Catch anything?

Photo by Joanne Rathe, Boston Globe

I've read Kevin Dupont's very fine piece from the sports pages in last Sunday's Boston Globe four or five times. If you haven't seen it, treat yourself!

You don't have to love fishing to understand this story but it helps if you had a childhood and still hold some memories from back in the day...

CARLISLE - The fish weren't biting Wednesday, but that was OK. Had I returned here to the side of the Concord River Thursday or Friday, or even this morning, I suspect the outcome would have been the same. I learned long ago that fishing is rarely about the catch, even before I learned - after a great deal more angst and too many drowned balls to count - that golf is rarely about the score.

For the record, I am not an angler, which is no big deal, one way or another, except maybe to all the fish in the deep blue sea, or those that inhabit all of New England's lakes, kettles, and streams. Once was the time, as a kid in the early 1960s, when fishing held a real fascination for me, a time when I fantasized about having a tackle box stocked with tantalizing lures and fancy, vibrant flies.

One day, I dreamed, I would own a boat with a little motor hanging off the back, and zip up and down the river, hauling in live, weighty treasures from all the secret, teeming spots.

Where were the secret spots? I had no idea, but I knew they had to be there, because I read about them, over and over, in outdoor magazines. These were the same pages that carried advertisements for the most incredible fishing paraphernalia, such as sonar equipment, flashlights, "professional" lures, night-vision glasses, and magical bait and hooks.

Buy this bit of bait, and prepare yourself, because there isn't a 10-pound bass IN THE WORLD THAT CAN RESIST IT! Or so the ad said. Something like that.

So there I was on Wednesday morning, the nicest day of 2008 thus far, standing in a rear aisle of the Kmart in Acton, wondering how to get back in the fishing game. What rod to buy? What reel? What thickness of line? And service in America being what it is, whom to ask? A stockboy flashed by, but he disappeared before I could react, which, as things turned out, became a metaphor for my entire day of fishing.

"Ugly Stik." There it was, just for me, hanging amid the many columns of fishing rods soldiered up along the display gondola. If there was any doubt, the "Ugly Stik" is marketed by Shakespeare (ah, for who knew The Bard held a sportsman's soul so near his writer's heart?). What writer could resist? The Kmart receipt referred to it as a "spin combo."

The Shakespeare "Ugly Stik" spin combo has everything a beginner - or aging Boomer outdoors returnee - could want. A 5-foot rod. A spinning reel. A whole bunch of hooks, lures, bobbers, and metal line weights. All right there, a fishing kit, to go.

Tax included, I was out the door for $22.67. Well, almost out the door. The cashier, a young woman who must really like fishing - how else to explain that tiny ball that looked like a line weight pierced directly under her lower lip? - called me back. So intent on getting to the river, I had left my "Ugly Stik" at the register.

"Nice catch, thanks," I said, uncertain whether she understood the pun.

The visit to Concord Town Hall, to purchase a fishing license, went much quicker and was only slightly more expensive at $28.50. The clerk wrote me up in a little more than five minutes, after I provided my driver's license, place of birth, and height and weight.

"Are you a US citizen?" she asked.

After saying yes, I asked if that mattered.

"No," she said, placing her "x" through "YES" next to "US Citizen" on the license application. "But we have to ask."

And if I had said no?

"You'd still get the license," she said. "It's just part of applying."

Homeland Security must not be overly concerned with what's going on down by the river.

Once at the river, I returned to the exact spot where I fished as a kid in the early 1960s, to a well-trodden bank on the Carlisle side, directly across the water from the Bedford boat launch. The river was higher than I remembered, because of recent rains that thankfully have lifted the water table throughout Middlesex County and much of the Northeast.

But beyond having to stand slightly higher on the bank, it looked and felt and smelled precisely as I remembered it from decades before, when, as a grade schooler, I would while away the afternoon, casting and hoping, only occasionally reeling in a sunfish or catfish.

In those days, it was about the catch, even if the catch was never more than modest. It was about the tugs on the line, the big catch that almost was, the endless changing of hooks and lures and bait. It was also about the confounding snags, the voracious mosquitoes, and the annoying powerboats that would speed north or south, their drivers delighting in the size of the wake they could send shore's way.

My river redux, under blue sky and temperatures in the low 70s, had much of that. But not all. Be it the water too cold, the feeding times not right, or the spot simply "fished out," I did not get so much as a nibble.

I fished on the Carlisle side. Shut out. I walked over to the nearby bridge, which connects Bedford to Carlisle, and fished off there. Nothing doing. I wandered over to the Bedford boat launch, where boaters during the day set off in canoes, kayaks, and outboards. A few dozen more casts brought nothing home.

A few steps from the boat launch, a few of Henry David Thoreau's words were inscribed on an information board.

"The river is an enchanter's wand," wrote Thoreau, "ready to surprise you with life."

The river on my day brought a gangly blue heron, a pair of vibrant cardinals, a bunch of geese, a pair of frolicking and quacking ducks, blue jays, robins, sparrows, and one small snapping turtle. It brought a light breeze, redolent and sweet with spring air, barely strong enough to bother my endless casts, only one of which got so tangled up that I had to cut it off and repeat the entire dressing process.

But, ah, progress. What took me 20 minutes the first time around, in part because I had trouble threading line through hook, took me less than half that the second time.

Most of all, the river brought me back, to a time when my cares were few and easy to fulfill, catch or no catch. Today is Mother's Day, and when I was a kid, it was my mother who would drive me here to the side of the river, and then wait patiently, usually with a book in hand, until I unloaded my fishing gear and got set up for a day. It was my little piece of heaven, and I returned on Wednesday.

"You could do that then, leave an 8-, 10-, or 12-year-old there for the day and think nothing of it . . . you'd be perfectly fine," she reminded me last week when I told her I was going back to the river. "Not in today's world . . . sad, that."

My son is in that age group now, and his life is full of far more things than I ever dreamed of at that age, in part the reason he never has fished.

He is playing both lacrosse and baseball this spring. He plays guitar and altar serves. He just finished a school play and has a special field trip planned to perform with the school's treble chorus. He'll play some golf and tennis this summer (provided the lacrosse equipment hasn't drained the family sports fund).

Wherever he goes, he will have adult supervision, and call me a helicopter parent, but I wouldn't think for a second to take him down to the river, even in this sleepy rural suburb, and leave him there for the day. It may all look the same, but I know it's really not.

I will be back to fish at the river, soon, and my boy is coming, too.

"Catch anything?" he asked immediately when I came home Wednesday night.

"Not a thing," I told him. "But you know, it didn't matter."

If nothing else, I hope someday he catches that.

- Kevin Paul Dupont in The Sunday Boston Globe
May 11, 2008 (dupont@globe.com)