A few weeks when I became so obsessed in my efforts to catch a coho I started trolling Main Street looking for anyone who could help me get my canoe in the water, I got to thinking about Jack Hemingway.
The son of Ernest, the famous writer, Jack was an angler so possessed that he packed his fly rod when he parachuted into France in advance of D-Day. While his fellow soldiers were busy setting up a radio behind enemy lines, Hemingway dropped a line in a local stream.
A German patrol stopped to watch him fish. Fortunately for Hemingway, they were on his left side. On his right shoulder was an insignia of the U.S. flag. The Germans assumed Hemingway was a Frenchman out fishing for a local lodge and moved on.
It’s time to put the canoe away but I’m fighting it. November has arrived and I haven’t caught a coho, not a single one.
Last year my wife and I pulled about 10 of them out of Chilkoot Lake, big bright, fat females. On Oct. 5, we limited out with two each. It was like the “fish pond” game you see at kids’ carnivals where tykes pay two tickets to drop a line behind a curtain and every time catch a prize.
If you’re good enough with a pole and spend time enough, Alaska can be like that game. A Juneau friend who was an adept fly fisherman said he didn’t understand subsistence for white folks. He caught all the fish he needed on a pole.
But the coho run is down this year and heavy rains flushed so much brown water into our lakes and streams you’d need a light bulb on your lure for a fish to see it. Plus, the Canadians are back in town and they’re hungrier for salmon than brown bears this time of year.
I’m not giving up. There’s always fishing from the bank. Last year I received my free, lifetime fishing license from the State of Alaska. (It’s one of the two perks of reaching age 60 in the frozen North. The other is lunch at the Senior Center, where they’re not afraid of gravy.) I keep my license and a telescoping fishing pole on me.
There are fish in these waters. I have caught them. Plus, Al Badgley tells me coho are still running up the Chilkoot in December. A man could lose a lot of pixies in that river, but not so many if you remove the treble hook and replace it with the single hook that now comes standard in the lure box.
There is something about fishing that, when done right, is a radical act. It’s about saying to hell with the world, there’s an entire other world below the water every bit as interesting as the one above it, and I’m going to spend time with it.
That’s a good feeling.
Also, I’m making up for about 10 weakies I owe my dad. A “weakie” is what Easterners call a gray trout. They run in Chesapeake and Delaware bays and aren’t always so easy to catch. Dad and I were fishing for weakies in a skiff on the Delaware when a wind blew up, rocking our small boat and making me seasick.
The chop also blew up a school of weakies, which were hitting our lines faster than dad could reel them in. He’d never seen such catching and the only thing that matches it in my life came jigging off Hoonah when we pulled up four halibut and two cod within minutes of dropping our lines.
While I was getting sick, dad – who was now fishing my pole as well as his – kept saying, “Just one more, Tommie. Just let me catch one more before we go in.”
My dad was an honorable man who motored away from that school of fish and got me to shore before I became too violently ill.
I still feel bad about that.