Season of the Gar: Adventures in Pursuit of America's Most Misunderstood Fish

Preface

Preface To stereotype my gar-obsession: Back when I was a gar-virgin, I could hardly do anything other than research and write about gar, fish for gar, and dream about gar—so as to become gar-experienced. It was a long time coming, but it finally happened , and in the process, I lost my gar-innocence, which allowed my monomania (“Gar Fever”) to finally release its hold on me. The result is a book devoted to a subject in which the imagination has always been a major factor. For millennia, gar have inspired myths, legends, scenes of slaughter, extreme emotions, epic battles, and in the tradition of ye olde fish story, extravagant lies. Concerning the latter, I would like to make it clear that there is only one moment in the following pages that is not as truthful as it pretends to be. This happens at the end of the first chapter when my hairy Bulgarian accomplice and I take on a monster-gar in the swamps of Louisiana, where there are no Gaspergou Bayou Oil and Gas Fields. The reason that I mention this is because—in these days of James Frey and the dialogue regarding where to sincerely draw the line between fiction and nonfiction—it’s important for writers to honor the unofficial contract with their readers not to stray from their expectations. At the time that I wrote that piece, though, this wasn’t a concern of mine. But now, since one of the missions of this book is to comment on our tendency to indulge in misinformation , I indicate this in the interest of offering the most honest and credible text that I can on a topic tainted by false information. That said, the rest of this book can be trusted not to twist the facts beyond the generally acceptable degree of tinkering with minor details. Now that that’s cleared up, I would like to note that even though I learned a lot about gar in the metaphorical season I spent on this project (which started out in Louisiana, ran its course through Missouri and Texas, and ended up in Arkansas), there’s still a lot I don’t know, and there’s still a lot the experts don’t know. But that’s why gar have always been intriguing: They are true mystery fish, whose histories have been confused by sloppy scholarship, unchecked science, prejudicial journalism, and generations of fishermen who think they know the facts. Another message in this book is that gar aren’t as destructive to other fish as they’ve been made out to be, and that they serve a valuable function xi in providing ecological balance. Plus, contrary to popular belief, gar do not destroy gamefish populations or eat their own weight (or twice their own weight) in other fish per day. As studies have shown, gar cut down on populations of carp, shad, drum, buffalo, and other fish that can be destructive to nesting habitats, therefore leaving the smaller members of the minnow family for bass, pike, catfish, trout, crappie, et cetera. Though it sometimes might feel as if the purpose of this book is to glorify a demonized fish, it is not my intention to portray garfish as victims . Rather, this book seeks to “re-educate” (more on this term later) humans on the issues involving gar, in order to help protect and preserve a fascinating natural resource. This book is not a nature book, nor is it a fishing book, or even a study. If anything, it’s a creative nonfiction montage of different voices with varying tones, all grounded in the central theme of my relationship with gar—which I use to reflect our relationship with gar. Thus, the following pages contain essays, folklore, what I call “garticles,” comic relief, flashes of science, unavoidable bias, recipes, a portrait of a pet gar, a first-person narrative thread leading to the fulfillment of a lifelong dream, a look at changing management plans and garfishing/bowhunting laws, and a heavily footnoted regional history included for its timely information on propagating gator gar. In other words, these chapters are multi-faceted, just like gar are. And since there are white gar, black gar, gray gar, brown gar, gold gar, green gar, yellow gar, fat gar, skinny gar, old gar, young gar, stripy gar, spotty gar, one-eyed gar, gars with chinked scales, gars with bullet holes in their fins, gars with scarred-up lumps on their...