The Sport of Fishing: The Lure of Failure

By Stefan Kanfer

Fishing: a line with a worm on one end and a fool on the other. That definition seems as good as any. The bait may vary, but at the other end of the line, nothing is altered. At about this time each year, eager anglers pour down to lake shores and riverbanks in search of fresh-water fish. And each year, despite millions of dollars spent on equipment, despite the cleverest lures in history, the fisher folk are doomed to interminable hours of unsuccessful casts, tangled lines, spurned bait and impaled thumbs.

Theoretically, then, this somnolent sport should appeal to no one over the mental age of twelve. Instead, fishing continues to attract business leaders, politicians, intellectuals and writers to an extraordinary degree. What has hooked them?

In part, of course, it is the season. Fresh-water fishing automatically summons thoughts of lyrical spring days, when minutes, like dragonflies, hover motionless over water. Perhaps more important are the benefits derived from angling's lack of speed. Unlike any other outdoor sport, it allows the mind to unreel and stretch itself. With luck, and time, and endurance, the angler gets the long-awaited result. Out of dark water, the fish flashes to the surface like a new idea--and in that instant the sport justifies its glorious history.

From the very beginning, the appeal of the fin was irresistible. The very word angling derives from the ancient Greek onkos, or barbed hook. Circa 200 B.C., Cato the Elder (manifestly a non-angler) was astonished by tales of "a city where fish sold for more than an ox." (To the fisherman, the situation is unsurprising; acquiring the fish called for more ingenuity, greater effort and less tenderizer.) History's most prominent fisherman was, of course, St. Peter, who later turned to netting souls. In the years A.D., angling was seen as something more than the mere coaxing of coldblooded vertebrates from water. Consider, for example, Shakespeare's metaphor:

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth, and thus do we .. .by indirections find directions out.

With such distinguished observers and enthusiasts, it was only a question of time before the sport acquired its own philosopher. Izaak Walton, a draper by trade, was a biographer by avocation, but his chronicles have been forgotten. Only the discursive jottings on his favorite hobby have endured.

The Compleat Angler, published in 1653, remains as fresh today as it was in Oliver Cromwell's time. Through Walton, millions of readers have learned to put as much lead "as will sink the bait to the bottom and keep it still in motion, and not more," and that "when the wind is south, it blows your bait into a fish's mouth." Through Walton's American disciple, Washington Irving, millions more have been apprised of the fact that "there is certainly something in angling ... that tends to produce a gentleness of spirit, and a pure serenity of mind."

That something persists today, and it remains one of angling's surest lures. Its name is failure. No matter how fine his equipment, no matter how limitless his patience, it is the angler who is cast most often as the poor fish. The odds, as always, still favor the quarry; yet to the true fisherman that very failure is a kind of triumph. His sport lacks the com pulsive pursuit of hunting, the dizzying zest of mountain climbing. But it grants something else: a philosophy -- an acceptance and ultimately a grudging admiration for unyielding nature. It is that philosophy that lured such beleaguered politicians as Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover, Eisenhower and Kennedy. It is that philosophy that prompted Henry David Thoreau to describe time itself as "the stream I go a-fishing in."

And it is that philosophy that underlies great American nov els as diverse as Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn -- and The Old Man and the Sea, in which an angler's prize catch is finally reclaimed by nature.

The Old Man and the Sea has a very contemporary reso nance. For too long, fishermen have been journeying down to their favorite spots, only to find them defiled. Lake Erie crawls with sludge worms and vegetation that has choked the life out of all game fish. Ohio's Caya-hoga River is so oily that it occasionally catches fire; New Jersey's lower Hackensack River is a stream of odiferous waste.

But throughout the U.S., other watering places have begun to regenerate, reversing the pro cesses of civilization. In the Hudson River, Virginia spot have begun to spawn again; trout are slowly returning to the Willimantic River in Connecticut.

The destructive activities of that all-purpose villain, man, are not wholly irreversible. A decade ago, Oregon's Willamette River was the most polluted waterway in the Pacific Northwest. Even scavenging fish could not survive its toxic atmosphere. After a concerted drive by environ mentalists, government officials and just plain anglers, the river has become so pure that the delicate trout and salmon can be found throughout its reaches.

In many parts of the U.S., in fact, nature has begun to reclaim its property -- with a necessary assist from concerned people and governments, and at an enormous price. The reclamation is often underwritten by America's 26,022,547 licensed anglers; every penny of the $107 million they pay in license fees is used to support conservation programs.

Yet, even if the streams revive, even if trout, muskellunge and bass thrive tomorrow as they did in Walton's day, a fisherman's luck will remain random and capricious. For most anglers, that will be all right. In the end, they do not gear up for the sole purpose of bringing back a haul of wall eyed pike or edible perch. They also go out in the spirit of that great adventure novelist John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps), who once peered beneath the surface of the water and caught the essence of the sport: "The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual se ries of occasions for hope." Hope: in 1974 that remains the best bait of the angler, and of the nonparticipant as well. In the end, they are all in the same boat.

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