On Bluegills
When I was a kid in Massachusetts, there weren't rivers nor saltwater in the roughly five-mile circle that I considered my backyard. My fishing was relegated to a bike-ride’s distance or a decent walk, at the end of which were ponds and backwaters, and lazy bits of snaky suburban stillwaters. I grew up in a New England town that was digestible as milk toast, but something less than inspiring for the aspiring angler. So, I took what I had. And what I had were a lot of bluegills.
Lake Waban was my primary target, particularly a two-acre cove flanked by the local college library’s lawn. It was all cattails and lily pads and milfoil by midsummer, redolent of decaying organic matter and populated with dragonflies and bullfrogs. The channel of a feeder brook cut a slot through those pads, and scoured enough of the muck to make for some palatable wading, which I did barefoot through the summer afternoons and evenings. I had a wiggly nine-foot glass Fenwick back then, and an assortment of flies that seemed buggy enough to me but were, in retrospect, an abomination. Most were spun deer hair and mallard flank, chopped and stacked and affixed at random to Taiwanese hooks that had rusted, I’m quite certain, well before arriving on American soil. These I tied to a leader of level, four-pound Stren, with something akin to a clinch knot, before wading into the sand and the leeches to learn a little bit about patience.
A montage: Dusk and mosquitoes and knee-deep water, and the smack of bluegill lips on the slimy undersides of lily pads. On the lazier days, waiting for the witching hour in the heat and the lightning, I swear you could watch the lily flowers close. But that was all part of the ritual, the eagerly measured prolonging of the day. I’d ease into the water with a fly in-hand and pick a pocket not 30 feet out, one of those holes that emerges through the density of weeds as a bucket full of promise. This was hard for me—hard to take the time to ease my way in, hard to get the loops high and level and tight with my crappy rod and my cracked line, and hard to measure the length quite right so that I could drop that travesty of hair and feathers into the dark black pocket and not into the weeds around it. A miss required a hard yank or a wade-out or a break-off, and the almost invariable disturbance of that bucket, and the departure, for a few minutes at least, of the blue-gilled leviathan that I imagined lurking there. So I took my time, stripped off line, measured my casts, and prayed just a little.
In case I have not been clear, in my 12-year-old mind the reality of laying a fly among a flotilla of aquatic hazards was quite a feat, and one I was proud of. I knew if I could get that bug into a bucket in the lilies a bluegill would eventually eat, and I would wrestle it through the tangle without breaking it off. But, if I grew impatient, and if I tried to lift the fly out of the pocket to re-cast, I would either snag on the lift and break off, or snag on the lift and spook a big fish. With limited patience, and a limited fly selection, and limited means of acquiring more, this was high-stakes poker.
At times I’d lay out a good cast, and I’d wait. I’d watch the juvenile nudges of the little fish whose rounded lips were not big enough to engulf the fly, and I’d imagine something bigger, something lurking, finning beneath them with its nose aimed up, its own impatience growing thin. If I waited long enough, my fly would disappear in a boil, and I’d lift hard enough to get tight.
Digging a good bluegill out of those weeds was an art. But it wasn’t always pretty; sometimes I’d lift-and-skitter a fish over the thick stuff and into the channel where it could dance. Then it was all steerage, and the occasional surface swirl, before I could bring a slab to hand. I’d chuck the rod on the lawn, cautiously lay the bluegill’s dorsal fin down, and admire my hard-won prize, aware that the waiting was finally over.
I’ll roundly admit there are few things as beautiful as a colored-up bluegill in July’s midday sun, when the oranges wink, and the silver-greens glitter, and the swatch of blue-black on the ‘gill gets darker by contrast and precise as ink. In evening light the bluegill descends from an artist’s phantasmagoria into alive with flesh, something alive and spiny. Bluegill, of course, are near harmless, but they also demand some care. Their dorsal spines and rough scales will get you if you don’t watch out. Bluegills are, for this reason, the child’s perfect fish.
As a kid I admired each one, something only the size of a small salad plate and no more than a half-pound that somehow commanded my attention. In the chirr of American toads, and the hum of crickets, beneath the swirl of nighthawks and bats, and under the soft light of a rising moon, I gained a first appreciation for what it means to wait for something . . . and why doing so might be worth it.
First Published in American Angler Magazine May/June 2019
