Reflections: Why I Love Those Who Fish

[Editor’s note: In celebration of In-Fisherman’s 50th anniversary, we look back at In-Fisherman magazine’s long-running Reflections column. This is one of our favorites, appearing in 2007 and written by Justin Isherwood of Plover, Wisconsin. He’s been one of the most prolific contributors to the column since the early 1990s. It also features one of our favorite illustrations by Larry Tople.]

I have a friend who fishes. In truth somewhat more than fishes. My friend impersonates water, he sprouts gills and a swim bladder, heads upstream, his underbelly turns red. My friend melds with water, molecule for molecule. Some fishermen are like this, endlessly, compulsively without end or diminution devoted to fish.

I understand why the CEO of the New Testament Corporation chose fishermen as junior executives. Okay, so throw in a tax collector for the sake of brevity, add a carpenter for household repair, for literature’s sake a legal secretary; but for the grunt work of the franchise go with fishermen. On this planet there is no single phenomenon, personal habit, or kinky pathology more devoted, more faithful, more loyal to cause, more punctual to the evening rise than is the fish-type person. Why this is I can not say. It appears related to instinct, a secretive gene whose blood oath affects their manner and choice, so entwined seem they with the blessedness of waters.

It is honest to wonder, is it the fish or is it the waters? Myself I think it is the waters, the fish are secondary, an accidental by-product of being addicted to water. My guess is some day researchers will find a primordial nerve-ending, a ganglion deep in the antechamber of the brain that relates precisely to a nerve as found in ancient fishes. Inclusive of mud puppies and suckers, shipworms and sharks, the very same found in the hind-brain of fisher-folk. This nerve none else than the ancestral sea clock, that patient endless ticking tide yet hinged to moon-pull and star-rise, this what is still murmuring in the basal ganglia of fishermen. Proving once and for all it has less to do with filling the creel, dancing with flies, and wearing disagreeable clothes than an involuntary response to the rhythm of water. It is this alternative pulse as abides in the innards of the severely afflicted. Never mind the display that the fish persons express to camouflage their affliction, decorating their walls with trophy bass, lunker walleyes, a leviathan muskie, that five-pound brown. It’s all show.

Never mind there are fish-type persons whose two-car garage is wall to wall rods, reels, minnow buckets, jigs, tip-ups, igloos, bass boats, waders, fly vests, anvil and spool, bags of allergenic feathers, another of lynx hair, Wolf River rigs, cane poles, fiberglass and split bamboo. They could not fit one rollerskate in their garage even with the wheels removed because of all that gear. Parking the car is of course out of the question.

These same folk read fishing magazines by the bushel, study lunar tables, they bend over an infinitesimally small fly trying to breathe life into it despite anybody can see CPR is too late. Failing this they still try to teach the fraud corpse to fly, not merely glide but fly on gossamer wings tendoned in silk, hoping this frankenstein will soar well enough to arouse an animal only a little smarter than cold dirt and no warmer. On this unblinking creature are these sorry souls pouring their hard-won fortune, to better converse with a creature whose brain is slightly smaller than the average neutrino.

If one were to wish on the world a helpful gospel, perhaps a beneficial attitude, something calming, and to perform this therapy on the most resistant sort of barely house-broken red-neck and by this improve the ages of Mankind; were we to ask of artists and poets to construct a fanciful and no-holds-barred realm governed by the most charming of quests ... we could do no better than imagine fisher-folk. They who follow the murmur of waters. These blessed few who feel in their own cells that most ardent pulse. The first cradle rocking, some opine it has a sloshing sound. The hymn they hear are the waters. Not just water over rocks and the hiss of beaches but the whole darn cloud-rain-earth, evaporation cycle whirlygigging thing. Very close is it to the sound of the universe ticking, cloud, water, earth, cloud again. The insistent hush of water flowing ceaselessly to a somewhere sea only to escape and start all over again.

This the will of water, the ever-­living pulse, the way it all works, that splash, that drip and drizzle is the sound of the Earth alive and well. Sky, rain, water; terribly simple when you think about it just as  the junkman said, recycle. Fisherfolk know this already and always have. After all it was they who taught the artifice to fly. This why I love those who fish.

---