Fishing Through the Snow

There seems to be a latent relationship between the pen and the rod. Since the days of Walton, the angler has wielded the pen with consummate skill, and to-day we read of great men resorting to fishing as the most desirable of all antidotes for an overdose of penmanship, be it in the cause of politics or of literature.

Not being skilled in either pursuit, my fish-story differs from theirs, and the reader is warned beforehand, lest he may be led into the error of thinking this a chapter from Burroughs’s Nature Study, or a bit of valuable advice from some such authority as Stewart Edward White.

The simple fact is that, being no fisherman, I started the other day upon a fishing excursion, urged on by my wife. Our youngest was celebrating his fourth birthday, and had expressed a desire for some ‘ goat fish! ’ It was an easily translated wish, to be fulfilled, seemingly, at small effort and modest cost. But we had just indulged in an avalanche ol snowstorms, one storm coming upon another in such quick succession as to prove how unstable our existence really is when Nature takes the bit in her teeth. Consequently, the simple act of going to town and back was a day’s task in itself.

From sheer habit I said that of course I would get the goldfish, and hurried for my train. As I waited at the station, it came over me that the purchase of goldfish to-day was a nuisance. However, I was in for it, and, furthermore, I wanted the little chap to have his heart’s desire.

It so happened that there came a lull in the day’s work at noon, and I decided to run over to the little bird-store a block away, where goldfish enjoy a temporary habitat. When I entered and asked for four goldfish (one for each year seemed an appropriate number), the clerk looked at me with what seemed a disagreeable astonishment. ’We have n’t had a goldfish in here for a month,’ he said in a disgusted tone. ‘The demand is greater than the supply.’ (I had heard the term applied before to sundry essentials of life, such as sugar, but it had not occurred to me that the war had affected a change in the status of goldfish.) ‘Even if there were goldfish to be had, they could not be transported in such weather. Nothing ever comes through on time’; with which statement I heartily agreed, having had some difficulty myself of a similar nature in the office.

This news was very depressing. I remembered sundry youthful birthdays of my own, and I recognized that no substitute would quite take the place of goldfish on this occasion. I returned to telephone to my wife.

I knew that her disappointment would be as keen as mine, and I found it even keener. ‘Why not try another place? ’ she suggested.

This was a good idea; but I knew no other store, and it was snowing hard, and I said so.

’Perhaps I can find out where So-and-So bought hers,’ she ventured.

‘Why not borrow hers for the day? ’ I inquired brilliantly, anticipating relief. But no, that would not do. About ten minutes later the telephone rang, and my wife triumphantly gave me the address of three likely stores where goldfish were to be had.

The telephone operator in my office is a friend in need. She immediately joined in the hunt, and I felt as if my task were done and she would have those goldfish neatly caught in a small tin pail and placed on my desk before the hour of departure. But not so. The three stores all reported the same depressing information. No goldfish. The thing became critical. The whole office became interested.

‘How about Mr. So-and-So? He has goldfish,’ suggested my resourceful secretary.

So-and-So is one of my classmates, who drops in once or twice a week and carries me off for lunch. He is an ardent collector of oddities and, among them, goldfish; and in times past he has had a good deal to say about them — too much, I thought at the time. Unfortunately, he was ill and away in the South.

Why not call up his wife? Here was a good idea. I might borrow a few of his fish and return them promptly, for it was the birthday that counted; and so I once more resorted to our operator.

It was some little time before she reported. It seems that my partner’s goldfish are old family friends, a part of the family almost, and, unfortunately, his wife was to give a reading on the following day when a number of her most intimate friends were to be present. That made it impossible for her to lend the fish just at this time. She was very sorry because, loving goldfish, she would like to have my little boy have some on his birthday; but of course I could see how impossible it was.

That was the message, and, naturally, I saw how impossible it was; but at the same time I wondered whether the goldfish were indispensable to the reading or to the friends, I tried to think of some poem which must be read beside a bowl of glowing goldfish, and failed. Then I attempted to picture a gathering of middle-aged women all dependent upon the presence of piscatorial charmers; but finally gave it up and was preparing to go to lunch, when the little operator herself hurried into my room to tell me that she had found fifty goldfish in a little store kept by foreigners about a mile from the office, and that they were holding the lot subject to my orders.

I could have embraced that little girl on the spot. She never fails to produce results. She certainly produced one this time, for it seemed that one of our office-boys was out ill and the other out upon sundry errands, which would keep him for hours. It was, therefore, clearly up to me to go after the fish, which I did, through streets four or five inches deep with snow and slush, with a high wind blowing particles of ice and snow into every crevice — into ears, eyes, and nose. In short, it was a memorable journey, for it was taken on foot, as the street-cars failed to run in that particular direction.

However, I secured the fish — poor, small, anremic-looking chaps. ‘It’s a hard winter for us all,’ said the woman to me as she dipped the fish from the tank into a little cardboard box,— they had run short of tin pails owing to the demand, — and I agreed.

The trip back was even more difficult, for it was slippery, and I knew that, if I fell, the box would burst and the fish perish; but we managed to make the office, and I signed my letters before leaving for home.

When I arrived at the railway station, the storm had increased to such proportions that the suburban trains were hopelessly delayed. After waiting about in the steaming train shed for half an hour, I gave up hope and tried my luck with the electric cars. The idea was not original, and I found myself surrounded by a mass of irritated humanity, whose deportment was not at its best. The struggle to keep the paper box intact was hard, and the journey long. To travel the scant six miles from the office to my home took two hours and a half; and when I arrived, I felt as if I had engaged in one of those historic football games between Harvard and Yale; but I had the fish, and they lived.

As I was late, the party was all but ended. However, we hurried into the china closet to find the large glass bowl, the permanent home for these golden treasures.

My wife is generally a placid soul, but on this occasion she was hurried, and I do not blame her in the least. She wanted our boy to have a perfect time. And so, as she placed the bowl hastily beneath the faucet to fill it with cold, clear water, she unfortunately held it too high, and faucet and bowl came together. The faucet, had the better of it and the bowl was smashed into many pieces. But when a man had gone through what I had in the last three hours, a bowl was not to spoil the day; and before many minutes had elapsed a new bowl had been rushed from my mother’s house across the way, and the goldfish were swimming contentedly before the chubby and delighted countenance of my four-year-old.

I have heard that fishing takes patience, that the lone fisherman tries one place and then another, philosophically following the lead of both judgment and intuition, sometimes up to his waist in water, chilled to the bone, but still game. As I retrace in my mind this fishing excursion, it is wonderfully like the accounts one hears of fishing-trips; and yet, what fisherman will read this screed without calling out anathema?