The Morality of Fly Fishing

NEXT TIME YOU JUDGE A CATCH AND KEEPER:

As an 11 year old I was sent to my first overnight camp, a one night "Introduction to Fly Fishing" where I learned how to cast, tie a few knots, and even dissected a fish. At 15 I joined my father and grandfather on a week long fly fishing trip in Montana. I fly fished regularly for the better part of 10 years before I ever considered the moral status of fly fishing--and I loved it.

There is something about fly fishing that makes it special; something about standing in a river repeating the same motion over and over to the soundtrack of one of those "Nature Sounds" CDs that is so supremely soothing and peaceful that the experience is quite unlike anything else I've ever done. For me it is a sort of meditation, a stress release outlet--that is, unless I've managed to catch myself a fish.

You see, I'm a terrible fly fisherman. Seldom in a season (with the exception of my time out in Montana) do I catch more than one or two fish a year. But when I do, my adrenaline responds instantly and all of the singing birds and soaring eagles in the world couldn't distract me from what--in the moment--seems to be my sole mission in life: to land that fish.

Initially I always confuse the feeling of the weight of the fish in my net with elation, but then after looking down into the net and seeing this beautiful silver and speckled creature with its mouth opening and closing as if it were gasping for air, its eyes almost seeming to avoid my own, and with my fly hooked into the corner of its mouth, I cannot help but feel a pang of guilt. I would release the fish feeling worse off than I would have if I hadn't caught anything. "But at least I released it," I would tell myself while thinking disdainfully of those fishermen I often see walking back to their car with three trout strung through their gills.

The distance between a catch and releaser and a catch and keeper could not be greater. Typically, the latter is a fly fisherman and the former a lowly spinner, or even worse... a bait fisherman!

The fly fisherman who practices catch and release views himself as a steward of the river: he never litters, lands his fish in the textbook manner (always minimize the time the fish spends out of the water, cut the line rather than retrieve a swallowed fly, etc), follows all of the rules (which are designed to protect the fishery after all), and can be counted upon to glare contemptuously at anyone removing his precious trout from the river. On occasion, he's even been known to deliver the occasional lecture or two about releasing fish "so that someone else might have a chance to catch it."

So then, for any reasonable and responsible fisherman catch and release is the rule of thumb, the default setting for those of proper sensibility. Catch and releasers held the moral high ground--or so I thought.

Two years ago, a friend whose opinions I value and respect challenged the morality of my fishing hobby as incongruous to my own stated world view. He pointed out that in order to fish for pleasure, one had to view themselves as above nature, or at least above the trout that I claimed to respect. For someone who lamented the loss of man's sense of place within nature and who constantly preached against the dichotomy of man and nature (as only a twenty three year old can) I immediately and regretfully recognized my own cognitive dissonance. Did this spell the end of my illustrious fly fishing career?

As I was in Idaho at the time of this revelation (with a three day stint on the roadless section of the St. Joe in front of me) I set out to work manufacturing a defense of my revered hobby--cognitive dissonance be damned! At the time, I had just finished a book which discussed several indigenous groups and their relationship to their world; among them was a group of Inuit who believed that each seal that they hunted and killed was in fact the same seal which would continue to come back and give its life to feed their family provided they treated the animal with respect and cared for the local environment. To them, an unlucky hunt was not the result of a lack of seals but was the result of improper behavior on the part of one of the hunter's families. Now while I certainly don't consider each trout to be the same trout dumb enough to be caught by the likes of me annually, I did recognize that I had discovered a potentially fruitful line of inquiry.

I already ate fish somewhat regularly and tried to do so as responsibly as possible, but as anyone who is aware of the state of the worlds saltwater fisheries knows, this is often difficult to do. What if then, I supplemented my own diet (which already included fish) with trout that I caught myself? Certainly, this would be no less moral than if I bought a fish at a supermarket, which would obviously need to be killed in order that I might be able to eat it. The only real difference would be that I would be doing the killing directly by my own hand, rather than indirectly by purchasing a plastic wrapped, deboned filet from the supermarket.

And to preempt the moral vegetarians response: no, I do not think it would be better if we didn't eat meat at all. Plants are living things too after all; just because they aren't as easily anthropomorphisizable and we have less in common with them than we do with animals doesn't mean that they are any less worthy of life than a fish or a cow--though I admit that we could certainly eat LESS meat. That brings me to another benefit of fishing for my own food, by involving myself in the process of obtaining my own food--in addition to increasing my own self reliance--I am also made acutely aware of the actual cost of the food on my plate. I have to kill that fish with my own bare hands, I have to deliberately and directly end its life in order so that I might eat it and live. Certainly I can be accused of over dramatization (and am often guilty of that), but in this instance it is really as fundamentally simple as that.

Unfortunately however, I knew this was all just intellectual masturbation and as a result, I hadn't fished in over two years because I knew I was a fraud and a hypocrite if I did so. After all, if my motive was to obtain food, even if I wanted to do it with my own hand there were many easier, cheaper, and (for the fish) less painful ways of catching trout.

Fly fishing for me was still on morally shaky ground when I decided to join a friend on the river this past weekend in spite of all of my intellectual misgivings (because I recently discovered the futility of trying to live a perfectly moral life). We were on my home river, the West Branch of the Delaware, where I've caught a grand total of one fish in my entire lifetime (as I stated previously, I'm a terrible fly fisherman) and I was having my usual luck. After about an hour of fishing with an emerger, despite not seeing a single rise or mayfly on a river known for its prolific hatches, I decided to pull my line in, find a cozy rock, and sit in the river and just watch it drift by. My buddy was fishing a hundred yards or so upstream directly under a bald eagle nest and having a pretty good time so I knew I had some time to get comfortable. I sat on a boulder about a foot under water and with my feet on the ground I was able to rest my arms on my knees. At only about two feet over the surface of the water, I was able to see the myriad of tiny bugs that flew just over the waters surface. After a few minutes, I watched a beaver swim up to a pile of brush on the side of the river before it disappeared into a hole that I hadn't noticed just in front of where I had been fishing--as if I needed the additional challenge! I sat there for about a half hour when the river's hypnotic effect began to take over and I lost myself in its steady lull. A piece of pollen flew by in a steady wind, pushed down to just above the waters surface it was light enough to float on whatever breeze occupied that intermediary space between the atmosphere and the river. A pair of red winged black birds danced like fairies in and out of a tree on the bank as swallows darted over the river after their dinner. The hillside in front of me was frosted in the light of the low sun, the shadows of the trees contrasting with the sun's golden rays. High above a turkey vulture soared in a thermal. In the river tiny trout caught a break from the current in the eddy created by my legs and I watched as they scoured the rocks and fed on mayfly nymphs. And there I sat, the fading sun warming my face as I realized that most people wouldn't appreciate the beauty of this moment. Most people wouldn't know that red winged black birds love the water, that swallows can make maneuvers that would make fighter pilots blush, that an eagle sound more like a seagull than a hawk, and that the river has an entire world, an entire language that can be understood by those willing to listen.

When we fly fish, we are a part of that world, we must be fluent in that language. In order to catch a fish you need to know what it is eating at that particular moment and what it might be eating in an hour. You have to know how big the flies are that are hatching down to the sixteenth of an inch and you have to understand their life cycle. As a fly fisherman, you have to stalk your prey. You must be careful not to alarm the fish. You have to place a fly that is as light as a feather in a spot the size of a dinner plate from twenty or more feet away, all the while making sure to avoid any drag from the line as the various currents attempt to pull the fly off its path. You have to watch the birds for signs of a hatch and skim the water for aquatic insects and read the currents and features of the river to locate prime trout habitat. In order to catch a trout you must be conversant with what it is like to actually be a trout. Fly fishing doesn't separate man from nature, it places man squarely within it.

True, there is a certain amount of dissonance between the art of fly fishing and the act of releasing a fish. I cannot argue that it isn't simply making a game of that fish's life, but I can certainly understand why so many people find it virulently appealing. And true, we are always a part of nature and a part of the ecosystem, but with most of life lived indoors in an attempt to hermetically seal ourselves off from nature the disconnect between ourselves and our ecosystem can seem insurmountable at times. Fly fishing requires an intimate relationship with the natural world, a fluency in the language of the river, and an empathetic understanding of the life of a trout. The difficulty of fly fishing ensures that only those properly initiated into this world are privy to the esoteric secrets of how to catch a trout, an initiation most perfectly consummated by tasting a trout caught by your own hand.

From Yahoo Sports

Having occurred only 16 times since the modern baseball era began in 1900, pitching a perfect game is among the rarest feats in sports. It's the Holy Grail for pitchers, earning them a one-way ticket to sports immortality and a permanent spot in the history books.

But for 24-year-old Wade McGilberry, there was a more, uh, practical motivation: $1 million, which is exactly how much the Alabama man just won for throwing a perfect game in MLB 2K10 for the Xbox 360 and PS3.

"It was actually my wife who convinced me to go for it," he said in a statement. "I never thought I'd actually win a million dollars playing a video game, it's all still sinking in for me."

From Yahoo News

At times, these injuries are infamous enough to inspire a nickname, such as in the case of Glenallen “Spiderman” Hill. The outfielder – who has coincidentally played for eight different teams – got his nickname from an incident spurred on by his apparently severe arachnophobia. Early in his career, while with the Blue Jays, Hill was having a violent nightmare about spiders. While still asleep, he tried to escape from the phantom spiders and fell into a glass table. This nightmare gave Hill cuts on his toes and elbows, carpet burns on his knees, landed him on the 15-day DL and bestowed upon him his nickname.

Mystery and Religion

Life is an absurd game in which there are no explicit rules and the only purported answers come from institutions, our religions in particular; but that's not how a relationship with God is supposed to work. Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, Mohammed, all found God for themselves and their lessons to us are not ends in themselves but are instead paths to the divine ("I am the Way"). Even the great scientific prophets Newton, Einstein, and Bohr (among others) blazed their own trail and broke with convention. Evolution does not arise from status quo but from revolution. The great prophets were not themselves divine anymore than you are or I am. They each forged their own path to the divine and THAT should be the true goal of any spiritual life; not to be a devout follower but instead to be a spiritual hero, boldly confronting the great mystery of life.

The Evolution of Me

It never ceases to amaze me how much progress we make as individuals. Have you ever looked back five years and wondered what the hell you were thinking? How could you be so naive, so stupid? What about the "you" of last year? Last month?
Often I look back at myself and can barely recognize the person that I once was. How could I have thought such thoughts? I often laugh at the naivety of my former self but really, is that not the guiltiest sin of all? The true naivete is in thinking that right now I have arrived at some sort of truth superior to the truths of my past.
So I look back at the things that I said, that I wrote--even on this blog--and sure, I cringe at some of my baseless assumptions, magically-arrived-at conclusions, and wild ideas but I also value them as a testament to the evolution of me. After all, will I not someday view the "me" of now in the same light?
I am not some static politician having to defend ideas that I once had thirty years ago; I am me, an ever evolving, always growing person capable of making mistakes and dedicated to the subjective experience that is life.

Judas' kiss,
sweetly lingers,
upon my lips.

Random Musing

Note: The following is a stream-of-consciousness free write. I make some (personally) valuable conclusions, but I don't contend that they are historical "truth." For example, I greatly simplified man's transition from a purely experiential existence to our current abstracted existence, attributing the shift to Classical Greece when in actuality it likely was not any single event and took many thousands of years.

Do I have anything to write? Do I ever have anything to write? I shall never be able to tell my story, because I can never step away from it. I am immersed—fully immersed in a way I am only beginning to understand. Maybe I am not as logical and methodical as I imagined. Maybe I am led by my heart, truly. Am I the only one who shudders in a sort of rapture at moments in life? At these moments an ecstasy flows through me. I want to cry but my rational mind does all it can to suppress what would otherwise be a social embarrassment. It is socially unacceptable to cry at your sister's soccer game, or during the wrong scene in a movie. But I don't want to cry when the hero dies, I cry in his moments of beauty. So why do I suppress this? Why is it so important that it isn't socially allowable? What could the reason be that my rational self tries to suppress that feeling, that raw emotion so strongly? It is a mystery to me, but one that having made myself aware of, my conscious self will try and make this suppression conscious and then quell it. Maybe I am one who follows heart and not rationality at my core. It's funny—to feel this battle between my cartesian and non cartesian self, and to see the sides so clearly! Maybe I am meant to lead this charge for balance between the mind and heart. Ah but if this is so then I must always follow my own heart...or must I have balance too? Two steps back to take three steps forward? Or is it nothing at all? Is all of it nothing and this all just a silly exercise? Am I just inventing all of this machinery, this system that has battles to be fought? Isn't it amazing? My mind is asking itself questions in order to identify what it needs to do? It's eliminating possibilities and finding solutions as if it were a computer. But which is me and which is the other? There really is a voice asking questions that my mind would know. Is it external to me? Why would my brain ask itself a question that it had the answer to? Then what the hell is it asking the questions? Is it just some algorithm that I must follow in order to process information or is it something else altogether?

Why do I think to myself in questions? Even while performing actions I ask myself—wow I just had a slight vision where I actually saw the struggle between the part of me that experiences things directly and the part of me asking the questions and I realized that they are both me, but that I am a sort of schizophrenic person, split into two. But while I prefer the non-rational part of myself, by choosing one or the other I am ensuring that harmony cannot be possible. Either extreme cannot exist without its other half but in choosing one or the other, you are ensuring imbalance. And a superposition of the two? That just seems like rubbish, not just to my rational self but intuitively too. The battle between my conscious and subconscious self cannot be won. All that can possibly exist is a balance between the two. Once a dichotomy is identified, it cannot go back to being singular—that is impossible, isn't it? That is why in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc. the “good” never completely triumphs over evil, there can never be all good. And evil always fails because it seeks total victory over good. It can only fail at this. But the good side always seems to be on the non-Cartesian side of the battle, but perhaps that is only because we live in a Cartesian world. What if, for instance, we lived in a world that revered the subconscious self? Would Luke Skywalker be on the side of the masculine, rational self?

Orphic vs the Promethean... Not always in battle for not always have they been mutually exclusive. Before the dichotomization occurred the two existed not only in harmony, but they were not two but one. And then the fabrication of a barrier between the two created an actual barrier, and now they will always be locked in eternal conflict with only God, Buddha, Brahma, the Tao, Quetzalcoatl, Yahweh charged with holding the balance between the two. But what court is it the gods play in? Ah the mystery of life is a veil draped before our eyes. If only we could but lift the veil and take a peak! What wonders would we see? Ah but this mystery IS our subconscious, always just out of view.

Why do I love the Orphic so much more? Really it must be because I live in a Promethean world. If I had my wish and Orphic conquered over Promethean, humanity would lose its ability to survive. How else could we keep 7 billion people alive? Could we have invented language and technology if we were completely Orphic, with no ability to step back and observe the situation, for the Orphic experience of the world is a direct, unfiltered, unprocessed experience of the world. No—there must always be balance. If I lived in an Orphic world I would yearn for the Promethean. But my world is Promethean, so I yearn for the Orphic, I romanticize its history and dream of its future. Yet this world will never come—nor should it. This earth, this world, my life really is a battlefield between the two. Will I help bring the balance? What will my roll be?

Was Ancient Greece overly Orphic? And therefore the source of the Promethean uprising? How did that dichotomy occur? Things went from being just one, to all of a sudden dichotomous. After the dichotomy the world could be seen to be clearly much more feminine than masculine—maybe Heraclitus was the Emporer and Socrates was Luke. We now (we being the balancers of the Force!) demonize Socrates, Plato, and in particular, Aristotle as the inventors of the Promethean, masculine side, but perhaps they were the Rebellion? They were the heroes of their day, not the villains? Or perhaps they were the ones who invented the dichotomy in the first place and THAT is why they were villainized? In either case, that period proved pivotal because it marked humanity's separation from the rest of the world. That's the difference, that's where human rationality was born and it is that, the ability to step back and consider a situation, which truly separates us from animals. The invention of the dichotomy is indeed the banishment of man from eden (singularity), prior to then there was no battle and man was at rest. Man was forever forced to a life of unrest as long as their was not balance between masculine and feminine, his whole being always in conflict to bring back the balance. So the advent of agriculture was not evil on its own, but because it necessarily led to the invention of the dichotomy. Man now had material matters to contemplate of an abstract nature—surplus, future yields—and could think on a higher level than before.

But what if this banishment from Eden is not a curse after all, but is a necessary evil for our future growth. Perhaps Eden was the womb which we have been ejected from and mankind, in it's infancy, is going through growing pains? Maybe the dichotomy is necessary in order for us to meet our destiny. Maybe balance can be achieved and the two can become one again as humanity evolves. What if we aren't the thorn in nature's side but her golden child after all??