Gone Fishing

I don’t really care much about fishing. I like the idea of it, and I’m happy to have people around me doing it, but I don’t get my hands dirty very often. My husband grew up fishing, and it is a part of his life that he enjoys. He has made it a part of our family life.

In one famous bit of family lore, he and a friend went on a backpacking trip in the Sierra when they were teens. The plan was to catch and eat fish the whole time so they wouldn’t have to carry food for the long trip. They caught plenty of trout, but after ten days, they had more than their fill of fish.  When they got back to the trailhead, they had a little money with them, so they bought as much candy they could in the camp store and devoured it while they waited for their ride home.

His taste for trout came back, and one summer before we had kids we stayed with friends at their cabin in the mountains. On a hike, the guys found a little pool in the stream where some brook trout had gotten trapped. They caught them with their hands by cornering them and flipping them out onto the sandy shore. I’m pretty sure that is frowned upon by the forest service, but we grilled and ate the evidence–it was delicious.

My husband was excited to teach our kids how to fish, so we took our young daughters–four and two–to a place called Trout Haven in Estes Park, Colorado while we were vacationing there one summer. It had a little pond stocked full of fish. Catching fish was guaranteed.

They outfitted the girls with kid-sized poles and provided the bait. Our oldest daughter, wearing her Beauty and the Beast outfit, and the younger one in purple patterned leggings and matching flowered top, danced with excitement while dad put bait on the hooks and showed them how to cast the line into the pond. Our third daughter, who was one, was in a backpack on his back, craning her neck to see everything, her cheeks rosy with excitement.

When they felt a tug that meant a fish had taken the bait, the girls called loudly for dad, who scooped the fish into a net and helped them plop the slippery, shiny, wriggling trout into a bucket of water. After they caught a few, the fish were measured–they charged by the inch–and taken to the on site restaurant where they cleaned and cooked them for us. We ate the fish we had just caught at a table overlooking the pond.

Another summer years later, at a beautiful mountain lake near Tahoe, our 6-year-old daughter was perched on a rock with her line in the water when she got a nibble. She stood up, yelled for someone to help her with the net, and flopped into the water. Whether it was a very big fish or the excitement of catching something that made her lose her balance, we don’t know. We pulled her out, sputtering and embarrassed, from the shallow, cold water.

My husband took up fly fishing for a while, inspired by inheriting his great grandfather’s old bamboo fly rods and hand-tied flies. On camping trips, he left the kids and me sleeping in the camper while he ventured out before dawn to fish. I don’t know if he caught much, but being out in the middle of a quiet, scenic river was the most of the enjoyment anyway.

One time in Yellowstone, he waded into the cold water on a late afternoon to fish, and when he got back to camp, he took off his wet cutoffs and hung them outside. The next morning, we found them frozen stiff; when we took them off the line they stood up on their own, looking like they had frozen where he stepped out of them.

For the last several years, Pinecrest Lake has been the site of the Men’s Fishing Trip over Memorial Day Weekend. The Hanawalt men tie our red three-man canoe on top of the car, stop by Safeway for provisions, and take to the hills for the long weekend. Sometimes they catch enough to bring trout home for the women folk, but even on low-catch years, there are tales of bravado: finding a secret fishing hole with the big ones–the lunkers–in it, paddling furiously across the lake in wind and rain to get back before dark, and of course, the story of the one that got away.

The girls and I sometimes plan our own weekend activities since we aren’t  included in the fishing and stogie trip. This year we went wine-tasting in Sonoma. I don’t think they would bar us from coming if we wanted to; the early enthusiasm the girls showed for fishing has waned, though, and they’d rather spend the weekend doing something else.

After fishing with a friend on a backpacking trip recently, our youngest son complained that his friend knew how to fish, but he wasn’t a fisherman–he threw the line in, didn’t get anything, and gave up. Stocked ponds aside, that’s not how it works.

The mark of someone who fishes isn’t how many he’s caught, but how many hours he’s willing to wait around for that little tug on the line. Maybe the reason fishing  holds appeal for some and not others is the pace of it. Fishing slows you down; it’s a sport that is more about the company and the surroundings than the action. That’s the part of it that I resonate with, and I can share those benefits by just going along for the ride.