Fishing, particularly freshwater fishing, means snagging. You cast too close to the log sticking out into the water under which you just know fish are lurking and your line gets wrapped around the log. Or you cast into overhead branches, or get hooked on an underwater obstruction. You pull, try a couple of different angles, and pull again, but sometimes (oftentimes) the snag just won’t get unsnagged and you need to cut your line. Look carefully and you’ll see you aren’t the only one. Hanging from trees, or tracing lines below water, you’ll spot cut lines from other anglers and at the end of the fishing season at my favorite pond the shoreline is just littered with the stuff. Left behind lines and lures are not only ugly but dangerous. Old ladies swim the circumference of my pond for their morning exercise and kids who splash in the shallows, and my pond is home to birds, turtles and, of course, fish — all of whom can get tangled in the line and cut by the hooks. So every once in a while, wearing swim trunks in the Summer and waterproof bib waders in Spring and Fall, I wade out to the weed beds and jutting logs and clean up the mess. Sometimes I find still serviceable lures that I clean up and add to my collection (a Booyah pad crasher frog bait I found has become one of my favorites), but most of the time it’s just yards of line and rusted hooks. Although like to think of my favorite fishing spots as mine, I also recognize that they’re not really “mine,” they’re something we all share.
Whose streets? Our streets! It’s a classic activist refrain, one that I’ve chanted thousands of times myself. It’s a statement of power and agency: taking over a street, or a square, or a public space with our bodies and our voices from the authorities who are trying to stop us. Yet, it’s not only “our” streets, nor are they “their” streets — they are shared streets. I remember once doing a training action with a group of West African activists in a working-class, market neighborhood in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The first thing the young activists did when we arrived was to visit all the shopkeepers in the surrounding area to let them know what we were doing: a street theatre protest), why we were doing it: to protest governmental corruption, and how long we would be doing it: 2hrs. They did not ask for their permission but, as they explained it to me: we are coming into their space, where they live and work, and since we are going to cause a disruption it was a simple matter of respect to let them know what was going on. (This consideration was not extended to the police or authorities, who would have shut down the action immediately.) Not everyone they talked to was happy, nor did everyone approve of the political message we were trying to convey, but they did appreciate the gesture and as the activists performed their action, I noticed several locals coming out from behind their market stalls to watch, smile, and nod their heads in agreement.