FISHING, EASTER AND TIMES GONE BY

When I was a boy, I had very mixed feelings about the Easter season.

On the plus side, there were chocolate rabbits, jelly beans, and Cadbury eggs.  I lived in Connecticut then, where Good Friday was a state holiday, so there was also the welcome prospect of a day off from school.

But I was never sure that those good things outweighed the downside.  I grew up in a Polish Catholic household, and in those days, that meant that the religious aspects of Eastertide were very, very much at the fore. 

Good Friday was a day of “fasting and abstinence.” No one in then house was allowed to eat a bit of food until the evening meal, and even then, meat wasn’t an option.  My mother also insisted that, as part of the ritual mourning, both TV and radio were strictly off limits.  So as soon as I was old enough to leave the yard on my own (which was very young in those far simpler days), I hoped that Good Friday brought good enough weather to let me escape the house and its seasonal dolor first thing in the morning, and spend the day outside.

Not surprisingly, I’d end up somewhere near water.  

Sometimes, I arranged to meet friends at the boatyard, where my father stored our 18-foot Lyman over the winter and we were allowed to fish off of the docks.  By Easter weekend, flounder would already be stirring in the river, along with the tomcod that had been active all winter beneath the ice that, in some years, had only melted away a few weeks before.

The flounder that I usually brought home from such sessions represented a significant upgrade to the planned meatless meal, which would have otherwise been built around canned Starkist tuna or the frozen and slightly freezer-burnt remains of fish caught the season before.

Other times, particularly when Easter came late and I was a bit older, we’d meet at the Mianus River dam, where river herring stacked up by the thousand as they tried to run upstream.  We weren’t the only folks with Good Friday off, so the parking lot at the dam was often filled with cars with out of town plates, while the banks of the river was lined with people doing their best to intercept the herring run.

It was the only time in my life when I flirted, in a very small way, with the commercial fishery.  There were no rules or licenses back then, at least with respect to what we all called “bony herring.”  But there were plenty of city folks who were willing to buy herring, and were just as happy to sit on the bank and take nips from their hip flasks rather than catch their own, if they could find anyone willing to sell.

On Good Friday, it was usually a seller’s market.  Later in the season, when the water was warm and the run was peaking, you could wade in with dip nets, catch loads of herring and sell them to the New Yorkers for maybe $5 per bushel.  But on Good Friday, the water was cold, and the run was still sparse and newly begun.  The fish tended to stay below the Route 1 bridge, a couple of hundred yards below the dam, and close to the bottom, where dip netters couldn’t get at them.

But we had learned how to catch those early-run fish.  We’d line up on the wall at the town parking garage (a place long since closed to such public access), casting out treble hooks with our spinning rods and allowing them to sink down to the bottom, where the herring swam slowly and were easy to snag.  After we’d each caught a dozen or so, we’d cross back over the road to the dam parking lot, where eager and often slightly inebriated buyers were willing to pay 25 cents apiece for our fish.  Then we’d go back across the road and do it again.

We can laugh at such trivial transactions today, but being a 10-year-old back in ’65, with six or eight bucks in your pocket that you earned by your very own hand, was to be sitting close to the top of the world.

And it certainly beat sitting around in a silent Good Friday house, listening to your stomach grumble and waiting for the day to slowly grind to its end.

The problem was that things didn’t get much better on Easter. 

It was supposed to be a “joyous” holiday—and yes, there were those chocolate (hopefully, solid chocolate) rabbits—but somehow the concept of “joy” got twisted around into dressing up in fancy clothes and hanging around with family for the rest of the day.  You weren’t even allowed to fish.

And wasn’t that what Sundays were for?

My father worked Monday through Friday, and on Saturday mornings, too.  So Sundays were his only days off, and when they came around, for much of the year, they started with the earliest Mass at our church.  On the way home from church, we’d stop at the tackle shop for bait; after that, we’d go home, change, grab our fishing gear and head out on the boat for the rest of the day.

But on Easter, you didn’t buy bait, you didn’t fish, and you didn’t even change out of your church clothes into something you might get dirty or torn.  That never seemed particularly joyous to me.

I’m not sure that my father was all-in on it either, but it was important to my mother, so he went along. 

Even so, I remember one Easter morning when we at least got to go outside, and headed to the town park at Greenwich Point to fly a kite.  We picked a spot on a secluded beach, near the Old Greenwich Boat Club’s small dock.  But while we had the beach to ourselves, and soon had the kite soaring in the wind off the Sound, we noticed that there was someone on the dock who was fishing on Easter morning.

He was catching nice flounder, too.  Every ten or fifteen minutes, he’d drop one in his pail.  It got to the point that my father started longingly saying, perhaps to himself, “That was a good one…he just got one more…”

My mother was not amused.

But all that happened fifty-plus years ago, and since then, the world has moved on.

Today, anyone who let their nine or ten year old sons out of their sight—much less out of their yards—and allowed them to sit, unsupervised, to fish off empty docks floating on a cold, early spring river would probably be reported to the child welfare folks.

And I can’t think of the fate that might befall any parents who let the same boys associate and strike deals with not-quite-sober strangers along the banks of a deep tidal stream.

You can try to convince me that kids are better off now, with their tight leashes and sports teams, and maybe you’re right.  In the end, it doesn’t make a real difference, because the fish that created my sort of childhood have largely disappeared.

The winter flounder we caught in the rivers are gone.  There were days when, as I boy, I caught a dozen or more soaking worms off a dock—no chumming, no thought, just casually fishing.  Last year, there were so few caught in the entire state of Connecticut that National Marine Fisheries Service surveyors could not find even a single angler who had taken one home.  

The tomcod are gone as well, not only from Connecticut, but from all the northeast.  The same NMFS surveyors haven’t recorded any recreational landings at all—anywhere—since 2010.

The herring in the Mianus River have fared a little better.  The run nearly collapsed years ago, but the state has since built a fish ladder alongside the dam, and river herring can once again reach their freshwater spawning grounds.  While the run is much smaller than it was fifty or sixty years ago, it appears to have stabilized at a sustainable level, and is not under immediate threat.

Even so, you can't fish for them any more.  The crowds, the dip netters, the entire spring circus, is gone.

So these days, there’s not much point fishing on Easter anymore, at least not in salt water, even if your family didn’t complain.  We have lost much in the past 50-plus years, and when I say that, looking back on my time as a boy, I’m not just talking about the fish.