As a lifelong, native New Yorker, I’ve never been a fisherman.
Oh, sure, I was taken fishing, during the summers, as a kid, but that was something different. My dear friend Charlie’s father used to insist we join him on some early-morning blue-fish missions out on Long Island. We’d all pile into some wobbly, amenity-challenged boat, and Charlie’s dad would start reeling something in and then frantically hand one of us the rod so we could complete the job. This inevitably resulted in the fish getting away with a mortal wound and/or yanking the rod right out of our inexperienced hands and into the water, which made for rousing mornings of damp, frequently repulsive disappointment.
Charlie’s father also dependably supplied our family with unsolicited amounts of the ocean life he did manage to catch --- meaning that my first brushes with seafood were marred by this particularly oily, unappetizing variant of fish. But in terms of catching fish, I just never got the hang of it, never improved, and never particularly cared to.
Then, around 1980, or so, one of my best friends – Shawn – moved from our shared Upper East Side neighborhood to the unlikely environs of Bozeman, Montana. For a couple of summers after, I would fly out to visit him for a week or two. While he and I had originally bonded over our mutual loves of Marvel comics, “Star Wars” and KISS, since moving to “Big Sky country,” Shawn had embraced his evidently long-repressed “outdoorsy” streak and gotten into stuff like horseback-riding and ATVs (all-terrain vehicles). I was more-or-less good with those hearty activities, but he’d also become absolutely preoccupied with fly-fishing. Here was where we diverged.
I should probably point out, at this stage of the narrative, that fishing was probably always in Shawn’s blood. His grandfather was a world-renowned novelist whose name I shan’t share, but you can probably figure it out (let’s put it this way – the character of Captain Quint in “Jaws” was basically a thinly-veiled homage to the writer in question). As such, Shawn had embraced the discipline of fly-fishing with the same, devoted zeal he had formerly applied to his meticulously fastidious comic-collecting (an endeavor I’d been much more onboard with), going as far as “tying" his own "flies” (i.e. making his own, specialized, bug-emulating lures). It's kind of a big thing, evidently.
Anyway, I was out at Shawn’s lovely ranch house in Montana, at one point, in the summer of 1981, and, not wanting to be a party-pooper, I mustered up as much good sportsmanship as I could to gamely agree to go properly fly-fishing, an activity for which I harbored no aptitude -- much less enthusiasm -- but hey … I was the City Mouse guest and Shawn was the Country Mouse host. What else could I do?
I was shortly outfitted with a rod, reel, a fly personally tied by my friend Shawn and a ridiculous pair of “waders,” which are basically giant-size, rubber overalls intended to keep the wearer dry while messing about in waist-to-chest-deep water. Now fully equipped and ready for aquatic blood sport, we dispatched to a nearby river – the name of which I’ve long-since blocked – to go cruelly deceive and summarily murder some unsuspecting fish.
I was pretty much immediately uncomfortable and out of my depth (figuratively and literally), standing without a great deal of conviction in cold, murky water up to my waist. Again, though, not wanting to let everybody down, I was determined to follow instruction and give this soggy endeavor a proper try. Having listened to the directives and watched more capable individuals demonstrate, I dutifully raised my rod and reel and prepared to cast my hook-laden fly over the water in a manner that replicated the frenetic, flighty mannerisms of an insect. As I brought my right arm back, I did so without a great deal of thought or finesse, and immediately heard a strange whirring sound.
Time suddenly slowed down to a glacial crawl.
I’d brought my rod back far too quickly and the fly on my lengthy line was now speedily whipping around my head in a sharply tightening orbit, as if hungrily zeroing in on a surface soft enough to puncture.
In these fleeting nanoseconds, I was somehow entirely aware of what was happening, but frozen in fear of making an already dangerous situation incalculably worse.
The hook finally found its target – my cheek, just about a half-an-inch south of my left eye. The sharpest point of the hook plunged deep into my face, and I suddenly felt both a rush of adrenalin, a palpable sting and a pronounced surge of empathy for the average, unassuming fish.
I emerged out of the weeds and onto the banks where Shawn’s mother and younger brother were sitting. “I caught something,” I laughed. I wasn’t giggling out of bravado, but out of the sheer, panicky realization of how lucky I’d been that the hook sank where it did and not slightly higher. Forty-two years after this incident, I still shudder at the thought.
I was quickly brought to a nearby hospital to extract the hook from my face, with Shawn’s parents informing the hospital staff that I was their son – an absolutely heroic lie, given that Shawn and his family all boasted a pronounced family resemblance to each other that my comparatively dirty-blonde hair and summer-burnt skin bore absolutely no kinship to. Mercifully, they bought it, and the offending bit of metal was excised without much incident.
I haven’t been fly-fishing since.
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