Humanity: A to Zern

When Ed Zern died in March, I felt relieved, not shocked - for he'd had a rough couple of years and at a certain time I suppose it's what passes for a blessing, to leave all at once, not inchmeal. Sandra, his long-time companion, told me that when they wheeled him out of the rest home and headed for the hospital, he asked the nurse where he was going; the nurse said, "On a fishing trip, Ed." He slipped into his last coma a short time later.

"Blessing" it may be, but I miss him. Mostly I regret I didn't know him well enough, that I hadn't met him sooner. I didn't see him face-to-face until he was in his seventies, and though we never got anywhere near moving water together, I realized at once that I had been fishing with Ed since I read those first marvelous books of his, To Hell with Fishing, How to Tell Fish from Fishermen, How to Catch Fishermen, and Are Fishermen People? I trolled a Johnson Silver Minnow down Fifth Avenue with him from one of those old double-decker buses; I learned the "difference between big-game fishing and collecting millstones" (millstones aren't slimy); I recognized the truth in "fishermen are born honest but they get over it"; and I knew he was right when he jostled the notion of proper imitation of a trout-stream insect by reminding us of that black, curved thing under the artificial's body. I dreamt with him about constructing, in this great dry city, the World's First Indoor Trout Stream - and modified that, without credit, when I wrote my first article for Fly Fisherman, twenty-five years ago, about stocking the fountains and their pools throughout New York.

He gave me the first alternative slant on Izaak Walton, whom I'd always admired - from a great distance, and predicated on the simple truth that I'd read only some scattered quotes, not all about Piscator, Venator, and the Milkmaids. Ed advises, in "The Truth about Izaak Walton," that the book "has nothing whatsoever to do with fish or fishing. It is, in every detail, a turbidly political allegory intended not for the amusement or instruction of anglers but simply for the advancement of the Caroline cause and the confusion of the forces of Cromwell." His brilliant review of Lady Chatterly's Lover taught me that this infamous book was in fact a "fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English gamekeeper" and contained "many passages on pheasant raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways of controlling vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper" - though unfortunately it was filled with "extraneous material" and would never replace J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping. Half a dozen readers of Field & Stream wrote in that they'd like to know where to buy the Miller book; Admiral Rickover, thinking it was serious, liked to quote it - until told otherwise; and it was reprinted in a half-dozen places, for one purpose or another.

Then, putting together an anthology (Fisherman's Bounty) some twenty-five years ago, I met another Zern. I'd wanted to use the delicious "Something Was Fishy About Stonehenge," but Ed said it had first appeared in Sports Illustrated and they wanted to see it in an anthology of their own. Why not use "A Day's Fishing, 1948"?, he asked me. I'd never heard of it. In fact, its only publication had been in a Theodore Gordon Flyfishers magazine a few years earlier. Ed said then, and repeated it to me a couple of decades later, that it was his favorite story.

I read it quickly when I opened his letter. It had none of the quick wit, the improbable imagination, the reversals, and the unexpected that I had grown to admire. I put it down and didn't circle back to it for a week. It was a quiet story about a quiet day's fishing, and its wit was of a different order: that of a wise and gentle human being who loved sport and had the greatest regard for privacy and that connectedness we call friendship.

Ed is fishing in the Adirondacks one summer, and the fishing in the "name" rivers is poor. "There are few things deader," he observes, "than a dead brown-trout stream." So, in that rambling, chancy way in which we sometimes discover the best water - and much else that is important in life - he asks questions, pursues a hint or two, and is led to the place, ninety miles away, of a man named Thompson, a "queer bird" in his seventies, a widower who fishes not at all. "If there's ever an unpopularity contest in this county," his informant tells him, "he'll win it hands down."

Ed meets Thompson and frankly owns up to his informant's description of what will take place. "He told me if you liked my looks, you'd let me go through the place to the river, and if you didn't, you wouldn't." Thompson looks him over with folded arms for a few moments and then curtly says he'll show him the way to the river. Would Thompson like a few trout to eat? Silence - then, a hundred paces later, "I guess I could use some. If they're cleaned."

The two paragraphs of actual fishing bring seven interesting rainbows and brookies and a lost larger fish. It is a day's fishing, what some of us still go to the river for. It is pleasant, rewarding, solitary, unsentimental, with a few happy surprises, and the river itself, with all its life, with no Latin and no tough chances - and it is memorable. It is sport stripped of its pretensions and aggrandizement; it is a simple thing, restorative, continuously interesting, an act caught in its own time; its pace is very different from the pace of the rest of the world.

And then he's back with Thompson, who, though reportedly "well-to-do," lives in a basic, even primitive fashion. Why does he use a dug well instead of a pump? "Had a pump once. It froze. This don't freeze." Thompson brings out a chocolate cake, says, "There's cake." Ed waits to see if he means to "pursue the subject," then asks directly if he might have a slice of it. Was it cooked by a neighbor? "I do my own cooking," says Thompson. Does he fish? "Don't fish a-tall. Don't see the sense on it." But aren't trout pretty good eating? "Not that good. Not good enough to go traipsing up and down a river all day getting bit by black flies."

He asks if Ed has ever milked a cow, and Ed allows that he has - though poorly. Thompson says he'd known; he could tell a man who'd milked a cow. "Never missed a one."

And then they part, with Ed first asking if he could come back some day and Thompson saying, "I guess so," but it would have to be alone; he didn't want "all creation tramping across them fields." Then, when Ed is turning his car out of the driveway onto the road, Thompson calls, walks over, and says: "You can bring someone, if you want." Ed thanks him and says he'll be back the first chance he gets but will only bring someone who has milked a cow. He means to go back - but never does.

Nor, too often, do we.

We move on. We live in a transitory world. And that day, cut away from the rest, is a special jewel, all too often missed, all too often trivialized. Keeping it, sharing it, conserving it are at the heart of the man, who once said, "When the fishing goes, I'm willing to go, too."

In Ed's wit there is the best corrective lens with which to view our foibles and, by implication, the clearest sense of what our values might be. He anguished over the right word, the exact timing, the just balance, and he became the sharpest wit angling will ever know. There was no self-aggrandizement, and there was never the stasis of mere description. He loved his gear and his many fly boxes - but he did not celebrate them. People - humanity - are at the center of everything he wrote. The fishing gave him great pleasure, but Thompson gave him a connection to an unusual, improbable, uninviting, very human new friend.

When I think of Ed, as I've done a lot this past month or so, I think of that connection to Thompson, of Ed's great love of sport. I think that Ed was the best part of an older generation, now fading, now giving way to new voices - some splendid, some merely loud. We forget him at our peril. I never will. I surely won't see his like again.

"Humanity: A to Zern" originally appeared in the September, 1994 issue of Fly Fisherman Magazine. Reprinted by permission of Nick Lyons. I wish I had met Ed Zern. I read his books, and was a devotee to his column in Field and Stream. I also remember him fondly as a skillful advocate of catch and release when there was little support. - Editor.

RWOL

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