This article is part of SELF’s 2024 Guide to Getting Outside, an editorial package that explores the connection between nature and well-being through the lens of awe. SELF will be publishing new articles for this series throughout October. Read more here.
It’s not every day, as my friend Teddy pointed out, that one gets to use the word “confluence” in its most literal sense. We were standing waist-deep in the Delaware River near Hancock, New York, a small hub town on the Pennsylvania border where the East and West Branch of the Delaware conjoin. We had waders on, waterproof boots, and overalls. The September afternoon sun was high, the water was cold, the current tugged fiercely at my hips. Confluence. A word often deployed to describe nebulous things, like energies, or worse, financial markets. But here it was, the real thing, the point where waters meet. It’s why I’d come: To make things real. And to catch fish.
If you’d told me a year ago that fishing would become a big part of my life and mental well-being, I wouldn’t have believed you. I grew up angling for catfish with my uncle in rural Oklahoma but, like most aspects of my life back there, I’d long since left it behind. I viewed fishing as a hobby reserved for retired old men whose humor was based on disliking their wives. To be fair, this is how a decent chunk of fishing enthusiasts portray it. Fishing culture relies heavily on novelty T-shirts featuring slogans like “Part Time Hooker” or “The Tug Is My Drug.” My personal favorites are the flatly menacing ones. “I Fish So I Don’t Choke People.” Okay!
This is to say, I—like a lot of millennials, I’m sure—have long thought of fishing as a corny dad activity. And yet, my Google Bookmarks now overflow with lakes and rivers I want to fish, as well as potential charters to book. I suppose that, not unlike a corny dad, I’ve found peace in fishing. It’s one of the few activities that makes me feel present, a salve for the apartness I’ve felt for some time now: I go about my day feeling numb and inattentive, as if experiences are passing right through me and I’m outside the arterial flow of things. I’m technically present, but I feel more like a spectator in the dull events of my daily routine. I’ve been struggling with depression and anxiety for most of my life, and the apartness can likely be attributed to one or the other, or perhaps both at the same time. Another one of those less desirable confluences.
Fishing activates my senses in a way that’s hard to replicate with other methods. It organizes my attention, forces me to listen and anticipate—a nibble, a slight disturbance on the water’s surface. I’ve taken several cognitive behavior therapy courses, completed my share of worksheets, and have tried meditating, but mindfulness seems to come most naturally to me when I’m fishing.
Because it’s an activity that deals directly with wildlife, sharp hooks, and easily tangled lines, fishing definitely has a learning curve. I find that, as I wade back into fishing, it’s best to have a guide, someone who knows what they’re doing. Someone like Brian, Teddy’s and my guide for the day, who splits his time between Manhattan and Hancock. Brian’s business, City Fly, specializes in getting urbanites like myself into the wild. When he’s not fishing, he’s pursuing acting. His IMDb page touts appearances in The Walking Dead and Law & Order: SVU. The arc of Brian’s life has been deeply informed, he told us, by watching the 1992 movie A River Runs Through It as a child.
Teddy and I drove up to Hancock on a Saturday to fish all day Sunday. More specifically, we were to try our hand at fly-fishing, which I had assumed was merely a more flamboyant form of “regular fishing” that used ornate, feathered lures as bait in place of, say, live worms. This is only partially true, as Brian informed us. Yes, the lure is different—instead of live bait, a tiny “fly” is used. But the rods are also much longer and feel lighter. It is also, in contrast to the mental image of an old man practically napping while waiting for a fish to tug at his line, quite active. If you’re not casting, you’re reeling in the line to cast again.
Fly-fishing is a finer art than bait-fishing. It’s damn near balletic. After outfitting us in our waders, Brian drove us to the edge of the river and demonstrated how to cast. It is not, as I assumed based on fishing tropes, “all in the wrist.” Your wrist actually doesn’t bend at all. Instead, you hold your forearm stiff and swish your rod back and forth to whip the line dramatically through the air, building up distance for the cast. Brian was taking us nymphing, a form of fly-fishing that utilizes microscopic lures that mimic aquatic insects at a juvenile or larval stage. Mayflies, a trout favorite, can live as nymphs for many months in the river, only to emerge as winged adults that often die within a matter of hours. Understanding the life cycle of this tiny insect is crucial to a successful fly-fishing trip.
Fly-fishing is a world in which the tiny things matter quite a bit. We humans have long looked to nature to inspire awe, hoping to find that sacred feeling of smallness in the face of something larger than ourselves—a sunset, a mountain, a river like the Mighty Delaware, which was carved by glaciers some two-and-a-half million years ago in the Pleistocene. But the emphasis of fly-fishing is often the microscopic.
In the physical sense, the lures are small as they are beautiful, with beaded, insectoid forms and jewel tones. They will often feature feathers or fur, and there are “fly-tying contests” where winners can be selected based on practicality or on sheer aesthetics. Just like insects themselves, it’s bewildering how much detail can be packed into such a tiny form. The process of making them is delicate, involving a vise mechanism to hold the hook in place and, often, a microscope.
But beyond that, small facts, like whether or not someone pressed a button at the reservoir and released dam water that morning, as was the case on our fishing trip, and whether or not the mayflies were hatching on the surface that day, were of the utmost importance. It was a reminder, for me, of how things actually work. The big stuff is only possible because of the small stuff—the things you can barely see, the things that you wouldn’t normally notice. It all matters.
Of course, on an intellectual level, I’ve known this to be true for much of my life. I’ve seen The Lion King. I know about the circle of life. I get it. But it’s one thing to understand a concept and another to get your hands dirty with it, to wade into it, to feel it. That’s what fishing does for me. It’s brought life back into a world that was starting to feel dead. Even when I’m not physically fishing, I now look at bodies of water and wonder what kind of animals live in it, what tributaries feed it, and what its journey to the ocean looks like. How many times, in life, have I passed by rivers and lakes without a second thought?
I’ve received mixed feedback about my new hobby. Some friends, when I tell them, laugh and ask if I’m being serious or will make a comment like, “Okay, butch.” Or, as a Grindr hookup on the eve of my Hancock trip did, they will express disapproval: “So you’re really into torturing fish, huh?” It’s hard to deny that there’s some truth in there. I am, after all and at the end of the day, aiming to get a wild animal on the end of a sharp hook, and it’s hard to imagine that a fish wouldn’t rather be doing, well, just about anything else with its time. There are guides available about best practices for environmentally conscious anglers; though, of course, it’s exceedingly difficult to avoid doing harm altogether.
But I’ve found that fishing has encouraged me to care more about our planet, about my place in it, about all the things, big and small, that come together to make it happen. On that trip, I caught four fish. Two brown trout, two rainbow trout, all beautiful. We threw them back. For me, that fishing trip was hardly about catching the fish, anyway. It was about standing in the water, and, like the trout that were flicking about beneath its surface, feeling the tug of something much older and bigger than myself.
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