Some stories we love for their complexity, their awe, their in-depth analysis of a place and spot in time, and their themes. If the prior book was any indication, I adore those stories. But, sometimes, we long for something simpler. I do, anyway. Was is it they say: read everything, right? I try to, anyway. Sometimes I look for a charming slice of time and a quaint piece of place apart from the churning momentum of existence. One can still exist in this space free of the usual bonds and limitations of whatever life they’ve left behind to travel there. It can be as simple as leaving the phone behind for a bit, or picking up a book, or disappearing into the woods.
Humans long for escape, in part because our existence is all-consuming and, now more than ever it may seem, the stresses and notifications of it inescapable.
Many, including myself, decide to go fishing as a result.
So did Murray Hoyt.
There’s not a whole lot more I can say about the author of The Fish in my Life. He was a Vermonter, he wrote about bees and ice cream and fishing, he may have known my grandfather, and there’s not a lot of information about him out there. Part of this is because of the time and the nature of his writing, and that I’m not actually sure of his level of fame even within Vermont.
I found his books, a few of them actually, leaning alongside stacks of old records in my grandparent’s cabin in Ludlow. They were old, missing jackets (if they ever had them), smelling of the dust and age inherent of the cabin itself. A relic of the Vermont that existed before I remembered visiting, of a time before many of the things I know and take for granted even existed.
But in that time still, Murray Hoyt fished, and he’s here on the list of my Top 10 at least.
Why? Well, while reading his book I found that he fished trout streams, like I was learning to those summers under the blissful Vermont sun. He fished in Florida where, years after reading his accounts of snook, sharks, and tarpon I would go to college and catch stingrays (it happened more than once), catfish (yum), and snapper (never big enough). He fished with flies, with worms, with lures, with friends, and alone. Along the way, he collected stories (as any angler does), he collected memories in that way only anglers can, and he collected fish (usually as dinner, but there we have it. There’s more than one reason to fish).
These were all things I’d experienced, or would experience and remember him as sharing with me before.
He did all of these things as the rightfully acknowledged spokesman of the, “some of us who, despite the very best of intentions, occasionally fall just a teeny bit short of… perfection. Not many of us, you understand- I doubt if this number would ever exceed seventy or eighty million- not very far short either. But now and then one of us does wear old pants, or sneak a worm onto a hook when nothing will bite flies, or figure that with the budget in the state it is, if he doesn’t catch the family will just have to be satisfied with canned beans.” Granted, he explains, it was unanimous vote of himself and his wife. (I wasn’t old enough to vote so, unfortunately, I also did not elect him. But I’ve accepted the results since.)
This is because, sadly, even fishing has had to bend to the changing of the times. There are those images of perfection there as elsewhere in life, from the forever instragrammable streams and trout to the gear, the lures, the flies, and the trips (that last one albeit on hold). Fishing has always had some similar weight to it, it’s evident in Hoyt’s text, that of the lure (I’m hilarious) of the bigger fish just around the bend, the stories of the ones that got away (we all have them), and the tricks to increase your haul next time (and next time and next time and next time).
It’s there in his opening description of the perfect fisherman, which would not look out of place in an instagrid or on the cover of a magazine.
Fishing, therefore, and even in moments like that and as much as it is a wonderful escape from life, is a reminder, comforting for its familiarity, of how little life really changes. That a book written in the 1960’s should have the same hilarious, embarrassing foibles I encounter when out fishing is a testament to how it, like any shared activity, is a piece of human connection.
We all certainly need a little more of that now.
What draws me back to his book (it’s not quite an annual read, but certainly a comforting flip-through), is the humanity in it. Not just the flagrant acceptance of being less-than-perfect (it’s really closer to reveling in it), which is something I think provides more comfort than he realized (I’ve got my fair share of trout in a bathing suit, barefoot, flipping a worm into a pool (and once in a three-piece suit)), but also in the lessons given, intentionally or not, from the fishing stories themselves. Acknowledgment of the greatness of reeling in a shark, and the minute appreciation of a native brookie in a stream. The joy of the warmth of the south, and the bravery of facing northern winter. The slips, the falls, and the entanglements beside the irreplaceable experiences, the time spent with companions, and the things you only tell others after a few drinks.
Because, at the end of it all I, like Hoyt, “…intend to think about the quiet, beautiful woods up north, the red-bellied trout, the cabin, the animals, the guides. I intend to see with my mind’s eye big snook taking out line, schools of mullet, the Gulf beaches in the moonlight where the sand looks like snow. I intend to remember all the things I’ve written about here, and the others that are later going to happen to me.”
And, like Hoyt, I intend to do it however I please, Right Way and Looking the Part be damned.
