The Microlight Quest: Trout, Adventure, Renewal

  Fishermen absorb themselves deeply in nature. The fluidity of the water they probe invites them to inwardness, every outing becoming a story brought home, how to fish a much larger issue than methods and techniques. The whole of life becomes engaged, which helps account for the competition among fishermen not only at catching fish, but over the level of their dedication. Some feel all-in as if nothing else matters. Not even their marriages. 

          Never diminishing the drama of story, The Microlight Quest does address trout fishing methods and techniques, especially the method involving microlight spinning tackle, because the book’s basic argument—that the importance of outdoor recreation transcends the conventionality of the work world—is nothing without details of a way to enhance life. I do discuss methods other than microlight, including fly fishing, and while I can’t hope to include all, how-to leads into the book’s stories amounting to a philosophy of reclaiming the earth to empower the self. A reciprocal relationship. We empower the earth by standing in relation to it as witnesses, evaluators—above all as participants.

Deep Relationship in Stockers’ Popularity   

          Microlight method’s efficiency at catching stocked trout is explained in ways that may entertain your sense of how things work, especially if you love fly fishing and make fun of something as visceral as salmon eggs. But how-to undergirds a drama of personal development that stands in for any kind of outdoor pursuit’s ameliorating work life’s frustration. Whether you’re working class as I’ve been, or professional—we all know the stress. It’s just that nobody knows it more than people doing manual labor. I knew many professionals while working for a credit union. One of them told me my job on the road as a courier was the best in the company, and I made it better than he could have known by fishing on lunch breaks. And yet, fishing or no fishing, that job wasn’t as hard as working in a supermarket.

          Stories set in my home state of New Jersey grew out of fishing stockers. Of all the different kinds of fishing I did in my youth, fishing stockers is especially important because of the greater social element. It led to an inward adventure, which I’ll soon talk about, as a kind of promise of my return. Any adventure that pushes life to the limit must finally yield to day-to-day practicality, implying that cycle of setting out and return. My renewed habit of fishing stockers helped me readjust after no less than profound journey inward. And unless trust funds, savings, or self-employed work support an individual, he will need to hold a job sooner than later, which is about sociability, not just money. Microlight method having originated in New Jersey where people are very busy—having the highest property taxes in the nation contributes to that state-of-affairs—gives my writing style a streak of Jersey Attitude I hope my friends will recognize. Being nearly a lifelong resident, I can’t help but feel it makes the book uniquely appropriate for anyone who catches a breath outdoors—even if limited to reading while laid back on the patio.

          Pressured society—New Jersey is the most densely populated state—and pressured fish. Jersey residents involve themselves at fishing like nowhere else. One look at the number of Superfund sites along the Raritan River will give anyone a sense of the pressures on us and fish alike. History has a way of sticking around, as anyone familiar with how resistant those sites are to cleanup knows.    

          If stocked trout don’t satisfy anglers on deeper levels than jobs do, no doubt exists that nevertheless they compel anglers to get out. Yes, stocked trout. And that call of the wild is especially poignant at local pullovers, potentially leading to a much deeper engagement than trust felt for any job. (Just about every fisherman will agree.) Enjoyment includes the sporting; the social and the solitary; appreciations of nature; health of mind and body; the artistic, philosophical, and spiritual; and the biographical in the way long-term fishing habits provide structure for the story arcs of angler’s lives. For many, fishing is life. Until I began fishing on lunch breaks, I only wanted out of my credit union job, but thereafter, I loved the company I worked for.   

          Although done state-by-state, trout stockings from coast-to-coast amount to a national tradition no less than a deeply interconnected passion among hundreds of thousands, beginning with the first rainbow trout hatchery, Baird Station, built during the 19th century on California’s McCloud River of the Cascade Mountains. To say that stocked trout are popular might be an understatement, and the fishing is usually about hanging out with others having the same interest, rather than solitude in nature. Anyone who fishes for them, whether he calls them “stockies” or “stockers,” participates in a dialogue between nature and civilization. He may scorn civilization, but he not only knows he can’t escape for long, he might be in earshot of the guy standing 20 feet downstream, so he knows it's better to find a way to accept it. The hatchery itself embodies relationship between the given and the humanmade. Creates a fusion. Symbolizes everything synthetic.

          After all, for a human being, given nature—“the outdoors”—is a passage from and back to “the indoors.” Humankind went indoors after we originated as an animal species of the wild. You could say life is just the Doors, and the book’s first chapter inclusion of issues concerning Jim Morrison, William Blake, and Aldous Huxley arise from streamside origins. My mentor was one of the two original microlight anglers and four years of fishing with him quickly led on to my spiritual relationships with the three literary figures, not because he was familiar with them, but a bit because his reading American history nightly bore similarity to my reading literature. The inspiration of the wilds fuels the brain, and for me, as it did for William Blake, visionary and spiritual experience comes from God, though microlight trout fishing led to my artistic, philosophical, and spiritual discipline by drawing me aside of the expected avenues of life. God is beyond modern life, which is why people taken up and into the mystery are sometimes called bipolar. It’s a denial of that mystery’s meaning appropriate to modernity’s denial of the divine. You can find bipolar disorder named “the divine madness” in literature, but why would a psychiatrist utter the phrase to patients, when he needs to belittle them?   

          Reason exists to speak well of the expected, though. Not only would my life have ended tragically at a very early age without return to the ordinary; my holding jobs has helped support my family. I hope my book delivers on the promise, however, of expressing what many of us feel about such jobs. It’s not been easy for me. Professional work was expected of me, but wage jobs generally aren’t easy for anyone else, whatever the expectations. And we see why fishing stockers liberates some who do them. While crafting my sentences, I didn’t think of my ideal reader as merely steeped in the reading of literature and philosophy, no matter the hundreds of such books I’ve read. I thought of guys who fish stockers. Gals, too. My ideal reader would be like me: one of the guys out there fishing. Tens of thousands fish stockers in New Jersey. Men and women from all the other states who do the same are, of course, equally invited to enjoy the book.

Clearwater Revival

          According to New Jersey Fish and Wildlife records, 85,822 trout stamps were sold in 2021, although figures for more recent years aren’t available. More than 13,000 people have joined Trout Fishing in Nj—that lower case “j” is as appears on Facebook. The group is about trout, but don’t we look for signs in everything questionable? Interpret the “j” as you will, but I don’t mean to imply the group or my book is about cannabis consumption. All the power to trumpeter Miles Davis and his sidekick Easy Mo Bee for letting “the ‘j’ give it to you.” After all, the studio album Doo Bop is fit to haunt the road trip. But regardless of marijuana, I prefer the pastiche of Andy Griffith’s whistling woven into “The Doo Bop Song,” conjuring up that image of rod against his shoulder. And to raise the issue once more, Morrison, Huxley, and Blake mean a lot of things to many people, but I never used psychedelic drugs to appreciate their work. Huxley made the point that he was not a visionary without LSD and mescaline, but like William Blake, in whom Huxley was fascinated, I am a visionary without drugs.  

          Much more to fishing New Jersey stockers and Facebook exists. Having arrived recently, in 2023, NJ Multispecies Mayhem Fishing includes me—I’ve been on Facebook since 2011—as one of the founding members. I had fished with Joe Santiago—from a separate canoe, while he fished in another with Brian Cronk—before he also created the NJ Multi Species Podcast that year with Chris Pereira. Anyone can join Mayhem, and anyone can email Joe or Chris to propose an appearance on the podcast.

         Trout Fishing in Nj, and the other New Jersey fishing groups on Facebook including NJ Fishing.com, are riddled through and through with Jersey Attitude, and they can grate on the sensibility of those who preserve their sensitivity—so the name of “Mayhem” is honest and to the point. The element of cramped participation on our streams and rivers, reflecting more than a century of pressure put on stocked trout in New Jersey, is replicated in feverish online participation, which becomes innocuous through repeated visitations. Familiarity with names increases, and the hard exterior shells of individual members reveal themselves as porous. We’re all hermit crabs, but when we change our shells, we prove we’re in the same trade.

          And not only does the quality of community become manifest in all sorts of surprising ways; the more you get to know individuals who post frequently, the more signs of intelligence refresh you from the burden of less than that. Fishing for stockers might be “bon marche, as far as she can tell,” because this admittedly sketchy pastime predominantly practiced by men might imply the patience of our wives. The Jew’s harp accompanies Steely Dan’s “Haitian Divorce,” the song from which I quote the French. The same instrument at the end of Supertramp’s “Goodbye Stranger” is a far-flung indulgence by comparison.     

          And as wretched as fishermen who fish stockers may seem, we’re more spiritual than the drudge who never gets out alive. Not only do we “suffer for the fish,” as Chris Pereira famously said. In one of my book’s chapters, I give credence to Christ, and the pun is intended—we’re the revival coming from clear water. No trout are born on a bayou, but Christ said he would make believers “fishers of men.” To what purpose if not increased abundance? To me, that seems to be the struggle of millennia—to make life bountiful for all. It can seem a painfully naïve goal.  

          The similar idea of the American Founding Fathers achieves “a more perfect union.” Not limited to any one religion, or any religion; only the politics of freedom allow its achievement. Notions of abundance and union come from the same source of wholeness. Abundance can overwhelm and destroy, but existing in the right measure, it is divine. Recreation and art engender that.

          Recreation had an advocate when history tested England during its civil wars. The “Brotherhood of the Angle,” named by the 17th century English author of The Compleat Angler: Or the Contemplative Man’s Recreation, Izaak Walton, would not exist in America if limited to the Church of England. And yet, since anyone who fishes streams might appreciate the friendliness of strangers met there, Walton’s Brotherhood remains at least suggestive, though I believe it is existential. Fishing is personal prior to being a brotherhood, however, and beyond concrete circumstances, space exists up and over humankind. The spirit frees us from social institutions while giving us the power freely available in nature to affirm those institutions we need to carry on. Sincerity of care about a more perfect union isn’t rare. Every chapter of my book features an epigraph from an American president to honor readers who appreciate the words. They headline the fishing of stockers as part of a nation that deserves to endure, as painful as the struggle the book reflects is.  

          What is the life of a nation? Humanity defines it, though humanity exists only in individuals. Most of us today feel the national character retained in each of us suffers, and judging by what Chris Pereira said—"suffer for the fish”—we as anglers may give pause. Did the Founders think we would banish suffering altogether? No. A “more” perfect union never stops developing. We will suffer for the fish, because not only do fish symbolize Christ and other forms of spirituality; they symbolize nature in the deepest sense of human origin, our very blood remaining salty like the brine we originated in as fish. Our humanity must coexist with its origin. At best, it unifies with it. That’s why the outdoors are such a vibrant quality of our national character.

          Outdoors, we find new beginnings and revitalize ourselves, all of which requires efforts, returning that symbolic being of our pursuits to its rightful place—to the water as we wade. We ourselves return to that water like the fish we release, engaging originality in nature as the only way to renew life. Transcendence and joy gained beyond suffering.

   Like a Jar of Salmon Eggs  

          Whether Yah-Mo be there—up and over—or the overman should reach as wide as James Ingram does, to be duty-bound in a failure to struggle and rise above the pedestrian level with its contrivances and petty conflicts is undesirable. We suffer because we break out and the shards afflict us. But we must do that at the least, if not learn to be reasoned and balanced in our approach, because, while doing our jobs, we get caught up in a down way, though the barrier between work and fishing may be difficult to surpass. I know a couple of men who want to fish but for whom it is too difficult—to get out. Most of us would feel freedom is too important not to achieve, but I respect the individual differences that amount to different motives.

          To contemplate freedom exercised by many people inspires me. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, on the other hand, could be called elitist for at least two reasons. He rejected democracy as if it kowtows to masses, and he believed only philosophers, artists, and saints are truly human. If not for the issue of humanity being dignity, the thought of the overman overcoming animalic human nature is as absurd to me as having no toilet in the house. Besides, transcendence from below exists, which men who go deep into nature may understand. Men who don’t overcome animalic nature but, on the contrary, fulfill the lust of its desire. Men of great physical health, unlike Nietzsche. Ever since Walter A. Kaufmann translated Nietzsche’s works and otherwise wrote on them, Nietzsche is credited abundantly along the walkways of the Western mind, even as he remains misunderstood by some, and he is only one example of a celebrated personality who does deserve the homage, for various other reasons than I’ve named. Ultimately any form of property—whether of body, character, personality, honor, belongings, or the intellect—will lose its static dimension to the singular conflagration of human freedom. Whether of the soul or the Honda Civic, the resolution of value relieves tension in the world. The thingness becomes inclusively whole, losing artifacts of anxiety making it piecemeal. Securities are necessary, however, just as a fishing outing on the West Coast, in relation to the East Coast, requires cash. But nothing holds for less than a purpose struggling to overcome lack to gain control. Even events at cross-purpose share the will-to-power. 

          And we cannot abandon the world to God any more than God will abandon the world to us. Rather than existing as a member of a group, a human being must be utterly alone to release himself from the world. He may experience the unitary being of God, which consumes the world only within the mystery, but as such a mystic, he must return to us and complete a cycle necessary to his survival. It amounts to function. The balance is like that of a jar of salmon eggs. You can add too much salt and make the eggs hard and crumbly, and if you refuse to salt them, they will droop. Salt them just enough and they stay on the hook.

           Imbibing a little brine each day was a habit of mine as a commercial clammer. I believe in the health of doing that. I had abandoned the world for the wild bays behind New Jersey’s Long Beach Island only to experience the planet giving me the deepest feeling of home I’ve ever known. Aristotle, on the other hand, is famous for peripatetic espousals of Athenian life, which his school, the Lyceum, researched closely without jealousy. Instead, the philosopher and his students fully embraced that society as the system of their homelife. And yet, if that were enough, how would ongoing history have overcome it?

          No reports of any Athenian having become a beast or a god seem to exist. Aristotle asserts that would happen to anyone living outside the polis. The people of Athens celebrated humanity in theater, sculpture, philosophy, politics, and architecture. But when anti-Macedonian sentiment affected them, Aristotle fled. He was of Macedonian origin. The misfortune of relative homelessness occupied the philosopher for little more than a year before he died at age 61.

           During my boyhood, I felt Aristotle’s flight alarming…and very unsettling. In some respect, I knew no greater fear. I was just a little boy like any other, but the gravity of the philosopher’s leaving home affected me in a personal way. I learned about Aristotle at age nine; I felt the fear into my teens. A caveat for some to consider when the success of easy familiarity becomes complacent. I decided to head it off at the pass and accept the far greater depth nature affords me, rather than become the bourgeois compromise that novelist Hermann Hesse believed is man. I abandoned “the program” my peers sanctioned for themselves, but in later years, I’ve suffered the consequence of wage work in a supermarket. The pain has reformed me, because although an artistic temperament is never only that of a worker, a worker’s is no less sufficient unto himself. I’ve met the man on his own terms, and I couldn’t have written my book if I hadn’t.    

          Trout are of the world an adventurer returns to, and I believe anything less than a full return to the responsibility of adult social life is an evasion, but it shouldn’t be at the cost of healthy recreation. Whether an angler sticks to stockers or moves on to fly fishing only wild and native trout, he needs to let go and fish when he can. If his late teens and 20’s were spent seeking artistic, philosophical, and spiritual achievement, he may know the adventure expends that which is greater than the world, so he is left with coming to grips with the ordinary in the way his expenditure compels him to compensate for the loss. To create anew while the substance remains with him, even as he must work like anyone else. And what is more “worldly” than the working class? The eyebrows of privileged people may rise, but who makes their privilege possible?

After that inevitable return, an adventurer may live a decade in poverty as I did, but anyone truly possessed of the adventurous spirit is sure to rise. Reason is tested by adventure, and reason alone wins. The reassessment that the adventurer’s return to society demands, results in recognition. Equity coming later in life is the measurement of his elevated youth—an existential form within his character. Success is assured, so long as he passes the test of employment. Even the date of his birth is ultimately irrelevant, for he does not know how many lives he’s led.

True to the Big Picture

          Although The Microlight Quest’s explanation of how to catch stockers using microlight and other methods is essential, the book never loses sight of the big picture possible for us, and the reader may be left feeling civilization depends on fishing stockers, more than fishing stockers depends on civilization. In any event, what would be the value of a civilization that only ruins lives? The Microlight Quest argues that outdoor commitments enhance the lives of anyone who takes them up, lessening the frustrations of work life, and the book does so especially by the example of microlight method and exemplifying the overcoming of working class frustrations. No work is more fundamental than that of the working class. Calling that work base is the absurdity of expressing contempt for the foundation supporting all else.

          Remember that a war rages against nature and has for millennia, humankind remaining in profound denial about what it needs most. The working class, in some ways, is closer to nature than are the privileged professions, but the same war is waged against workers. It can only be reversed as individuals embrace the fact that nature offers power to make positive change. Acceptance of that fact may serve no more than acknowledgement—agreement, at least, but lack of courage to act. But as painter Salvador Dali has intimated differently than I do, deep commitment to the life of the planet results in grand affirmation engaging the primary level and moving the world itself.