Randy Kadish's Blog - Posts Tagged "spirituality"

Downriver, the Hudson flowed into the New York harbor. To me, it suddenly seemed amazing that a shallow, tree-lined stream in upstate New York could turn into a wide, deep, building-lined river. I wondered, Was the Hudson, therefore, a reflection of the flow of humanity? After all, our knowledge supposedly deepened as generations flowed on. But the Hudson eventually flowed into the ocean and lost its shape and identity. Perhaps if it knew where it was flowing to it would stop and wait, forever. But, like me, there are things a river can’t cure, though in a few hours, when the tide changes, the river will turn around and go back, at least for a few hours. Is that a metaphor for the river flowing back into its character defects, the way I have? In many ways I’m like the river. I’m also flowing toward losing my identity, toward the final unknown. But before I reach it, will I somehow pull a Houdini and escape the dead-end in front of me? If only I could turn around and become a doctor, a lawyer, a forgiving son instead of an angry one. But like the banks of the Hudson, my past is shaped in stone. ...
The Way of the River My Journey of Fishing, Forgivness and Spiritual Recovery

The old angler's laugh sounded like a howl. It chilled me like a wind. I remembered there were coyotes in Westchester.

“I have no favorite river,” he insisted. “Why discriminate? Like people, rivers have their own characteristics, but what kind of angler are you who doesn’t know that when you come right down to it, all rivers are a chain of riffles, runs, and pools?”

I wondered, are people really like rivers? Are we all just a chain of regrets, hopes and fears? I said, “Maybe you can tell me something I should know: How are rivers born?”

“Will knowing help you catch more fish?” He laughed again.

I thought, maybe he’s right. After all, will knowing change this moment and help me put my thoughts and feelings aside? Will it help me assume the shape of this river? Help me become as tall and as wide as I can see and hear? Help me meander through this hilly countryside for the next thousand years?

No, because soon I will grow old and weak and unable to stand here and cast a fly rod, unable to lose myself and, in a sense, become only what I see and hear, the way so many other anglers—Jim, Gil, Pat, Garcia—also have, the way so many anglers one day will. So in this moment am I every one of those anglers? Am I therefore no one? Am I just a tiny, tiny link in the chain of infinity?

But today I didn’t have to ride the rails and join the Croton Fishing Club. I must, therefore, be more than just a neutral, passing moment. But what? A chain of choices? A self? So when night—a real link of infinity—comes, and I ride the train home, maybe I won’t choose to hear or to see my regrets and my fears. Maybe I’ll instead hear and see my dreams and memories of catching trout and of becoming a father. I just wish trout could choose between dreams instead of deep pools, or shallow riffles, or long runs.

But trout, unlike me, aren’t city anglers. ...
The Way of the River My Journey of Fishing, Forgivness and Spiritual Recovery

... Quickly I changed, set up my fly rod, and marched down the narrow boardwalk and up a short flight of steps. I stood at the top of the high dune.

A fiery corridor of reflected sunlight blazed at right angles to the advancing, gently breaking waves. The long beach was spotted with only a few clumps of people. Instantly, nature painted over the images in my mind of a fast-moving, automobile-choked, concrete and brick city. I became as calm as the beach. The five years I had been away seemed to have collapsed into five days. I thought, Maybe Einstein is right about time being relative, or maybe a part of me never really left the island.

I didn’t see other anglers. The tide was high. I scanned the beach looking for a big point and found one about fifty yards to the west. Seagulls streaked above the surf. Their piercing squawks made them sound like drunken hooligans cruising for a fight. I wondered, Why can’t seagulls sing beautifully, like other birds? At least they can circle and dive, and show anglers where bait fish, and possibly stripers, are.

This time, however, they didn’t circle and dive.

Though I didn’t have their help, I wasn’t discouraged. I marched across the soft, warm sand to the harder, cool surf. I walked to the big point where years before, for perhaps the first time in my life, I had voluntarily surrendered to something much bigger than myself: the infinite beauty all around me, a beauty that made me forget all the pain and disappointment I had been through.

Again I wanted to surrender, maybe because nature was a higher power I could believe in. I put on my stripping basket and then false cast, letting out more and more fly line. Finally, I made my presentation cast and let the line go. My front loop took the shape of an arrowhead. My green Deceiver turned over and landed about eighty feet out, just beyond an incoming wave. Unlike the seagulls, the breaking waves spoke softly. They splashed around my legs and greeted me, one by one. As they slid back out, they tried to pull me with them. I fought their beckoning, stood my ground, and retrieved my line, six inches at a time.

I thought of how all the clichés about fishing—being caressed by nature’s beauty and being washed of self and time—were true; and though as a writer I always tried to avoid clichés, now, as I stood in nature’s canvas, I was sure no one, especially me, would criticize the clichés in my mind. ...
The Way of the River My Journey of Fishing, Forgivness and Spiritual Recovery

... Sure? I wondered. I was once sure I had more time with my parents. The only thing predictable about cancer, the doctors told me, was its unpredictability. Is life like cancer? I never thought I’d be where I am in the river of life: a childless, journeyman writer. No wonder I can’t stop regretting the past, no matter what the recovery books say.

I roll cast across stream, mended and retrieved my fly, then again. No take. Time for streamer technique number two: I roll cast, then, using the jerk-strip retrieve I had learned in Kelly Gallop and Bob Linesman’s book, I worked my fly downstream.

Stay in the moment, I reminded myself. Cover as much water as possible and use several different streamer techniques, one right after another. What if time could learn from streamer fishing and not repeat itself?

Would the world be even more unpredictable? Maybe Einstein would know.

Again I cast and jerk-strip retrieved. No take. Time for technique number three: I back cast—right into a branch. I’d forgotten to look behind. A spring-training error. I pulled my fly free, luckily, cast three-quarters downstream, and let the river dead-drift my fly. I moved my fly rod side to side, feeding line through the guides. When my fly was directly below me I pointed my rod tip up and waited. No take, still, so I quickly retrieved and then cast my fly closer to the far bank. I listened to the gurgling river and the singing birds.

Yes, I thought, rivers are the music halls of the universe. Maybe the Croton is playing only for me. Maybe the river doesn’t want to be alone and has a soul and feelings that it transforms into passionate music.

I waded downstream and started another fishing cycle.

Close to the bank the water was foamy. Illuminated by sunlight, some of the foam looked like floating silver dollars. Alongside them were small eddies that swirled so quickly they looked like spinning tops, or miniature black holes. If they are black holes, maybe, like black holes in the universe, they’ll stop time, at least on the Croton. After all, out here I’ve lost track of my regrets and resentments. Suddenly, I’m happy. Are rivers—their sounds, their images, their beauty—reflections of some sort of divine, eternal plan that scientists like Kepler, Newton and Einstein spent their lives trying to uncover? Were any of those men fly fishermen? ...
The Way of the River My Journey of Fishing, Forgivness and Spiritual Recovery

... I walked to the north side of the pier, tied on a popper, and cast upstream. My new strategy didn’t pay off. Were two schoolies all I had to show for my $625 fly rod?

The sun looked like the eye of a giant Cyclops peeking over New Jersey. But the sun’s face, like the face of Mr. Potato Man, was made up of many parts, including what seemed like the mouth of a fire-spewing dragon. The sun beamed down a burning path across the Hudson River. When the sun set, I knew, it would also set on my fishing year. Slowly, the Hudson darkened into gray, but instead of letting go of all its light, the river seemed to divide the light and reshape it into flickering columns. The columns, I saw, were not reflections of moonlight but reflections of the Riverside Park, man-made lights. To me, the reflections looked like the linear-shaped galaxies of a contracted, upside-down world—then the reflections looked more like giant, vibrating subatomic strings, particles supposedly holding the key to understanding the universe and the possibility of even a twelfth dimension.

I asked myself, Am I in it?

No, just in a place where a person’s disappointments, such as losing a friend, take up a single speck of space: in the three dimensions of a pier.

Five miles upstream, the lights of the George Washington Bridge formed the shape of a huge, hanging smile. The smile, surrounded by the shapeless, dark-blue sky, didn’t have a face. I wondered, Is the smile the mouth of the Cyclops? If so, it’s certainly a happy monster, maybe even a bait fisherman who won’t eat the Manhattan skyline. Are the monster’s nose, chin and ears also disguised and hidden in the beauty surrounding me and surrounding all the piers I fish? Beauty, perhaps like the idea of a God or a Higher Power, doesn’t have boundaries like rivers and harbors. Beauty can spread, even to monsters.

A voice inside me said it was time to let go of fishing for the year, and to make peace with winter. I retrieved my popper in a straight line, frequently pausing and creating rings on the water. The movement, I realized, reflected my fishing adventures. They too moved in a line of time, frequently creating fishing rings filled with anglers, including bait fishermen, I could speak to and then feel less alone. ...
The Way of the River My Journey of Fishing, Forgivness and Spiritual Recovery

... Below me a fly line shot out and unrolled. The leader swung left, as if the caster had moved his elbow too much. The fly landed gently, upstream of the line and just outside a swirling eddy. The fly drifted about two feet, then was retrieved. The angler below me wore a black suit, hip boots and a gray cap. He cast again, pointing the rod out at an angle of about 45 degrees to the water. The leader swung again, and the fly landed just outside the eddy.

I walked off the bridge and down the road. Following Clay’s directions, I turned onto a narrow road and into a rocky clearing. The clearing, I quickly saw, was the north bank of the Beaverkill. Across the river, the far bank was about six feet high and tiled with big, flat rocks. Above the bank was a big corn field.

The angler under the bridge wrote something in a small notebook. He looked familiar. Could he be—yes he was, George M. L. La Branche!

I walked to him. “Mr. La Branche?”

He glanced at me. “Yes?” he said coldly.

“I saw you cast in a tournament.”

“I cast in a lot of tournaments.” He stuffed his notebook and pencil into his pocket.

“The one in Central Park that Izzy Klein won. Do you know what happened to Izzy?”

“Happened? I never saw or heard anything about him again. I’m very busy right now.”

Busy? He was fishing. I was stupid for starting a conversation with a man with two middle initials.

I walked downstream. The river widened into the shape of a huge funnel. The funnel, I knew, was the Forks. The stem was the Willowemoc Creek. Like the upper Beaverkill, it was riffled from bank to bank and reminded me of a marching army.

Why, I wondered, did images of armies, instead of beauty, pop into my mind? Was it because I felt I was in foreign, hostile territory and about to do battle with the Beaverkill?

If so, at least I was glad the Willowemoc and Beaverkill armies didn’t collide. Both slowed, surrendered and merged into a large plain of what seemed like neutral territory. The plain, however, was wrinkled by swirling eddies that soon changed directions, as if they were lost and couldn’t find their way.

What formed the eddies?

The biggest eddy disappeared, suddenly, then popped up a few feet downstream.
Did eddies, like stars, form out of nowhere and then disappear?

Way downstream of the big eddy was a big, round island, covered with tall, uneven grass. The island looked as if it needed a haircut; then I remembered the tree trunks that blemished so many mountains.

I thought, Maybe nature was better off not having Man as a barber.

I walked to the pool’s tail. Two currents flowed in opposite directions, like the lines of immigrants strolling up and down Orchard Street. Near the end of the tail, the upstream current about-faced and merged into the downstream current, and the whole river seemed to smooth into a football-field-long pane of sliding glass. At the end of the field, in the end zone, the river sloped sharply, sped up and reformed into a riffled, roaring army, more powerful than either of the armies flowing into the Forks.

Why was it, I wondered, the Beaverkill presented so many different faces of water? Was the Beaverkill like an exposed army donning different camouflages?

But the river had no real reason to feel exposed. A mountain protected it like a fortress wall and enabled the river to quickly surround the island; but instead of storming and sacking it, the river widened and gave way to it, then marched out of my view, without saying good-bye.

How could it? Did the Beaverkill, the sky or the mountains care about me? Wasn’t I like an unloved insect trapped in the vastness of the world? Or was I just trapped in one small world? If so, how many different worlds were there on earth? As many as stars in the sky? Could people go from world to world and not get lost or trapped? After all, less than thirty yards away was my eventual way out of the world of the Beaverkill: the railroad tracks. But for better or worse, for the next two days I had no other world to go to.

I set up my Leonard and tied on a Green Drake wet fly. I decided, however, to go after Clay’s monster trout later on. I walked back upstream, pulled line off the reel, and cast over the neutral plain. The eddies grabbed the line like a thief and wouldn’t let go. I pointed the rod up and tried to mend. The eddies pulled more strongly. I pointed the rod lower and fed line through the guides. The fly sank.

No take. I retrieved and cast a few feet downstream. The eddies left the line for dead, surprisingly. To give life to my fly, I slowly pointed the rod up and down, up and down.

Again no take. Again I cast, landing the line between two eddies. The smooth water grabbed the line.

An hour later I still hadn’t induced a take. Discouraged, I walked to the pool’s tail. The sliding water glowed brighter than a sun-reflecting marble floor.

Was the Beaverkill, or at least what I saw of it, more beautiful than Penn Station?

Not sure, I waded into the tail. The rocks on the bottom were flat, as if the moving water had shaped them so people could walk on them. The water rushed gently around my legs. Instead of trying to push me back or to knock me over, it seemed to caress and welcome me.

A cloud blocked the sun. The water’s glow faded and, like a chameleon, turned into the upside-down reflections of trees and the mountain. I thought it strange that less light brought out more images. The reflected trees and mountain looked as if they were sinking into the earth. Suddenly I didn’t know if I was in the bottom of a wide valley or at the top.

Or was I in both places at once?

I wished every time something bad happened, I could look at a reflection and the world would be upside-down. And then if I could also change the river’s direction maybe I could bring my mother and all the dead soldiers back to life.
But unlike flowing water, the reflections seemed cemented in place. ...

The Fly Caster Who Tried to Make Peace with the World