Corrupting a Child into the Art of Angling: a Journey from Granny Knots to 8-Weights

Posted on March 28, 2018 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

The 2018 cover of the Southwest Alaska Fishing Regulations featuring my photography: I was out on the ice last winter when I happened upon these two cuties (Barbra’s students) trying their luck for Dolly Varden Char and smelt on Chignik Lake. Teaching a young person to fish is an action that can have long legs and far-reaching positive consequences.

My father started my little sister and me with granny knots, #6 hooks, 10 lb test line, wine cork bobbers and solid fiberglass poles sans reels. Hers had a red handle. Mine was green. Half-a-mile below our house down the winding Route 322 hill lay Piney Dam Reservoir, an impoundment on western Pennsylvania’s Clarion River which, back in those days, was fairly fishless thanks primarily to acid runoff from coal strip mines and effluent from a paper mill 60 miles upstream. This was in the days before President Nixon’s executive order establishing the Environmental Protection Agency. The river looked clean – but the acid runoff left it relatively sterile, bereft of the web of aquatic weeds, tiny crustaceans and insect that make up a healthy ecosystem. These days, the coal mines are mostly gone, grown over with mixed forests of white pine and oak and other hardwoods that have reclaimed the landscape from the war-zone look I remember from childhood. Thanks to EPA regulations, the mining operations that remain are much more responsibly operated. Meanwhile, the paper mill modernized, also guided by EPA regulations. Now trout, bass, muskellunge, decent-sized panfish and, I’m told, even walleyes swim in waters that back in my day held little more than a few stunted sunfish, perch, shiners and bullheads.

Given time, if the Earth isn’t damaged too much, it can heal.

On the sunny side of the valley at the foot of the old 322 bridge was a small, wooden, long-abandoned dock. The steps leading down the steep embankment were rotting and coming apart. The dock itself wasn’t in much better shape. But unclaimed, we called it ours, as in “Let’s go fishing at our dock.”

Even digging up a coffee can’s worth of worms in preparation for those trips was an adventure, and with my dad being a biologist, something of a science lesson as well. For starters, we discovered that there were different kinds of worms; the little red ones worked best. And turned up by Dad’s spade would be other creatures: beetles and beetle larvae, centipedes and millipedes and alien-looking chrysalises. Sometimes garter snakes and little green snakes would glide out of the weeds ahead of us, and a rock turned over might reveal mice tunnels, big black crickets or shy red-backed salamanders with their protruding, otherworldly eyes.

There are four indispensable characteristics an adult must possess if he or she expects to successfully corrupt a child into the art of angling:

The adult must know where there are fish an inexperienced child would be able to catch…
…and he or she must know how to catch those fish in the easiest manner conceivable.
Once conditions one and two have been met, the adult must possess the abundance of patience necessary to allow the young person to figure out how to catch those fish.

To his credit, although my dad took along his own outfit, after casting far from the cover of the dock out into featureless water where there would be no fish, he would set his rod down, ignore it, and focus on my sister and me. That way, if one of us might say, “Dad, you should fish too,” he could truthfully reply, “I am fishing.”

There were always a few panfish hanging out in the dock’s shade – diminutive bluegills and pumpkinseeds, a shiner or two, and our favorites for their combination of size, brilliant orange fins and qualities on the table, yellow perch. The shiners, too bony to deal with, went back into the water. As for the rest of the fish, five-inches was enough to make a “keeper,” and those went on a hand-made stringer. As long as we didn’t fish it too often, the dock could be counted on for a meal’s worth of fish.

The fourth characteristic necessary to develop an enthusiastic young fisherman is probably the most important. The adult must know when enough is enough. My sister and I were diligent in our attention to our wine-cork bobbers, staying with them as they rocked in the wake of ski boats, not moving our eyes from them for long minutes when they just sat there on placid water doing nothing. We didn’t miss many bites. But as time went by and we thinned the dock’s population of fish, bites became fewer and further between. The sun climbed higher and grew hotter. Small stomachs started to growl.

My father seemed to have a sixth sense for impeccably timing the question, Are you ready to call it a day?

No! Not yet! Let’s stay! Just one more? We’d plead.

Well, my dad would wisely say while enthusiasm was still running high, We’ve got enough for a meal. Your mother’s going to be wondering where we are. It’s time to go.

Aw-ww! That’s the response you hope to hear from someone you’re trying to teach anything to when it’s time to call it a day. Aw-ww, in at least two syllables.

Weeks went by between our trips to the dock, but my sister and I never lost track of whose turn it was to carry the stringer back to the car and triumphantly in through the kitchen door. Down in the basement, Dad would spread out yesterday’s Pittsburgh Press and we’d get to watch as he cleaned the catch. Too small to bother filleting, he’d scale the fish and gut them and remove their heads, so that by the age of six I knew enough about fish anatomy to pass a biology exam. We’d even open their stomachs to examine the dragonfly larvae, midge pupae and other tiny animals they fed on.

Upstairs in the kitchen, Mom made them Appalachian style – rolled in cornmeal seasoned with salt and pepper and fried golden brown and so crisp their tails were like potato chips. The three of us unerringly remembering whose plate the catch-of-the-day belonged on – usually a nice perch. Bread and butter and a big salad of lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers from my dad’s garden rounded out the meal. Those summertime meals of fresh fish and garden salad are far and away my favorite childhood food memory.

The Language of Fishing: A Father and Daughter Story

Posted on January 17, 2013 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

Fishing with Maia at Ja-Ike (Snake Pond) in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan. Ja-Ike was full of large bluegills and bass, and in spring when everything was newly green it was perhaps the most beautiful stillwater we have ever fished. Wild wysteria with their white and lilac blooms draped the trees and reflected in the clear water, and wild yellow irises could be found along the shore. (The image above and some that follow were scanned from snapshots taken in the day.)

We recently drove Maia out to the short strip of pavement that serves as our airport here in Point Hope and saw her off, back to her home in Berkeley, California, where she is finishing the last leg of her senior year in college. She’d just spent part of her winter break visiting us in our Arctic home. For two beautiful weeks, we did nothing more elaborate than watch movies, cook together, eat great food, and catch up. On the short drive to the airport, a ground blizzard (high winds whipping up already fallen snow) forced me to creep along at the speed of a brisk walk. It was 10:00 a.m. and still pitch black. Once we got to the airport, the three of us, Maia, Barbra and I, sat in the car, heater blasting, talking, waiting. We wondered if the small plane would be able to make it up from Kotzebue.

Suddenly the runway lights came on. A few minutes later we found the lights of the plane in the dark sky as it made its descent. The lone passenger disembarked and the pilot helped a couple of the locals unload supplies for the Native Store onto a pickup truck. When they were finished, we hugged and said our good-byes and Maia climbed aboard. Fifty-mile-an-hour gusts were rocking the little plane and pushing the windchill deep into the negative degrees, but the skies above were clear. Should be a routine flight, and with a tailwind no less, Bar and I agreed. Still, a father worries.

Maia Flying Kite_n

Flying a kite on Folley Beach, South Carolina.

Maia and I started fishing together not long after she learned to walk. Our excursions began on the banks of the Sakuragawa (Cherry River) in Ibaragi Prefecture, Japan. Like Ja-Ike, Sakuragawa had healthy populations of large bluegills and largemouth bass, and like kids the world over, Maia’s earliest fishing experience was shaped around a pole with a line tied to the end, a float, a hook and a worm.

Back then, the fishing wasn’t really about the fishing. There were flowers and frogs, water snakes and dragonflies, bike rides and walks. I’d put Maia in a little red seat that attached to the handlebars of my three-speed town cruiser and we’d take off, looking for promising water, singing songs and naming birds and stopping at little shops for snacks along the way. Among our favorite finds were the colorful little kawasemi (Eurasian kingfishers) we’d sometimes spy along the river banks and the mysterious evidence of mozu (shrikes) where they’d impaled their tiny victims on garden fences and small tree branches.

Maia caught her first salmon, a bright Coho fresh from the sea, on a late summer day near the mouth of the Columbia River not far from our home in Astoria, Oregon. Is there any better dinner than a good fish you caught yourself?

But most of all, those early fishing trips were about us – two buddies, hanging out, discovering a world that was new for both of us. It didn’t matter if we caught fish. In fact, sometimes we didn’t even get around to the fishing. There was always lots to see and explore. We never had a bad day.

Qualifying for nationals in cross country meant a trip to Lincoln, Nebraska and post-race bison burgers. That evening, Maia talked me into going to a movie based on a book she’d recently read and was quite excited about. Although I didn’t become a Harry Potter fan, there is magic in doing things with a person you love, and I have a very fond memory of a pasta dinner at a downtown restaurant followed by watching “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” together.

Later, other things became the focal points of our lives: violins and piano lessons, cross country races and track practice, hikes and a black Labrador Retriever-Australian Shepard mix that was lovable and wild. But fishing remained. It was a constant in our lives, an unbroken thread that gave us a common language even in those times when common language between a father and his teenage daughter sometimes became elusive.

Blonde hair and a red violin – and springtime trips to a nearby lake to fish for trout and to pick fiddlehead fern heads to sauté in the pan with those trout.

Cinching up the bag on two limits of razor clams at Clatsop Beach, Oregon – fried clams for dinner!

On the Exit Glacier Trail near Seward, Alaska, with boyfriend Neal.

Although Maia’s on her own now, we still get together every summer. We hike and explore and boat and enjoy good meals, and our days often end with a bottle of this or that and stories. And we always work in some fishing.

At the helm of our sailboat, Bandon, in Resurrection Bay near Seward, Alaska in June, 2012.

Maia will graduate from college this spring with a degree in music composition and theory. Each time she visits, she brings us an iPod jammed with excellent music – everything from obscure Sinatra to the latest Buck 65 and tons of stuff I’d never find on my own (but end up liking). Maia’s study of music is taking her into a world that, in its depths, goes far beyond my understanding of the subject, and her life near San Francisco couldn’t be much more different than our lives up here in Alaska. And so sometimes we return to the language we know – a language of five-weight fly rods, elk hair caddises and pheasant tail nymphs. We talk of the trout waters we’ve fished and the waters we’d like to fish. And invariably we circle back to the ponds and rivers we knew in Japan and the bluegills we used to catch there, and the bike rides and those those striking little kingfishers with their shimmering turquoise backs.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi: A Philosophy of Life and Sushi

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

Yanagiba (sushi knife), ohashi (chopsticks) properly resting on an ivory spotted seal hashioki, and David Gelb’s documentary of world-renowned sushi chef Jiro Ono. Let the feast begin.

The shots of sushi will wow you. Segments depicting 85-year-old Jiro Ono magically transforming rice and fish into pieces of art that are at once too beautiful to be eaten and yet must be eaten will mesmerize you. The manner in which he and his 51-year-old son run Sukiayabashi Jiro, a 10-seat sushi restaurant in the underground subway system in Tokyo’s ritzy Ginza District will, perhaps, prompt you to make subtle (or not so subtle) changes in the way you run your own kitchen. At the very least, you are likely to come away from the film with a heightened appreciation of tamagoyaki – the grilled egg dish frequently served on nigiri sushi menus. Sukiabashi Jiro is the only sushi restaurant in the world to earn Michelin’s top rating – the coveted three stars. The simple definition of a three-star restaurant is this: a restaurant that by itself makes a trip to that country worthwhile.

As a self-taught chef, as a father, as a person who is seeking to perfect my own path in life, and as one who lived in Japan for nine years and came to deeply appreciate the Japanese sensibility toward life, this film profoundly moved me. Jiro Ono embodies the characteristics of the shokunin – a master craftsman or artisan who, while possessing superb technical skills in his field, is also aware of his responsibility to model an honorable life and to look out for the welfare of others. In the film, Masahiro Yamamoto, one of Japan’s leading food critics, identifies the five attributes of a great chef. These attributes are no doubt valued by all shokunin.

1. A serious attitude toward one’s work

2. Aspiration to improve – to strive for perfection

3. Cleanliness (which includes a proper order in one’s life and work)

4. Lead rather than collaborate

5. Bring passion to one’s work, (and through that passion to discover moments of ecstasy)

I’m going to add a sixth element to Yamamoto’s list. If Jiro’s life is about striving for perfection, the question is begged, “Perfection to what end?” To what purpose are the above five attributes?

It is this: They are all aimed toward providing others with an ultimate experience. Jiro dreams of sushi, yes. But what he really dreams of is providing his customers with a perfect dining experience. That is the sixth attribute: The desire to provide others with a penultimate experience.

Some of these attributes are, perhaps, antithetical to current western thinking. Therein lies the core of the criticisms of this film. Aren’t we supposed to value collaboration? Is the emphasis on cleanliness really so important? Is Jiro truly interested in others, or is he merely a shallow, self-inflated ego with no meaningful connection to other human beings – including his wife and his two sons? Doesn’t taking one’s work too seriously lead to imbalance in life?

I think this much is fair to observe: The path Jiro Ono has chosen in life is not a path that would suit everyone. But it is a path I admire. In the director’s cut, it is mentioned that a regret is that Jiro’s wife was unable to be in the film. This seems to be owing to the health of a woman in her 80’s, not about a failed partnership. His sons are both key players in the film, and speak of their father with honor, respect and love. They have both chosen to follow in his line of work, to embrace his teaching and have become highly respected sushi chefs in their own right. In turn, Jiro speaks with pride and admiration of both of his sons. As a father, I can very much relate to Jiro’s philosophy regarding child-rearing. You spend your life teaching and guiding, and in the end you hope a good bit of it takes root. In both of Jiro’s sons, his teaching did stick, his guidance payed off, and because his sons worked for many years in his restaurant, he ultimately spent more time with them than most fathers ever spend with their children.

As to taking one’s work too seriously and carving out one’s own path rather than collaborating, I grew up in a family wherein, not just in my nuclear family but in all the uncles and aunts in my extended family, the life philosophy most frequently espoused was an admonition to not take work (or anything else) too seriously. It was a philosophy that did not work for me, and ultimately inspired an opposing philosophy.

At the age of 4o, I began the long, sometimes arduous, deeply satisfying process of remaking my life. Part of the remaking has been rooted in a newfound freedom – a self-given permission to pursue life with renewed passion, dedication and a commitment to honor and excellence. As I move forward with this life as a sailor, chef, writer, photographer, father and husband, this film that so eloquently captures the life and spirt of a true shokunin resonates.