Observations of the Bass, and Directions How to Fish for Him

I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully.

—George W. Bush (29 September 2000)

In 1830 appeared Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s memorable novel Paul Clifford, which is memorable specifically because it opens with the statement “It was a dark and stormy night,” a choice of phrasing that has given rise to Snoopy’s authorial endeavors in various Peanuts comic strips, to an annual writing prize dating back to 1983, and to a probably not-all-that-popular board game. The largemouth bass angler’s version of Bulwer-Lytton’s sentence should run something like this: “It was a gray and rainy morning.”

So it was that kind of morning all right, following five days of pleasant, sunny weather on Mason Lake in the lower Olympic Peninsula of Washington—days that brought to my line the usual myriad of yellow perch, a few of which were destined to feed one of the three eagles that cruised the lake this summer, two bald and a golden. Every morning and evening these now unendangered birds would serenade me with their oddly high-pitched squeaks. Somehow you expect more from an eagle, something brasher, perhaps, like the squawk of a great blue heron. But no, these noble symbols of the United States and Mexico respectively utter a cry that reminds me somewhat of my mother upon encountering the mouse that always seemed to await us at “The Camp” in eastern Ohio when our family would make that first visit of the summer. The Camp was not really a camp with tents and so on, but a simple white frame cottage my father had helped his father build back in the 1920s. Even at the age of five or six I was impressed to see how quickly, with one graceful motion, my mother could leap to a chair and thence to the tabletop as my father sought out the broom.

Angling for the ubiquitous yellow perch or the occasional small crappie seems hardly the stuff of serious fishing legends, but I’ve always been inclined toward the paths of least resistance. A few years ago I landed some 63 fish in a single day of applied angling at Mason Lake, and while I do not recall the exact numbers, they went something like this: fifty or so perch (three or four keepers), five or six crappie (perhaps two keepers), four or five pikeminnows (aka “squawfish”—nonkeepers by definition), two or three small bass, and one small rainbow trout, who must have been lost or confused. I prepared the keepers for dinner, drawing blood a couple of times on their spiny rays, as is my wont, and released the rest of them, consigning the predatory pikeminnows, one of which weighed a couple of pounds, to the mercy of the piscine gods or devils who created them. No eagles were working the lake then, but a pair of ospreys doubtless appreciated my offerings.

Although the little perch can be bait thieves—more so than the equally ubiquitous bream of freshwater Florida and almost in a league with the diabolical sailor’s choice of saltwater Florida, where I grew up (to the extent that I did grow up), or the bluegill of everywhere—I find that once I’ve got the knack, they’re pretty easy. It becomes something of a game to see how many perch I can land on a single half-piece of worm. My record is at least four. Often these guys are good for about five seconds of fight, five seconds of self-delusional excitement, before you realize it’s just another yellow perch. You sigh. You hope they haven’t swallowed the hook in their avid hunger, but all too often they have done just that. More food for the birds, whatever the birds may be.

This wonderful place is the home of my brother-in-law Bob, now doing his third tour in Iraq as an army doctor, and my sister-in-law Candy, now playing hostess, as she seems to love to do, to my wife and me, and to...