People come to fish and fishing in a variety of ways. I grew up in a family whose only outdoor activities were playing golf and splashing white gas on a charcoal broiler. So when I recount the pleasures and lessons I've discovered on northern streams, I am describing strictly personal discoveries, ones unaided — and unhindered — by family history and custom. I mention this in the hope that my experience may encourage others unfamiliar with the watery world: with love and patience, both angling and stream life can be decoded.

Why fish at all? I credit an incredibly tedious and happily former job with pushing me toward running water. Stuffed into an "office" that made Dilbert's cubicle look roomy — it also served as the janitor's storage room for brooms, mops, and toilet supplies — I dreamed almost continually of the North Woods' bright streams and resinous forests. They were my imaginary antidotes to the sweating concrete block walls, concrete floor, and tiny, slitlike windows that surrounded me.

One day, I realized that learning to fish might teach me a deeper way of understanding places I already loved but hadn't explored with any particular purpose. Besides: hadn't angling, and fly fishing in particular, inspired an entire, very satisfying literature? For this writer, that aspect of angling all but conferred an imprimatur. I would take up fly fishing and approach streams with new intent. This sudden revelation all but figuratively toppled the concrete walls of my nine-to-five prison. On my lunch break that day, I checked out books on fly fishing from the library. I was off on a quest that hasn't slowed down or softened after six years, though it has spread so that today I also pursue fish with cane pole, spinning, and baitcasting gear, but mostly nothing but unarmed curiosity.

Why certain folks become possessed by fish and moving or still waters is no clearer to me now than it was when I began my headlong pursuit, but it's a common enough phenomenon. Yet of the many who feel called, few, it seems are chosen; as John Randolph, editor of the magazine Fly Fisherman, explained to me, "The percentage of people who stick with fly fishing once they realize that fine gear can't catch fish for them is really small. You can't buy your way into angling skills - you've got to put in time, lots of time."

The briefest acquaintance with fishing taught me that I was more interested in learning about the worlds that fish inhabit than in hooking them. Notice that I don't say merely hooking them: to catch fish consistently, you need to know a fair amount about their lives. But I discovered I could learn this not only through the feedback loops of catch-and-release and catch-and-kill but also through watching individual fish patiently, hour after hour, from streamside, winter as well as summer; through watching the instream and terrestrial life on which they depended; and through learning about the hydrodynamics and chemistry of the northern waters I live by.

But because I am also interested in my own tribe's relations to fish, I have pursued the angler's offstream knowledge, too, and this has less to do with fish than with human culture: the roles of rods, reels, lines, flies, fly tying, lures, baits, topographic maps, and other bits of fishing's material culture that move us downstream toward the deepest pools of fishing's mysteries.

Angling regularly brings me up square against my own limitations, my own ignorance. In my first couple of years of fishing, I discovered, and it was a very quelling discovery, that I probably didn't like myself very much. I was impatient and almost unimaginable cruel to myself while learning the basics of streamcraft. Do I like me better now, or have I merely reached a level of fishing competence that lets me off the hook? Only a modest time into this discipline, and self-taught at that, I certainly can't claim competence as the explanation. Learning to fish well takes a lifetime. I have to believe instead that time midstream, spent on something approximating the fluid rhythms of a fish's day, has forced my awareness onto the beautiful watery world and away from myself, gently drowning self-consciousness.

Hooking fish is the paradoxical method by which anglers rap on the watery door of the animals we seek. The late Roderick Haig-Brown, a British Columbian angler and judge, and the preeminent lyricist of North American angling, explained the lure of fishing this way in A Fisherman's Summer (1959):

What did I want of [the fish]? Not to kill them certainly, nor to eat them, though I would probably do both these things. Not even to match my skill against their instincts, because I cheerfully assumed they would be rising frequently, as Arctic grayling so frequently are, and present no problems. Nor for the excitement of setting light tackle against their strength and watermanship, for I had long ago learned to handle faster and stronger fish on lighter gear than they would make me use. Really, it was only to see them and through them somehow to become more intimate with the land about the streams their presence graced.

I wish hooking fish occasionally weren't necessary to me, but it is: I need — or have I merely transmuted desire into necessity? — to touch fish with wet and, I hope, reverent hands, to feel their bodies torquing away from me, leaving a fresh and acrid scent on my fingers that lingers as potently, as alluringly, as the smell of sex.

Copyright 1999 by Jan Zita Grover. All rights reserved.