Rainbow Trout Round Valley Reservoir at the Surface

Each time I reeled the m & m (marshmallow and mealworm) rig in, the two marshmallows tore off the hook and floated to the calm surface, and trout took them within seconds. If flycasters could get the needed range, I think they would have caught rainbows left and right, possibly some browns by now too. As for everyone else with shiners under bobbers and m & m's floated off bottom, I heard of one trout caught.

We saw more than a dozen leap in an hour's time. And more that tailed at the surface over 10 or 15 feet of water like permit or bonefish on shallow flats. I've never seen this happen before. I've seen plenty cruise in very shallow water, but not oriented to the surface over the depths. 

Enlightenment for the Sake of my Novels: Eternal History and Being Down to Earth

Put out a line at Round Valley Reservoir. In an hour's time I saw one rainbow almost caught. A couple of them cruised by in water almost too shallow to cover their backs.

Thought I might have to take a long hiatus from my work on the novel, but I came right back around after spending time in the 5th dimension or whatever you want to call it. About two months ago I told my brother Rick that I would be toast if I didn't fish. I really need to get my feet wet and I never complain that my boots stink. They seem clean as a whistle.

Some achieve enlightenment for enlightenment's sake, but hiking boots represent what is more important to me. Life on earth. I think of the entire event of the last week or so as having informed my novel; that's what it was all about. I intend to finish it and continue on with other works I have in mind. There was a lot more to the experience than I may put into words, but the point is that I do have a purpose as an artist rather than being someone divested of endeavor for the sake of God.  

Drama of the Orange Monk: Temptation, Resistance, and Release

 Haven't fished since the 13th, with Landolfi. Thought I would put in a playful post that might make sense as a little game. No big deal, just a little fun.

Our featured animal in the photos is an oyster cracker, also known as an orange monk, related to monkfish prized for the table. Supposing that a monk represents certain possibilities, rather than that these ultimately existential realities are limited to monastic life, I have caught on film an analogy to a drama of force and temptation.

But look how our little fish came out of being surrounded in the attempt to get the hook out. I snapped a picture of a smiling orange monk just before the line was cut and fish released. 

Round Valley Reservoir and Ancient Greece: Shoreline Rainbow Trout in Abundance

 With the camera I told a Bedminster friend--after my son's recent football game loss--never loses, I shot these photos. Interjection--my natural grammar (lack of it!!!) is ancient Greek. That's how I spoke in my teens. Very often. And it's how I wrote before revision, and grammar is still difficult. Ancient Greek is a straight line.

Surprised by best neighbor friend arriving on the scene. He's the guy in the photo below, blown away by the energy in the air. Steve and I have no plans at all but the agreement that another fortuitous lunch meet at the reservoir would be nice, my getting some more photos than I have today.

The Western Dream is gloriously more than west of the continental divide.

One of the anglers shore fishing rainbows called me over from my perch where I photographed. A whole school of close to a dozen rainbows, the largest about 20 inches, foraged in the broken whitecaps, the sediment roiled by the blow from the south. 70 degrees. Right there. Eight feet from my legs. You can make them out in my last shot.

Why Ayn Rand Despised Ronald Reagan and What Capitalism Really Is

Litton's Line expands upon angling. I didn't anticipate with the first post that the blog would communicate so many ranging ideas, but I am well aware it's still only a blog. I type very little compared to what I pen in notebooks.

I read Atlas Shrugged in Brant Beach, New Jersey, at age 21, and felt very pleased that Ayn Rand: 1. Voiced an appreciation for given nature through her character Rearden. I would expect this. All true creators begin with elemental nature, and as far as I know, all have personally spent time in the wilds to absorb nature. 2. I felt distinctly thrilled that a woman is described fishing in Galt's Gulch.

But I felt much more than thrilled to later read of clammers in The Simplest Thing in the World. A deep level of plot suggests itself. Living in Brant Beach during the summer of 1982 when I read Atlas, I clammed to earn a living, and I held commercial licenses for each of 13 years beginning 1980. Long Beach Island, New Jersey, became my home and yet sort of an outpost from which I would later return to live in mainstream society, my purpose at the shore to study and write. I had come upon some of Rand's works on my mother's bookshelf during that first summer of 1980 doing this self-employed work. I took her novella Anthem back to Beach Haven Crest to read. 

No reading experience before or after has ever enthralled me to such intense degree. When I enrolled at St. John's College, Annapolis, for the spring semester of 1982, one of my fellow "Febbies" (students who enrolled in the spring) made a sarcastic comment about how stupidly simple Anthem is. I find it lean, spare, and direct with an amazing power to elevate, if you are young and know what it's like to be marginal for being intellectually gifted.

Rand herself never liked that description of giftedness. Her whole emphasis is on what we achieve, not on what is given to us, and yet each of us is born with a given potential, and I think it's important to begin with that and honor it as a birthright. 

This primary motivation from native consciousness connects me with the ultimate substance of originality. Postmodernism claims nothing original can be done anymore, but this misses the point. Originality is a matter of beginning anew from fundamental truths, which Rand encourages her readers to grasp. Ultimately, it's not a matter of truths restated in pastiche arrangements, but an act of union with what Rand named the metaphysically given, and fishermen call the great outdoors. 

I wrote a paper at Hampshire College on Ingmar Bergman's character Isak Borg in the film Wild Strawberries, a title which might obliquely recall The Beatles, but for me the theme of Borg's alienation from nature became readily apparent, and though the paper came as a surprise to my instructor, John Roosevelt Boettiger, he lavishly praised it as thorough and insightful. Boettiger happened to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandson, and even though my politics were and are radically pro-capitalist, rather than quite liberal as FDR began the tradition, John and I began a dialogue I wish had gone further. 

More important than capitalism as a system of produce and money, the system of the mind begins at the bottom, not at an indoctrinated top tier cut off from origins. 

I think the question of our times involves whether we will regain original substance, whether we will unify with nature and create culture and civility, or whether we will collapse like a top-heavy skyscraper with no grounding on bedrock.   

Most of the stay I mentioned at the shore, we clammers shelled it out during the Reagan years, and it never surprised me that before her death in 1982, Rand utterly despised him. I don't think this indicates her "alienation from reality," as came out in a published conversation between Nathanial Branden and someone else I don't recall. Reagan was a conservative. Rand clearly not a conservative, but a radical. The fitting definition for radical she offered is common in dictionaries. It means, "to the root," a metaphor for the origins of nutritional substances. And although an actor, Reagan's affinity with art and philosophy is dubious. Even though I came upon a writing sample of Reagan's in Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte that moved me as revealing a poignant gift for experience portrayed in poetic language, why, I ask, is no President like Thomas Jefferson present in today's world, or Abraham Lincoln with his profound literary grasp? And though I read Theodore Roosevelt's The Strenuous Life with trepidation for what I felt to be an inflated assertiveness--after all, that life didn't last long--he was a man of passion, literature, science and the outdoors. 

Rand made it abundantly clear that every human being has affinity for art in order to have any motive and a necessity of philosophy to be able to think and guide any of those motives, and yet many conservatives lack profoundly in the personal qualities of culture that art and philosophy create. I don't mean to blame them, but enjoin them to take part. Remember that art and philosophy serve schooling secondarily. It's not as if an either/or division necessarily exists between great American can-do, on the one hand, and "books" on the other. It's not even necessary to graduate with a four-year degree to become educated. I never did. A bookshelf is needed, but never forget that Galileo implored people to learn from nature, more than he urged them to read. Nevertheless, reading is practical like anything else, and it does wonders for making the will effective at doing anything.  

Consider that personal value is ultimately intellectual and hard won, because without thought and effort, no one can emerge by any name. This is exactly why education should never be made into a game of testing, and shared essay writing, for example. The essence of capitalism is art and philosophy, for without art there is no motivation, thus no incentive--personal, business, or otherwise--since any form of driven achievement is emotional in nature while being rational in essence. Without philosophy there is no reasoning to guide any choice whatsoever.

I cannot hit the mark directly to reveal the reason of Ayn Rand's contempt for Ronald Reagan, but have a look at America today and consider judgment.

Lake Hopatcong Hybrid Stripers and the Sunglasses Story

Eventful day on Lake Hopatcong. I haven't seen Joe Landolfi since November last year because we had no ice, but I can tell we will be fishing at least once a year for many to come. I remember the two outings last year as if they happened this fall. 

Today we fished a hump out away from the shoreline, and I recognized Marty Roberts immediately, called over to him, and the fun began. He had just begun to nail small hybrids of about two to three pounds, battling them on a couple of ultra-light rods, each baited with a live herring on a simple hook and split shot rig. Anchored, he insisted on putting the bait directly down in 29 feet of water. No more, no less. Who could argue? He seemed to have a magic touch. Joe and I agreed it was uncanny; we both felt this. That depth wasn't exactly the breakline between flat bottom and the sharp rise to shore, but the graph alarm rang constantly like Christmas chimes. And constantly, Marty retrieved presents.

I had met Marty at Dick's Sporting Goods in Rockaway Township a year or so prior. I was looking for something, don't remember what. He dropped me a question about what I examined, and conversation ensued. He had read a blog just before coming there, on hybrid stripers at the lake. I told him the title of the post, just guessing.

His face lit up. Absolutely astonished, he said, "How did you know that?"

"I wrote it."

His eyes opened wide as silver dollars, "That's you!?"

Now Marty relaxed in his boat. "Bruce, fishing has a lot to do with attitude," he said. "It needs to be positive." He sat back, legs stretched over the port gunwale. I felt his leveling with me--right there and then--would be one of the best rewards of the day.

Joe and I caught a couple of hybrids, missed a couple of hits, and against Marty's advice, we prepared to move on for what Joe hoped would be six- to eight-pound fish.

"You should stay right here," Marty said.

I laughed and shrewdly pointed at restless Joe, "Marty, I'm obsessive enough to stay right here another five hours. Joe never knows where to begin." 

Joe's the veteran. He's been on Hopatcong for decades, and for a time was a large presence on the lake. He still knows an astonishing number of people here.

Marty phoned later to report four- and five-pound hybrids coming over his gunwales, and we did return, this at the end of our five or more hours in total out on the lake, although by the time the 9.9-horsepower Mariner got us there, action had slowed.

Earlier along our haphazard way, we gave a point of land scant attention by vertical jigging, but we passed through another range of water by drifting herring, wind allowing us to pass horizontal to shore. Joe was absolutely determined to teach me how to drift bait. Wildly edgy by turns of success and misfortune in life, a talented cabinet maker who ran his own business, hiring employees and enjoying a net gain of a quarter million one year, and then losing everything but black depression, he's turned his life around time and again, a man who never loses his appreciation for living, devastating depressions never convincing him going on isn't worthwhile. He never gives up. That determination is what I like best about him. The liveliness resulting from it he always contributes to an outing, and his focus of concentration is a talent in more than one respect. It includes making sure he gets across to other people by finely detailed explanations. But I'm sometimes as stubbornly skeptical as any you may find about what he says. I couldn't buy his idea that hybrids on the bottom--and walleye--would swim up from 32-foot depth to a herring passing over 17 feet up. I still don't trade my feeling about that for his. It's dark down there. Could lateral lines sense a target from that distance, given that vibrations from surface chop send even more information downward for fish to pick up, washing out a little blip from a herring? I don't know. Maybe those lateral lines and those little fishy brains are advanced enough to tell the difference. Anyway, fish marked on the sonar at 15 feet as we passed over depths twice that. Were they hybrids? Probably.

As far as I know, walleye at this time of year don't suspend, but I could be wrong. Maybe some of them do, but they seem in their element among rocks on bottom. But herring do suspend. So walleye may suspend among them; even with the lake turned over this isn't out of the question, just beyond presumptions I feel strongly about. It makes sense that herring would avoid schooling right down among rocks where walleye would typically lie, but walleye eat just about nothing but herring in Hopatcong, so maybe they do rise, even though oxygen in the depths this time of year allows them some suitable habitat, rather than open water. I don't know. But there is more to consider. Most of the rocks--schist for the most part, if I'm correct--situate shallower than 20 feet, by what I'm informed. It's not that more walleye are at bottom 20 feet or shallower this time of year, but that they don't have stone providing habitat for them in most of the deeper water, anyway. 

So.....who knows.

But I catch a lot of walleye on bottom 35 feet deep or more. Whether rock or other cover is in those depths or not, walleye hug bottom.

That stubbornness I mentioned got the better of me as we continued to drift. I let my weighted rig down to bottom on the sly and got snagged. (A bottom bouncer rig supposedly avoids this, but I used an egg sinker.)

"I have to fail first before I learn anything," I said.

I retied, committed now to adjusting my way of fishing to the one Joe insisted on.

No one I know of has failed in life to the extent I have, proportionate to potential I have always known I possess. The relatively little I have complained about it has blown back at my face, so while I may lack positive attitude in some respects, to recall Marty's observation of me, the situation isn't petty; it's a life-long refusal to get altogether indoctrinated to going styles, educational or otherwise. I like to carefully turn the table on what is commonly perceived as the truth, by a truth I have originated. Often it solves a problem. But in the big picture, it still appears as if an awful lot of solutions have to add up to my getting ahead in the eyes of the world.

Besides, when I let too much weight to bottom, I'm set back. 

We both lay back in the bottom of the boat to relax, Joe launching into one of his many fascinating stories from life. He told me half-a-dozen or so. Just before he began his best, the Sunglasses Story, I quipped that I was a little tired, and actually I was afraid the week's lack of virtually any sleep, busy at writing projects, was going to make me nuts if I didn't watch out. I drive about 1100 miles a week for my job, and while I don't complain about it--plenty to be proud of with writing efforts in addition to it--staying sane really is an issue, and while I never give in to helplessness, never let nerve fail, I do have to be careful sometimes. Have to think and act to balance what could be a lot of trouble. Thinking always gets me through to normal life again, even when it seems impossible.

Here's what it can be like in another way:

Joe dropped sunglasses into Lake Hopatcong. He swung the boat in their direction to try and retrieve them, but the water was rough and he couldn't see them as they must have suspended just under the surface. There's a reason I don't say they sank, and I will get to it. Joe's told me he can't write for beans, but he tells stories better than anyone I know. Hours in a boat after fishing years together can get interesting. A great Jewish prophet, who knew he didn't have to be a prophet to say so, said that all true living is in meeting. In other words, if you can't share stories, you're missing out in a dire way. Print doesn't offer a stage for gesture and expression, but it does allow deeper comprehension, if you will engage it, so here's the story. To lose Gucci sunglasses to a 2680-acre lake, then to catch them inadvertently the next year while trolling for muskies, alludes to another theme of age-old prophets--redemption. Something fouled the thrumming of the foot-long lure, the rod taking on a little bend, but not bouncing to the vibrant resistance of a fish, as if otherwise a perch or crappie got inadvertently snagged. Hopatcong's water mass flows, but very slowly. The sunglasses hadn't traveled very far in the direction of the Musconetcong River below the dam, but they neither floated nor sank to bottom. The plug--the lure--ran about 10 feet down, where the Gucci glasses suspended in-between surface and bottom like a fish. The event signifies how Joe manages to live by so many amazing falls and rises. Life comes back if you troll for it.

Getting those sunglasses back from a lake that big. Joe beat the odds.

On that first, long drift for those suspended hybrids I was skeptical about, we talked as a hybrid nailed my herring over about 30 feet of water. Joe's stories had revived me completely. I was no longer tired at all. Never felt pulled precipitously close to the edge, even though I could feel the possibility in me. 

Hours earlier, we had taken one of Laurie Murphy's boats out from Dow's Boat Rentals. Reality makes all the difference to living a good life. Places off the screen. The nation still struggles to recover from recession. Upon return to Laurie's shop, I said to her, "The whole country's dead."

She said, "Business is down to about 10 percent of what it used to be."

It was no occasion to be a chump and speak any words of hope. "The issue, rather than money, is fundamental. People's motivation is lacking," I said. Not long ago, I visited a 50-acre woodland preserved by Green Acres funds. I found no trails. As a boy, I explored the woods thoroughly, as did other boys from the neighborhood, trails leading through. Now they follow pathways on screens.

I changed the subject and the three of us laughed about Joe's sunglasses, the story still vividly present in Laurie's mind, as Joe had come in that day of their return happy as a high-flying kite.

My story would end well on that note, but I must explain Joe's hybrid mounts, one of them now up on the wall of a local bar where Joe knows people. But Joe didn't know Marty. For once, I knew someone on Hopatcong Joe doesn't. Just before we parted company with my acquaintance, Joe said to him, "I have two hybrid mounts on Laurie's wall, an eight-pounder and a six or seven."

"Oh, yeah!" Marty said. "Laurie gave me a mounted hybrid from the shop!"

"Oh, no!" I said. "I bet Marty has your striper!" I was laughing all the harder because I sense social connections already there before people meet. And I felt confident Joe will be on the lake at least once more this fall, while I have only more outing ahead here this year, with my son.

It's confirmed. Marty has Joe's striper. Joe took the other mount off the wall of the shop, and placed it on the back seat of my Honda Civic. I never asked why, respecting instead his personal privacy, because the one thing I knew for certain--it's his fish, his mount. After more than a decade admired by countless of Laurie's customers, I soon discovered it will spend time at McKenna's Pub near the lake. Joe directed me to the place, a favorite of his. The mount may finally grace a wall of Joe's own, but just after I snapped a photo of him with the striper, he went in and placed it high over people at the bar.  

Marty tells me I need positive attitude.

Joe caught a sunfish on a Gotcha Jigger deep.

Joe and his stories.

Small hybrid I caught while drifting.

Hybrid angler Joe had us stop to speak with.

Joe's other mount now at McKenna's.



Round Valley Reservoir Rainbow Trout in close to Shorelines

Rainbows have been in for almost two weeks at Round Valley. I saw a few caught today and Tuesday, nice 16-inchers. I put out a line both days and got no hits. But I had the dock space today, enjoyed the view greatly--being there is so much better than viewing photos--and read Bay Country by Tom Horton about the Chesapeake, the chapter on eels most fascinating yet. I learned a lot about eels as a nine-year-old, and caught many too. Tried to harvest them commercially in Little Egg Harbor years ago, but stuck to hard clams instead. 

Eels and clams go together, though.