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Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published three times a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.

Oregon Humanities Summer 2008

Crossing Lines

Art, meat, and enlightenment in American sport fishing

By Henry Hughes

On a gray October morning, Bob Fultz and I motor his drift boat up the Salmon River, north of Lincoln City, Oregon. Three miles from the sea in the deep narrows, the river has a marbled turbidity, sheened here and there with oil from dozens of motorboats anchored or maneuvering into every hole. A boy in a small pram holds up a blood-streaked chinook salmon for a photo, while a man in a new sled boat--the name Blood Sport stenciled on the hull--fights a big fish, his rod bending and pulsing, his friend waiting eagerly with a wide net. I can hear the whine of the man's drag as the fish makes a fierce run, tangles in another boat's anchor line, and snaps off. "Fucking shit!" the fisherman yells across the river. When he turns, I see a pistol holstered to his hip. "What's he gonna do?" I ask Bob. "Shoot the fish?"

As we approach the bridge for Highway 101, the trampled, trash-strewn banks of the Salmon River are lined with more anglers slinging heavy globs of orange eggs under huge sliding bobbers or lead sinkers. Avoiding an oncoming boat, Bob steers us closer to the bank, rousing a large, flannel-coated man sitting on a cooler, smoking a cigarette. "Better watch my line," the man barks. Bob swings us away, and I lift my hand in a conciliatory wave. The man just stares. "Goddamn boats," I hear someone else grunt as an ounce of lead splashes beside us. When we clear the bridge, Bob shakes his head, saying, "They're a rough crowd."

Bob Fultz has been fishing the Salmon River for thirty years, and, though he's witnessed some ugly moments among the sportsmen, he can't deny the appeal of big fish concentrated in great numbers within a few well-known holes accessible to both bank and boat fishermen. It's fishing for the masses. In addition to being a natural run, the river boasts a hatchery four miles upriver that raises chinook salmon, releasing the young smolts every August. After leaving the river and living up to five years at sea, these salmon return as what some locals call "fall hogs." They are magnificent creatures in silver and bronze, frequently leaping and rolling out of the water, making their way upriver to spawn.

Bob and I fish intensely for several hours, casting spinners and bait, eventually joining "the hog line," a ring of boats anchored around the Barn Hole, where I hook a torpedo. For ten minutes, the fish runs hard and deep. Bob and the anglers next to us reel up their lines to give me some fighting room. After a few more dives and runs, she's in the net--a thirty-pound, chrome-bright chinook. Bob and I high-five and pop celebratory Buds. The older couple next to us nod admiringly. "Real nice fish," the woman says. "You sure got supper for everybody."

Bringing fish home for my family to eat is one of my earliest memories of childhood pride. I baited hooks with sandworms and caught flounder after flounder off a steel bulkhead in New York, within the roar of my father's crane, unloading gravel barges. My father, brother, and I spent weekends in a leaky boat on Long Island Sound, bottom fishing for flounder, porgies, and blackfish, or trolling through boiling schools of bluefish. We'd catch dozens of blues, giving fillets to neighbors and grilling the rest with sweet corn and clams for an August feast. In some ways the very simplicity of those boyhood outings is pleasantly revisited on the Salmon River. "You're getting in touch with your working-class roots," a colleague at the university where I teach teases me.

In popular culture, "meat fishing," catching fish to eat with spinning or bait-casting gear, is often perceived as lower and middle class; catch-and-release fly-fishing is viewed as upper class. Spinning, bait casting, and trolling with heavy equipment is stereotyped as simpler, easier, and aimed at extraction; fly-fishing carries the lofty air of a more challenging, refined art, rewarded by intellectual, emotional, and spiritual satisfaction. But like most simple binaries, these orders are easily upset. Many anglers, like myself, look for beauty and art in a range of fishing styles. Many anglers cross class lines.

One hundred and fifty miles east of the Salmon River, over the Santiam Pass into Central Oregon, lies the Metolius River. Emerging from springs at the basaltic base of Black Butte, the Metolius runs cold and clear through alpine forests some twenty-eight miles to Lake Billy Chinook. Walking into the pine-paneled country store at Camp Sherman in late October, I hear the woman behind the counter discussing the virtues of cane rods, while an older gentleman in a tweed jacket selects flies from the extensive display case. They speak Latin here. "Are the Drunella coloradensis still hatching?" the man asks. "Try a small paradrake or Bunse's natural dun," responds the fluent attendant.

As for all civilized pursuits, there are considerable terms, protocols, and rules for fishing here. Only barbless hooks are permitted from Camp Sherman downstream to Bridge 99. Lead sinkers are prohibited. And no fish may be kept. Below the bridge, anglers may, in addition to flies, use artificial spinning lures, but the no-bait and catch-and-release policies cover the entire river. I couldn't help bemoaning that there would be no grilled trout to accompany the pinot gris I brought from the Willamette Valley.

There is good reason to protect the fish of the Metolius. Unlike those in the Salmon River and in many other Oregon fisheries that are pumped up with hatchery offspring, the rainbow and bull trout of the Metolius are wild. For precarious and threatened populations of wild fish, catch-and-release policies are important management tools. The great sport angler Lee Wulff extended that idea, declaring, "Game fish are too valuable to catch only once." But many fly fishermen take the moral high ground, always release fish, and denounce eating any catch as crude, cruel, and ignorant of the higher art. The writer John McPhee, however, deflates the presumed nobility of catch-and-release devotions in his book Founding Fish. "I'm a meat fisherman," McPhee says. "I think it's immoral not to eat a fish you jerk around the river with a steel barb through the mouth. I see no other justification for doing so."

Although the fish in the Metolius are wild, the land around the river has been tamed by educational signboards, campsites, cabins, and huge RVs. Driving the red cinder roads through the clean, thinned stands of ponderosa and lodgepole pine, one gets the sense that here, nature is managed but respected. I pull into a paved parking spot beside a new SUV, gather my gear, and walk down the well-worn path to the river. A man approaches a garbage can and tosses in a wrapper. "How's the fishing?" I ask him. "Tough," he says. His name is Robert, and he's a physician from Bend who fishes the Metolius a few times every year. Given his Patagonia boots, waders, and wader jacket stuffed with Wheatley fly boxes, and his Simms vest and Filson hat, Robert must be wearing around two thousand dollars. His Sage rod and Abel reel might run another twelve hundred. But fly-fishing with even the best gear can humble a man, and Robert's manner is easy. "I saw plenty of fish, but no takers." Identifying a blue-winged olive hatch, he cast his fly, a sparkle dun, until his arm got tired and his back ached. "It's always great to be out here. If I get one or two fish, I'm happy. But this is a very tough river." When he asks me what's happening on the coast, I tell him about my Salmon River chinook. "You can have it," Robert says. "I don't want any part of that meat market."

It might seem that people come to the Metolius more for fishing than fish. I've met several anglers, men and women, who caught little but seemed happy, recalling Roderick Haig-Brown's reflection, "Perhaps fishing is only an excuse to be near rivers." And that's understandable. The river has a beautiful, gin-blue transparency, undulating with watercress and the white-tipped fins of visible trout. I tie on a pheasant-tail nymph and begin casting. The weight of the line rolls from arm and rod into satisfying, graceful loops, unfurling straight over the water. But fly casting can be more difficult than spin casting, and my fifth back-cast puts me in a bush. I untangle and continue, casting steadily for about two hours without a hit. Other fly fishermen pass and say hello, politely stepping out of the river to walk behind me.

When I least expect it--which is always the reward for expecting so long--the line tightens, and there's a terrific splash of silver and pink. I take my time bringing a fourteen-inch rainbow to the net. It's a gorgeous fish with striking, red-metallic lateral bands and black spots over its fins and tail. I hold the trout in my wet hands, remove the barbless hook, look at it a moment longer, and let it go. Sound of rushing water, blue-bubbled cascades, kingfisher in a tamarack bough. How different from the outboard- and man-snarls of the Salmon River, slamming that netted chinook to the deck, and clubbing it with a bat.

Do gear, technique, and the fate of the caught fish determine the class of the person fishing? Judging from the vehicles and apparel along the Salmon River as compared to those along the Metolius, it would be easy to speculate that the average income of the fly fishermen from Sisters and Bend is higher than the Lincoln City plunkers. But gauging class among those who fish is tricky. Many wealthy people eat the fish they catch using the freshest bait and the most expensive lures, gear, boats, and guides. And one of the best fly fishermen on the Little Luckiamute River, where I live, sleeps in a van and collects mushrooms for a living.

Then there are the Southern bass fishing tournaments, where pro anglers speed around lakes, deploy state-of-the-art tackle, and catch and release trophy bass for huge cash prizes. Though this kind of fishing caters to the working class, it exercises the science, the technology, and the bait-free and catch-and-release principles admired by the fly-fishing elite. "I think bass tourney fishing is soulless," explains Richard Bunse, one of Oregon's most distinguished anglers and fishing illustrators. "It's driven by competition with other men for the heaviest fish and money, not as a way to deepen your relationship with nature." Bunse reminds us that fly fishermen have also organized competitive, cash-crazed televised events. "It's not about lure fishing, bait fishing, or fly-fishing; it's about attitude."

Perhaps, as the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argues, economic capital is not the main force in shaping class behavior. Rather, it is the manners, tastes, activities, and attitudes we inherit and learn--our cultural capital--that determine the class we occupy. Cultural capital is, however, historically traceable to economic capital. The deepest associations between sport fishing and more sophisticated attitudes about nature originate in Great Britain, where river access and fishing opportunities were limited to the landed gentry. Consequently, the culture of sport fishing maintained the values of a leisure class obsessed with fashion and manners, but also with science, literature, and art.

And because fly casting requires more space, it has come to mean emotional or spiritual space for those who can afford it. Today, with the help of the Orvis and Hardy catalogs, fly-fishing, more than other forms of angling, still evokes images of tweedy ladies and gentlemen relaxing in nature, casting spey patterns, drinking scotch, and reading poetry.

Although these values and styles were transplanted to the New World, fishing in America's fin-filled waters has always been less exclusive than it was back in Europe. In his Description of New England (1616), John Smith writes, "Here nature and liberty afford us that freely, which in England we want, or it costs us dearly." In the colonies, Smith exclaims, "man, woman and child, with a small hook and line--by angling--may take diverse sorts of excellent fish, at their pleasures." American settlers, of course, fished to feed themselves, but by the eighteenth century there were more and more accounts of pleasure fishing in America.

Recreational fishing worried our workaholic founding father, Ben Franklin, who wrote, "I was seen at no places of idle Diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting." In the early nineteenth century, Washington Irving offers a refreshing Romantic alternative in his short story "Rip Van Winkle." Rip has an "aversion to all kinds of profitable labour" and "would sit on a wet rock ... and fish all day without a murmur, even though he should not be encouraged by a single nibble." We think of leisure time for sports like fishing as something afforded to the middle and upper classes. But perhaps because fishing could put meat on the table; or help forget worries; or be done at its simplest with a stick, string, and bent pin; it has always had adherents among the poor and disenfranchised.

Recreational fishing also became immensely popular with America's growing middle class in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and continued to capture the imagination of writers like Ernest Hemingway, who wrote passionately about fly and bait fishing in his novels and short stories. Despite the rising number of anglers, fly-fishing was still relatively expensive until gear revolutions in the 1950s replaced silk lines and cane rods with more reasonably priced products made of nylon and fiberglass. This, combined with a proliferation of information on fly-fishing, from brochures to books, caused the sport to become very popular in the 1960s. During the 60s and 70s, fly-fishing was further celebrated by a generation of hippie or renegade fishing writers like John Gierach and Russell Chatham, and significant literary figures such as Richard Brautigan and Thomas McGuane. These fishermen rejected Franklin's capitalist overdrive, but they were not content to sit on the bank, crack a beer, and drown a worm like Rip. Instead, they drew on both the back-to-earth environmentalism of their time and the traditional aesthetics and spirituality of the enlightened angler to reshape fishing as a "way," in the Taoist sense, toward peace and harmony.

This tradition of contemplative fishing can be traced back to ancient China and also to privileged British anglers who had the time to fish and think, such as Izaak Walton, author of The Compleat Angler, or The Contemplative Man's Recreation (1653). Walton--who used flies, lures, and bait--was one of the first writers to give sport fishing a true aesthetic and philosophical dimension, and his ideas are key to understanding the sensibility that favors fishing with "wit, hope ... and patience, and a love and propensity to the art itself," over a fillet quota or the most expensive gear. In the philosophy of contemplative fishing, the angler has everything to gain; he cannot even lose a fish, "for no man can lose what he never had." This kind of fishing was clearly more than a means of procuring dinner or an excuse to skip work. It had become a way of being, a discipline, possibly an art--and this takes practice, knowledge, and a philosophy.

The connection between philosophy and fishing is realized in the life and work of the American writer Henry David Thoreau, who called fishing "the true industry of poets." Although he had little money, the many hours Thoreau invested in angling paid off in a series of moving parables and meditations. He used worms to catch perch and pickerel for supper, but he recognized that most men "plainly fished much more in the Walden Pond of their own natures, and baited their hooks with darkness." Fishing was a way of sounding those darker, unconscious impulses and of connecting lofty thoughts back to nature. There's surprise and renewal, Thoreau says, "especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres, to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams and link you to Nature again."

In a comparably beautiful passage from The Habit of Rivers (1994), Ted Leeson writes: "The rise of trout to a drifting insect reverberates in expanding concentric ripples, magnified iterations of a simple event that resonate outward to encompass more and more, remaining visible long after and far from the thing that made them." Leeson goes on to say that "the rings of the rising trout eventually comprehend the entire river," including the person fishing. Making a distinction that might be more useful than those related to social class, Leeson believes, "The craft of angling is catching a fish. But the art of angling is a receptiveness to these connections, the art of letting one thing lead to another until, if only locally and momentarily, you realize some small completeness."

So perhaps it is attitude, philosophy, and art, rather than technique--fly, lure, or bait--that differentiates the people who fish. And yet fly-fishing undeniably lends itself generously to the kind of angling most revered as art. Consider the fly itself: a beautiful object, hand-tied from delicate hair and feather, lovingly described and illustrated in countless books. A good dry fly fisherman, in particular, must also know something about insects, matching a delectable natural hatch to the representative artificial in his box. The fly, along with hand-split cane rods and a smooth cast, have no artistic equals in spin or bait fishing. In A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean recalls his father's belief that man had fallen from grace into a state of chaos, and that "only by picking up God's rhythms were we able to regain power and beauty." For the Macleans, fly casting, "an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o'clock," was a sure way of regaining that divine beauty.

The best places to fly-fish are often the most beautiful wild rivers and streams. But beyond the trout stream, fly-fishing is usually not the most effective way of extracting fish, so the emphasis is naturally on process and experience, not merely product. For me, there's nothing declasse about keeping and eating fish; but if, as Thoreau says, we fish the waters of our own natures, there are distinctions between people who snag salmon stacked in a pool because they want something for the smoker and those who wade icy rivers, casting flies to wild winter steelhead in Oregon--arguably the greatest challenge in American angling, and one that is almost always crowned with a gentle release.

Exerting tremendous skill and effort over many hours to attain something nearly impossible and of indeterminate value? Sounds like art. Although art has always appealed to the upper classes, it is also true that nothing crosses the lines of social class more easily than the creation of art. Successful artists, even those with meager incomes and raggedy pedigrees, readily receive byes into high society. Consider the simple voice and music patterns in American roots and folk traditions, which continue to speak emotional truths to contemporary listeners. Technical mastery and sophistication are important criteria for judging art, yet the simplest work, like Lead Belly's lyrics, sometimes provides the profoundest insight.

Wouldn't it follow, then, that more simple means of sport fishing--plunking cheese baits for catfish on a sultry Louisiana night--may just as easily lead to enlightenment? Yes, indeed. And the most basic--perhaps purest--moments in fishing have been the subject of many songs, paintings, films, and works of literature. Think of the poor Cuban fisherman, Santiago, in Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, working his crude hand-lines baited with sardines. Santiago is, by definition, a commercial fisherman, perhaps out of the realm of this discussion. Nonetheless, his simple, faithful, thoughtful, and financially futile labors canonize him as one of the most beloved fishermen in literature.

But if, as the media critic Marshall McLuhan claimed, "Class in society is determined by voice," then fly-fishing still commands the choir. For descendants of contemplative bait and crossover anglers--writers including Norman Maclean, Thomas McGuane, David James Duncan, and Ted Leeson--fly-fishing is not so much a subject written about as it is an activity lived. Fishing is always a way toward self-cultivation, enlightenment, even grace. "Trout as well as eternal salvation . . . come by grace, and grace comes by art and art does not come easy," Maclean writes. Is the challenging art of fly-fishing the pinnacle to which all soulful anglers should aspire?

In the end, fly-fishing represents a way, not an arrival or a class. Perhaps there is a progression from the child swinging a worm into a pond of hungry sunfish to the seasoned angler casting flies to wary steelhead. But the greater progression is that of the human who comes to revere and protect the environment; who catches and keeps fish with conservation, personal values, and sensible use in mind; and who learns about fish, water, and angling simply because there is much to learn. These virtues can be achieved by anyone, no matter his or her formal education, occupation, or economic state. If fishing becomes an art that deepens a person's sense of self in relation to others and nature, that's progress. I'll plunk at night with worms for muddy catfish and wake at dawn fly-casting pale duns to rising rainbows--moon and sun, master and servant, forever changing places.

Henry Hughes is an active fisherman, traveler, and writer whose essays and poems have appeared in publications including Harvard Review, Northwest Review, and Gray's Sporting Journal. His collection of poems, Men Holding Eggs, received the 2004 Oregon Book Award. Hughes is an assistant professor in the English department at Western Oregon University.

Published in the Summer 2008 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2008 Oregon Council for the Humanities

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