Buck Perry's Principle Reconsidered: Do We Ever Stop Fishing?

Buck Perry, known as "the daddy of structure fishing" and much talked about during the 1970's, had a lot to say himself. Since fishing involves so much more than catching fish, inevitably his obvious principle that the purpose of fishing is to catch fish--about as tautological as anything can be--irritated me. 

Of course this is true. To fish is to try to catch: the proposition "to try to catch" is in fact embedded in the meaning of the word fishing. But I kept trying to see my way around the compulsory feeling of trying to catch, as if trying to catch is a value at all costs. Why not fill a bathtub with bass and employ a bunker snag? Or why not get temperamental and doubt yourself at points along every retrieve just to be sure you are really fishing? Is it possible to fish with grace? Or do you have kick yourself in the ass to make sure every cast "counts."

Maybe the question is: Are you an angler--a fisherman--or not? Because if you are an angler, then when do you every really stop fishing? When do you ever stop intending to catch if you are indeed a fisherman? Do you have only conscious intentions? Isn't it possible intentions keep on actively seeking objects while you are consciously occupied otherwise, or asleep? Doesn't action necessarily follow from identity? So if you are an angler, then every act of yours has no separation from fishing. 

Encounter with a 16-Inch Trout from under Route 206 Bridge makes my Evening on North Branch Raritan River

 As I drove into AT&T World Headquarters this morning at 9:30, the Pequest Hatchery people had just scooped a heaping netfull of brookies to drop from the entrance bridge. Getting back there--this time below the bridge--at 5:15, I found the place jammed like I've never seen before, took my place between a right and a left shoulder of two others, and assessed that the trout weren't cooperative. Plenty there. And that's a 20-inch or so brown I snapped a shot of as this angler beheld it before release. With low water, the trout just stayed in place as I had feared they would. None had moved up to the second bridge, and the water is so low anyhow that bottom is visible through that run.

I managed to catch one after ten minutes or so. Shortly thereafter the guy next to me caught a six-inch shiner, slammed it to the ground, and kicked it back into the North Branch where it frenetically shook with spasms of pain, then died from shock to rest belly up on the bottom. I gave the guy a fiercely disgusted look and walked off.

Every life is sacred. Fishermen who don't know this suffer from toxic dementia of some form. No, that's not to give into the lunatic professors who believe fish possess moral lives. But it is to respect all life as living, until only necessity ends it.

Judging by all the war games being played on game boxes, I guess it's going to be hip for people to kill each other pretty soon. Is life worth any better? It's always up to individuals to judge. If they can. Get caught up in a lust for power and you may be mentally disabled.

I got a call from my wife. She had left her lights on as Matt practiced baseball. So instead of driving directly to Route 206 bridge, I went to Miller Lane at the police station and gave her Civic a jump start.

Later, a 16-inch or so trout swam out from under the Route 206 bridge to nose my salmon egg and refuse. When it turned, it's side seemed like a mirror reflecting the chilly green of river water. I realized very soon that once again this spot hadn't been stocked; it hasn't for three or four years. Another guy had caught a 12-inch brown trout, and when he cleaned it, discovered pink flesh and showed me. We agreed the fish was a holdover, not from the fall either. Fall trout are at least 14-inches. And although a few breeder browns get stocked with these early brookies, as far as I know 12-inch browns don't make the scene until May.

Don't Throw Out the Baby with the Bath Water: Keep what each Decade Offers

It's a prettier spot than I saw on the South Branch Raritan today off Route 523 near Flemington, but despite what everyone else seems to say, I think water levels are great right now. The river looked beautiful, and no one fished it, nor the Neshanic River on the other side of Route 202. At any rate, I like clear water, and from my vantage in the lot above, the South Branch looked good enough to drink.

That's the Salmon River photographed. In some respects, no comparison.

As my son and I walked out the door this past Friday, I had an insight. By current social standards of cool celebrity, we could seem awful square walking out the door with snake sticks. Who goes into the outdoors to encounter creatures and photograph them?

Instead of succomb to any sort of embarrassment about it, I immediately had the idea: "Don't throw out the baby with the bath water." Each decade we pass through offers something to keep. I was born in 1960, but this was just after the 1950's when people stood ramrod straight. Developments in the 1960's progressed, and so on with each decade since, but to fail to keep what is good from each is to have learned nothing along the way.

Pre-Spawn Largemouth Bass: Blues Clues as May Approaches for Better Fishing

 Felt like I had been thrown back a month or so. Last year I began fishing Mount Hope Pond after the first week in May. Many places look like early May now, but up here above Route 80 the trees aren't green as they are elsewhere. The wind came from the northwest so strongly that 59 degrees felt cold. My whole impression felt bleak and stripped away as if the wind stole my presence of mind.

I fished a Senko-type worm all of 15 minutes on the off chance a bass would hit while staging down below these shallows where they spawn.

The contrast to how I knew this place a year ago in May drove me back to my vehicle. For those of you who had two-year-olds about 10 years ago, I took out my Blues Clues "Handy Dandy Notebook" to write a paragraph, which lifted my mood. Then I read for a half hour as I ate lunch.

Reflections on Blog Archives

Last night I went back into Litton's Lines archives to read some posts. I felt them as fresh as though written presently.

I have a friend in mind who might frown on my being publically outspoken in others more recent. He once told me that words can do more harm than nuclear weapons, a suppostion I could not agree with. He's a photographer who tends to shun language. Or maybe it's a symptom of something worse than that.

If you go back in the archives and spend some time just enjoying pieces I've written, you might agree with me that most of them are really fairly soft spoken, even when I implicate officials in "No Fishing at Merrill Creek Reservoir," for example. But on occasion I write themes that run strongly against the grain of everyday ordinary realities. If no one did, no progress could exist for the obvious reason that everyday reality is always the same. It is, without something rustling the window curtains at least.

I think what makes this particular brand--Litton's Fishing Lines--a stable, reliable source is its chief form of accounting for particular outings. I began writing very young. The first article I attempted to write got published in what was then The New Jersey Fisherman at age 16. By age 18, 25 stories of mine had been published, one of them in the world's largest circulation fishing magazine at the time Fishing World. Those are chiefly how-to and where-to. For Litton's Lines my accounts of outings celebrate themes just as particular as the score. If you enjoy an intangible contact high, that's because I embed universals, but I always do so in ways inherent to the experience recalled. I recall the line about today's Tom Sawyer getting high on "you," the rock band Rush's lilting exclamation. I think these words of the song are sort of silly, but that's about what contact high amounts to. The strict definition is that a contact high is a psychological transference from someone under the influence of drugs. I find that conception way too limiting. It's not a drug that's essential to such suggestiveness, but personal presence; whether involving a drug or not, we all know the experience of being turned on by someone.

When I remember my beginnings, I never fail to be grateful to getting published early, because it seems to have ensured that I will always write with freshness--that is, youthfulness and vigor, and if I seem to go over the top sometimes, this is not really because I lack ordinary sensibility, but because I have spent 35 years writing constantly to have produced a life of my own that is tiered rather than level on the flatland of the moment. I see possibilities people I know do not see. And I try my best to relate them, to make a contribution.

That doesn't mean I see none of the possibilities they see.

Opening Day Early Morning Trout Fishing among Hills Catching Plenty Trout

We fished for about an hour-and-a-half this morning, all to hold my son's interest. Instead of fishing our local river, the North Branch Raritan flowing through our hometown, Bedminster, we rode out to Lambertville, stopped in Stockton to get coffee (Matt asleep), and over the Wickecheoke Creek State Highway 29 bridge, turned right and headed up CR 519 to Locatong Creek.

Sunny and chilly, I had noticed ice formations on the hood of my car loading up earlier, but no matter, the air calm and slowly warming, above all streams in perfect shape invited us in. I think perhaps next year we'll fish for hours because my son felt impressed by our success. We haven't done so well on the North Branch Opening Day, and I really want to wander around these hills again.

Maybe not as interesting as those to the north, these lower ranges of the Highlands, if technically they aren't that--I'm not certain--are part of my exploration, or reorientation since I spent a lot of time here between Lambertville and Milford in my teens. Once I got my driver's license, I used to drive my dad's BWM four speed around tight, rolling turns up here a lot, up there from the vantage of Lawrence, and catch hundreds of trout.

Not much further north, the Pohatcong rushes to the Delaware and the Musconetcong River just above. But my brother Rick discovered the Pohatcong and must have caught close to a thousand trout between himself and his friend Dennis. With those two streams you know you're in the Highlands.

So three trout for Matt and 17 for his dad, 20 total, and enough for a great dinner tonight and more in the freezer, although we did not take two limits. I was just too tired to fix a late breakfast. I really need to get to bed early before getting up early. Matt called his little 9 1/2-incher too small and put it back.

Plenty trout will be in the streams this spring, but very, very few holdover in these Hunterdon County streams and these very few that do apparently remain dependent on a very few groundwater seepages or springs during summer. I've seen it happen in Stony Brook, Mercer County with spring water five inches deep in a little backwater off the main flow. Three trout in August with their dorsal fins virtualy out of the water.

Hiking New Jersey Highlands, Photographing Plants, Fishing for Pickerel and Bass

We visited a copperhead den we discovered on our own last summer, and won't divulge the location because in this day and age we discourage collecting. We photograph what we find and let go on its way. Climbing the steep trail, I recalled a couple of months of frequently hiking a dozen or so Kittatiny Ridge trails in my late 30's. Then I viscerally remembered what it was like to hike in my teens and 20's. When I hiked 150 miles or so of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina at age 23, the shape this beat me into by completion really amazed me. I remember having filled my pack with food at a crossroads and just blowing by day hikers without packs at two or three times their walking speed, hiking 20 miles a day with ease among peaks 5000 to more than 6800 feet. I was a clam treader then, earning my living by selling to the wholesale market and had to struggle for each clam by more and less jogging backwards for four or five hours a day, but this didn't beat hiking with a heavy pack among the highest mountains of the Eastern United States for getting in shape. At age 38 I felt as if I had lost the world by comparison. But at 51 I no longer feel directly what it was like in my 20's, but for a number of years now I don't have a difficult time climbing a steep trail. I just bear down, persistently breathe in a controlled way, and keep my awareness centered low at my diaphragm where it helps generate the will to overcome the rising altitude. I am steady on my feet and I never complain.

When I've been up in the mountains awhile--even for an hour so long with intense interests exercised--I am elevated to reason beyond stresses amounting to coercive forces which distort people's (mine too) being and tend to make us less than fully human. My being a writer, you might suppose that I should hike into the mountains a lot with pen and notebook to catch that reason, but this isn't the point. Writing always implies a certain amount of volume--it's a way of making a world in words--while this mountain awareness is lean. I haven't much desire to assert it beyond ascending the next ridge and taking keen interest in observations; it has happiness in a lightness of being. I think environmentalism is, above all, the reasoned experience of environments rather than political dealings, although this of course includes environments in which politics are practiced.

We visited a large vernal pool. I actually did expect to see frogs. We did not, but plenty of eggs are ready to hatch. We saw a pair of wood ducks, very exciting for me, but for Matt they stirred only ascenting indifference, since he keeps his focus on reptiles and amphibians (and fish for the catching). 

Without snakes about, I took intense interest in emmerging plants and related this to my son. "I'm not into plants," Matt said.

"I was the same at your age," I said. "As you grow old, your mind expands."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." I smiled broadly.

A book I purchased over the winter at Scherman-Hoffman Wildlife Sanctuary's New Jersey Audubon Society nature center where Matt and I volunteer care for reptiles, Hiking the Jersey Highlands by George Pettty, is one I need to read and have meant to read for months now. I really began to fall in love with this whole region last year. The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area has been special for my hiking since age 17 and many times since, but now I want to know everything about all the Highlands and Ridge.

We hiked out, went to the Jefferson Diner, real cool place. Calamari for me, cheeseburger for Matt, good conversation, and then off to Ryker Lake by a roundabout route on roadways and through towns I've never visited.

Matt caught a bass; I caught three pickerel in under an hour. We missed a couple of others. One of them had struck explosively at the surface, this despite heavy wind (whitecaps on a 30-acre lake) from the northwest under cloudless sky, temperatures somewhere in the 50's.