People have told me I’d catch more fish if I did more fishing and less screwing around.
While I’m fishing, I mean.
My erstwhile father-in-law, Keith Keltgen, told me that.
My outdoor buddy John Cooper told me that.
Even that silver-throated minister of the great outdoors, Tony Dean, told me that. And Tony could have some pretty drifty moments himself with a fishing rod in hand.
I know focus and persistence produces fish. And sometimes it does for me. But it’s easy to get distracted when you’re out with a fishing rod on some pretty stretch of stream or piece of lake or pond. So, if there’s a gap in the action, I tend to fill it with something other than unrelenting casting.
That’s how, I guess, I came to be crawling around on my hands and knees on the private boat docks in the southeast marina on Angostura Reservoir. It made for an unusual sight, one mostly ignored by the people launching their boats across the marina.
But it captured the attention of the woman fishing on shore nearby. She left her chair and assumed a cautious demeanor as she walked closer for a look at the old guy with the broad-brimmed hat crawling around on the docks.
I didn’t have time to explain. There were carp to pursue.
I make such decisions when the fishing is slow, as it had been that morning. I don’t give up casting, however. That’s all instinct and muscle memory. You can pitch a jig while letting the eyes and mind wander.
And they soon wandered to a pair of yellow lips forming a barbeled O-ring the circumference of a Wall Drug coffee mug, flattened a bit on the top and bottom and illuminated by the sun. It was breaking the surface of the water along the sunny side of the dock.
Another pair appeared, and another, and another, one after the other until a dozen carp nosed the surface, opening and closing their mouths as if whispering to the clouds. They reminded me of the Ted Kooser poem, “Carp,” in which he refers to the much-defiled invasive species (here in this country, at least) as “water monks,” with “mouths like those of angels singing.”
Even without the poetry in mind, I was infatuated by the yellow lips and the dark, slick bodies barely breaking the film of the surface. So, I set aside my spinning outfit and more walleye-inclined intent and turned my attention to carp, aiming for a close-up photo with my smart phone.
But on hands and knees? Yes! And it was a blast!
It was also transformative for the carp. They had been sluggish and casually incautious about my presence while I ignored them and fished for more popular prey. But when I turned my eyes toward them, they responded with a sudden wariness, a skittishness beyond what you would expect from the muck-sucking Rodney Dangerfield of the water world — no capital W or Kevin Costner reference intended.
Again, and again, they thwarted my stalk and won the hide-and-seek battle, disappearing under the docks as I made my hands-and-knees approach. They would rise on the other side of the dock sucking and whispering just long enough to get me crawling their way again. Then they’d disappear again.
Eventually, I tried crawling on my belly, which didn’t work with the carp but seemed to convince the woman on the opposite shore that I was probably harmless enough, if odd. With a shrug, she returned to her fishing. And I continued my almost-fruitless carp pursuit long enough to get a picture that wasn’t what I wanted but would have to do.
It was time to get back to a more traditional form of fishing. First, though, I dug out my reporter’s notebook, sat on the gravel shore and scribbled some thoughts, as follow:
The thing about fishing is, it’s ageless.
No, wait, it’s not the fishing that’s ageless. It’s the fisher.
You’re ageless, when you do it, if you do it right,
which sometimes means hardly doing it at all.
Take this morning. Take me. Take the Angostura docks.
And especially take the carp. Big carp.
Big, yellow-mouthed, broad-backed carp
a dozen or more, five to 10 pounds each
peeking out from the shadows along
the boat docks, vacuuming the surface for
God knows what.
Carp know what, and who, and probably why,
without the need for thought they appear,
reminders of things you can’t control:
grizzlies in campgrounds, rattlers under the deck,
lions with a taste for terrier, and carp,
taking over where sauger and pike and crappies,
common sense and complacency leave off.
Izaak Walton called them “queens of the rivers, stately
and good,” but he was known to exaggerate, for effect.
Carp don’t care about effect. And they
never exaggerate. Their presence is hyperbole enough.
No queens of the rivers today, at least
not our rivers, not our today, they are labeled invasive
and chastised by anglers who poke out their eyes
and bash in their skulls for play,
leaving them to rot and reek on the shore
But that is not my play, especially today,
My play is to lay my graphite rod aside
to engage in hide-and-seek on the docks
with carp, the fish nobody but kids
and old anglers who find their ageless selves
while fishing, know how to love.
A generous reader might call that an unfinished poem. Others might say, more accurately, that it’s an oddly arranged assortment of musings. But I know what Keith Keltgen and John Cooper and Tony Dean would say:
“You’d catch more fish if you did more fishing and less screwing around.”
Which is true, of course, but not as much fun.
And a long way from ageless.
