Deep Thoughts # 8 – The Greatest Love of All

"That Adam loved Eden before he loved Eve" – Douglas Malloch (poet, American)

A little more than a year ago, Reelin’ Ron gave me a book of fishing quotations collected by John Merwin, and I entertained the idea of doing a series of deep thoughts inspired by some favorite ones I found while taking care of business each morning in the room my son Lukas and I call the fisherman’s bathroom.  The book is still in there, as it fits the room’s eponymous décor, which is comprised of all fishing-related things I have been given or collected over the years.  I don’t have a proper office anymore, but I have an office, you see. The quote above came from a poem in that book, which I still peruse often, and it can be read as a mildly sexist comment about the fights that (fisher)men have with their partners about the time we spend chasing fish, researching spots, tying flies, reading book and magazines, watching first person point of view footage of other dudes fishing on YouTube, reading blogs (thanks, fellas) and so on.  “My wife says she’s leaving me if I don’t stop fishing,” goes one old t-shirt I remember seeing on camo-ed pot bellies wandering around the sportsman show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Complex in my youth.  “I sure am going to miss her.”  

But the quote can also be read through the lens of the importance of nature in our lives, the need to be outside with the fishes, flora and other fauna.  Yes, sometimes we need to catch fish and kill them and eat them or shoot deer or turkey and kill them and eat them, but I think if martial law was enacted, and we were told that we could fish and hunt but kill nothing we would still fish, perhaps hunt with a camera instead.  The experience trumps the quarry, and I don’t mean to say that I am a fisherman who sits bankside and watches the butterflies.  No, I am usually in total concentration mode, but the trip’s bookends and the small moments of grace and appreciation that bubble up during the more quotidian moments of fishing are important.  I do notice where I am and am grateful for Eden, even if Eden is presented to me in the form of a tiny wild trout surviving highway run-off and lawn fertilizer bloom just minutes from urban sprawl.

Hus, me, James, Zakhi.

The fact that teachers like Hussein from the Project Learn School in the Mount Airy neighborhood of Philadelphia want to put students in this urbanized Eden in hopes of hooking a few students with the lure of fishing, hiking, nature, well, that is something that speaks to my own mission in life, I suppose.  Consider it kismet, then, that I encountered a trio of young boys fishing on a Wednesday morning along the banks of one of my urban oases, the Wissahickon Creek.  I ended up helping them for about thirty minutes before I met their teacher, who had an entire small class of students of several ages and both genders, most if not all of them from the City, out there in the woods; “Woods School,” I later learned they call it, in fact.  Hus and I exchanged numbers, and I promised that I would dig around in my garage, my other fishing office, and call on my fishing buddies in order to put together some more fishing supplies for his class.  Between Jay, Kenny, and my dad, I think we put together a collection of stuff that sort of overwhelmed Hussein.  He returned the favor, however.  When I finally found a day that worked for both of us to deliver the fishing tackle to the school, he asked if I wanted to come in for a minute and say hello to the kids.  I was greeted out front by Hus and two of the boys I originally met that day on the Wissy, James and Zakhi, and they helped me carry into the school the fishing rods, terminal tackle, lures, nets, vests, and other tools that the guys and I put together for the class. 

Sick Days Fishing's first award.

When I got inside this small school, a community cooperative school with an admirable mission beyond Hussein’s “Woods School,” they were in the middle of an end-of-the-year assembly.  The entire small school population, teachers, kids, and administrators were there in a small great-room at the front of school, crossed-leg on the floor, leaning back in folding chairs, wondering who this old dude with the beard was at their meeting.  I had to say a few words—I teach public speaking, so that was not an issue, thank goodness—and then the boys presented me with a handmade certificate of appreciation with notes of thanks from all the kids I encountered that day on the creek.  I expected none of this, of course!  The certificate belongs to Jay and Kenny and Joe as much as me, too.  I just wanted to support Hussein’s personal mission to teach fishing to kids from the City.  The day I met them, he was running low on lures.  He supplied most of what they used from his own collection, which was going to run out some day.  I hope he keeps fishing with the kids long enough that I need to put out a call for more supplies in a few years.

The boy's been in woods school since shortly after conception.  Green Lane on Monday this week.  Will it take?

If time in nature, if fishing, getting up close and personal with one of the creatures of Eden, wherever that may be, hooks just a couple of Hus’s students, then he’s done a great thing for someone.  Fishing may become a hobby for a few more of them, and they may pass it on to their kids and so and so on.  I believe the children are the future of the sport, and all that.  But one or two of those kids may find that fishing is more than a hobby or sport.  I love my wife and son, along with writing, literature, and music, but I could not live without the gifts that fishing has given me over the years, and those who love me know that.  Those gifts are personal, much like yours, I am sure, and they have met certain needs at certain times of my life—therapy, family time, friendship, worship, lifelong learning, paying it forward and backward.  I still believe that things happen for a reason, and I am happy that I happened upon those boys in the woods on a Wednesday morning, and that I wasn’t too preoccupied to take some time and lend them a hand.  They obviously helped me too, and perhaps gave me a new purpose.