Hemingway was a Bait Fisherman
He swung the hook on which the two worms curled, dropping it gently to let the current take the line and baited hook beneath the bank. There was a heavy wildness of movement in the narrow, deep current, and the trout was torn out of the water…flopping in the air…sailing over Nick’s shoulder and tumbling into the ferns on the bank behind him.
Ernest Hemingway -The Last Good Country
By John Luthens
Ernest Hemingway wrote and fished where few had gone before: Places where the sun never fully set its eye on the water. Moss-covered runs sucking at the faintest glimmers of light escaping through the woven thickness of the alders and pines above. Shadowy pools that were bottomless as his imagination.
I can’t write like him. Can’t drink like him, either. He raised fancy glasses with famous people and toasted the exotic backdrops of his stories and watery exploits across the world. The wildest feat of literature that I’ve ever been able to slam down is when I stumbled into a back country, Wisconsin dive bar and scratched down directions to the local trout stream on a beer-soaked napkin.
Still, me and old papa Hemingway have something in common. In the darkest reaches where raw nature authors up twisted plots of mosquitoes and stinging nettle. Through brushy walls and into water-bound gardens where worms and grasshoppers dance upon the hook and dive beneath roots and logs. In environments like that, Hemingway was a bait fisherman, and it is there that I can wade as his equal into the stained waters.
Hemingway may have waxed poetic upon the sweet science of fly rods and hand-crafted flies, but the thing he knew best was crawling into the overgrown jungles with a tin of worms and horsing trout out of the snags and onto the bank with the sheer exhilaration and force that made him a tenacious writer and reporter.
I admit that there’s nothing more romantic than casting a trout fly into the setting sun and watching as it is sucked down in a smashing, swirling rise, and, living in Wisconsin, there are plenty of pristine, open water stretches where I can have a fling at doing just that. Problem is, there are scores of others in our state who can not only accomplish the same thing, but who can accomplish it with a success rate and finesse that leaves me clenching my fists in jealousy.
I can’t fish like them. I can whip my fly rod till my wrist goes numb, and I can also whip off as many Hemmingway one-liners as I want about fishing truly and honorably, but it boils down to the fact that I’m naturally clumsy. It’s downright embarrassing having my fly-fishing buddies laugh with hysterics as my line slaps the water like a beaver’s tail and every trout within a half-mile radius splashes for cover.
Like Hemingway escaping to Cuba to avoid the limelight, I find myself, time and again, seeking solace from the flashy casts of the fly-fishing paparazzi by crawling off into the muck and mire with a gob of worms to winch a trout or two from beneath a log pile. Preferably, in a stream that’s narrow enough to leap across. And preferably one that’s got brush thick enough to snap off the expensive rod tips of any of my high-brow buddies who dares to follow me.
My dilemma is further compounded by the sordid fact that I find trout delicious. Fried with bacon, just a touch of lemon, crisp on the outside and tender pink with when the steaming backbone is pulled away. I personally know of many trout purists who would tie me up with lead-core leaders and leave me to sink into the swamp for even mentioning the words “eat” and “trout” in the same sentence.
Hemingway kept what he caught, and he ate what he kept. He put his fly rod to good use slashing through weeds and briars and into streams that time forgot, and he carried a bait can instead of a fly book. Hemingway was a bait fisherman, and he never apologized for it.
Who cares if I find myself hooking every other back cast into the trees and losing a week’s wages worth of flies when I set forth up the high road to the fly-fishing mountain? I can crawl down the low path into an unforsaken mosquito factory and plop a squirming piece of bait into a snarl of branches to hook a trout with the best of them, even if it does mean plunging into the pile and wrenching the fish free when my line gets belly wrapped around the sunken mess.
“What did I know best that I had not written about and lost? What did I know about and truly care for the most? There was no choice at all.”
Hemingway wrote those lines before penning “Big Two-Hearted River,” perhaps one of his finest short stories. Critics say that it wades deep into the healing powers of nature, water and trout, and I sure can’t argue with that.
Hemingway was a bait fisherman. Read the story for yourself. If you happen to be a chaser of trout, and if you’re looking for some adventure in the wildest of places, set down your fly box and follow us into the shadows. I know from experience that it won’t make you a famous writer. But I can guarantee that you will never look at a live grasshopper quite the same.
John Luthens is a freelance writer, photographer and outdoor journalist from Grafton, Wisconsin. His first novel, Taconite Creek, is available on Amazon or at www.cablepublishing.com, or by contacting the author at Luthens@hotmail.com