IT WAS THE SUMMER OF 1969. My brother was home from Nam, having survived the Tet Offensive at Pleiku, and the Cubbies were going great. Dr. Goldman and I alternately hopped and limped into my trusty ’63 Dodge Dart. We eschewed the interstate and headed south on old US 45 past Tuscola through corridors of towering corn. We liked to start in the morning but not too early. Dr. Goldman’s days of catching first light were behind him.
Somewhere along a shady stretch of the Kaskaskia River, our first order of business was finding a pair of reliable forked sticks for rod rests. We crimped split shot onto our lines—he using pliers, I my teeth (lead poisoning be damned). The river in mid-August was sluggish, dark, tepid. It wouldn’t take much weight to hold down the line. I started to attach my hook, but Dr. Goldman smiled, told me it wouldn’t do. My usual hook-tying technique entails multiple overhand knots—about four, let’s say. Dr. Goldman patiently taught me how to tie a clinch knot, surely the most valuable knot for any fisherman to know. With it, you can secure your hook or lure to the line, or you join two lines together with a blood knot, essentially two back-to-back clinch knots.
With half a nightcrawler on your hook, all you need do is hunker down on the bank in the 90-plus-degree heat and 90-plus percent humidity and wait. With Dr. Goldman as your fishing partner, you didn’t wait long. Ah, the wondrous impatience of the aged! If neither of us got a solid bite within half an hour, we were outta there. My 98-year-old father likes to say he has lots of patience because over the years he never used much of it. He would’ve found a kindred spirit in Dr. Goldman.
We moved to a different spot on the Kaskaskia, baited up again, and cast out. Dr. Goldman landed a slender silvery fish with a flash of gold and a small suckermouth. “Golden redhorse,” he said with apparent satisfaction.
“Isn’t that some kind of sucker?” Fishing on the bottom as we were, I’d been hoping for channel cats or big flatheads.
“Let’s get the stringer.”
I expressed my surprise and perhaps my reluctance, but Dr. Goldman assured me that this species offers firm white flesh. “And they’re not really that bony.”
A few minutes later I latched on to a yellow bullhead that put up a momentary struggle but proved to be minuscule. I was about to return it from whence it came, when Dr. Goldman swiftly admonished me, and I learned the cardinal lesson of fishing with Professor Marcus S. Goldman: You Keep What You Catch. Presumably, you then take it home, clean it, and eat it. No fish is too small to eat that is large enough to take the hook, certainly including the delectable bullhead. By the end of the day, we had hauled in two ordinary river redhorse along with the golden and a grand total of three bullheads, not one of them longer than five inches. Dr. Goldman was delighted, and insisted I take this fine mess home to my bride, a Florida farm girl accustomed to dining on fat bream or bass.
Dr. Goldman showed me the small booklet in which he recorded the date, stream fished, species landed and number of same. He’d been keeping records like this for 40 years, with no apparent ichthyological end in mind. We talked about Izaak Walton—reverently, as Dr. Goldman was a devout Episcopalian. I confess not to have read the entirety of The Compleat Angler, and Dr. Goldman saw to it that I left his home with a nice edition of the volume a University of Chicago professor named Norman Maclean would, a decade later, dismiss as unrespectable because Walton was “an Episcopalian and a bait fisher.” I wonder what Dr. Goldman thought of that hymn to family and fly fishing, if he ever read it. By the time A River Runs Through It appeared in 1976, I’d pretty much lost track of my old fishing partner.
Back at our cottage in Urbana, I undertook the less-than-pleasant task of fish-cleaning, skinning the tiny bullheads and scaling the redhorse, which resembled the baitfish we called shiners in Florida. We dusted them with flour and pan-fried them, and they weren’t bad—the bullheads quite tasty at about three bites per fish—even though the good professor wasn’t altogether candid about the boniness of the redhorse. But their flesh was indeed white and firm, and the flavor was okay.
I was destined to taste worse. One day I took home a fish generally classified as a minnow: a horned dace, maybe three inches long. In a notable passage of The Compleat Angler, Venator (the hunter) complains, “Oh, Sir! A chub is the very worst fish that swims. I hoped for a trout to my dinner.” Piscator (the angler) assures his companion that he will “make it a good fish by dressing it.” Unlike Piscator, I have never been quite so confident in my culinary capacity to transform a minnow into a trout.
It was the summer of 1969 and Nixon had moved toward “Vietnamization” of the war, Senator Ted Kennedy had plunged off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, and Buzz Aldrin had taken a stroll on the moon. The Beatles were in their heyday and the Manson Family had introduced us to a perverse vision of family values. Woodstock was under way in New York, but I was no more a hippie than I was an antiwar activist. I was a grad student in English literature with little income and a wife seven months pregnant, and I was under the gun to wrap up my dissertation. While I liked the Beatles and didn’t like the war, my current passions were the writings of Thomas Traherne, rugby, the Chicago Cubs, and fishing.
It was another warm, muggy day in August. Maybe it was the Sangamon we visited, or maybe Sugar Creek or the Embarras—Dr. Goldman would not approve of my casual attitude here. Whatever stream it was, we lingered no more than half an hour before the professor declared it time to pull up stakes. So we took our forked sticks to the next stream, where I promptly landed a chunky black sucker, my first. As the chances of returning this ugly fellow were zero, I slipped him onto the stringer, noting the unpleasant touch and remembering a day in Florida where a small gator made off with a stringer laden with half a dozen big bream. I would have welcomed him back, that hot day in Illinois.
Needless to say, I toted that black sucker and one of its mates back home along with a sizable carp. And needless to say, Dr. Goldman assured me these would be laudable additions to our dinner table. “Carp caught in moving water develop good firm flesh,” he said. “They’re much prized throughout the world.”
He told of seeing tanks of carp at fashionable Paris restaurants after the war—by which he meant the Great War, the War to End All Wars, the War to Make the World Safe for Democracy. I imagined him selecting a carp for dinner much as I’d once selected a lobster at a fine restaurant in Boston. I imagined him conversing with the brash young Hemingway of 1926, full of himself over the stories of In Our Time and excited about his novel-in-progress that would become The Sun Also Rises. If I’d had my wits about me, I would’ve asked Dr. Goldman whether he read “Big Two-Hearted River” right after it came out—what did he think about it, had he ever been a trout fisherman, a fly fisherman. But I didn’t.
Back home I applied my knife to the carp’s large, coarse scales, noting with disgust the slime, the viscera that is still the foulest of any fish I’ve encountered. I won’t waste metaphors trying to describe the experience, but I thought of Elizabeth Bishop going on about the “dramatic reds and blacks” and “shiny entrails,” and the “pink swim-bladder” that was “like a big peony” inside the old red grouper she caught down in the Keys sometimes in the 1940s. But she was using her imagination, not a knife. And unlike her, I hadn’t been granted the option of letting the fish “go.”
There’s an old Midwest recipe for preparing carp that begins with a cedar plank, soaked for an hour or two in warm saltwater. You scale and thoroughly rinse the fish, score the skin much as you’d carve diamonds in a baked ham, then rub it with olive oil and your choice of herbs. With the coals good and hot, you slightly char the cedar plank on one side, flip it, lay the carp on the charred side, and grill till done. A thin-bladed knife should slip easily into and out of the flesh. Then you throw away the carp and eat the plank.
Not having a cedar plank, we popped open a cookbook and tried baking the carp and the black suckers in the oven. Rather mushy, and very bony. The next carp we tried frying, and the time after that we tried the grill. The results were unsatisfactory. Years later, an Idaho friend gave me an easy and tasty carp chowder recipe involving onions, celery, and thyme.
My boldest fishing exploit with Dr. Goldman occurred late one afternoon on the Wabash following a rain. We shared a general theory that fishing on a descending barometer was inadvisable, and you’d likely get soaked in the bargain. But fishing right after a good rain (provided it wasn’t a deluge) with the barometer on the upswing often works well. Whether this or any other Theory of Angling will hold up under scientific scrutiny isn’t very pertinent here, but most serious anglers should adopt a theory or two somewhere along the way, and then must periodically make a point of fishing in spite of that theory, in order to test it out.
The True Scientific Angler will always be willing to risk his or her hypotheses. Suppose you theorize that you shouldn’t fish for rainbow trout in a small, clear stream in the middle of a hot day in July. Then you must go out on such a day from time to time to test your hypothesis. The fundamental theory of fishing is that there’s never any good reason not to go fishing.
That afternoon on the Wabash, I locked on to a big carp, and it wasn’t, as I’d supposed, like dragging a log against the current. This fish really fought. I’d just maneuvered it to within a few feet of the bank when it snapped my line. I jumped in after it, sneakers and all, and it surged between my calves. Dr. Goldman whooped—the only time I ever heard him whoop—and we both laughed, which is all an angler can do under such circumstances except curse, and my fishing partnership with Dr. Goldman was not of the sort that supported profanity.
About a week later, Dr. Goldman invited me to the local chapter of the Izaak Walton League’s annual game dinner. He might have been a founding member of the League, or maybe just of the Illinois chapter. I joined after that dinner and have remained a member all these years.
I learned a lesson at that dinner I’ve never forgotten: Never be near the end of the line. By the time I reached the meat, the pheasant, quail, venison, wild pig, rabbit, even the squirrel were gone. I feasted upon (in descending order of delectability) raccoon, muskrat, and possum. I’d say raccoon tastes a little like chicken, or at least that one did. I didn’t go back for seconds.
The highlight of that evening was being introduced by my fishing pal, Dr. Marcus Selden Goldman, who regaled the membership with his account of my battle with the Great Wabash Carp. He opined that a fellow who’d jump in the river after a carp was surely an angler in the best Izaak Walton tradition.
Ron McFarland teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Idaho. His most recent books include the poetry collection, Subtle Thieves (Pecan Grove Press 2012), and a study of memoirs from the inland Northwest, The Rockies in First Person (McFarland & Co., [no relation] 2008). His next book, tentatively titled, Appropriating Hemingway: How Ernest Hemingway Is Configured in Biographical Fiction, will be out later this year.
