Time Essay: The Sport of Fishing: The Lure of Failure

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That something persists today, and it remains one of angling's surest lures. Its name is failure. No matter how fine his equipment, no matter how limitless his patience, it is the angler who is cast most often as the poor fish. The odds, as always, still favor the quarry; yet to the true fisherman that very failure is a kind of triumph. His sport lacks the com pulsive pursuit of hunting, the dizzying zest of mountain climbing. But it grants something else: a philosophy — an acceptance and ultimately a grudging admiration for unyielding nature. It is that philosophy that lured such beleaguered politicians as Franklin Roosevelt, Hoover, Eisenhower and Kennedy. It is that philosophy that prompted Henry David Thoreau to describe time itself as "the stream I go a-fishing in."

And it is that philosophy that underlies great American nov els as diverse as Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn — and The Old Man and the Sea, in which an angler's prize catch is finally reclaimed by nature.

The Old Man and the Sea has a very contemporary reso nance. For too long, fishermen have been journeying down to their favorite spots, only to find them defiled. Lake Erie crawls with sludge worms and vegetation that has choked the life out of all game fish. Ohio's Caya-hoga River is so oily that it occasionally catches fire; New Jersey's lower Hackensack River is a stream of odiferous waste.

But throughout the U.S., other watering places have begun to regenerate, reversing the pro cesses of civilization. In the Hudson River, Virginia spot have begun to spawn again; trout are slowly returning to the Willimantic River in Connecticut.

The destructive activities of that all-purpose villain, man, are not wholly irreversible. A decade ago, Oregon's Willamette River was the most polluted waterway in the Pacific Northwest. Even scavenging fish could not survive its toxic atmosphere. After a concerted drive by environ mentalists, government officials and just plain anglers, the river has become so pure that the delicate trout and salmon can be found throughout its reaches.

In many parts of the U.S., in fact, nature has begun to reclaim its property — with a necessary assist from concerned people and governments, and at an enormous price. The reclamation is often underwritten by America's 26,022,547 licensed anglers; every penny of the $107 million they pay in license fees is used to support conservation programs.

Yet, even if the streams revive, even if trout, muskellunge and bass thrive tomorrow as they did in Walton's day, a fisherman's luck will remain random and capricious. For most anglers, that will be all right. In the end, they do not gear up for the sole purpose of bringing back a haul of wall eyed pike or edible perch. They also go out in the spirit of that great adventure novelist John Buchan (The Thirty-Nine Steps), who once peered beneath the surface of the water and caught the essence of the sport: "The charm of fishing is that it is the pursuit of what is elusive but attainable, a perpetual se ries of occasions for hope." Hope: in 1974 that remains the best bait of the angler, and of the nonparticipant as well. In the end, they are all in the same boat.