Fishing

The other week one of my friends said that he had a sudden desire to take up fishing. This stirred something in me. I haven’t been fishing in over fifteen years. I have a rod in the garage somewhere that my Dad gave me when I was a teen. I still occasionally have dreams about fishing, at the edge of some pristine clear lake up in the mountains, by myself, casting and retrieving.

My memories of fishing are of my brother and I going with our Dad on little lakes and streams while camping around Michigan. I was an impatient little kid, asking my Dad every 2 minutes why the fish weren’t biting. I also remember the times at Uncle Cliff’s cottage where we could dip our worm baited hooks into Houseman lake and pull out so many blue gills we filled a bucket. Mostly, I remember sitting in a boat with Dad, just sitting, the water still as glass.

I know that memory distorts and it probably didn’t seem so serene at the time, and I am annoyed by people who treat their childhood like it was perfect and can’t seem to let go of a rose-colored view of their past, but these kind of moments, perfect or not, are something I’d like to pass on to my children. When my friend mentioned that he had a sudden desire to go fishing, I immediately remembered Oregon’s free fishing weekend was coming up soon.

There was an event at the Bonneville hatchery in the gorge that had some stocked ponds and a bunch of fishing tips for kids. It sounded perfect. We didn’t even have to bring our own rods. It was a sunny day and there was already a line of parents and kids 100 yards long when we got there at 9am. Before the kids could drop a line in the water they had to go through several stations where they were supposed to learn some basic fishing lore, like water safety or fish identification or how important it is to remove your trash from your fishing spot. After each nugget of fishing wisdom was bestowed the kids waved their “fishing passports” to get stamped by the friendly volunteers. It was similar to events at the zoo, or the science center, or the summer reading program at the library, or other organized fun activities. The kids are corralled along a path, wait in lines, ingest the required fun/learning, get validated, and get prizes at the end (stickers!) After 2 hours of this they were allowed to wait in one last line for their chance to pull a rainbow trout out of a small stocked pond, with dozens of other kids fishing at the same time. The were allowed 20 minutes. If they didn’t catch a fish, they could go back to the end of the line for another shot. (My daughter caught one right away, but my son wasn’t as lucky. We did not wait for a second chance as at this point the line was so long that we would have been there another hour just waiting for his turn.)

I suppose they got something out of it, after all, they didn’t complain the whole time and genuinely seemed to enjoy themselves, but, to me, the whole experience had nothing to do with any of my nostalgic feelings about going fishing. When I was a kid I don’t remember going to anything like this, we just went fishing and my Dad tried to teach us what to do. When I was a kid and we went to the zoo, I don’t remember going on any scavenger hunts or collecting facts about animals, we just looked at the animals. If we wanted to learn about them we read the sign or listened to the speaker or checked out some books about them at the library later. I don’t remember any summer reading program at the library because we didn’t need to be bribed to read.

And I know this is my fault. It’s easier for me to go to something like this than planning a fishing trip and making sure we have the right gear and packing food and driving a long time to get there and knowing they will get bored after and hour or two. Packaged fun. It’s insidious and vexing and too damn convenient. It’s frozen dinners and delivery/takeout. It’s video games and playdates.