Good Ending for an Outing

My first largemouth from the Raritan River proper.

Sense of Unreality We Overcome

Now I’m blogging on Squarespace, having spent a long time learning how to build a site on the platform, having spent lots of time writing and rewriting those long essays for the About and Books pages, and I wonder if the improvement for my writing on fishing is mistaken. Litton’s Fishing Lines in its glory when I turned to the present blog, the audience following each weekly post (sometimes twice weekly) had never before been larger.

Such easy access Google provides for that blog. But it’s perfectly obvious that you can easily figure out that all you need is the Fishing page’s URL to access my posts, but I still have to put in anchor links so you can simply hop down the page in one leap to those posts. I’ll try to do that this afternoon. The introductory text isn’t something you’ll likely want to read more than once or twice.

We’ll see how the new blog works out. One advantage for me is that I can post on places like Lake Musconetcong and rank high in search results, because the post came from a different platform. I’d already used up my opportunities with Litton’s Fishing Lines. Even though the post from the old blog that ranks high under that keyword is from 2012.

You might be wondering, I wonder about it myself, why someone as deeply committed to word on fishing as yours truly is committed, and who—while he isn’t the best of the fishermen you can read about online—obviously catches fish and is knowledgeable…you might be wondering why he has any reason to put in the amount of effort it took him to perfect the essay on the About page. And the one on the Books page.

That would be a long story, though I might be able to contain it within a blog post on the Philosophy and Literature page. I did say somewhere on the website, probably in the introductory text to the blog, that all three blog categories interrelate. You might not have any interest in the others, but that question this paragraph is about might have confronted you, nevertheless. Rather than try to answer it in depth, I’ll say for now that I love my gutsy down-to-earth activities, and they have informed my philosophizing from the beginning when my mind acquired its abstract powers at age 13 or 14. Postmodernism and any of its post-postmodern variants is like an attempt to persuade us that we should lock ourselves indoors, and if you were to read that very long essay, you would infer clearly that I break those barriers.

Philosophy is important because it sets the basic attitude of a culture. For the example of postmodern varieties of philosophy, sociocultural realities are fundamental. Since society and culture are regarded basic, not nature, nature is regarded as a social construct instead of as given metaphysical reality through which origination is possible.

To those of you who feel the society around you is telling you fishing is not cool, that’s not surprising when the river you fish supposedly isn’t really real. You know what I mean when I tell you that a sense of unreality is something we anglers overcome. You don’t get that sense of unreality from the river or lake you fish; you get it from the culture that would close you in.

Over at the Raritan

Trout have been stocked in the rivers, but I fished the Raritan main stem before that happened upstream in the South and North branches, with nightcrawlers leftover from the Delaware River trip in September. I experienced a slow time at the fishing, but in keeping with the subject divulged above, I was right there in the middle of things from the moment I stepped out of my car. No overcoming any unreal feeling, and on my very first cast, a bass took the bait and slowly swam aside. I had reserved my patience for a spot I like about a quarter mile upstream. I tried to set the hook and came up with nothing but a nightcrawler head on that hook.

I fished about an hour-and-a-half, catching a couple of sunfish, missing the hits from yet another couple of fish I thought were bass, piecing apart the water as I enjoy doing. Nice deep water, oxygenated by a generous amount of greenery. Nothing coming up out of it. Sunlight on my shoulders. Last year, I fished the same stretch with live killies leftover from fluke fishing. I landed a 15 1/2-inch smallmouth and another about a foot long.

I began to feel as if I wasn’t going to catch a bass. My options seemed to close, and I didn’t care for going back downstream to access another, shallower, stretch. The sun had come down low on the horizon, about to sink below. I knew I would go home in minutes, but I let time go on breathing deeply.

I rapidly reeled my nightcrawler over shallow water to get it back out in deeper. Suddenly the water erupted and I halted that retrieve. The bass had vanished, so I reeled in. Then I saw a smallish bass in the darkening water and tossed the worm in front of it by a couple of feet or so. The bass you see photographed, above.

I had taken the water’s temperature at 70 degrees, and I’m certain that’s the last I’ll fish any that warm this year. The evening coming on felt almost summery, though a hint of the coming chill fringed the wholesomeness. I felt as if persistence always pays. Even had I not caught a bass, the investment of effort carries over, keeps me in the vital reality of things, rather than in the lapse that feels sleepy.

A Raritan River deadfall I don’t remember being there last I fished here.