Why Fifty Million People Fish: An F&S Classic by Nick Lyons

Why Fifty Million People Fish
With more than 400 magazine articles and 20 books to his name, Nick Lyons has been a force in the publishing of outdoor books for more than 30 years. Here, in an article from the August, 1972 issue of Field & Stream, Nick explores a favorite topic: why we fish. As you’ll see, he touches on things that ring familiar with all of us. Click here to read the article.

What sends a person away from the comforts of his hard-earned home to fight insects, rain, cold, and other disasters in the name of fishing?

There is a curious rumor that fishing is idyllic and pastoral, that it rejuvenates the spirit and excites the blood to high adventure, that it requires high intelligence. My experience has been otherwise. Your boat leaks. It rains. You fall in the water, freeze, boil, hook yourself, hook your partner, lose your equipment, catch the weeds, catch pneumonia, lose more equipment, snarl the line, get bitten by flies you can’t see, miss the big one, and hear, inevitably, that you “should have been here yesterday”—or last week or next month. If you return alive and sane, no one believes a word you tell them; if you stay out too long or too often, you lose your family or your job. If you don’t stay out long enough, he who did will taunt you until your death that “they began to bite like mad ten minutes after you left.”

You don’t want to neglect your wife, so you take her along: she gets bitten to shreds by blackflies and doesn’t speak to you for a year. You take your children along, since you’ve heard that in these hard times the family that fishes together stays together: you spend all day untying knots, the kiddies fall in, you bring them home sopping wet and sneezing, and your wife doesn’t speak to you for a year. You drive 300 miles for striped bass fishing: the tides are perfect, moon tides, but a hurricane has driven all the fish offshore. You fly to Montana in June: there’s a snowstorm.  You get up at 2:00 A.M. and collapse before you get to your pet stream. You get to your pet stream—but 9 million guys have gotten there before you.

They say that man has evolved. Fishing disproves it. In 1496, when Dame Juliana Berners wrote A Treatys of Fyshing with an Angle, it was possible to fish for a whole year for respectable fish with a few cents worth of equipment. In the Stone Age it was cheaper, and the fish were larger. Today more than $3 billion is spent annually by those called in the national surveys “habitual anglers.” And the fish are smaller and fewer, and certainly no smarter. On certain salmon rivers, the average fisherman spends more than $300 per salmon caught; it’s cheaper to have a dozen air-shipped from Scotland, and you don’t have to worry about the blackflies. President Grover Cleveland, who on this occasion knew whereof he spoke, pronounced: “At the outset, the fact should be recognized that the community of fishermen constitute a class or subrace among the inhabitants of the earth.” “Subrace.” There’s a message in that word. And in the word “habitual,” too. “Good luck” is the traditional greeting among brothers of the angle. Why not, “Good grief!”?