A Fishing Tale

Nash Williams and a clean water bass (Williams family photo) ROGER WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY

Even the great Russian writers talked about fishing.

Take Leo Tolstoy. Although fishing is arguably about peace (so is war, which doesn’t make it defensible), he didn’t do it in “War and Peace,” but instead in the novel, “Anna Karenina.”

There, he said about one of his characters, “He liked fishing, and seemed to take pride in being able to like such a stupid occupation.”

But what do the Russians know? The great Florida writers consider fishing too, and one would think they know what they’re talking about. “Fishing is boring unless you catch an actual fish,” Dave Barry said. “And then it is disgusting.”

Greater than the Russian writers and Florida writers put together, however, is Mark Twain, who only talked about fishing when he was actually talking about the art of telling lies.

“Do not tell fish stories where the people know you. Particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish,” he advised.

You can take that wisdom to the bank — the offshore bank or the riverbank, either one — the next time you decide to go fishing. It’s a sport, an art, an addiction, a meditation and sometimes just an effort to put supper on the table.

Roger Williams

Fishing is like prayer, except you can come away with food in hand. Teach a man to pray, and you teach him to starve. Teach a man to fish, and you’re teaching him to tell big stories. Women are usually too smart to starve or tell fishing stories.

All that’s the easy part. People who fish — men and women who use it either as a commercial enterprise to put food on the tables of countless folks they’ll never see, or those who fish for the personal pleasure of the act first, and the harvest second — must have the same starting place nowadays whether they like it or not.

That makes fishing more complicated than it used to be. Before people fish in this particular Florida, all of them need to consider how the fish got there, and what the fish need to stay there — what it will take for the fish to be there the next time they go, or anyone goes.

By that reasoning, a fish story is now a water quality story, just as a water quality story is an environmental story, just as an environmental story is a story about the quality of our lives: How we live, how we expect others to live near us, on the same ground beside the same water.

Put another way: In general, you can’t have good fishing in Florida, in salt or fresh, without good seagrass or clear water. And you can’t have good grass and clear water if you don’t keep it clean and flowing naturally.

Odd as it may sound, this strikes me as true, a condition that didn’t use to matter: For better fishing, vote. Since politicians of every stripe all talk solemnly these days about how important water quality is to them — Republicans, Democrats, Independents,

Space Aliens (a party that seems to be doing especially well in Florida) — you have to decide who means it and who doesn’t, and vote accordingly.

Although the great or greatest golfer of all time, Jack Nicklaus, appeared to spend much of his life with a golf rod rather than a fishing rod in his hands — let me just call it a golf rod, not a club, since everything else should be measured by its relationship to fishing — he had this to say about it: “There are always new places to go fishing. For any fisherman, there’s always a new place, always a new horizon.”

Always a new horizon. What a beautiful life to be so free, and to carry so much hope you always have a new horizon. Fishing is the act of hoping. If you have hope — if you have a new horizon — you have everything.

I’m not as old as Mr. Nicklaus, at 85 still a Palm Beach County resident, but I may come from the last generation that got to think of fishing that way, and not in the more complicated way.

Now, the horizons include Tallahassee, and good fishing requires good politics.

Even so, fishing is still therapy, with a pole or rod that includes only “a hook on one end and a fool on the other,” as the loquacious 18th-century writer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, put it.

That would be true of me, at least.

I’ve always appreciated our 39th president, Jimmy Carter, for a number of reasons, not the least of them his own comment about fishing: “Many of the most highly publicized events of my presidency are not nearly as memorable or significant in my life as fishing with my daddy,” he once said.

I get that. One sun-spangled summer afternoon high in the Rockies I watched from a boulder perch between my mother’s knees as a stream spilled from the crags far above us like water music written with plume and spray, a snow-melt symphony composed in rapids and pools. Dad used flies and bright red salmon eggs beneath a blue bowl sky to bring five fat trout out of the flowing magic of the world, looking my way occasionally, his lips moving in explanations I couldn’t hear over the roar.

Each fish went into a creel and later emerged from a frying pan, the young world and the clean water finally slipping into night, and dreams.

That moment has always reminded me of something Norman Maclean once said in “A River Runs Through It,” his epiphanic novella:

“In our family,” he wrote, “there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.” ¦

The post A Fishing Tale first appeared on Fort Myers Florida Weekly .