September 2002			Big-Picture Transformation End of an Era Fortunate Son	Letters Sports E Line Books Alumni Passages Classes From the Field First-Person Huskiana
		Hooked on Fishing The reasons, like the fish, can be elusive. By Herbert Hadad More than thirty years ago, still new to Manhattan, I struck up a conversation with a man at a Greenwich Village restaurant and learned that he, like I, was a fisherman. Several days later, at four in the morning, we took the subway to Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay and were soon aboard a large party boat slicing its way into the Atlantic. I had most of the luck, which included a beautiful striped bass. My new friend asked for the fish and told me to drop by our restaurant meeting place that evening. It turned out he was its owner, and he served me a sizzling striped-bass dinner. I’m not crazy about fish: It was the only catch I ever ate. Fishing is a complicated thing. To be considered successful, it generally has to be lethal. And its appeal is mysterious. Some people go for the fish. A lot of others go for something else. My dad grew up in Beirut on the shores of the Mediterranean, but he didn’t fish. He’d linger at the wrought-iron gates of the U.S. Embassy, watching the men playing something called baseball. I, on the other hand, growing up in Boston, learned to fish with the neighborhood kids. One day, Dad asked to go with me. We took the subway to Savin Hill and walked to a decrepit wharf jutting into Dorchester Bay. I dipped a line in and pulled up some silvery baby mackerel. Dad, concentrating on avoiding the wharf’s rotten or missing planks, wasn’t impressed with my catch. “I don’t understand your interest,” he said gently. A few Sundays later, we went to a doubleheader between the Red Sox and the White Sox. I fidgeted for upwards of six hours. Though I imagined many years of fishing with my dad, he never joined me on the water again. He didn’t see me hoist fat orange carp out of a lagoon adjoining the Charles River, or lift fast-running smelts from the Neponset River in Dorchester Lower Mills as vapors from the Baker Chocolate factory descended in a sweet invisible cloud. Dad’s devotion to fish stopped with his devotion to the scrod—he called it “schrod”—lightly baked and placed before him and Mother at a Tremont Street restaurant near the Boston Common. At Northeastern, I met Robert, a student older, smarter, stronger, handsomer, and seemingly far more self-assured than I. We were co-op copy boys who wanted to be reporters, a distant goal that gave us something in common. But what really brought us together was fishing. We’d drive out to Hurley’s Boat Rentals in Quincy, then motor our skiff across Boston Harbor, visiting many of the islands, catching blues and flounder, washing down homemade balogna sandwiches with ’gansetts, cherishing the sun and salt and friendship until we were exhausted and ready to head back. I knew Bob to be an angry man. I’d seen his frequent diatribes, his contempt for dishonest sentiment, his suspicion of authority, and his tendency to resolve disputes with a powerful and unexpected right cross. One late afternoon, when we were miles from Quincy and already tired from the pleasures of our day, our outboard motor failed. As the boat drifted and the sun grew cool, we pulled unavailingly on the starter cord and slapped at the spark plugs. I was suddenly afraid to be on the water with Bob. I expected him to explode. But he set the massive oars in their locks, leaned back, and began to row. We were at least three miles from port. I offered to spell him, but we both knew I didn’t have the strength. Besides, the more he rowed, the calmer and happier he became. I smiled back, a little puzzled. By the time we’d reached Hurley’s and leapt onto the deck, I knew that something special had happened. A tough guy had bestowed an act of tender affection. Fishing and love can go together in many different ways. In an enchanting house surrounded by the woods of Woodstock, New York, I stared at the person across the room and wondered whether this getaway cottage’s charms would be enough to save our marriage. I drove to a nearby stream and spent the morning in solitude, casting with a silver spinner, amused rather than excited when a little trout took the lure, realizing how important it was for me to do this. After a half-day’s reflection, I returned to the cottage, knowing it was over. One day many years later, part of a new family, I returned from errands brimming with sorrow. My three children saw it on my face. “A terrible thing happened,” I told them. “I killed a cat.” They thought I meant Megan, our cat, and were about to cry. I quickly told them the details. A neighbor’s cat had run in front of my car and died by the side of the road. As I knelt beside the animal, a boy came up and told me who the owner was and where he lived. I carried the cat in my arms to the house, but no one was home. Later, I looked up the owner’s number and called. A boy answered. “It was my car that ran over your cat,” I said. “I’m very sorry.” The boy, who sounded about thirteen, said, “Thank you for calling. It was kind of you.” He was so decent that when the children found me, I was crying. I asked my wife, Evelyn, to excuse me from chores and went to the lake where I’d taught the children to fish. I cast and retrieved for several hours, comforted by the familiar action and the setting, watching the changes in the patterns of water and sky, praying I would not get any strikes. I returned home when the sun began to set. When my son Charles Aram was eleven, he joined my friend Danny and me on Danny’s 25-footer in the rough waters of Plum Gut off the end of Long Island. Suddenly, a bluefish smacked Charles’s line and ran for the sea, so powerfully that my son’s heels flew off the deck and I feared he might be pulled into the sea. But I hollered, “Hold on, Charles!” and let Danny maneuver the boat, deliver encouragement, and suggest strategy. A half-hour later, a glorious 15-pound fish lay in the ice chest. We returned burned and weary to shore and slipped into a bar on the dock. “Any luck, boys?” asked the pretty bartender. “Charles here pulled in the blue to end all blues,” Danny told her. She poured rum and cokes, inconspicuously omitting the rum from Charles’s glass. I watched my son in the tinted mirror, and when he reached for his drink he managed to do it jauntily. We’d started the day with a boy but came back with a man. More recently, an old acquaintance with a fellow Husky named Malcolm blossomed into a new friendship after an exchange of letters. He invited my family for a day aboard his fishing boat out of Hull, Massachusetts. “Some businessmen came down last weekend,” said Malcolm, a slim, handsome retired teacher, “and went home with enough stripers to feed their families all summer.” We fished from Hingham Bay to Boston Harbor. We hooked one modest striper. Malcolm had by then become an affectionate uncle to our children and an admirer of Evelyn. So naturally he blamed me. “You’re a curse,” he said. With three words, Malcolm, in his frugal Yankee way, had saved face, apologized, and invited us to try again. Another day of another summer, I fished from shore at Jones Inlet, between Jones Beach and the tiny community of Point Lookout, New York. I was alone, unless you count the fifty people at the rail of a fishing boat forty feet away, glaring as I hooked flounder after flounder while their lines remained slack. But the moment was curiously empty. I was not connected to these people. Then my young son Edward Salim arrived, back from swimming at the ocean beach. He sized up the irony and smiled at me, and suddenly the moment was joyful. We could hardly wait to deliver the catch and tell everybody our story. This year, on Father’s Day, my daughter, Sara Jameel, who’d been out late with friends the night before to celebrate her college graduation, rose without a whimper and went with me to the lake. We fished for three hours, catching and releasing large-mouth bass and sunfish. Walking back up the trail to the car, she curled her arm around my shoulders. “I love you, too,” I said. So this is what I’ve ultimately learned about fishing. For a lot of people, people like me, it was never about the fish. It’s about what happens at the other end of the line. Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and award-winning writer, lives outside New York City.