The Fishing Life

[ozark trout fisher]

I tend to start thinking while I sit at my fly tying vice, probably too much actually. I was tying Woolly Buggers at cruising speed this evening for a smallmouth trip next weekend, and I started to think about how I view the world. More and more, it is through the lens of fishing.

And I think fishing is a good way to look at the world. It places a heavy influence on the natural cycles of our world, and the long and incomprehensible connections that allow ecosystems to flourish. We learn a bit of everything on the stream, from entomology to hydrology. We learn how the mayflies need a clean, cold stream to survive, how the trout depend on the mayflies, and how the herons depend on the trout. We learn about springs, where water flows up from subterranean passages to the surface of the earth. We learn in a way that is too real and too tangible to be learned any other way than spending a lot of time on the water. And if you have curiosity, these things fascinate you to no end. They absorb you to the point where you can hardly think of anything else. Soon, every thought that you have will be filtered by it.

Sometimes I wonder if this single track state of mind detracts from my enjoyment of life. It causes me to crave solitude, which some people don't think is a good thing. Still, I find that fishing instills poetry in my soul, and I can say without reservation that I love fishing more than anything else. If you ever feel this, you'll understand how some seemingly important things can become insignificant.

[Al Agnew]

Today I was fishing a long run of water along a big island gravel bar on the Yellowstone River. This place is right at the edge of Livingston, Montana, but from this island you see very little civilization, mainly river, cottonwoods and willows, gravel and round river rocks, with the Crazy Mountains downstream and the upper part of Livingston Peak in the Beartooths looming over the river on the opposite bank. I was alone except for the occasional driftboat floating by.

After fishing for a couple of hours and catching a suitable number of trout plus the Yellowstone's ubiquitous whitefish, I suddenly realized I had been staring at the water and my strike indicator for all that time with hardly any interruption. I reeled in, waded out of the riffle, and sat down on a handy stump. I looked around, drinking in the river and the landscape. A couple of white pelicans drifted downstream along the opposite bank. Swallows glided over the water, looking for the caddis hatch that had fed them well the last couple of weeks but was now almost over. The river was rising slowly, snowmelt from the high country in Yellowstone Park finally running down the mountains and into the streams feeding the Yellowstone after an unusually cold April. The snow was still gleaming on Livingston Peak, but the willows were beginning to leaf out and the cottonwoods were getting that golden brown look that precedes the sudden explosion of green. I simply drank it all in.

So your thoughts on fishing were well taken after today. I feel almost exactly the same.

What is there, really, about fishing that enthralls us so? It seems a pointless pursuit when you don't fish to eat. And yet, it is infinitely interesting, often challenging, sometimes humbling. When I'm standing in the river, the human world retreats and nature takes over. To me, no matter what the species, the highest form of fishing takes place on a natural river within its natural rhythms, and understanding those rhythms, no matter how imperfectly, is an integral part of the experience. And yet, I get a kick out of catching a little bass out of a distinctly unnatural pond, or a big bass from a big reservoir from a very mechanized bass boat. The total experience is different, and perhaps of less quality to me at least, but it's still fishing.