Fear of Fishing

Sometimes it's what you don't know that will kill you.
It was late afternoon and the sun zeroed in on me like an arc welder and I needed relief. The air was still. Birds sprawled in the shade of shrubs. The leaves on the trees were panting like dogs. The fields of white grass were hissing, like the sound of water simmering on the stove. I avoid travel into the village on days like this. The asphalt roofs and roads act as solar collectors and send up heat in silvery billows that can be seen for miles. When one looks into the distance, the air above the village is bent like a circus mirror and it magnifies and distorts and shrinks various objects, depending upon the temperature gradients, wind strength and particular swirl. At times this effect can be quite severe. In fact, this is not limited to the summertime. I have seen this phenomenon in the Great Plains in midwinter, when there is a temperature inversion. When looking in the direction of the Black Hills or Badlands of South Dakota I have seen it create phantom hills, disconnected from earth, like castles in the sky, a home in the clouds.
So, I went to the lake. When I stepped onto the beach, there, offshore, was a man in a rowboat, flopping about like a tarpon. He was fishing. I knew this man; it was Chauncey, the retired attorney who lived on the north shore. Over the years, I had learned to avoid all conversation and contact with this man. He considered himself a great outdoorsman, a master fisherman, but was known to all who met him as a badly inflamed windbag, a self-inflated dolt, puffy like a sail on a ship, a distended sausage of a man, the moral equivalent of a weather balloon. Locals called him “Fat Chauncey.” I watched him thrash his bait upon the waters and nothing was coming back.
This was late summer, a time when the sun is well along its course to the southern hemisphere, a weary bleached traveler with bowed head, like a white hearse slipping silently over a hilltop, like a defeated army on its retreat that pillages the northern landscape, burning the foliage and raiding nearly every color until, at last, in the month of November, everything is stripped away, everything except the glacial blue of the sky. A time of the year when fish begin to gorge themselves in preparation for months chambered in darkness and cold, amidst a diminishing supply of oxygen. A time to fish.
Chauncey was an outstandingly incapable fisherman, and this was well known. As I watched him toss the anchor into the water and follow it overboard, I recalled the degree of arrogance he displayed. It was his custom to hire local fishing guides with the sole intent of showing them just how fishing was to be done. When they broke from shore, he would announce to the guide, “You might be paid, but you are being paid to watch the best.” Then he would drop his sunglasses over his eyes and pull mightily on the oars. When he used up the guides in one community, he would move on to the next. Yet, in 35 years of fishing he had never caught a fish! His excuse?
“There is a simple rational explanation,” he would bluster. “There are no fish in this lake. In fact, there are no fish in any of the waters we can know.”
Once, I prodded him for an explanation. He said, “I can disprove the improbability of what is not unproven. What does not exist is unknown. I know of no evidence of fish, I do not know of it, therefore it does not exist. Hence, the fish do not exist in these waters, and all other waters that I do not know of, or of what is in them. You should know that by now.”
One could only shake one’s head and I felt the one in my possession shaking uncontrollably. Some guides reasoned that the man, being so repellent to those above water must have the same effect upon those below water. Apparently, the word got around, for he was no longer able to keep a pet. “My parrot ran off”, he once said. The story was, if he had an aquarium, the goldfish would run away too.
As the years passed and his creel remained vacant, it became apparent that he used the idle time in his boat to enlarge and multiply his explanations. I chanced upon him one day while he was unloading his boat and pressed him for an answer:
“So, why the empty stringer?”
“You again. I’ll tell you what – the fact is, the opposite or sub-opposite has and has not been true or false nearly so often as not. And that is my final word.”
“What?”
“That’s right.”
“But say it again.”
“It has never been the same twice, you know the odds.”
“So why do you fish?”
“To show it cannot be done.”
An image flashed before my eyes, that of myself throwing my fishing gear into a fire, but I dismissed it. It wasn’t the fishing, it was the failure to catch fish.
On another occasion, as we sat in the diner in town, he offered further explanation. He patted his ample belly. “I would not disallow for unknown uncontrollable factors were I not to know what I do. But I do not profess to not know what I do. But I know there are no fish. Beyond that is mere hyperbole, fantasy. You can label it winterkill, cold fronts, inbreeding, predation. Primitive tribes believed it was the action of comets. How do you differ?”
“I ate walleye once.”
“You see fairies with gilded wings!”
“They tasted good, too.”
Then I suggested to him that there might be an information hole in the bottom of the lake that consumes all facts and renders them imaginary. For a moment it appeared that we might agree on something.
But then he turned his head away. “You have much to learn about that vacuum in your head.”
“Thanks for the inspiration.”
Eventually, his diatribes in the cafes, bars, and diners led to exile. As he broadcast his beliefs, those unfamiliar with his disposition spread the word back home: “The lakes are all fished out.” “There were never any fish up there to start with.” “No wonder why we can’t catch anything.” “Maybe the whole thing is a hoax.” “Who have we been kidding?” As a result, tourists avoided the area and vacationed further north. Profits declined. Shops closed their doors. At the urging of businesses throughout the region, he was blacklisted by the guiding community, evicted from fishing tournaments, barred from bait shops, and, by the time I watched him from the shore that afternoon - wrestling with the oars and spinning the boat in circles – he was denied fishing licenses in twenty-seven states and provinces. But this did not steer him off course. Here he was in front of me, at it again, offshore, hoisting another tree branch up from the bottom of the lake and easing it into the net. One for the mantle, I thought.
His notoriety increased. His image was posted at boat landings, with a fair warning. News media interviewed him. Parents warned their children. Schoolteachers told cautionary tales. The Legend of the Sea Lout. The Epic of the Perilously Listing Nanoid. Captain Bombast, Where Have You Been? Flotsam Meets Jetsom. The Man Drifts. Fables of a seaman just slightly more advanced than the crustaceans he impaled on the hook. A man repeatedly outwitted by wooden lures. This only served to intensify his determination to prove that the fish did not exist.
What drove him to this? I have often thought that it may have been something as simple as a lack of patience. No matter how much effort he infused into the art of fishing, he could not find it within himself to sit motionless in a boat, holding his arms out stiffly, waiting for hours, even days, until that moment when he sensed the slightest twinge in the line, at which moment his mind estimated the mass, depth, and species of the fish, calculated the time necessary for ingestion, the arc of the pole, torque of the hookset, tension of the drag, and length of play. No. He would stir, rise, fold his seat cushion, grab an oar, change a lure, move from seat to seat, lift anchor, drop anchor, change hats, whistle, sing, remove his shirt, fiddle with the oarlocks, tap his feet, inspect his fingernails, write in a notebook, read a book, wave at other boats, and, in the end, stumble over something in the bottom of the boat and end up flailing about in the water.
So this afternoon, I decided I had seen enough. I was about to give a little advice. I called out to him.
“Chauncey!”
“Go away.”
“No, listen to me.”
“What is it now?”
“Try live bait, a sucker on a number-six hook.”
“What for?”
“It increases the odds. Especially under these conditions.”
He responded with the usual dogma, there aint no fish in the lake, fish are a figment of the imagination, mystic blips on the mind, vestiges of primordial man that well up in the senses when under stress, a child’s slimy toy stuffed with ignorance, fear, and insecurity, swirling images produced by oxygen deprivation and most certainly, the sunstroke suffered by all fishermen, and so forth and so on. I waited until he lost his breath and I said it again.
“Been in the sun too long today?”
“Shut up.”
“I mean it, try live bait; a sucker on a number-six hook.”
“What is your problem?”
“Scared to try?”
“Look, little man, I will do it just to prove to you it cannot be done.“
“You can tell everyone it was your idea if it works.”
“Then will you go on your way and keep your ghosts to yourself?”
“Nobody else can see them anyhow.”
And he opened his tackle box, removed the plug from his line, and baited it with a sucker. Then, after glaring at me for a moment, he tossed it out into the open water.
“I got a big one out there once,” I said.
He didn’t say anything.
Suddenly, his rod bent double.
“What the…”
The rod was trembling, the tip touched the water. The boat tilted. The rod tip plunged under water and he nearly lost his grip.
“This can’t be!”
“Don’t horse it.”
He didn’t say anything. Now the fish was heading under the boat. He leaned over the side of the boat to look.
“My god…”
All at once, he threw his rod overboard and waved his arms.
“No, no - I can’t bear to look.”
He fell into the water and disappeared from sight.
And he was gone.