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Originally published May 2008
Editor's Creel Taking Note |
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As the Alaska spring slowly meanders its way into May, I again find myself at the edge of sanity, staring blankly at walls for longer than I care to admit, taking a little too much interest in the tulips that are threatening to bud at any moment, unable to even pretend that I might once again feel like tying a fly. It's just been too long without flowing water, and I'm watching days tick off the calendar like-well, like an inmate in the final month before release.
It's a weak and hackneyed simile, I know, but after another winter in Alaska, this one without a warm-water reprieve to the Keys or to the bonefish flats of the Bahamas, it does feel particularly apt. I want to get out on the water, and I'm determined to do it as early as possible.
This leads to the pacing, and to the calendar, and to some really unfortunate exhibitions of memory. Just when did I have that great day for rainbows at the mouth of Clear Creek? Early May is what I tell myself, though it was probably closer to the end of the month. And I'm pretty sure I landed a king on the Kasilof by mid-month last year, even though my wife reminds me I didn't travel farther than south Anchorage until well into June. I'd know for sure, of course, the dates for these and about fifty other early-season successes, if-like Scott Haugen recommends later in this issue-I ever wrote it down.
I do keep angling journals of a sort, which is to say there are about six randomly placed notepads under varying levels of dust in my office. Sadly, they're not much help: I just prowled through them in the hope that I'd find some nugget of information telling me that a stream within driving distance was in fact fishing excellently right now. Instead I discovered a recipe for venison stew that I begged off a lodge chef on Prince of Wales Island, several names that I can't read followed by quotes that make no sense whatsoever, and a receipt from the Alaskan Hotel bar in Juneau, where I apparently treated the entire town to a round. Nothing about ice-out or migrating rainbows or early-run kings.
Forget the utilitarian failure, it's just sad to look at these pathetic attempts to carry on what is actually a quite valuable tradition. Beyond their usefulness for winter-jaded anglers, journals and diaries make up the bedrock upon which the history of the West rests. In an area of such rugged isolation, characterized by haphazard and chronologically skewed settlement, the personal narrative is frequently our most reliable starting point for investigations of the past. Osborne Russell's Journal of a Trapper let us know about Rocky Mountain life in the mid-1800s. From diaries we know what it was like to travel with Manuel Lisa up the Missouri or to the Montana goldfields via the Bozeman Trail. And of course, there are the writings of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, "our national epic of exploration," as one of their later editors put it.
At their simplest, diaries or journals can be said to provide glimpses of the past from individual points of view. The life and times of a mountain man, the story of a journey across the continent, an account of battle or the documentation of the contours and cutthroat of a mountain stream-if there are differences of ambition among these examples, the contrast lies in the scope of the event, not the journals. Diaries are frequently candid, not conceptualized, and because of that, they're expected to provide a realistic, though certainly subjective, accounting of their moment in time, no matter how small or significant the moment.
However, unlike most of the journal collections that now serve as bona fide artifacts, fishing journals are typically not diaries of circumstance. Antonio Pigafetta kept a diary because he'd been assigned to jot down every detail of Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe. Captain James Cook kept journals to document his extensive explorations on behalf of the English crown. Soldiers from Thermopylae to Fallujah both wrote and continue to write in order to express the emotions aroused by the extraordinary situations they find themselves in. Anglers keep journals, well, because they fish, and because fishermen have lots to say. Journals, playing upon the satisfactions of the monologue, make good listeners.
If there's such a thing as a first angling journal, it's probably scrawled on the walls of a Memphite-dynasty tomb near Saqqara in Egypt. Drawn among the hieroglyphs in the mastaba of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep there is a scene depicting anglers in action with nets and harpoons. It's over four thousand years old.
In another tomb, also from the fifth dynasty, an angler is shown sitting in a one-man papyrus raft, fully prepared to thump a catfish on the head. While it's debatable that the move from Nile perch in the first tomb to catfish in the latter can be viewed as a sign of progress, the second fisherman has graduated to hooking his catch on the end of a line, and there's not an angler alive who wouldn't understand the wish to have the event commemorated. Also, fluttering in the space above the angler in the second mastaba are many finely detailed insect representations. Clearly this was a fly fisherman, and in looking back at his cave painting, he probably knew when to go fishing again, and what to use. I'm sure he had a friend, someone a lot like me, who always meant to keep notes on his angling but never really got around to it. No doubt he did worse, or he learned to keep his own journal.
It's embarrassing and not a little humbling to think that four thousand years later I've only conspired to set the world of angling back a step. Still, it's May; the snow's gone, the water's open and one way or another, I'm going fishing. I'll do the same next year as well, and the year after that, which when you get right down to it, is probably why I don't bother taking a pen.
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