This is, undeniably, remarkable rhetoric; in fact the article created a small sensation among literary fishermen and was called “the first real advance in Walton criticism in fifty years or more.” But it is also, undeniably, compleat bilgewater, asking us in effect to ignore all but two or three pages of a two-hundred-twenty-page book, and to forget the fact that when Walton wished to include a section on fly angling he considered himself ignorant of the subject and hired a friend, Charles Cotton, to write an addendum. But the really pathetic thing about H2O’s piece was that by the time he’d finished penning it, he’d actually come to believe it. After its publication he invited Ma to read the article (thinking it would have more authority in magazine print); Ma complied, then offered this succinct critical evaluation: “Shit, Hen! This is nuthin’ but commie hogwash an’ you know it!” But Hen now insisted that he didn’t know it—so Ma took off on an extemporaneous counter-argument wherein she asserted that “Ike Walton was nuthin’ but a limeyfied cattle-puncher an’ a boozer an’ a rowdy good ol’ boy, an’ I’d like t’shake his hand fer tossin’ in that token bit o’ snot-nosed crap about flyfishin’, ’cause it’s plain as pee he only done it so rich snobs’d buy the book, which’d give him plenty o’ pocket money fer fishin’ gear an’ ale an’ nightcrawlers.…” And, strange to say, by the time Ma finished she had somehow bamboozled herself into thinking that her rendition of The Compleat Angler was the one godly interpretation.
Thus began that marathon debate, The Great Izaak Walton Controversy; thus my childhood home became a fishy little Belfast, strife-torn by an interdenominational “dialogue” that consisted of little more than name calling, jibes, scoffing, bragging, and weird wrestling matches that eventually resulted in the advent of my little brother. The one interesting addition Izaak Walton brought to the fray was the Quotation. Like Southern Bible-belters backing harebrained theology with Dale Carnegie Translations of Scripture, H2O and Ma grew adept at trotting out lines wrenched from The Compleat Angler. The book became our family bible, and from the time I could toddle I heard it quoted, and misquoted, daily. So, naturally, as soon as I could read I set out to solve the Great Izaak Walton Controversy for myself.
5b
The Great Izaak Walton Controversy: My Own Rendition
Most men forget to pay their praises… to Him that made that sun and us, and still protects us, and gives us flowers and showers, and stomachs and meat, and content and leisure to go a-fishing in.
—Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler
When I would beget content, and increase confidence in the power, and wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, I will walk the meadows by some gliding stream.
—Izaak Walton
I labor to possess my own soul.
—Walton again
By the time I was fifteen I had read The Compleat Angler perhaps as many times as Moses read the Commandments, and (like Moses?) the more I read the more confused and disillusioned I grew. The more I read the more I doubted whether Izaak Walton gave a coot’s hoot whether one fished with a flyrod, plunking poles, trot-lines, harpoons, or gill-nets. The more I read the more obvious it became that there was only one thing he cared for deeply—a thing completely alien to my experience, a thing that made me most uncomfortable, a thing too vague to grasp but too frequently alluded to to ignore. The more I read, the more it seemed that The Compleat Angler was almost casually and incidentally a fishing book. Its deepest raison d’être was not love for Angling, but love for that nebulous Personage men call God.
Walton credits God with providing all the savor a person gleans from any form of angling whatsoever; thus even the pleasures achieved by employment of bait or fly are, for Walton, references to the omnirecurrent gifts bestowed by our Spendthrift Creator. Izaak further credits his busy Deity with the manufacture and maintenance of the Universe, and though little evidence is forwarded as to how this extravagant hobby is practiced, Piscator calmly assures us that every “various little living creature is not only created but fed (man knows not how) by the goodness of the God of nature.…”
Sherlock Holmes shook his head like a man who is far from being satisfied. “These are very deep waters,” said he; “pray go on with your narrative.”*
Who was this “God of nature”? Why hadn’t I met Him, or at least learned something substantial about Him, or at the very least heard His Name consistently taken in some way other than in vain? Why—when I had fished the fresh and saline waters of Montana, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, Colorado, Canada, and Alaska for five kinds of salmon, four kinds of bass, three kinds of catfish, two kinds of steelhead, ling cod, flounder, halibut, bluegill, carp, crappie, sole, shad, smelt, snappers, shark, sturgeon, perch, pogies, mullet, whitefish, squawfish, dogfish, crawfish, trash fish, frogs, turtles, chub, nine kinds of trout, and so many more species that to name them might hypnotize me—had I failed to even hear of this Illimitable King who created, fed, and ruled them all? Why—when I had laughed, leapt, shouted, sung, gloated, grinned, sighed, wept, cackled, cursed, capered, crowed, and careened every which way in the fishing for and catching of every which fish—had the Magician behind these million moods not put in an Appearance, or even a Word? Why did Old Izaak so insistently insist that my myriad jubilations, desolations, and preoccupations did not come from the sensible domain of water-whisper, fish-leap, rod-arc, rises at dusk, heart-jolt at savage strike, or night wind on mountain lake, but from imperceptible wee bliss-bolts shot from the bow of his hyperactive Deity? And if somehow I forced myself to rant and ballyhoo about God’s goodness and learned to turn ever and anon to the Invisible Zero of His Face, might I, like Piscator, come to be “so transported and amazed, and so admire the glory of it, that I would not willingly turn my eyes from that first ravishing object, to behold all the various beauties this world could present”?…
“We are bound to take every possibility into account. But the poor devil has certainly got himself into very deep water,” said Holmes, “and it is a question whether we shall ever be able to get him ashore.”*
Holmes’s was my conclusion also. Having fished as intently as perhaps any boy had ever done, I had not only failed to encounter Walton’s God, I’d failed to see the least evidence of His existence. Perhaps He resided only above England. Or perhaps He had retired since Walton’s day and now lived quietly in some remote Condominium Galaxy where He enjoyed a game of intergalactic golf now and again, deftly driving, pitching, and putting stars into eighteen black holes in space, loosing devils on us whenever He scored a bogey. Or perhaps He hid behind every tree, rock, and bush, or was closer than my very breath so that just as I had never laid eyes on my lungs, so I’d never seen Him.… Whatever He did, however He did it, Whoever and Whatever He wasn’t or was, if He wanted my attention He’d have to leave off making Himself so scarce.
As for Izaak Walton, it seemed to me he forced Piscator into wasting a lot of fishing time yammering on about his divine Will-o’-the-Wisp; this would have been legitimate had the book been called The Compleat Vicar, but a truly “compleat angler” ought to angle more compleatly. So despite having been led since fetushood to believe The Compleat Angler the most important book and the Bait-versus-Fly controversy the most profound question I would ever encounter, I came in my fifteenth year to some new conclusions based on my own observations: 1) my parents’ debate was an absurd mare’s nest stemming not from any paradox inherent in The Compleat Angler, but from their own invincible stubbornness. 2) unless it was somehow proven to me that this soundless and unseen Sky-Pie of Izaak Walton’s was crucial to the art of angling, I would be forced to conclude that Walton’s classic was a misnamed antique of no use to any pure incarnation of fishermanliness—such as I believed myself to be. 3) unless and until such proof were provided, to hell with the bloody book and the whole dumb business.
Being of a fiery constitution, Moses did not hesitate to smash the Commandments the moment he suspected them of failing him in leading the people of Israel. Being of watery
constitution, I simply took The Compleat Angler from its prestigious place among the autographed fishing books of Joe Brooks, Sparse Grey-Hackle, Vincent Marinaro, Charles Ritz, Roderick Haig-Brown, Lee Wulff, and company, and let it gather cobwebs in H2O’s library among his countrymen, Herbert, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, and Smart. I could think of no more ultimate symbol of rejection.
I did pay Walton one last consideration: I had for years kept notebooks—many volumes of mathematically precise accounts of where, when, and how I caught every fish I caught; it now occurred to me that, on the off-chance there was something to this God character, I might employ the same system of note-taking with regard to Him. I titled these records “the God-notebook.”
6
Excerpts from the God-notebook
I have been in the buttery
In the land of the Trinity…
It is not known what is the nature
Of its meat and its fish.…
—Hanes Taliesin
Scanning the “God-notebook” I find my most frequent entries tell of certain door-to-door-salesman-like persons purportedly devoted to a variety of invisible beings with names like “Great-Gawd-Amighty,” “Fathern Heaven,” “Parsonal Lord N. Savior,” Jehovah, and “R. Lord.” Judging by the fact that these people seem never to fish and, so far as I know, are found nowhere but on the denatured streets of America’s urbs and burbs, it seems unlikely that their gods are in any way similar to the “God of nature” of Izaak Walton. Neither does their behavior evince harmonious comparisons to Piscator’s, for they are found to be nervous, twitchy, often belligerent people—terrified of ale, ignorant of poetry, oblivious to the possibility of error in their views, and not about to say anything so interesting as “There is also a fish called a sticklebag” or “I have been much pleased to walk quietly by a brook with a little stick in my hand” or even “the primitive Christians were, as most Anglers are, quiet men, and followers of peace.” It even seems likely that the tranquil Piscator would have been hard pressed to maintain his customary good nature in the company of a typical door-to-door urb-and-burb god’s devotee—for these inexplicable people make it their business to bombard unsuspecting citizens in the privacy of their homes with little comic books full of the most grandiose and depressing threats, prophecies and admonitions imaginable; and they paste all kinds of weird epigrams and doom prophecies on their cars, causing many an innocent motorist to drive to his death trying to read the blasted things; and a common edition of these bumper legends promises worse havoc, flatly warning that the drivers of these stickered cars could at any moment evaporate away to Heaven in a process called “Rapture,” showing no concern for the holocaust of traffic fatalities they would unavoidably leave behind!
The door-to-door comic-book distribution is part of an activity these folk call “Witnessing”—“Witlessing,” as my mother renders it. The divergent courses of action my family members took when these threat-peddlers came knocking are worth noting: H2O classified the “Witless” according to gender—the men he called “the Christian Brothers” after Ma’s brandy, the women “the Weird Sisters” after the witches in Macbeth. When they offered him the comics they called “littercher”—“a term,” said H2O, “the first two syllables of which approach the truth”—he would coolly misinform them that he and his family were passionately attached to the Church of England and had no use for their propaganda. (This confused the hell out of the Avon lady.) Of course, none of us but H2O had ever been to church except for weddings, but the Witless—tongue-tied by the frigid eloquence of one of God’s Frozen People (H2O’s nickname for himself and all Anglicans)—would either take silent leave or find themselves conversing with an abruptly closed door.
Ma’s technique was less articulate, more woodsy, and such a delight to Bill Bob and me that a dull rainy day would sometimes sink us to our knees to beseech Fathern Heaven or R. Lord to send along a Witless. When the knocker sounded, Ma would size up the visitor through a fisheye peephole she’d installed for such occasions. If she spotted comic books she would repair to the closet, return to the door, let it swing slowly open, and stand there—wordless, immobile, and menacing—while the unfortunate caller grew cognizant of the fact that a wild, unreliable-looking woman had a double-barreled shotgun aimed at his or her knees. (Ma figured if you shot their knees you shot their ability to pray.) Her invitations to “clear the hell off a my property” were never refused or even discussed.
My technique was to wait for someone else to go to the door so I could record whatever transpired in my notebook.
Bill Bob seldom responded to door knocks, but one time when H2O was away and Ma was momentarily occupied he went to the door and admitted a Witless—a surly looking, obese, red-faced Christian Brother who made no attempt to return Bill Bob’s friendly greeting and eyed my notebook and me with extreme suspicion. Grinning hideously, he presented Bill Bob (who was six at the time) with one of the unhappy comics and growled “Where’s your muthah, Sonny?,” not realizing that Ma and a wounded water buffalo were two of the last creatures on earth he’d like to see. Always grateful for a gift, Bill Bob thanked him courteously and trotted off. Our guest naturally assumed he’d gone to fetch “muthah,” but Bill Bob was back in a jiffy with a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd funnybook—one of his personal favorites—which he presented to the stranger in gentlemanly fashion. Realizing the exchange to have been highly advantageous to the Witless since his comic was bereft of jokes and color pictures, I was startled when he glowered and started hollering about what he called “baiting a servant of Thlord.” He threw Bugs and Elmer on the floor and looked like he might grab Bill Bob and shake him or something… when Ma slipped up behind him, jammed the shotgun in his back, and hissed, “Gitch yer commie ass outta my house ’fore I blow yer lungs out.” Hearing this, Bill Bob stepped quickly aside lest he be spattered with debris.
The Witless leaned over and picked up Bugs and Elmer with such reverence you’d have thought Thlord were the cartoonist, then reeled toward the door making little “hrgch-hrnk” noises in his throat like he was trying to be polite and not blow lunch all over Ma’s carpet. Once down the front steps he tried to run a little, but his chest seemed to be bothering him because he stopped at the curb and sort of half sat, half collapsed onto the sidewalk, clutching at his shirt front in a seizure of some kind. When he finally went away he still carried Bugs and Elmer tucked carefully under his arm. I think we changed his life. And I never forgot that phrase, “baiting a servant of Thlord”: my only understanding of the word baiting forced me to conclude that the poor Witless considered himself some sort of fish hook, and Bill Bob’s comic a kind of worm. This conundrum constituted the single connection I ever made between door-to-door doomsayers and my beloved art of angling.
I also find in my notebook numerous references to the god of my great-grandmother, Celestial Darling Carper. I noted that her Deity was “apparently a Christian” and that his son Jesus was, according to her, the author of the Bible. But GG’s choicest discoursings (we called her “GG” because both “Greatgrandmother” and “Celestial” were somewhat unwieldy) emerged during what we called her “pretoddy tirade”: whenever she came to visit she would scarcely sit down (and she could barely stand up) before she started scolding Ma for letting me fish on Sundays. “Carolina, you always done it, you still do it, and if’n your boy ends up shanghaied t’hell in the divil’s fishnet, on your head be it!” etc. etc. And Ma would listen with incredible patience (explaining to Bill Bob and me that she “always made it a rule o’ thumb never t’mouth off at a soul in its nineties”) until GG started to run down a bit; then she’d say, “I’m sorry I’m so bad, GG. Would you like a nice toddy now?,” to which GG invariably replied, “I shorely wouldn’t mind a spot, being’s it ain’t the Sabbath.” So Ma would whip up a nasty concoction of lemon, hot water, and good Kentucky bourbon which they’d pour from a teapot into china cups and saucers and ruin with heaped spoons of sugar. Then presto! sermons and chastisings wou
ld give way to girlish giggling and shrieks of laughter, the pair of them talking family and old times like two tough fingers living on the same old hand. I recall an afternoon when, especially looped and happy, GG leaned over, squeezed Ma’s knee, and said, “My my my my Carolina, if Jesus could see me here sipping with you this way, He’d roll right over in His grave!”
Eavesdropping on this ritual, I gleaned many pages of amazingly unreliable information; the most relevant are these references to angling:
1. GG’s devil is a fisherman whose favorite fishing day is Sunday.
2. GG’s devil doesn’t use bait or flies. He catches people in a net you can’t see and drags them off to Hell, which is like a fish cannery where GG worked, except people are the fish Down There.
3. God doesn’t let the devil net folks who go to church on Sunday.
4. God does let the devil net folks who fish on Sunday.
The River Why Page 5
