Little Kid, Big Fish
Can we pass on a love of fishing to our distracted children?
All the kids these days seem to have ADD. In university classes I’ve taught, they arrive armed with doctors’ diagnoses. My kid probably has some variation of it, too, given that his default posture seems to be face to phone.
But I’ve learned fishing has the power to distract him. The sport’s unlimited capacity for surprise transports him to that same magical place it carries me. Thirteen is 13, of course, and, sooner or later, I know his phone will repossess him. But, for the time we’re on the water, he focuses on a tiny fly floating on an enormous river.
The fish brothel
Uko’s first fish was a two-kilo pike caught on a five-dollar rod when he was seven years old. These rods come from Walmart, are a meter long, and available in a dozen different colors, some emblazoned with Disney princesses. Uko was no taller than the rod, and the fish nearly as long as he was.
At age 10, I took him to an Estonian fish brothel, that Eastern European experience where you catch captive rainbows in dirty water using a broomstick, piano wire, and hook baited with trout flesh. With the permission of the pond owner, we used a fly rod. I cast, he stripped line, and two-kilo trout threw themselves at the fly. He was quickly convinced that fly casting is superior to all other ways of fishing.
When we later fished for crucian carp with worms at a neighborhood pond, he changed his mind: worm fishing is superior to all other ways of fishing.
The wild west
This year he turned 13, and in the summer we visited our cousins in Cañon City, Colorado. Cañon is a tough town: it boasts 11 prisons — a Who’s Who of murderers and terrorists* — and one river. A car at the Arkansas river put-in had a door sticker that sums up western attitude: Dept. of Fuck Off, It’s Public Land.
The river in Cañon is a great democratizer, bringing together hippies, rednecks, and fly fishermen. Everybody gets along, perhaps because water flowing at thousands of cubic feet per second doesn’t care how rich you are.
It’s also phone-free fun, since digital devices go straight to the bottom when you encounter your first rapids. Uko had to hang on to the raft and cast when he could. Neither fisherman nor fish has time to think, and Uko caught a dozen in a couple of hours, two of them over 15 inches. He was once again of the opinion that fly fishing is superior to all other ways of fishing.
Farm ponds
America has no trout brothels, but a farm pond is the next best thing. Farm ponds get little or no pressure, and if you can get the fly out there, you’re almost guaranteed a fish. Even on a 35-degree summer night, largemouth will hit prey on the surface, scaring the bejeezus out of a young angler.
I don’t think our part of Europe has a fish to rival the largemouth bass. Pike, while worthy prey, don’t explode on the surface like bass. Pike lack passion and purpose, something we might also observe about rock and roll in our region.
Our American bass fishing owed a shout-out to the digital world: my son knew all about bass thanks to Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson’s TikTok videos. I don’t know much about the Rock’s wrestling- and acting careers, but I’ve got a lot of time for any rich guy who wants to create the perfect bass pond on a Virginia farm.
Failure in Valhalla
With Uko’s confidence running high thanks to bass, we decided to try what may be the most kid-friendly river on the planet, Dry Run Creek, a tributary of the Norfork River in the state of Arkansas.
It sounded easy: 8,000 fish per river mile, catch and release, one barbless artificial fly only, and nobody over 16 allowed. I’d never seen so many monsters packed so tightly in a stream. But despite how easy it looked, the fish weren’t suicidal. Uko’s dead drift wasn’t quite dead enough, and the fish he caught were small.
On the ride home he seemed despondent. His head was bowed to his phone. But hearing him giggle, I glanced over to see what TikTok video was amusing him.
He was sending fishing pictures to his friends.
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*Among the inmates in Cañon City prisons: El Chapo, Ted Kaczynski, Robert Hanssen (15 life sentences), Tyler Bingham (Aryan Brotherhood), Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Boston Marathon bomber, Little Jimmy from the Chicago Outfit (18 murders), and Richard Reid (Al-Qaeda shoe bomber).
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