Fish Story…

I used to love doing things with my father. He was a big guy…six feet four…two hundred and twenty pounds…and “bald as a cue ball” as he used to say. He worked very hard all day during the week, so when I got to spend time with him on the weekends, it was important.

When I was eight years old, we moved to south Florida, and after some searching, my parents purchased a home on the water. Although the lot was a small one, as waterfront lots tend to be down here, the house had something wonderful…a dock. The dock was not a large one…only sixteen feet wide and just as long, but it was SO COOL for a little boy from New Jersey. One day, not long after we moved in, my father stopped at Reef Bait and Tackle on his way home from work. He purchased two “entry level” rod and reel sets, and some line, hooks, sinkers, and so on. Everything we’d need to fish from our new dock. And that very weekend, first thing Saturday morning, we started fishing. It was great fun. We caught a few little fish, which we very carefully threw back, and we even caught a couple of larger ones…Mangrove Snappers…which my mother fried up in butter and fresh ground pepper for breakfast. They were delicious. And I was as “hooked” as those snappers were. I found that I LOVED to fish.

I continued to fish with my father whenever I could. And as I got older, I started to fish alone. I had to…my father died young. And I discovered something else about fishing. It allows your mind to wander. It’s quiet most of the time when you fish alone, and very meditative if you allow it to be. And every time I fished alone, I thought about my father. That was nice. The more I fished the more my technique improved, and I started to try different kinds of fishing (plugs, fly fishing, ultra-light tackle, etc.). I liked them all. I learned to catch my own bait, tie my own leaders, sharpen my hooks with a clever little device made expressly for that purpose, and repair my rods and reels myself, with advice from an elderly gentleman who worked part-time at the tackle shop. He could fix anything, using the odd bits of hardware that he kept in hundreds of tiny, unlabeled drawers in a cabinet that covered the entire back wall. The place smelled of bait and chum and sweat and salt water, and sometimes I hung around there just for fun.

As I got older I fished as much as I could, but my time was now occupied by other endeavors. School, girls, cars and so many other things…all beckoning, vying for the few available waking hours. And when I went to work, my time was still very limited. but since I worked for the state, my weekends were, for the most part, my own. So I still managed to fish…not as often as I had in the past, but I still managed. And I developed a preference for one type of fishing.

The water behind my house is brackish, and so it favors two types of large game fish…the Tarpon and the Snook. With lots of advice from the grizzled, beer-soaked old timers that frequented the tackle shop, I learned how to fish for them, and I caught more than my share. I tried eating Snook, which most people seem to enjoy, and I didn’t like it. No one eats Tarpon. The Snook that I caught on a regular basis weighed up to thirty-five pounds, and the Tarpon, sometimes over one hundred. When I landed a big one, sometimes after a lengthy fight, I would climb down into the water, gently unhook the fish, measure it so as to calculate its weight, and release it. If it was particularly large, I would photograph it first. It was a lot of fun…at the time.

And then several years ago, I hooked the largest Tarpon of my life…well over one hundred pounds, and longer than my wife is tall. I fought it for nearly two hours, marveling at the powerful jumps that lifted it entirely clear of the water while it shook its massive head trying to be rid of my hook. No wonder the Tarpon is called the “Silver King.” Finally it was exhausted, as was I, and I brought it to the side of the dock. It was beautiful. I jumped into the water as I had so many times before, and unhooked the fish. It was too tired to swim away. I stayed in the water and “walked” it for longer than I had actually fought it, passing the water over its gills to try to revive it. I couldn’t, and it died in my arms. I felt awful. I had killed this beautiful creature for my entertainment, like the cruelest bullfight, only without the ceremonial trappings. I vowed then and there that this would not happen again. The only way to be sure was to stop fishing altogether, so that’s what I did.

I think of that one particular fish every time I look in the water from my little dock. No matter how beautiful the view, and no matter how much sea life I see, the sadness of that pointless killing to this day overwhelms me, although I know that it probably shouldn’t. I still eat fish fairly often, although I try to consume farmed species as much as possible. The Tilapia and the Salmon and the other farmed fish aren’t bad at all, particularly fried up in butter and fresh ground pepper.

Time is relentless. The Reef Bait and Tackle shop has been closed for many years, and the building that it used to occupy is now part of a drug rehabilitation facility. The elderly gentleman who could fix anything is long gone. I still miss my father, and I think of him every day. And I don’t go fishing anymore.

On the Death of the Hobby…

I am now officially an Old Fart. I know this to be true because I find myself referring longingly to “The Good Old Days.” This is not a welcome development in my life, but it is very real, and I must confront it, even though I cannot embrace it.

When I was a young man (see what I mean…) it seemed that most people had hobbies. A hobby, for those of you who have never had one, or known anyone who has had one (there it goes again…) is something you do consistently and frequently, focusing on a particular area of interest or endeavor, that gives you some degree of emotional satisfaction. It must be distinct from your occupation. Working overtime and like a dog is NOT a hobby. It must be distinct from your family. Figuring out ways to protect your children from themselves is NOT a hobby. And it must be distinct from your love life. Memo to Tiger Woods: What you have been up to is NOT a hobby.

Many years ago EVERYONE, or so it seemed, had a hobby…but when was the last time that you met a Coin Collector or a Model Plane Builder or a Water Color Artist who was under fifty-five years of age? One of the main passages of childhood used to be the selection, after much trial and error, of a hobby…one that would persist into adulthood, and one that the now-adult would unsuccessfully attempt to pass along to his or her children, only to be rebuffed by a flurry of extreme disinterest that represented one the the child’s first, but by no means last, incidences of healthy (although it didn’t seem so at the time) rebellion.

When you go through Granddad’s things after he passes on, you’ll probably find that old book with the few stamps in it, still hanging around from the time many decades ago that Granddad’s father tried to “get him interested” in stamp collecting to “keep him out of trouble.” It didn’t work. The only thing Granddad wanted to do was hang out with his axle-grease-stained friends (“those no good bums who will never amount to anything” as they were referred to by Granddad’s father when Granddad was a kid) and tinker with that old Model A Ford (this is what Granddad’s father referred to as “trouble”)…and he kept tinkering with old Fords throughout his life…didn’t sell ‘em, didn’t race ‘em, just got a kick out of putting them back together and making them run well and look good. This is how hobbies developed, and, like genetic traits, often skipped a generation or two. That spotless “Model A” that Granddad used to proudly drive in the Memorial Day Parade each year was the result, like most hobbies, of equal parts skill, interest, and rebellion. He sure looked handsome and happy driving it, didn’t he? That’s what a hobby used to be, and that’s what a hobby used to do for a person.

When I was a kid (oops…there it goes again) I tried stamps, coins, model trains, and more. They all bored the hell out of me. I was pretty good at sports, but not all that interested in them. Then, for my ninth birthday, a friend of my father’s went to Sears and bought me a present…a Silvertone brand guitar. I loved it…and learned to play it pretty well…well enough to sound good to myself and later on to impress the girls at the occasional party. I still play a bit today, using a Gibson J-series…that old Silvertone is no doubt long gone, probably used as kindling. Hobby One.

About that same time we moved to a house on the water. On his way home from work one day my father, who had never fished before, stopped by the Reef Bait and Tackle store and bought two “entry level” rod and reel sets, and some frozen shrimp. That weekend, we started to fish together from the small dock behind our house. I fished from that same dock well into adulthood, and even though that dock has been replaced by a new one, I continued to fish there until recently…thinking of my father every time I wet a hook. Hobby Two.

One year my wife and I decided to put in a rose garden as a birthday gift for my late mother. My wife really enjoyed doing it, and through some odd combination of evolution and osmosis, we BOTH became interested in gardening. Hobby Three.

My wife read about an organization whose members knit and/or crochet baby blankets for donation to needy and homeless families. She could neither knit nor crochet, but she painstakingly taught herself to do both, and produced a series of wonderful, complex, colorful, beautiful blankets, all of which she donated through this organization. She still knits and crochets, and gives away everything that she creates. Hobby Four.

And what about today? What passes as a hobby for a young person in the 21st century? Is someone with eight thousand songs in their iPod a music collector? Not really. Is selling the contents of your garage on ebay a hobby? Probably not. Does anyone still elect to play a musical instrument for fun and for fun alone? Not that often.

It seems to me that everyone today knows everything, or, using the computer, knows HOW to know everything. But most (younger) folks don’t know how to DO anything. How many twenty-somethings can repair a toilet?…roast a turkey?…rewire a lamp?…well, you get the idea. Maybe that’s what hobbies are really good for. They are a training ground. They show us that knowing how to actually do something or being really interested in something is satisfying in and of itself…not for profit…not because you have to…just because. And when, devoid of any practical application, you find your knowledge or your interests satisfying, then the acquisition of more knowledge and more interests becomes one of life’s goals. I miss hobbies. I think we’re all diminished as they fall more and more out of fashion.