Outdoor Adventures: Equipped to Live in a Dangerous World

Dear Robin:

Once a legendary coach had a dilemma. His team was in a real slump. At the half time of one particular game, he met with them in the locker room, held up the ball, and said, “This is a football.” He wasn’t being sarcastic. As in football, hunting, fishing, golfing, and all of life’s endeavors, there are fundamentals. They have to be discovered, studied, applied, adhered to, and revisited often.

I was thirteen years old when I discovered trout fishing. I ran with a group of kids, some of whom ended up not being such great compadres. On one particular evening, we were staying up all night, and we got this harebrained idea: let’s go fishing. We had one big problem: none of us knew how to fish. I found an old fiberglass fly rod with reel that my older brother had left behind when he joined the navy.

I lived in a small community in upstate New York. In the summer, you could go out at night with flashlights and find night crawlers everywhere, sort of basking in the moonlight on top of the grass, mating. If you would walk really slowly and move really fast, you could ruin their romantic interlude by snatching one and holding it as close to where it came out of the ground as possible. Then, if you pulled him out slowly and carefully, you’d have a nice big worm to use for fishing. By this time, Mrs. Worm would have quickly retreated back to her living room.

There used to be a hunting and fishing club on the outskirts of our town that apparently didn’t survive. They planted pheasants, and they stocked a small brook with eastern brook trout. No one had fished in this little brook for many years, and the fish had reproduced naturally. I think that the state was also still stocking it. This is where the Rat Pack decided to try our luck at something that none of us knew anything about. There was Rick, Pat, Andrew, myself, and others I don’t remember. Many years later, heroin got the best of Rick; he’s no longer among us. Pat was my best friend. He emigrated from Italy and initially didn’t speak a lick of English. Pat is a very loyal friend and a really nice guy. He finally went back to Italy, got married, and brought his bride back to the States. They still live here, and he has a couple of great kids. Andrew left home, started working for a Southern Californian city, and in time became the assistant city manager. He invested in a little hole-in-the-wall health food store over twenty-five years ago that now has several locations, and it has grown to over $100 million per year in sales. Andrew is wealthy now. And I joke with him that he still can’t fish. We talk regularly. He’s also a great guy and has become a believer.

We took our can of worms and fishing rods and headed on down the road, walking to Rambling Brook. Standing on the bridge, with fly rod in hand, I caught what was my first beautiful brook trout. I didn’t know whether it was even a trout. I didn’t know what a trout looked like and, besides that, it was a pretty poorly lit area. The only light was a streetlight that must have been one that we hadn’t shot out with our BB guns. I knew that the fish was eight to ten inches long and had beautiful spots. The spots were a wonderful powder blue with pink in the middle. I believe that we released it and went on doing whatever it was that we were not supposed to be doing in the middle of the night.

That was my introduction into the world of trout fishing. This was well over fifty years ago. These friends mostly faded from the sport, but I became addicted to the species and to trout angling. Every day after school, I was fishing and studying the habits of these fish. It became a true obsession for me. I would read about them and draw them, and before long l think I began to grow scales and fins.

Childhood was pretty lonely for me for a number of reasons. My parents were divorced when I was very young, and I rarely saw them. So I was running the streets by the time of this trout event. I hope you feel really sorry for me by now because I’m about to ask to borrow money. The point is that trout fishing and art became my life. I’m the youngest of a family of seven children, but they had all pretty much moved out by this time. I had some friends, but they weren’t trout fishing addicts like me.

I learned a few things about trout. They love colder water. They always face upstream, waiting to feed and assimilate the oxygen. They prefer clean, moving water. This is especially true of brookies. They primarily dine at daybreak and at sunset. They hide in the cover of undercuts in banks, and, if in the open, they prefer riffles and broken water for oxygenation and visual protection from birds of prey. They hang in feeding lanes. This is where feed floats by in its greatest concentration. There are a number of fundamentals, but one thing is for sure: If you can see them, they can see you. That is, of course, unless you are below them and they are facing upstream. Another fundamental is that they are smart. With the largest frontal lobe of any freshwater fish, trout are very intelligent.

Since those early years, I have gone on to catch thousands of trout and salmon all across the United States. By learning these fundamentals, I have caught hundreds of trophy fish and even several record-book fish. When I get in a slump, I remember to go back to the basics and, low and behold, my luck changes. What a coincidence.

I have witnessed a disturbing characteristic among those of the church in the West. Even though we have the greatest concentration of churches and Bibles and Christians anywhere, the majority of Christians have a very poor working knowledge of God’s Word. They really don’t understand the fundamentals. I’m not only talking about the theological fundamentals, as discussed in another letter. This is also true. I’m talking about a biblical worldview that comes as the result of a regular, daily, systematic ingestion of God’s Word. Most Christians have never read the Bible from cover to cover.