"Find a Hobby" - Long Story

ash · Post by **ash** » Tue Oct 11, 2005 7:48 am

Gone Fishin'

My wife told me I needed to get a hobby, so I did. I was touched by her concern -- until I realized she just wanted me out of her hair.
By Stephen Fried

"Find a Hobby"

During the early years of marriage, my primary leisure activity was being married. It was all so new and different. I was still astonished at always having a date.

My wife, Diane, was perfectly happy to have an attentive husband but eventually she started to wonder what was wrong with me -- especially when the weather would get warm, and regular guys were out doing regular guy things.

Of course, I took this to mean that I should find something new for us to do together: tennis, yoga classes, chess. We did play tennis once (at one of those love-nest hotels with the heart-shaped tubs and the his-and-her snorkels). We did try yoga, briefly (I was the only guy in the class, and the only student who had to sit down to bend at the waist). And we did play some chess, until I realized she was just toying with me to teach me how to be more Machiavellian in a particular work situation (since I later learned she could kick my *** in three moves whenever she wanted).

Eventually, she admitted that she actually didn't want to find a new activity for us to do together. Instead she wanted me to find a new activity for us to do -- not together.

"You know, what you really need is a hobby," she said, laughing at the sound of the word. It seemed like an artifact from our pre-VCR childhoods, when boys were encouraged to play with model trains so they wouldn't discover sex. "Something to get you out of the house. Go...fish!"

While I liked the idea of fishing, I did find it a little odd that it was her idea, not mine. After all, don't regular guys fish to get away from their wives? If your wife sends you off to go fishing, doesn't that somehow defeat the whole purpose?

At the time, though, I mostly thought that fishing sounded like fun. And I was really glad she hadn't tried to make me golf. There are, I think, basically two kinds of men: golfers and fishermen. Golf is clubby, social, competitive, classist. Fishing is more solitary and egalitarian -- although fly-fishing can be a tad golfy -- and is competitive only when my brothers and I do it. Golf is for strivers and fishing is for yearners, but each activity is profound and pointless in its own way. I grew up in a divided family. My Pop-pop was an avid golfer, while his brother -- my father's favorite uncle -- was an angler. This explains why one of Dad's favorite places to fish was the pond at the local country club.

Fishing and Fishing

I inherited the lunker gene and, as a kid, loved fishing with my father. But after I moved away from home, I stopped. Diane would see my old fishing stuff in our car trunk and wonder why I never touched it. The truth is that I wasn't sure where, or even how, to fish on my own, without my father. And I felt a little unmanly admitting that, even to myself.

So on that warm summer day when Diane told me to go fish, I was reduced to looking in the Yellow Pages for a bait shop. I drove to Bob's Bait & Tackle and bought a license, a rod and reel, and enough lures so I could lose the first 20. Then, sheepishly, I asked Bob where I should go fishing. He sent me to a place, reachable by a dirt road behind some railroad tracks, where the Schuylkill roars across a 30-foot waterfall. When I got there it was early evening, and the mayflies were hatching. They hovered in the air like tiny alien spacecraft, their pale-green wings fluttering against the rosy, sunset sky. As I sat tying my line on a rock just above the falls, fish were lunging out of the water at the mayflies, and all manner of birds were swooping in for them. It was fishing heaven.

I fished until it was so dark that I couldn't even see the bass I was reeling in (and taking hooks out using the "touch system" is not the smartest idea). And then I did something my dad never would have done -- even if the technology had been available: I called Diane on my cell phone.

She was incredulous. Why would I violate the blissful peace of my riverside solitude by making a telephone call? Because I wanted to let her know that I understood. I understood that she wasn't just trying to get me away from her, so she could write. She was trying to help me get away from myself -- which is much harder. Figuring out how to be alone was an important step forward in our being together.

Later on, after I had started fishing more regularly, we talked about the phenomenon of the fishing or golf "widow." (Actually, now that my mom really is widowed, I should be more sensitive to how casually the word widow is used -- but I can't think of a better one.) This fear of being "widowed" in your marriage, or being in competition with your spouse's avocation, is complex. I can only imagine what it's like when couples have the same hobby. I don't mean the situations where one spouse gets involved with something and the other decides to get involved as well, as a preventive measure (to make sure the husband isn't meeting any hot babes at the model train show). I mean couples who are, say, both good tennis players or golfers, so they play against each other -- those "till sudden death do us part" marriages. While I'm sure there are some joys attached to such situations, I'd imagine the worst part is that you have no one to come home to and exaggerate about how well or how badly you played.

There was a moment, when I first started fishing again, that I thought Diane might want to join me. We were in our favorite place in the world, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, where a good friend has a cabin in an old private hunting compound. When we're there, she reads while I fish. But instead of having to go miles away from home to fish -- or even days away, like the Canadian trip where I caught, and then released, the massive northern pike that appears in my all-time-favorite fishing picture -- I have only to walk about 100 yards from the cabin to find all the trout I could possibly catch. The property has three stocked lakes and private access to the Pecos River. After days of watching from the cabin window as I fished, she came out to join me. I gave her a lesson, and she quickly caught a fish. While she occasionally talks about trying it again, what I think she's really hooked on is the idea of seeing me fish, enjoying the intense pleasure of being alone with myself.

It is a powerful feeling to know someone wants you to have that kind of pleasure. It is, in fact, exactly the opposite of widowhood.