by Troy Letherman
Back when the number of television channels could be counted on one hand – and when I might be pressed into antenna action with various sheets of tinfoil at any moment – I’d eagerly await the weekend’s Howard Cosell cameo in his horrible corporate blazer, getting my sporting fix through ABC’s decidedly diverse programming habits. The show was called “Wide World of Sports” and it felt like an American tradition, similar to fathers chasing their sons around with power tools. [emember_protected custom_msg=’This content is available for subscribers only.’]
While I doubt it really registered at the time, today I can clearly recall the show’s promise to provide “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.” What stands out to me now is the recognition, so rare in our triumphalist sporting culture, that failure can be as compelling as success, and sometimes even more so. I know this to be true, of course, because I fish.
At a point early on in my angling evolution I left all other species in favor of the trout. Growing up in Montana helped, and moving to Alaska in my early twenties only heightened my affections for a speckled back and flanks tinged with crimson. When I should have been memorizing geometric equations I instead began to idealize the Elk-hair Caddis as a tribute to Pythagorean precision. Rather than sharpening skills in woodshop or memorizing the critical facts of some war or another, I sought to achieve the perfect drift – and believed such a thing existed. I learned the location of every burble in two miles of creek. I caught fish, and it indeed felt triumphant.
Somewhere along the way, however, things began to change between me and trout. Success still felt great, but the definition of what might constitute such a feat was slowly starting to alter. I’d find myself sticking with the dry fly long after it was obvious a nymph should do the trick. I used ridiculously small tippet and entered into interminable battles of will with a certain fish, a particular pool, even an overhanging willow that I might lose half a dozen flies to before finally managing the right cast.
Beyond those affectations of a proper fool, I found that more and more frequently it was the size of a trout, and not the number caught, that was becoming the issue. In 2002, a Kenai River rainbow that stretched the tape to just beyond 32 inches pretty much ruined me for the rest of my life.
I realize this is the case because I can take an immense amount of pleasure in an afternoon spent hauling Dolly Varden from riffle to riverbank. Salmon fishing is likewise fun; from kings to sockeye, I seem to simply enjoy the occasion and whether I land or lose a few here or there doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Even during my rare excursions to the saltwater flats of the Florida Keys, where I’ve watched allegedly grown men go completely to pieces in two seconds of a tarpon following their fly, I don’t much mind. In 2005, standing in the wind and rain on a gravel bar near the lower end of the Kanektok, I lost two consecutive rainbows that almost certainly pushed beyond the 30-inch mark. After the first, crestfallen but not yet defeated, I locked myself in mentally, changed flies, checked every knot twice and determined to break my rod before ever again setting up so limply. As almost never happens, I hooked another, larger fish. It blew up on the hook-set, shattering ten-square-feet of surface water. It tail-walked downstream, dove, u-turned and detonated again – all in an instant. Then my line went slack and I quietly dissolved into atoms, leaving nothing behind but a few wisps of smoke and the mysterious scent of morning coffee.
Six years and hundreds of very nice fish later, I still can’t escape the memory of that whipping. The agony of defeat indeed. It’s a scar, like surviving a car wreck, but I didn’t realize how permanently it had damaged my psyche until one May day on the banks of the Situk River, when I’d locked into one of those old battles of will with a quite sizeable steelhead I could see holding behind a rock midstream. After perhaps a thousand and one casts, it decided to eat; it jumped once and let me know I’d never before hooked a steelhead of this size – and I was immediately and so thoroughly gripped with fear that there was at least some risk I’d lose my hold on sanity and slip in an alternate dimension. If this fish got off, I knew, I would simply go somewhere else. Probably somewhere terrible, with nothing but whitefish and carp in the river, making it even more imperative that I land this fish.
I did, and it felt so good my hands shook a little from the adrenaline. I’ve since then forgotten almost every detail of the encounter, and the fish looks like a stranger in the pictures I’ve kept. It taught me something Howard Cosell never did – that when it comes to the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, too much of one over the other makes it all feel incomplete.
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