Yale Anglers' Journal

Volume Two Number Two

Martin Justice
A gleam of bronzy mail, a bristle of angry fins
Drawing from Fishing in North Maerica 1876-1910

An excerpt from:
Marcel Proust and the Art of Fly Fishing
R. Howard Bloch

For a long time I used to take what the British call a reading vacation. I would sleep until nine, read until two or three, then fish until dark in the pocket water of the Madison as it calmed, rich in oxygen and bugs, from the desperate tumble out of Earthquake Lake. The excitement of the feeding frenzy that accompanies the last rays of light pouring down the great valley from Ennis to Raynold's Pass, bringing the fish out from under the cut banks, left no other passion in its wake. On the good fishing nights you felt like a fellow deep into a detective novel, unable to put it down until you discovered who did it and how.

I used to think that my life in New York and in Montana was the stuff of two different worlds connected only by Delta Airlines and Hertz. The ideas that ruled my professional existence -- ideas about the status of the referent, the difference between language and speech, and gender as a social construct -- belonged to a higher sphere having little to do with fishing's close observation of nature and careful looking about. Gradually, however, I came to realize that the yearly stepping out of the city and into the streams of the Rockies was merely a process of changing perspectives upon the thing I loved the most -- reading itself. The reading that I did during the winter and the fishing I did during the summer were communicating vases that met somewhere deep in my psyche, intractable, untreatable, inaccessible, the mainspring of my biological clock.

Fishing is a kind of reading, which is why so many fisherman, when they are not fishing and not tying flies, like to read about fishing. They indulge winter fantasies with articles about perfected streamers and new material for the belly of a jassid and with river stories -- the classics of Hemingway and Grey, those of the modern masters Schweibert, Chatham, and Lyons. Indeed, beyond reading as a form of self-help or of escape, fishing may not only be a kind of reading, but the most intense form of reading there is.

Descending upon an unknown stream has always been like encountering a book for the first time. You hold it in your hand, you examine the cover, you try to situate it among the books you have read in terms of type -- a novel, poetry, a play from the English or French tradition. So too, before thinking about fish, one takes in the terrain, one begins to read the water. Is it one of the silvery sluiced pocket-waters laced with boulders like an action packed mystery a la Stephen King? Or is it a slow meandering meditative crisscross of a meadow, like a novel by Austen or James? Is it a steamy cauldron like the Firehole, one of the deep circles of Dante's Inferno? An oily-slick dark water like the Madison in the Park, which evokes the exotic perfumes of a Baudelaire poem? Or is it one of the clear chalky trickles like the Upper Ruby, with the clean lines of an O'Henry story? Rivers, like books, fall into genres, and our generic expectations determine how we begin to read them. For this much is true, and Faulkner knew it when he began The Sound and the Fury with a discourse on the trout of the Charles River and the process of forgetting time: stepping into the river involves reading the river and everything that surrounds it.

The conclusion available in Volume 2 Number 2

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