(HOST) Storyteller, contractor and commentator Willem Lange recently went fishing for the first time this year. He had some luck and found lots to think about.
(LANGE) I promised myself all week I’d get in at least a couple of hours of fishing. But when Saturday morning broke cloudy and breezy, my resolution faded a bit. Blowing around an icy pond in a canoe isn’t as much fun as it used to be. So I waited till mail time. I’d squeeze in a few hours after lunch, and get home before the rain started.
The pond wasn’t quite as windy as I’d expected, which was lucky, because I’d forgotten my anchor. But I could park the canoe on a submerged stump I knew about and cast from there. No problem. A red-winged blackbird swung on a branch of a paper birch and proclaimed his territory. The water, where my hand on the paddle dipped into it, was freezing cold. No swirls disturbed the surface; the pond felt dead.
But a movement above me caught my eye. An osprey was floating on the wind. The ice hadn’t been out long, but he’d have nestlings already, so he wasn’t hunting just his own lunch. I wished him luck. I found my stump, parked the canoe, and started working the circle around me.
The first fish of the year was a perfect rainbow, maybe a pound and a half. I looked at him for a moment – Mother had asked me to bring one home for her breakfast – and then slid him back into the water. Same with the second – a brookie – and the same with the rest. I don’t know whether it’s old age, or just some misplaced empathy. I’m no vegetarian, but I don’t feel like killing anymore. Maybe it’s just they’re too beautiful.
Or maybe it’s because they’re threatened. We’ve heard the warnings about contaminants and poisons in the flesh of fish. Especially mercury, which is being released into the atmosphere in dramatically increasing amounts. Falling in rain or snow into our water, it’s converted to an organic form, toxic methyl mercury. Here in New England, where the winds crossing the United States funnel out to sea, we get more than our share of it. It enters the systems of all living things in the water and biomagnifies as it moves up the food chain, reaching high concentrations in organisms at the top of the chain – large trout, sharks, swordfish, otters, ospreys, and us.
What bothers me is so few people seem to know what’s been lost. Our rivers aren’t the sewers they were when I was a boy, but the poisons in them now are all the more dangerous for being invisible. You can see how our thinking has changed: Instead of fish being good for us, fish is now not bad for us if we don’t eat too much of it. Even our minds have become polluted.
The osprey swooped down and flapped across the pond, huge against the gray sky. Poor guy doesn’t have a chance. All he eats is fish. He doesn’t know it, but it’s our responsibility to keep him healthy and help him raise healthy kids. And we’re letting him down.
This is Willem Lange in East Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.