Nick looked down into the clear, brown water…and watched the trout keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins…He watched them holding themselves with their noses in the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water….
(“Big Two-Hearted River Part I,” Ernest Hemingway)
I was in graduate school during the late eighties when new voices were finally being added to the cannon of literature in English—so there was the potential as a student of literature and writing to be exposed to a rich patchwork of ethnic and mainstream writers. I discovered a wealth of Native American, African American, Chicano/a, gay/lesbian…literature, most of it wonderful stuff. The bad news: some of the old guard were being tossed over board to make room. William Faulkner’s overtly philosophical and self-consciously “dense” style secured him a place in the academy. To study him, profs often feel, is such a challenge that he should always remain, and besides, his works open the doors to overtly hot topics like race relations and incest….but Ernest Hemingway? Well, there’s a different story.
Hemingway’s fiction is all too often ousted as inherently misogynistic, racist, overly simple, or just plain stupid. It is rare to find an academician who will give him equal billing with his contemporary, Faulkner, much less a writer like Toni Morrison (who has herself been especially harsh in her critique of Hemingway’s work calling his heroes “Lone Rangers” and his women “Tontos all”). Where Faulkner and Morrison are applauded for their philosophical richness, Hemingway is often denigrated for his naïveté and shallowness.
So, there I was in graduate school, studying away at Faulkner and a wide-range of contemporary ethnic writers, and perfectly content that none of my lit classes offered any Hemingway—not Modern Literature, not U.S. Literature, even. Then it happened. One of my favorite professors, the distinguished poet Donald Junkins, who studied with Robert Lowell and schmoozed with the likes of Anne Sexton and Theodore Roethke, was offering a class solely on Hemingway. When my chosen class turned out to be ridiculously large (a Modern Drama class that met the same requirement as Junkins’s seminar), I reluctantly enrolled in his Hemingway class.
We’d meet in Don’s office. He made us read with extreme care and gave us an essay question to write on every week for the first of the three hours. He’d either give us an A or no grade on these. For weeks on end, I received no grade. He’d say, “Hemingway is the greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare.” Or, “Hemingway gives me courage.”
What I started to learn is that for a work of literature to be good it doesn’t need to be overtly “about” anything. It doesn’t need fancy prose, the overt insertion of abstract ideas. From the outset of the course, reading Hemingway was helping me see that the fictional work communicates in a language much closer to the way a painting or song (or fishing—yes, the fishing is coming) communicates. I started to see that what at first I thought of as “subtlety,” which I later realized was poetic clarity, and the care that Hemingway etched into his work, was finally richer than anything I’d read up to then. Reading Hemingway was like learning a new language—or rather like remembering a language you once spoke but had forgotten.
These discoveries all roughly coincided with my discovery, or re-discovery of fishing, and the beginning of my love affair with fly fishing.
The summer before I begrudgingly sat in on Don’s class, a new friend had taken me trout fishing to some small streams near Amherst. They were fast moving, hallway-wide freestoners and freshet high, and Steve showed me how to thread a worm onto a small hook and get it to drift naturally in the current where native brook trout would engulf them; later we’d cook them, one alongside the other, in a pan of lemon butter. I hadn’t been fishing since I was a boy, though from 10-14 or so it had been my primary passion in life. Now again, I became obsessed, bought my own gear and started exploring.
I soon discovered that the reservoir not 100 yards through the woods behind my house was loaded with tender, pink-fleshed, native brookies, and I frequently poached a stringer-full for dinner. Once, I stopped at a stream I’d never fished en route to a meeting at a professor’s house and landed two nice rainbows on worms. Everyone was appalled when I asked to borrow a knife and gutted them and threw their innards off into the woods and wrapped them in newspaper. “If you had seen a rabbit, would you have shot it?” one fellow graduate student asked.
Then it really happened: I rounded a bend in the Swift River and saw my first ever fly fisherman doing magic, the line stretching forward, then unfolding away behind him, his fly too small to see, the line settling down so softly, and then the barely perceptible splash on the surface and a fish on. He played the fish without even reeling, just pulled the line in with his hands and held the fish gently in the water, never even lifting him into the air, and then let him go. My creel was empty. Though trout had been feeding all around me, I couldn’t get them to take lures or bait. And not only could this guy catch them with style, he then just let them go. I had never even considered catch and release before then, but it suddenly made perfect sense, and I kept very few trout from that day forward.
Within a matter of days, I had purchased a cheap fly rod and reel and later a fly tying kit (I was too poor to afford expensive flies I frequently snapped off or lost in trees and bushes anyway). I rented some videos and checked out stacks of books, and I was off. Soon I was snatching at hatching flies, learning about the entomological trinity of fly fishing—mayflies and caddis and stoneflies—devouring all this new knowledge, knowledge so unlike anything else I was encountering in my graduate studies. This was far from the world of Derrida and Foucault, the stylized psychological novels of James and Woolf….
A life-long love for immersing myself in an ecosystem, for taking hold of the world deeply and adamantly had sprung up in me. The only analogy I can think of is falling in love; I was so lost in it (and still am). Every time I approach the water, it’s something like that first time, like that first trout I caught after so many fishless years, like seeing that fly fisherman, sitting on the banks of the Swift and watching, amazed, catching my first trout on a fly I tied myself, a poorly proportioned hornberg streamer that unraveled after hooking a stocked rainbow….
(to be continued)
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