A year ago, after almost three decades in Michigan and Chicago, I went east for a late-bloomer jaunt in grad school and to finally see how things felt on the mythical edges of the country. Now it’s August, and I’m back in Michigan feeling nostalgic for my childhood. I spent the last week in Chicago, reliving my mid-20s, drinking beers at bars with Old Style beer signs out front and swimming in the cold, urban lake, the skyscrapers bobbing above me. The day before I left, my friend Ryan had blown my hair straight and dyed it blond in his hip West Loop salon. After he’d swept away the smock, I shook it out and felt like a pony, strutting and fancy. Today, in this tackle shop in Northern Michigan, my hair still straight but pulled back, I feel too precious, too clean. I wish my hair were three-days dirty and matted to my head.
I was home visiting my parents when I decided to ask my dad if we could go fishing. I was bored in the suburbs, and the long summer evenings and loud cicadas reminded me of when my dad would take my brother on fishing weekends. “We actually always went in the spring,” my dad told me, and I realized that I was likely confusing my own memory with something I had read in a book. He was happy to take me anyway, but it was clear that my urban wardrobe wouldn’t work on the river. We pieced together an outfit, and now I’m standing in the fishing shop wearing tight, high-wasted shorts, my mom’s Tevas, a Tigers hat, and a much-too-big shirt I found in my dad’s closet. (...)
I have no memory of our parents gendering my brother and I, giving him trucks and Hardy Boys books, me dolls and Little Women. But divisions came anyway, and my brother learned to cast a fly rod while I never did. Once, when I was about 8, I went bluegill fishing with a friend in a suburban pond. We used bait — an abomination to a fly-fisherman — and fashioned rods out of toys and fishing hooks we found in my friend’s basement. Within an hour, I had been bitten by a duck and had snagged a hook on my cheek. I was sure the duck was rabid and the hook was rusty. My mother made me get a tetanus shot, and the whole incident was all but the end of my fishing career. My dad thought it was hilarious.
I had proved myself clumsy and incapable in the ways of the outdoors, a truth I’d revisit on camping trips and hikes in the future when I didn’t know how to light a camp stove or pitch a tent. I’d ask my father to show me, and he would. But I only felt confidence later, when I was around friends who had never tried to thread tent poles through nylon — people who grew up in big coastal cities who took my status as a Michigan native as proof of some quality of ruggedness. It was only in relief, juxtaposed against someone who had never seen a camp stove lit or a fish flopping and bleeding on the floor of a boat, that I seemed expert.
Being a boy, my brother’s life as a fisherman was only beginning when he was 8. Every spring, he and my dad went fishing on the Au Sable River with my dad’s many brothers and family friends. They drove north to Grayling and rented a cabin at Jim’s, then waded into a section of the river called the “Holy Water.” There the men who were serious got up early to fish in the mornings, and the boys who were not started when they finally woke up at noon. They cast their lines into a stretch of river frequented by Jim Harrison and Ernest Hemingway, a place where maples hang over the copper water and mourning doves hoot for most of the day.
On those weekends, it seemed, the boys trained to be men and the girls trained to be women. My mom and I stayed home to paint our nails and watch romantic comedies. My brother and father came back with tales of salad dressing made out of pickle juice, pranks played, and enormous fish caught and released. My mother was satisfactorily grossed out by the stories and their carload of grimy, fishy equipment. She refused to let them in the house until they had hosed themselves off. In retrospect, I wonder if my brother and I were jealous of each other’s weekends. The gendered rituals seemed exotic and cloistered, each swaddled in it’s own kind of mystery. It wasn’t that I wished to have the male experience, and he longed for the female. It was that we both wanted our childhoods to be capacious enough for both. (...)
It was my brother who found A River Runs Through It, that most American and romantic story of fly-fishing and brotherly love. We read it to each other on Sunday nights in a ritual that was as close as we ever came to church. My brother once wrote me a card with the last paragraph of the book scrawled out in the penmanship of a seventh-grade boy: “The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” It was this book that made me want to fish, that last paragraph in particular. There seemed to be something mysterious in the river, something transformative in the act of fishing itself that would change a man or show him a kind of grace. I wanted access to that mystery. (...)
It is the movie version of A River Runs Through It that I love these days. The beautiful casts, the sweeping vistas, the hunky men: watching it is a kind of shortcut to feeling. The soundtrack and the ’90s cinematography put me right back in my parents’ basement with my brother, each of us trying to pretend we aren’t crying in the last minutes of the film. It’s the story of two brothers, both fishermen, who grow up in Montana and become very different men — Norman, a serious scholar who goes to Dartmouth, and Paul, a poker-playing reporter always in debt to the wrong people. They find each other again and again when they are fishing in the Blackfoot River, holding onto a bond of childhood and seeking closeness through experience rather than words.
There are almost no women in the movie, only a girlfriend, a mother, and a prostitute. It doesn’t come close to passing the Bechdel test. But women are good at imagining themselves into the parts of men, if only because men are often the only decent characters. The film inspired thousands of women to take up fly-fishing, a strange fact considering not a single woman performs that activity in the story. For 10 years after the film came out, some of the most famous fishing schools in the United States had more women than men learning to tie flies and cast tight-looped lines.
For all the years I’ve watched the movie, I switch between the moments I see myself as Norm and the moments I see myself as Paul; the times I feel stalwart and surefooted and the times I feel wild and talented. Either way, I imagine myself fishing in the currents of the Blackfoot River in Montana, roll casting a fishing line over the water, small and strong in the forest. I imagine myself competent and tough, and therefore male, an equation that makes me queasy.
I wonder now if part of the reason I never went fishing with my brother and father as a kid is that I didn’t want my gender and youth to become synonymous with my incompetence. When I think back on it, I certainly would have been welcome if I had ever asked to join. But by the time I would have gone, I would have been a girlish interloper who was still learning — the worst one, the youngest one, and a girl to boot. Even then, I didn’t want those ideas braided together. It is only years later, as an adult, that I have let myself be a novice and a woman — that I have given it all a clumsy, childish try.
by Heather Radke, Longreads | Read more:
I was home visiting my parents when I decided to ask my dad if we could go fishing. I was bored in the suburbs, and the long summer evenings and loud cicadas reminded me of when my dad would take my brother on fishing weekends. “We actually always went in the spring,” my dad told me, and I realized that I was likely confusing my own memory with something I had read in a book. He was happy to take me anyway, but it was clear that my urban wardrobe wouldn’t work on the river. We pieced together an outfit, and now I’m standing in the fishing shop wearing tight, high-wasted shorts, my mom’s Tevas, a Tigers hat, and a much-too-big shirt I found in my dad’s closet. (...)I have no memory of our parents gendering my brother and I, giving him trucks and Hardy Boys books, me dolls and Little Women. But divisions came anyway, and my brother learned to cast a fly rod while I never did. Once, when I was about 8, I went bluegill fishing with a friend in a suburban pond. We used bait — an abomination to a fly-fisherman — and fashioned rods out of toys and fishing hooks we found in my friend’s basement. Within an hour, I had been bitten by a duck and had snagged a hook on my cheek. I was sure the duck was rabid and the hook was rusty. My mother made me get a tetanus shot, and the whole incident was all but the end of my fishing career. My dad thought it was hilarious.
I had proved myself clumsy and incapable in the ways of the outdoors, a truth I’d revisit on camping trips and hikes in the future when I didn’t know how to light a camp stove or pitch a tent. I’d ask my father to show me, and he would. But I only felt confidence later, when I was around friends who had never tried to thread tent poles through nylon — people who grew up in big coastal cities who took my status as a Michigan native as proof of some quality of ruggedness. It was only in relief, juxtaposed against someone who had never seen a camp stove lit or a fish flopping and bleeding on the floor of a boat, that I seemed expert.
Being a boy, my brother’s life as a fisherman was only beginning when he was 8. Every spring, he and my dad went fishing on the Au Sable River with my dad’s many brothers and family friends. They drove north to Grayling and rented a cabin at Jim’s, then waded into a section of the river called the “Holy Water.” There the men who were serious got up early to fish in the mornings, and the boys who were not started when they finally woke up at noon. They cast their lines into a stretch of river frequented by Jim Harrison and Ernest Hemingway, a place where maples hang over the copper water and mourning doves hoot for most of the day.
On those weekends, it seemed, the boys trained to be men and the girls trained to be women. My mom and I stayed home to paint our nails and watch romantic comedies. My brother and father came back with tales of salad dressing made out of pickle juice, pranks played, and enormous fish caught and released. My mother was satisfactorily grossed out by the stories and their carload of grimy, fishy equipment. She refused to let them in the house until they had hosed themselves off. In retrospect, I wonder if my brother and I were jealous of each other’s weekends. The gendered rituals seemed exotic and cloistered, each swaddled in it’s own kind of mystery. It wasn’t that I wished to have the male experience, and he longed for the female. It was that we both wanted our childhoods to be capacious enough for both. (...)
It was my brother who found A River Runs Through It, that most American and romantic story of fly-fishing and brotherly love. We read it to each other on Sunday nights in a ritual that was as close as we ever came to church. My brother once wrote me a card with the last paragraph of the book scrawled out in the penmanship of a seventh-grade boy: “The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” It was this book that made me want to fish, that last paragraph in particular. There seemed to be something mysterious in the river, something transformative in the act of fishing itself that would change a man or show him a kind of grace. I wanted access to that mystery. (...)
It is the movie version of A River Runs Through It that I love these days. The beautiful casts, the sweeping vistas, the hunky men: watching it is a kind of shortcut to feeling. The soundtrack and the ’90s cinematography put me right back in my parents’ basement with my brother, each of us trying to pretend we aren’t crying in the last minutes of the film. It’s the story of two brothers, both fishermen, who grow up in Montana and become very different men — Norman, a serious scholar who goes to Dartmouth, and Paul, a poker-playing reporter always in debt to the wrong people. They find each other again and again when they are fishing in the Blackfoot River, holding onto a bond of childhood and seeking closeness through experience rather than words.
There are almost no women in the movie, only a girlfriend, a mother, and a prostitute. It doesn’t come close to passing the Bechdel test. But women are good at imagining themselves into the parts of men, if only because men are often the only decent characters. The film inspired thousands of women to take up fly-fishing, a strange fact considering not a single woman performs that activity in the story. For 10 years after the film came out, some of the most famous fishing schools in the United States had more women than men learning to tie flies and cast tight-looped lines.
For all the years I’ve watched the movie, I switch between the moments I see myself as Norm and the moments I see myself as Paul; the times I feel stalwart and surefooted and the times I feel wild and talented. Either way, I imagine myself fishing in the currents of the Blackfoot River in Montana, roll casting a fishing line over the water, small and strong in the forest. I imagine myself competent and tough, and therefore male, an equation that makes me queasy.
I wonder now if part of the reason I never went fishing with my brother and father as a kid is that I didn’t want my gender and youth to become synonymous with my incompetence. When I think back on it, I certainly would have been welcome if I had ever asked to join. But by the time I would have gone, I would have been a girlish interloper who was still learning — the worst one, the youngest one, and a girl to boot. Even then, I didn’t want those ideas braided together. It is only years later, as an adult, that I have let myself be a novice and a woman — that I have given it all a clumsy, childish try.
by Heather Radke, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Steven Weinberg
