Catch and Release as a Philosophy

You’re listening to Miles of Quiet. Episode Ten. There’s a thing I do at the end of every fish that I’ve never really explained to anyone. I hold it in the water, facing upstream, and I wait. Not for a photo. Not to admire it, though I do. I wait because the fish is tired, and it needs a minute in the current before it can hold itself steady again, and I’m not going to let go until it can.

Sometimes that’s ten seconds. Sometimes it’s longer, and my hands go numb in the cold water while I crouch there waiting for a trout to decide it’s ready. And then, when it’s ready, it just goes. One kick, and it’s back down into the green water, and I never see it again. That’s the whole point. That’s what I want to talk about today.

So. I’m Henry Wilder. Last episode I talked about public lands, and how I live the way I live because that land exists, and why I think people who use these places should care who’s making decisions about them. Today I want to stay near the water, but go somewhere quieter. I want to talk about why I put the fish back. People ask me about this more than you’d think.

Usually it’s polite curiosity. Sometimes it’s a little pointed, like I’m making a statement I ought to have to defend. And the honest answer is simpler than most people expect. I fish to fish, not to eat. The fish is kind of beside the point. I’ve said a version of that on this show before, and I’ve wanted to sit with it properly ever since, because it’s an easy thing to say and a harder thing to explain without sounding like I think I’m better than the guy at the next bend with a cooler.

I don’t. I’ll get to him. But first I want to tell you what catch and release actually is, because I don’t think most people picture it right. You hear the phrase and you imagine somebody reels a fish in, pops the hook out, and tosses it back, no harm done. And if you do it carelessly, there’s plenty of harm done. A fish you handle badly doesn’t always swim off fine just because it swam off.

It can go a few feet, hold in the current looking okay, and die an hour later where you can’t see it. I know that because I did it. My first year with a fly rod, before I knew any of this, I caught a good rainbow on a hot afternoon. I was thrilled. I dragged it up onto a dry gravel bar to get the hook out, fumbled it for a minute because my hands were dry and it was thrashing, held it up to look at it, and then set it back in the water and watched it swim off. I felt great about myself.

I’d let it go. And then it drifted back toward me, sideways, and rolled belly up in the shallows, and there was nothing I could do about it. I’d done everything a careless person does, all in about ninety seconds, and it killed a fish I thought I’d saved. That one stuck with me. It’s most of the reason I fish the way I do now. Not because a book handed me the rules, but because I watched a fish I meant to release die on a gravel bar while I stood there feeling good about my ethics.

So there’s a craft to doing this right. And the craft is most of what I want to talk about, because the craft is where the philosophy actually lives. Here’s the thing about that. Start with the hook. I fish barbless. That means I either buy hooks with no barb or I pinch the barb down flat with a pair of pliers before I tie one on.

A barbless hook backs out clean, usually with a twist of the fingers, and it doesn’t tear anything on the way. It costs me fish. A barb holds a fish that a bare hook lets slip, and I lose some that way, and I made my peace with that trade a long time ago. Then there’s the fight. If you play a fish too long, wear it all the way down so it’s easy to land, you can exhaust it past the point where it comes back. So you bring it in faster than your pride wants to.

You use enough rod and enough pressure and you get it to hand while it still has something left in it. Then the hands. You wet them first. Always, before you touch it. A trout has a coating on it, a layer of slime, and dry hands strip that off, and the coating is part of how the fish stays healthy. Dry hands, a dry rag, a hot dry rock.

They all do damage you can’t see. So you wet your hands, and you keep the fish low, over the water, never up in the air. You keep it in the river as much as you possibly can. If you lift it out at all, it’s for a couple of seconds, the way you’d hold your own breath. Because that’s exactly what it’s doing. A fish out of the water is a fish holding its breath, and I try to keep that in my head the whole time I’m near one.

Get the hook out, keep it wet, and then you revive it, which is the part I described at the top of the episode. You hold it facing into the current so the water runs over its gills, and you wait, and you don’t rush it, and you let it tell you when it’s ready. That’s catch and release done right. It is not throwing a fish back. It’s a short list of small courtesies you pay to an animal you had no particular right to bother in the first place. And when you do that list, over and over, a few hundred times a year, it starts to change how you think about the whole exchange.

Because that’s what it is, underneath. I’m walking into the fish’s house, interrupting its morning, sticking a hook in its mouth for reasons that are entirely mine, and then, if I’ve done everything right, sending it home with as little cost to it as I can manage. The fish gets nothing out of this. Let’s be honest about that. I’m not going to pretend the trout and I have some arrangement, that it’s a worthy opponent and we both had fun. It would rather I weren’t there.

But the care is the whole difference between taking something and visiting it. And somewhere in the last few years I started to understand that the care was the actual practice. Not the catching. The putting back. Now, I told you I’d get back to the guy with the cooler. I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of subject that turns people insufferable.

I am not against keeping fish. Let me say that plainly, because I mean it. My dad kept fish. He taught me to fish when I was twelve, with a spinning rod and a nightcrawler and a lot of sitting on a dock, and when we caught something worth keeping, we killed it and cleaned it and ate it, and there was nothing wrong with that. There was something honest in it, actually. You caught your dinner, you looked at what dinner costs, and then you ate it.

A person who catches a couple of trout and takes them home and cooks them that night is being more honest about eating an animal than most of us who buy it shrink-wrapped and never think about it once. So I’m not here to judge the guy with the cooler. If he’s taking what he’ll actually eat, and taking it legally, and not stripping a river down to nothing, then he’s fine by me, and I mean that without an asterisk. My thing isn’t a rule for everybody. It’s a choice for me. And the choice comes down to something I’ve only recently been able to put into words.

I already take a lot. I take a paycheck. I take gas, and food, and space, and other people’s patience. That’s not a confession, that’s just being alive. Being alive is a long, continuous act of taking, and most of it is fine, and most of it is necessary. But fishing turned out to be the one place I’ve found where I get to be inside something completely and take nothing out of it at all.

I get the cold water and the early light. I get the read on the seam and the drift of the fly and the pull on the line when it finally comes. I get the whole thing, start to finish, the entire experience I came for. And then I give the one solid object back. The fish swims off, and the river is exactly as full as it was when I got there, and I still got everything I wanted. That turns out to be a rare kind of deal.

Most of what we enjoy, we consume. We eat it, or we buy it, or we use it up, and it’s a little smaller afterward for our having enjoyed it. Catch and release is the only hobby I’ve got where I can take my fill and leave the thing untouched. And once you’ve felt that a few hundred times, it’s hard not to start wondering where else in your life that might be possible. Where else you could show up, get everything you actually came for, and walk out without needing to carry a piece of it home. I think about that on trips now, more than I expected to.

Somebody will ask what I brought back from two weeks in the Cascades, and the honest answer is nothing. No fish, no rocks, no antlers, none of the small trophies people collect to prove a place happened to them. I brought back a clearer head and a handful of cold mornings I remember well. That used to feel like coming home empty-handed. Now it feels like the opposite. The lighter I leave a place, the more of it I seem to keep in the part that actually counts.

I don’t have a clean answer for how that works. But I notice I’ve gotten better at it off the river, too. I can go to a place and not need a photo of it. I can have a good morning and not need to turn it into a story for anybody. I can appreciate something without the reflex to grab it, keep it, prove I was there. That’s a muscle, same as reading water is a muscle, and I built it standing in rivers letting fish go.

There’s a version of fishing content, I’ve mentioned this before, that’s built entirely around the opposite instinct. The hero shot. The fish held out at arm’s length toward the lens, so it looks as big as it can possibly look, the guy grinning like he beat it. And I’ve said my piece on that. The fish didn’t lose a contest. But I’ll add one thing here that I didn’t say the last time.

The hero shot is the fish being taken even when it’s technically being released. The guy lets it go, sure, eventually, but not before he’s held it out of the water too long, in the sun, getting the angle, extracting the one thing he actually came for, which was the picture. He released the fish and kept the trophy. And I’d rather do it the other way. Keep nothing. Take the picture, if I take one at all, of the water, or the light, or my own boots in the current.

And let the fish be the part I don’t get to keep. Because the not-keeping is the whole thing. The not-keeping is what makes it different from every other way I move through the world. I think that’s why I’ve held onto this practice so stubbornly, even the parts that cost me fish. The barbless hook, the quick fight, the wet hands, the long patient revival when my fingers have gone numb. None of that makes me catch more.

Some of it makes me catch less. But all of it is me practicing a way of being somewhere that doesn’t require me to walk off with a piece of the place in my pocket. And I’ve come to think that’s about the most valuable thing the river has taught me. Not how to read it. How to leave it alone. That’s a strange sentence to say out loud.

The most useful thing a lifetime of fishing gave me is knowing how to want something and not need to keep it. But there it is. So when people ask why I don’t keep fish, and I give them the short answer, that I fish to fish, this is the long version I usually don’t have time for. I’m not trying to take anything from the river. I just want to spend time in it. The fish is proof I was paying attention.

Next time I want to talk about fire. Specifically, the campfire, which I’ve come to think is one of the oldest and best pieces of technology we’ve got, and one we’ve mostly walked away from without noticing. I’ll get into what a fire actually asks of you, and why it’s the only thing I know of that makes people put their phones down without anybody telling them to. I’m Henry Wilder. This has been Miles of Quiet. Whatever you’re holding onto this week, consider whether you actually want it, or just don’t want to let go of it.

Those aren’t the same thing.