Rejected
Dave Motes
I got my copy of Gray’s. The sappy watercolor brought the usual ambiguous slosh of annoyance and jealousy. They’ve rejected me, what, fifteen or twenty times, but I can’t leave it alone. Among the editors at Gray’s I tiptoe between cute romantic-comedy protagonist and homicidal stalker.
I was flipping, enjoying the advertising environment and the awful pictorial photo layout they’ve been using forever when it hit me why Gray’s would never welcome me into their pine-paneled fraternity.
And why they’re exactly right.
My best flyfishing experience—the best of my life, all, the jumping albie, the football rainbow in the Hard-on Hole, the New River smallie, tunas in Provincetown Harbor, the bull shark munching specs off my stringer in Albermarle Sound—they all fall a sad second to a good-sized largemouth I caught on a flailed-out popper fishing from a pedalboat in an anonymous northern Minnesota lake. And I doubt anything will ever top it.
And it’s just fine, and I don’t care who knows.
Such complacent comfort disables me as a fishing writer. I just can’t generate the weary irony that Gray’s sells. It’s not that I don’t want to replace my Sears Roebuck with a Franchi or a Purdy, though if someone gave me one tomorrow I’d sell it because the Sears is an excellent excuse for missing grouse. And I’m not anti-snob; I’d jump at the chance to join the frat. On the few occasions I’ve rubbed up against the Better Class of Folks I’ve enjoyed myself shamefully. I’m writing for the wrong reasons. They’re right to reject me.
I just can’t elevate. My fishing, and therefore my writing, is only half committed. I’m as likely to put my rod down and take a nap. If I try to press it, I’m unconvincing—especially to myself.
The night of the pedalboat I nearly didn’t fish at all. It was a lovely evening, mid-June, which in Itasca County is late spring. Big bluegills were rushing around in the shallows, and I’d caught half a dozen that afternoon from the dock then put them back to complete their business. The night before we’d hammered crappies from the pontoon—you can see where this is going—and my younger son used his Scooby-Doo to hoist an honest 12-incher right into his grandmother’s face. That alone was a full weekend of fishing content and contentment for me. I might have sat on the dock again with the uncles, bobbering up more crappies for lunch, drinking Leinies and talking to the loons.
But my older son came down. He doesn’t fish, but he wanted to pedal, so we pushed off in the shoom-shoom and I started flipping a yellow popper against the cabbage edges while we circled warily around the birds and the bees and the babes. A northern clipped me and all I had was the thrashed popper that had been in my cap since the previous summer. It had one eye and the body turned freely on the hook shank, but it was a fly. These bass spend half their lives under a yard of ice. The big bass wolfed it on the next cast.
All of the usual stuff happened. I lost the hat, got splashed, and bunted my son in the ear with the butt of the flyrod. The fish jumped like an animated masonry block and zoomed around and got wired up in elodea and coontail and tripled the seven-weight over and required hasty pedaling ahead and abaft. Like all big bass it peeked out of the water for a two-count then flop-jumped right in my face. We didn’t have a net, of course—one Dr. Pepper, one beer, and a couple of life jackets—but I got a handful of lip on the third try and dragged her up onto the carpet. The kid goggled at it, we had The Talk—not that one, the other one, about life and fish and preserving the Chain, or some such—and I put her back.
I tried to write about it—it’s perfect for a fishing story, in a way—but it kept falling apart in the details. I couldn’t make it resonate with Tradition or Experience or any of the usual themes. Every time I wrote it I’d read it a dozen times before. I even tried to imagine it a watercolor, but that was ridiculous, kneeling on the deck of a silly little craft that belongs under a giant swan in a green-brown city-park lake, my ass in the air, guddling for an inelegant fish the size and shape of the small Igloo cooler.
But the real problem, I realize now, is that what made it good to me wouldn’t be visible to anyone else. In my southern youth I’d caught six pound largemouths on everything from four-weights to trotlines. They’d come with the usual spectrum of effort to savvy to dumb redneck luck. I’d been to big fish, but I didn’t stay. I guess I came back again, or maybe went beyond, but I didn’t stay there. I think most fishing writers stay. What made it good to me—the fishing and the writing--was the company, the occasion, the serendipity. Like some kind of benign Hannibal Lecter, my pulse didn’t even rise as I decked that fish. It’s not that I’m tired, or cynical about the environment, or preoccupied with problems. I’m somewhere else, and I have no idea whether it’s good or bad.
A few years ago I decided to write a fishing story in which no fish were caught. It seemed like a challenge at first, a perverse but noble undertaking like the guy who wrote a whole novel without the letter ‘e’. But it turned out to be easy, and I liked the story. (Gray’s didn’t.) I realized that, in a fishing story, the fishing gets in the way of everything else that is important. I’ve begun to wonder lately if the end result of this trend is that I don’t go fishing any more at all. At least then my kids would be able to go to college.
So now I turn a jaundiced pen to all my fishing thoughts. It used to be that no fishing story was needed: the whole tale was told in a photograph of big dead fish nailed up on a rack or laid out on the hood of a Buick. About the time there were fewer fish we started spending more energy on the telling, on the chase and the cast and the struggle. I love those stories, and want to write them, but I’ve missed the generation. It’s nobody’s fault but my own. And now, somehow, the whole experience is unwritable, or antiwritable maybe. Postmodernism has struck, and I have set the hook. What now?
Easy. Just back this puppy around and shoom-shoom to the dock before the bugs get heavy. We’ll tell Grandpa about the big one, and he’ll complain because it wasn’t a walleye, or doubt the whole story on principle. Then we’ll play cribbage until the last light leaves the sky, maybe finish that conversation.