One of my heroes, Aldo Leopold, once wrote that there were four kinds of people in the world: deer hunters, duck hunters, bird hunters and non-hunters. That pretty much sums it up alright.
I would say you could also divide the population into walleye fishermen, trout fishermen, bass fishermen and musky fishermen. I don't think there are any non-fishermen. Everybody fishes at least a little in their life and lots fish a great deal.
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| Size is relative, grandsons Raven and Quillan with 'huge' pike in 2006 |
Fishing transcends the human condition. You can be rich or poor, young or old, male or female, rural or metropolitan and you are all part of the same family of anglers.
Your equipment can be as simple as a stick or cane pole, a piece of line and a hook or as elaborate as an expensive boat, electronic depth finders and graphite fishing rods. There's nothing incongruous with the owner of the latter equipment leaving it parked at the dock while he joins the kids with the cane poles at the fishing hole on the local creek from time to time.
Just about everybody has fond recollections of their first fishing
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| Brother-in-law Ron Wink with an 'equally' impressive fish |
trip. It could have been with a brother or sister at the creek or with dad or grandpa on the lake. These are absolutely magical moments.
Fishing itself is a stream of consciousness, one out-of-body experience after another.
Casting out a bobber, hook and worm while sitting on the dock with your toes dangling in the water and seeing "faces' in the clouds overhead makes time stand still. It may take a tug on your rod to bring you back to the present.
Even if he has no formal education in physics, every fisherman understands relativity. He gets it when the kids come running to the porch out of breath and tell him that one of them briefly had an
enormous rock bass on the line, just
massive, and then illustrate by spreading their arms wide. The point is this fish was way, way bigger than the others, not literally the three feet between their little hands.
Fishermen daydream, nightdream and fantasize about their sport. They can pick up a dry fly or a popper, a spoon or a plug, a spinner or a jig in a sporting goods store in the middle of winter and know with all their being that this is going to work wonders come next summer.
We shouldn't even call it fishing. We should call it a trip to the twilight zone.
