David James Duncan

[birdhunter]

No fishing this weekend. I'm getting pretty bored so check this out. It's by Duncan, the same guy who wrote The River Why. I have it posted on my wall. Pretty good little piece.


A Manifest for Ignorance
The argument for doing it all by your fallible lonesome
By David James Duncan

My reservations about the average fishing guide are a lot like my reservations about the average spiritual guru. Both can be highly entertaining. Both can be idiots. Both charge for their services in either case. At its best, fishing is a satisfying duet, played by a body of flesh upon a body of water. A fish makes it an even more satisfying trio. The average guide renders duet and trio inaudible. The average guide mediates so relentlessly between you and your fishing that it feel as if you and the river are divorcing and splitting up the property. The average guide plants an ego-flag on every fish, as if he's a mountaineer, the fish is the summit, and your stupidity is Mount Everest.
Your guide, like your lawyer, can offer hundreds of scary reasons why you need him: You don't know the river and he does; you'll get skunked and he won't, you'll drown if he doesn't float you, starve if he doesn't feed you, get poison-oaked, snake bit, bum-fupped, and vulched if he doesn't protect you. These are remote possibilities. Far less remote is the possibility that at day's end you'll hand your guide 300 bucks, shake his hand, and bite your tongue as you fight the urge to say, "Thanks that the insects you said wouldn't bite did, while the fish you said would, didn't. And thanks, 28 times in a row, for identifying that upcoming stretch as a 'sexy hole.' Thanks, too, for saying, 'Don't worry. The grub and brewskies are on me.' I've never lived for 16 hours on Busy Bucko crackers and Moose Drizzle stout before."
I qualify all of this with the modifier "average." There are, of course, good guides out there. There are scholars and artists of the river, men and women whose lives I respect, whose intelligence I envy, whose humor causes loss of bladder control, and whose company I cherish. But I still reject the basic service. Guides accept payment to help clients circumvent their own ignorance. But ignorance is one of the most crucial pieces of equipment any fisher will ever own. Ignorance is a fertile but unplanted interior field. Solitary fishing isolates us in this field and leaves us no choice but to cultivate it. A guide is like a farmer who, for a price, drives his tractor over and plants your field for you. He may know what's growing. But you sure as hell won't.
I ask you to consider the osprey, the heron, the kingfisher. These fishing prodigies pass on the primordial art by feeding their young vomited-up trout, which naturally makes the young yearn for nonvomited-up trout, which in turn makes the young bolt upright in the nest and say: Eureka! I don't have to squat in this s**thole eating puked-up fish all day! Look at my wings, my beak, my talons! I've got everything Mom and Dad have got! What the hell have I been thinking? I CAN GO FISHING MYSELF!
Anglers! Look at your guides on their days off, unguidedly catching fish after fish! Look at your legs, your arms, your rod! Feel the heft and synaptic whir of your big cerebrum! You've got everything they've got! What the hell have you been thinking? GO FISHING YOURSELF! Dare to be the bumbling hero of your own fish story! Read like a fiend; practice like a fool. Find the best possible river on the best possible map, explore it, cast into it. If you fall in, get out. If you hook yourself, unhook yourself. Make a half-drowned, half-thrashed rat of yourself. It doesn't matter! And at the end of the day...Pay yourself! Charge an arm and a leg. Leave yourself huge tips. Remarkably painless, isn't it?