THE CLUB
I first fished on sand-bottomed creeks.
This was in up-north Michigan, where cold water glides around hardwood snags, and beneath the cedar vaults, which, on the straight runs, felt like Christian canopy, arching and dark. A sanctuary. So I began to think of rivers as holy places. They were silent and shadowed, yet light pierced the wooden tracery, bars of hope and color through summer stained-glass.
Like church, fishing was a contradiction. A ten-year-old boy did not know the word. He didn’t need to. He felt it pressing down; heavy timbers of discipline, commanding devotion—and then, in a flash, it sent him soaring when a fish would take the fly. Moments of elation to him, and of deliverance from the preparation: attaching the leader, stringing the rod, and trudging a mosquitoed path to places where a fish might be. Tying on the fly, the boy might make a hundred lonely casts along the soft grass bank. But then: The ecstasy of the strike and the play, of bringing the trout to net, and marveling at the jewel-box of topaz and sapphire spread along its flank. Fishing was salvation beyond the life of school and chores.
In those years my father stood behind me, both of us on the bank above the shallows. He would sister his arm to mine, his hand on my hand with his elbow pressing gently, flattening my arm to my side. He instilled good habits from the start. He did not use Maclean’s four-count rhythm, for A River Runs Through It had not been published yet. The slow pulse of his casting motion—mostly wrist—was an effortless lyric. The conductor and the music and a slow baton tempo, a harmony of line and water.
We fished mostly on a small spring creek, even though it was called the Little
