Gone Fishing, To Catch A Dream
By Richard Reiss
Sept. 2, 1990
LEAD: YOU can see their smiles in the rain as they scurry home to their mothers' kitchens. The dirty boys with dirty faces. The young adventurers clad in mud and worms and fishing hooks. The sportsmen, proud of their catch, the catch of the day: a 12-inch bass, a shiny rainbow, half a dozen blue gills and stories for a lifetime.
Their palms are covered with grime. And 10 miniature fingers flail and talk and move too fast to capture. So we return to their faces. The ruddy cheeks where they swat biting flies, the smooth strong brows where they wipe their sweat and the rounded chins where they slap one another, punch one another and act the way future men do.
These are the faces of sublime illustration, the muddy, gritty grins of the dirty boys on their way. From head to toe they drip of the world, but mostly of water from the sky and the streams, and the swamp down below and the lake in full view.
I see the boys as I leave for work or walk the dog or jog at sunrise. I envy their adventures and recollect my own. I remember the places where I fished: the bridges I sat under, the rocks I sat upon and the streams where I stood in chilling water waiting for the one that always got away.
I fished with my father when I was very very young. My rod was a stick, and my reel was a string and my bait was bread squashed onto a hook. We sat in a boat that rocked with the wind, and we caught little sunnies one by one.
In a few short years my company changed from father to brother. From Allan I learned that fishing was more than catching fish; it was an adventure occasionally fraught with danger. Fishing with my brother meant long bike rides to exotic places. It was fishing at night and fishing on the run. It was rising early and hiding from the rangers, farmers and other protectors of natural waters.
My brother's favorite spot was an hour away and high in the mountains of northern New Jersey. It was an area occupied by hundreds of Boy Scouts and thousands of fish. To get there meant sleeping in the yard, rising before dawn and hitting the road before the traffic got scary. Our first cast took place in darkness, and our last catch was cleaned, scaled and proudly displayed long before the morning bugle call.
As I grew older, I began to discover places of my own - secret places where the fish would bite and the air was cool. Small mountain lakes that mirrored the trees and skies and white doughy clouds. Places of simplistic beauty, places that turned fishing into a secondary activity.
What I once viewed as a wilderness adventure was becoming an adventure of the teen-age soul. And even though I continued to load my bike with my rod and my reel and my sack full of worms, the desire to fish slowly faded away. What replaced it was a sense of me, a sense that this mountain lake was a place for thinking and dreaming, a mystical place where the world was excluded and I was left to drift and aspire.
I wonder about the dirty boys and their chances for drifting into their own aspirations. I wonder where the secret lakes, farmers' ponds and trout-filled streams are for them. Do they have a place, a hidden place? And can they protect it forever and ever?
In my own life I sense that the hidden lakes have changed. The danger is gone, the thrill is subdued and the dreams are different and unassuming. Because as much as I want to think like a boy, a dirty boy with enchanted dreams, I live like a man in a world where I know that dreams are but moments to create and capture.
My secret places have left the woods, the water and the mud behind. They're not as dangerous and not nearly as wet. They're corners of my house where I write my stories, paint my pictures and create new dreams. They're quiet aspirations for a simple life in a world unobstructed by dirt and blood. They're moments with my wife, telling my stories, of the one that got away and the one that I kept forever.