The Seasonable Angler by Nick Lyons

Author:Nick Lyons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

4/Family Interludes

He that views the ancient ecclesiastical canons shall find hunting to be forbidden to churchmen, as being a toilsome, perplexing recreation; and shall find angling allowed to clergymen, as being a harmless recreation, a recreation that invites them to contemplation and quietness.

—IZAAK WALTON

Though the relationship of an avid fisherman to his family may be said to have no season, or to be always "in season," it reaches the peak of its intensity—or aggravation—in the very height of the trouter's year.

There are, I am sure, innumerable arcane and esoteric reasons for this.

But the safe pragmatic reason is simply this: the trout-fisher is at his moment of greatest self- and trout-absorption—and least resistance; and his family, flourishing under the beneficence of his year long support and devotion, and the ideal weather, is at maximum strength.

Days are long; children are indefatigable; wives acquire an alarming propensity for shopping and house-hunting and “just walking together, like a real family, in the park.” In the early days I did not have an ally among them, and my secret fishing life suffered much at the hands of my family.

There were the little things: two missing barred- rock necks that turned up under Anthony-the- thief’s pillow; a notorious departure from the Schoharie in the midst of a massive Hendrickson hatch, after I had waited three hours for it to appear (my wife called them “Morgans” and pleaded that we leave “this bug-infested place”); innumerable engagements that took precedence; irony; caustic wit to the effect that “grown men” did not act in the ridiculous way I acted about trout. I must be painfully truthful about it, for it all reached a crisis, a momentous crisis, in an incident still painful to recall.

My fishing friends say I am too generous with women and little children. Perhaps. For I suppose Mari, Paul, Charles, Jennifer, and Anthony owe their survival of that Fathers’ Day trip to my extraordinary equanimity. I am not at all sure how I survived.

The spring, troutless and city-bound that year, had been long, but Fathers’ Day weekend was longer.

We left in a flurry, all six of us, on Friday, but despite my best efforts, my speed and my scheming, it was still too late even to make the latest moments of the evening rise on the closest streams. So I settled into a family habit of mind, decided to bide my good time, and set about enjoying a harmless day of visiting friends and swimming on Saturday. After that we could easily fulfill the most prominent of our trip’s simple purposes: as I had engineered my wife into saying, “A few solid hours of fly-fishing for Dad—poor Dad, who never gets out on the streams anymore because he loves us so much.”

Not that I believed her, or had much confidence that at this particular season of my married life I would actually get to drop a few flies—but her gesture seemed sincere and I took it at face value. “A turning point,” I thought with quiet satisfaction.

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