Up the Creek, Fishing

The Philadelphia Maritime Museum’s “Gone Fishing! A History of Fishing in River, Bay and Shore” (cast your line before October 5th) is beguiling enough to arrest this professional non-fisher (who formally abandoned the sport at age 17 from terminal boredom before the perch abandoned his summer Lake Huron from terminal pollution.)

It’s the quayside sociology of it that intrigues me. To judge from Susan A. Popkin and Roger B. Allen’s curatorial manual (It’s less a catalogue than a compendium, a fine browse if not a steady read), fishing is the most demotic of American sports. In an icthyological variation on “everybody can grow up to be president” in the new republic, every boy more realistically can get a lot of cheek tanning himself down by the old mill stream, river, bay or sea.

And that’s not the best of it either, for there emerged the corollary of the kid with borrowed string and bent safety pin who wipes out the dude with the fancy gear. Ha! Talk about upwardly mobile louts! There’s also present the allegation that fishing is the least class-conscious sport in the new country. Poor and rich mix their lines--and their lives--peaceably.

But that didn’t keep the Schuylkill Fishing Company of the State in Schuylkill (I found no explanation for the amiably redundant name) from being the first sports club (and now the oldest in the country). It is a paradigm of a country which loves to flee to Nature while simultaneously destroying its pith that the SFCOSIS had to flee its first location because of noxious industrial wastes and then flee its second base near Essington for cleaner waters upriver near Andalusia.

I read in David Iams that Society will be visiting the Biddle Estate this fall, including the Fish House, where the formidable local potion, Fish House Punch, was devised. For the less elegant, the recipe is in the exhibition’s manual, as well as instructions for concocting State in Schuylkill Cream of Clam Soup.

The metaphor of bigness is rampant as well in the short and unnecessarily curbed natural history of fishy hordes in these parts. Each spring, before the piscine holocaust, armadas of spawning shad cruised up the river, and in fall flotillas of eels wangled seaward. The overkills that then ensued remind you of the pouter pigeons and buffalo.

I know, I know. The fish are coming back, slowly if not entirely surely. But his summer’s season of dolphin deaths at the shore, with the hateful flotsam of syringes, tampons and other nonbiodegradable petrochemical success stories, reminds us of how far our several commonwealths are from a mature ecology. We’re still kicking the holy shit out of Nature, poor benighted Eden we have made of it. Fishin’ for an apocalypse.

I told you fishing made me ill. But there is an upside to the mayhem we have made of it. Take that Eastonian who had the wit to see that bamboo, with its natural sectioning, cried out to be an improved, detachable rod. And the boats are wonders of function as well.

From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large