On Fishing (Not Catching)

This past summer, I became unexpectedly obsessed with fishing. I'm not sure how it started, but, like most things that take over my curiosity, before I knew it I was starting to see fishing everywhere. Fishing documentaries and clips were appearing on my streaming and social media feeds. I dreamt about standing in rivers, of golden fish with human features. Teenagers would materialize on the side of the road before me carrying backpacks and fishing rods, laughing as if they were all in on some joke. In May, on a post-hike drive, my friend Steve said, unprompted, “I’ve been kind of getting into fishing.”

“Actually, so have I,” I said, shocked.

Before I knew it, I was reading my name on a laminated fishing license, becoming an angler in the eyes of the state, and putting together a “starter set” of bait and tackle with the guy at my local shop. And not long after that, Steve and I had our hooks in the water of a local pond, with smiles not unlike those teenagers’.

Here's the catch (see, I'm even using fishing puns): Despite the many videos and documentaries; the training guides; the knots I've learned and practiced; the methodical research into the feeding preferences of trout, bass, and pike; the studying of water charts and weather patterns, in search of the best times of day to fish; the podcast episodes listened to on the subway, with titles like “How Trout Smell”; the hours spent watching water go from cloudy to glassy to cloudy again, trying a variety of baits and lures, making hundreds of casts, to the point that I'd return home with a knot in my shoulder and an hours-long tension headache—despite all of this, I still haven't caught a fish. And I'm starting to think that may be beside the point.

Fishing often gets lumped in with your typical sports, equating the number of fish caught with points scored. There are TikTokers who livestream, setting up four rods at a time on a riverbank trolling with live bait, waiting for their rods to twitch in the reflection of their front-facing cameras. On live, they brag about the dozens of catches they've made, the massive sizes of the fish. But to me, fishing seems like something else, with its beautiful landscapes, serene nature sounds, and its varying degrees of ritual and practice. To those of us who haven't caught anything, fishing might feel more like a meditation or an artistic endeavor. It's about craft, understanding the technique. It’s about patience, and more patience, frustration at your many failures, taking part in the method until you have exhausted yourself to an ending. Maybe catching a fish then feels less like scoring a point and more like publishing a book, removed from the process of writing itself. This only comes long after the writing has finished, when you’ve taken on the exhaustive sport of agent queries and submission portals, long spans of doubt and silence, waves of rejection and self-loathing, until finally, with the luck of hooking a rainbow trout after the end of a hatch, you get an acceptance; and when the book comes out—a year, two years down the line—and you unbox it for the first time, you will be holding something new, with only the distant memory of the practice that got you there.

Thinking back on how quickly this new hobby rushed in on me and became a part of my life, it was as if the pieces were always out there, and I was blind to them, and something about the circumstances of that time—summer, loneliness, working a corporate job in the city—led me to make sense of its wholeness. What is it about the algorithm of our lives that seems to take these hidden strands from out of our purview, one at a time, and slowly weave a fabric of something that feels real and so close you have no choice but to cloak yourself in it?

“Frequency illusion,” or the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, is a cognitive bias in which a person notices a specific concept, word, or product more frequently after recently becoming aware of it. Scientists seem to lay the cause of this on a combination of “selective attention,” the idea that we are constantly filtering what we pay attention to, and “recency illusion,” when noticing something new leads us to become more aware of that thing, thus increasing the odds of us paying attention to it in the near future. But this clinical diagnosis deflates the actual experience of Baader-Meinhof. How mystifying it feels when you discover an obscure band you love, and three days later you overhear a random couple talking about that band, and a week after that, in a passing conversation with a coworker, they mention how they saw that band live three years ago, and—have you heard?—they just announced a tour with a stop in your city. It’s these invisible threads that are constantly running between us that makes us feel connected: to art, to each other, to something deeper. In a way, noticing these strands, and putting them to use, is a creative way to live.

Around a campfire in early June, Steve and I were talking about creativity and our obsessive qualities, how we both tend to get taken over by new hobbies. I asked him if he thought he was a creative person. He said, “No, I don't think I am.” Later, though, I wondered: what is creativity other than starting and learning over and over? To create is to always be a beginner. Even if you’ve written a book’s worth of short stories, the next story will present its own set of challenges. Therefore, in fishing, each cast can be considered a creative act, and much like in art, it's about the process as much as the end goal. It's about the quieting of yourself––your stresses, worries, judgements––and immersing yourself in the act. Standing in the river, watching water, hearing the collective popping of the rushing current, seeing how a blue gill headbutts an artificial worm or a bass smugly passes your lure, always keeping an eye on it, before snatching back at it, you begin to think like a fish and not a human. And what comes out of this meditation? Often, it's self-realization. If I can observe the way a fish avoids the hook, ignoring a cheap meal, then maybe I can learn how to avoid the hooks in my own life. Or maybe I'm just making excuses for not yet catching a fish. But, it is this feeling of immersion, of the dampening of the self and the connectedness to the environment that keeps me coming back to the river. While catching a fish might be nice, you end up tossing it back anyway, with an empty hook to cast again.

This essay originally appeared in Barrelhouse Buzz, the monthly newsletter from Barrelhouse Magazine. Subscribe here.