to, I can wait in the truck.”
He looked back at me and pouted. “Oh, sweetie,” he said, in his sweetie voice. “I’m done, I promise.”
He told me to take the scree path up to the bridge, and we could follow the road back to the parking lot. I waded out of the water alone. He was right behind me, he said.
Scrambling up the scree was humiliating. Each step I took, the rocks gave beneath me. I moved slowly and low to the ground. My hands and knees, wet from the river, were now crusted in dirt. At the top of the hill, I stepped onto the bridge and walked to the middle. I was wet, cold, and I stood on a beautiful arching bridge that overlooked the Bitterroot. I watched him down below. He was right there, but felt far away. The mountains were black now, the river a reflective black, and the river rocks whitely piled in a path to me while the river blackly flowed away. As the dark descended, his casting became desperate. He fought time as I waited for him up above. I knew he could feel me watching.
The green neon line rears back like a whip. Then it flicks forward, floats on the air, and lands imperceptibly on the river’s face. He watches the invisible lure, following its invisible path. I watch what he watches, I try to see. A great rock wall takes up all the sunlight. There’s a log down at the edge of the water. We stare at its black belly. Now the invisible thing travels through the log’s shadow. In that blackness, we’ll have our best chance. I catch sight of the fly, get cocky, and then lose it again. He never loses it. He sees it the whole time, while I strain my eyes, scanning the surface of the water. I take a step forward. Silt swirls around my wadered legs, disturbing our camouflage. He glances over at me, and I notice the frustration on his face before he can control it. We wait for the silt to settle. He casts again.
The winter was long, and the Clark Fork turned into a solid serpent of ice. Without rivers to move him, Max took to the highways. He drove for hours in any direction. The destination didn’t matter. It was the movement he sought. Our home was too small, the walls were too solid. He felt trapped. He was beginning to get the old itch, he told me. The need to move. He wanted to go back east. No big deal, I said, we’d go back east. But he wasn’t sure he could be depended on. He was afraid to make any promises. What if he couldn’t find a job? What if he didn’t want to find one? We’d both go east, but maybe it’d be better if I made my plans without him, he said. We’d stay together, of course, but things would be better if the pressure was off.
I wasn’t sure. I had a feeling that the pressure was the only constant we had left.
I watched him work, his hands bloodied, the fish’s silk pink insides exposed.
One night my mom texted me. She said there were predictions that the Northern Lights might be visible from Montana. I told Max, and he brightened. This gave us a purpose. We would find the Northern Lights, it was settled. We would find them, and when we did, they would tell us something.
We drove for hours, farmland on both sides of the road. Because he was driving, my job was finding the Northern Lights for us. If I could find them, they might say the things I knew he’d like me to say without having to say them.
I looked for greens, pinks, yellows. I squinted in determination, sometimes gasped, is that it? Over there . . . ? But the sky was black.
After a couple hours, we abandoned our mission and began to head back to town. As the modest skyline of Missoula came into view, he put his hand on mine.
“Do you want to tell your mom we found the Northern Lights?” he asked.
On his birthday we had a fight about our future and then went fishing. I didn’t want to fish, but I didn’t want him to be alone to think about our fight. If he thought of the fight alone, then he thought of the future alone.
Because it was a special day, we drove to a faraway spot. It was April. The air was cold, and I knew the water would be colder. In the nudity of early spring, the place seemed tangled and devoid of color. Leafless trees reached with witchy knuckled fingers.
I’d never been here before. He led me through impossible brambles and trailless woods. We bushwhacked, anemic branches snapping against us, until we reached the riverbank. Logs had fallen in a grid over the water. We had to cross them. Max ran without trouble, but I couldn’t stop imagining slipping off the side, a leg going down the crevasse. When Max wasn’t looking, I got on my hands and knees and inched my way across.
And then we were in the river. The speed and slowness of it, the absolute solitude of it. The only sounds were distant April birds, the chime of water turning stones. The glacial snow was melting, so the river was high and opaque. We’d made it through the winter. This was our spring.
We stayed the whole day. For our final location, we waded down to a pebbled beach. The sky was pink black in the setting sun. Then the sun set and it was just black. I sat on the beach and watched him. The moon rose bright white. He fished in its beam.
There was something depressing about the undulations of these days. His sharp hot joy when he caught the largest rainbow he’d ever caught. The cold white of him in the moonlight as he stood there, frozen in the river, imprisoned by the possibility of another catch, casting spells against the sky with his silver line, whipping it back and forth as if cursed.
He was agitated and restless, like a trapped animal. I wondered whether he felt trapped by his fixation, or trapped by my gaze. Sometimes it seemed as though he wanted me to leave him there alone. But why did he invite me? Maybe he wanted me to see this—the shame, the pride, the determination. He was trying to tell me something without having to say it out loud. It was something he knew I needed him to say.
On a gray day in late spring, an existential grumpiness befell me. Max asked me if I wanted to join him fishing, but I didn’t.
I was pleased, a little guiltily, to find his absence left me feeling light. As soon as he drove away, my mood began to shift.
When he returned a few hours later, I was feeling more like myself. The sun had come out, and I’d gone for a hike on the mountain behind our house. Now I sat on the couch, unlacing my boots. He stood in the doorway.
“I have something for you, sweetie,” he said. He didn’t say this in his sweetie voice, but instead, carefully, gently, like a grown-up.
He brought a hand out from behind his back. It was his down jacket, bundled up and tied into a knot. He placed the bundle on the kitchen island and began to untie it. I came and stood beside him. Folding back the panels of the jacket, I saw what was inside. A beautiful, good-sized rainbow trout. I gasped.
“I thought you weren’t allowed to keep them?” I asked.
“Technically you can keep a few. But it’s not open season, so I had to sneak this one out.”
He scrupulously prepared the fish on our wooden cutting board. The deboning was a delicate job, but he was thorough. I watched him work, his hands bloodied, the fish’s silk pink insides exposed. He cooked it on the stovetop in butter and we ate the meat, unseasoned, at our little kitchen table.
When the fishing got bad in the early summer, he packed all his belongings into his Miata and left. The fishing getting bad and him leaving weren’t directly correlated, but they kind of were. There was no longer anything in this life to hold his attention.
After he left I fished one last time, to prove I could. My friend’s boyfriend was a guide, and the three of us went out on a boat. They took me to an area you could only float, a place Max had always wanted to go.
We explored narrow stretches of the river. The water was low and warm. I didn’t catch one fish. I didn’t care. Now that Max wasn’t here, the absence of a catch didn’t mean as much. I’d been “skunked,” my friends told me. It meant that we fished all day and caught nothing. In the shy heat of early summer, we took off our shirts and swam in the river.
I couldn’t see it then, through the shock of being dropped back into the real world, hurt but whole. But later I understood that I’d held on to him because I was afraid to let go—not because I thought I had the real thing. I’d fought so hard. To let go didn’t feel like freedom; it felt like defeat. The idea of starting that fight all over again, with someone new, scared me.
At the end of the day, my friend and I waited in the drift boat while her boyfriend brought the truck to the ramp. We sat together in silence, tipping in a still pool. White river rocks, warm brown water, a blue jay in flight, dark green trees. The river, a taut cable of light, pointed to the distant heap of Bitterroot Mountains. I wasn’t really here to fish, but if I’d never asked to fish, I wouldn’t have this moment. Deception leads us to beautiful places. Why does it look less beautiful when we realize we were deceived to get there?
Watching Max on our days in the river, I learned the art of a respectful release. He reached into the trout’s gaping mouth and freed what he had caught, as if he were her savior rather than her hunter. As he held her facing upstream, she seemed to visibly revive, her fins swishing. She gulped, gathering strength. Then he opened his hold so gently it was as if he never had a hold at all, and she swam away. She slipped like a silk ribbon through the water.
I imagined what she must have felt when she was released. Some kind of relief. The relief experienced after having come to the surface to feed, only to be suddenly pulled by the lip toward an unimaginable fate of waterlessness. She fought, was caught, and was let go. She swam away, still hungry, but now suspicious of her own instincts, wondering, if fish can wonder, What happened back there? Now can I eat, or will it happen again? This had to be a complicated kind of relief—if fish feel relief at all.
Catch-and-release is considered the most sustainable fishing practice, when done properly, and Max released everything he caught. But Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) estimates that almost a quarter of some of the most-fished trout species in Montana die of sublethal injuries after release. Poor release tactics—like losing hold of a trout from several feet out of water, as I did that first time—are the most common cause. These mortality rates vary by species, and are further compounded by injuries, exhaustion, and trauma. A 2005 publication by researchers Aaron Bartholomew and James Bohnsack includes a cumulative mortality model, showing that on top of these factors, “total mortality rises rapidly in response to repeated releases.” Fish die all the time from natural causes, but a cutthroat trout in the Yellowstone River can live over a decade. Cutthroats have a 22 percent chance of dying after being caught once and released; one cutthroat caught 10 times won’t survive. Research shows an individual cutthroat may be caught up to 10 times on the Yellowstone during one fishing season. A decade-long life expectancy could be reduced to 40 days.
What’s the alternative? To stop fly fishing—a sport that has been around since the end of the second century? To catch only what you’ll eat—a rule impossible to enforce in our maximalist culture?
The clear answer is to require all who fish to learn the context, consequences, and best practices of the sport. “Real” anglers are committed to releasing fish as painlessly, and as kindly, as possible.
A couple months after Max and I had split up, I saw him on an app. I was swiping quickly and decisively, barely looking past the first card. I almost swiped left on his profile. But I recognized him and stopped myself in time. It gave me a small thrill to nearly left-swipe my own recent ex. I tapped through his photos. Most of them were several years old—except one of us in his car, with me cropped out—and none showed him fishing. In the two years I’d known him, Max had fished almost every day. He had a camera roll of recent, attractive photos of himself—all with trout. Perhaps he intuited that fish pics aren’t particularly good bait on a dating app.
Sometimes we can’t even admit that it was our willingness to be deceived that contributed to our harm.
Part of the game of dating apps is about presenting what our ideal mate might be attracted to. We know there is deception at play on both sides, but we overlook it. We swipe on people looking for “short term relationships” (what constitutes “short term”?)—then we’re hurt when they ghost us after a night of fun. We swipe on 10/10 influencer babes (perhaps they’re ready for someone nice?)—then we rage when they’re a catfish or a bot. In his essay “Alder Fork,” Aldo Leopold says, “How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook.” Sometimes we can’t even admit that it was our willingness to be deceived that contributed to our harm. Likewise, we refuse the blame when we deceive others, knowing we aren’t what they’re fishing for, but trying anyway, hoping that if we set the hook, they’ll stay. But of course they’ll get free, and they’ll set us free. Or one of us will consume the other.
Leopold writes that there’s virtue in risk, no matter the outcome. “How utterly dull,” he says, “would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!”
I have a close friend, a woman, who is a fly fisher. As we hiked down a coppered trail in the Adirondacks, I asked her about her attraction to fishing—a male-dominated sport. Max, I explained, couldn’t let go of the possibility of another trout, if only he cast on the right fly or in the right shadow. I asked her if she got that way too—if she couldn’t stop fishing once she started.
“You mean, what creates the need for just one more?”
“Yes.”
Our trail led us into a clearing where the grass was tall and yellow. Pebbles crunched under our hiking boots.
“Is it an addiction to the thrill of the catch, like it was for him?” I prompted.
She continued to walk in thoughtful silence.
“No,” she said, finally. “For me, it’s about the fight.”
I imagined her in the rivers of Alaska and on her father’s fishing boats off La Push. I saw her in gray waders, standing her ground against some mysterious force, feeling the subtle pulls, listening, knowing when to resist and when to give, motivated by the nuance of figuring it out. Not just holding on, but understanding how to hold on.
“Once the fight is over, I lose interest.”
If there’s an art to the catch and an art to the release, there’s also an art to the fight. In “Alder Fork,” Leopold tells the story of a difficult capture. In an unfishable hole concealed by branches, he saw a single trout. There was an opening 20 yards upstream. Though he knew it was unlikely to catch a trout by fishing downstream, he tried anyway—“Now for the long chance!”—and through patient, tactful play, he reeled the fish in. That day, he caught only three trout, and none were so large that they required folding or beheading to fit in his creel. “What was big was not the trout, but the chance,” Leopold writes. “What was full was not my creel, but my memory.”
I step in silt and it swirls around my waders. I stare into the agitated water, wait for the whirl of organic glitter to settle and clear, and in its settling I have a distant perspective. I look down upon a planet from outer space, and the swirls of silt are clouds. When they calm, a life is revealed beneath the disquiet. Something constant. I’m down there, under the turbulence, solid in my boots. When I look up, I see a white house at the top of a hill. Larch trees surround the house. There are no other houses within view. Who lives there? What is their life like—alone on that cliff, looking out on us, alone in the river? Alone except for the people in that house, who can see us kissing in the current, reading on the rock, catching fish and letting them go again? Looking up at that house on the hill, I have a strange sense that it is me living there, and that I’m not being watched by a girl in the house, but that I am both the girl in the river and the girl in the house. I imagine all that I want from life, and I wonder if I’ll get it. I think I might.
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