The Moon of Spawning Crappies

When it comes to spring fishing, I get all existentialist: Nothing seems as important as that fish are caught.  Now. This urgency is part self-concocted mania, part seasonal reality: the wonderful flurry of spring fishing will necessarily give way to the mosquito plagued doldrums of summer.  No, if one is to catch fish, one must catch them when they can be caught. 

To catch them when they can be caught, of course, involves some sleuthing.  Part eve's dropping--I overheard two men at church yesterday say that "everyone had fish" at Lake Benton on opening day, walleyes--and part insider connections--got a text from a friend that said jumbo perch were on the bite at Summit Lake--the best way to find out is to find the bite yourself, to know enough about nature's tea leaves to show up when the bite begins and then ride it until its done.

So, on the impulse of a glorious afternoon, I showed up on the dikes of Lake Shetek.  That first day, the fish could seemingly be caught only adjacent to one specific rock in the shoreline, and fortunately the fishermen that found the spot were from my hometown: once they had enough, they allowed me and my children to squeeze in next to them.  That first day we took home ten fish, crappies.

But that meant urgency. 

The next time they bit in a new place, on the other side of the road, and at a more rapid pace: 17.  The third time, it was farther up the road and in the middle of the afternoon: 20.  The next time, they bit back on the other side of the road, still further up: 17.  Then it scattered and diminished: 8.  And because I couldn't leave it alone: 1.  An almost perfect bell curve. 

The old adage, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime," is a nice philosophy, but it leaves out the ebb and flow of days, weeks, months, seasons.  The part that it misses might be phrased something like this:  "Teach a man to fish and that will mean he'll need to know about 'the bite,' about keeping his ears low to the ground to hear about 'the bite,' or, better yet, will anticipate 'the bite' by reading nature's tea leaves and then invest significant time in order to ride the crest of 'the bite' until it's finished.  Coupling this insistence with some cultural knowledge of food preservation to ensure the fishes that he catches during 'the bite' will last him through the fish-famine of high summer, and he'll eat, day-by-day, for a lifetime." 

Of course, I'm not convinced it's done.  This bite had everything to do with both the seasonal spawning habits of crappies: at first almost all the crappies were females stuffed with lobes of buttery gold eggs; recently, they've been almost all smaller males, but I've caught no fish that are "spawned out."  Despite the recent hiatus, some sort of bite should continue for the near future.

Now, of course, it's tempting to try to hit the crest of other bites.  We were lured to the perch bite last night and found it a false positive: the ratio of four-inch perch to jumbos was about 40:1.  Then there's always that king of fish, the walleye.  Plots are already forming in my subconscious as to when I might sneak away.

What's really bewitching in all of this, however, is the seasonality of it all, the sense of something larger going on than even a man-made calendar.  We're in "the moon of budding plants" for the Ojibwe, but for me we're in the "moon of spawning crappies."  This year, despite the false spring that threatened to false-start the spawning state wide, "the bite" has come relatively late, but it's just one more season in a memorable string:  the mid-fall walleyes at Benton; the spring perch at Hadley; the winter Perch at West Twin; the fall northern pike in the Rock River ; and the list goes on. 

But always the crappies in the spring.  It's the beginning of the year, the first fish you catch with the year's new license. 

At school, one of the first verses my children are taught is Genesis 8:22:  "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night wil never cease."  I'm perhaps naive about the degree of stocking that keeps fish populations stable in southwest Minnesota, but the DNR doesn't control the spawning impulse of crappies, the urge that pushes them to the rocks along the dikes of Lake Shetek, laid out by the WPA so many years ago.  I'm confident in the process, in the seasons, in the faithfulness of God. 

But I'm also confident in the sinfulness of man.  We've been eating a lot of fish lately, contra what "they" recommend--pan fish once a week, game fish once a month, lest you want to injest enough mercury to make your blood silver.  The balance of nature is a wonderful, delicate thing, larger than us and yet something we dare not disrupt.  While Genesis 8:22 let's us go forward with confidence, lets us build a calendar around seasonal change, it's not a license to the environmental recklessness that some Christians have made it. 

And so while I stand in awe at the crappie spawn and what it represents, I also must consider what the disruption of these processes would look like, what that would mean for human life, how realistic the possibility is.  Cormac McCarthy ends his post-apocalyptic novel The Road with a sobering vision of fish:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Reading this horror makes me reconsider fish yet again, breaks me off of the urgency of catching fish now to the larger meaning of spring crappie fishing: to read the larger "map" that lies before us in nature, a map infinitely more intricate and significant than we will ever fully know, and to teach even a part of that map to children.