“Toilet trout,” my mother pronounced dismissively, shortly
before we became separated and I spent the rest of the afternoon riding around
on the “Lost Child” train at the 1964 World's Fair. The first trout I ever
caught came from a long, murky concrete pool under a blazing sun. I'd quickly
tired of the dark, endless procession past the Pieta and had begun clamoring
for another Belgian waffle; my mother noticed this less than bucolic diversion
on the way to the waffle stand and might have thought the change of pace would
shut me up. For a dollar or two I was handed a rudimentary pole with a fixed
length of line at one end, baited with a dab of rancid bacon. Directed by the
carny in charge to take my place along one side of the pool, it was only a
matter of moments before one tiny, stunned and torpid trout took the bait. I
don't recall what happened to that specimen; I hope I didn't carry him around
in a baggie on my lap as I rode about the Fair despairing of ever seeing my
family again.
I'd been fishing once before with Mom, from
a rented rowboat on the lake in Central Park where I caught something
primordial on a square of stale bread, some godforsaken chub or grunion. “Sewer
salmon,” my mother had called it as we watched the thing expire in the bilge,
neither willing to risk a touch. I'd missed a trip to Lake Kabetogama for
walleye with my father and brother because I'd come down with chicken pox after
spending a week at my stricken brother's bedside in an effort to contract the
disease. This was the home remedy for vaccination in the dark ages; he got well
and joined my Grandfather in Minnesota, I stayed home in bed with the pox.
Neither of these fishing trips did much to instruct nor edify; I'd had the
experience, found it wanting and remained entirely and blissfully ignorant of
the sport's finer points for the next twenty years.
My cousin,Ted, had two tackle boxes. One
was stuffed with shiny lures designed to attract striped bass and bluefish, the
other contained a variety of exotic inebriants sufficient to lure me into
accompanying him on a hike around the Point as a sort of fish-caddy, toting
what seemed an inordinate amount of poles, gaffs and gear on what I assumed
would be a fruitless, if not entirely unpleasant adventure. Cresting the dunes
that afternoon we came upon an unholy din, a sky full of screeching gulls and
terns above rolling waves of boiling bass and bluefish. Quickly casting a line,
Ted thrust the pole at me, “Reel it in! Reel it in! No....you're upside down,”
he shouted, “your left hand! The handle thingy!” I managed a few awkward turns
on the reel before the whole convoluted business stopped dead in the water. “I
think I'm stuck, “ I yelled back at Ted, “on a rock....Or on the bottom. Help,
I'm stuck!” Over the smoking shriek of the line peeling off his own reel, Ted
screamed back, “That's no rock, you ignoramus; that's a fish!”
This was no toilet trout, no small and
soiled grunion. After maybe half an hour of trading line with the beast, during
which Ted leaped about beside me calling out encouragement and instruction, the
massive striper rolled up into view within the foam at the foot of the rocks.
We gaffed her and killed her – we knew nothing of putting fish back in those
days – and dragged her through the bayberry and rugosa to the antique, hooked
hardware scale I'd never noticed on the porch. My first striper came in at
thirty-seven pounds and, as every fish story must contain a potential lie, I'll
offer this: each fish I caught for the remainder of that summer weighed in at
thirty-seven pounds. It wasn't until the last huge cow, bigger than all the
rest, that I hung a cinder-block from the scale and discovered it was broken.
But I was hooked and I fished non-stop, rain or shine, learning a bit more on
each outing, developing copious notes and theories concerning tides and times,
nooks and crannies and the deeper instincts of big fish.
My mother and I started fishing together
again; she in search of a fillet for Champagne Sauce while I tried to satisfy a
jones so monumental that I couldn't look at a storm-drain puddle in mid-town
Manhattan without thinking I'd seen a rise. One calm and sunny afternoon we
were fishing the Bluff, about a dozen yards apart, when I hooked and landed a
small striper. We'd finally learned to release fish, and as I reached down to
slip him off the hook, I noticed this little fellow had what appeared to be
about four inches of chartreuse electrical wire protruding from the flesh
around the gill. I carefully carried him over to Mom and she tried gently to
work the wire free without success. Perhaps he ate the wire thinking it was
some eel fry or other larval creature, we theorized, and the copper had slowly
worked its way out as the flesh grew in around it. In any event, he seemed
otherwise OK and, as I slipped him into the foam at my feet I remarked that
we'd taught a young and not particularly bright fish a valuable lesson; he
wouldn't be fooled by a lure again for quite a while. Ten minutes later Mom
caught him. In the days and weeks that followed we caught that poor little fish
a dozen times. My cousin caught him. My brother caught him. My father, who
hadn't caught a fish since the trip to Kabetogama, caught him. Unaccustomed as
we were to any bass this size – there had been some news about restoration
efforts and tagging schoolies in the Chesapeake, but we'd never seen fish much
smaller than a coffee table out here – we figured the babies might just be
inordinately dumb, or so intent upon our lures as to be insensitive to the
relentless pain of the treble-hook. By summer's end nearly everyone in town had
heard about or caught and released what had become known as “our” fish, and
anglers up and down the rocky coast of Maine were re-jiggering their tackle and
re-figuring their time-tested theories.
One afternoon in late September I got a
call from my cousin Richard. He was on a pay-phone at the Baltimore Aquarium
where he'd taken his kids while on a trip to the area. “ I had to call.”
Richard said. “I'm standing here, as we speak, looking at a giant tank of
striper schoolies. There must be a thousand fish in there,” he added, “ and
every single one of them has a chartreuse wire tag hanging off its side.”
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