Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.
– Jesus of Nazareth, recruiting anglers to be activists, Matthew 4:19
For everything there is a season. On Cape Cod, where I do much of my fishing, the legal season varies from fish to fish and whether you are fishing in freshwater or salt, but practically the fishing season lasts from early Spring to late Fall. My activism has seasons too, albeit on longer cycles. Every ten years or so I step back from day to day community building and troublemaking and take a breather. From my late teens to late twenties I was a campus activist, then ramped down to finish my dissertation and concentrate on my first teaching job. Over the next decade I worked as a community organizer in the Lower East Side, before putting activism on the back burner to raise a family and write a book about creative forms of activism. As our children got older, I took up activist politics again, this time as a trainer of artist-activists around the globe. After ten years as co-director of the Center for Artistic Activism, I decided it was time for another break. The Center was in good hands, the world of activism was doing just fine without a middle-aged white man like myself front and center, and the COVID crises had forced me, my family, and the rest of the world into a state of quarantine. So I took up fishing.
When I was young I loved to go fishing. My mother would drop me off at a local reservoir or brackish estuary, and for hours I would cast my lures out into the water, waiting for a strike from a slippery eel or toothy snapper blue, but mostly relaxing into the rhythm of casting and retrieving. As a teenager, punk rock, skateboarding and sex seemed far more attractive than being covered with fish scales, so I stopped fishing. As I got older, other things took the place of skateboards and guitars and teenage dalliances, but I didn’t return to fishing for nearly four decades. The pandemic seemed like a perfect time to pick up rod and reel again. I needed a break from the stress of living during an unmanaged pandemic, I wanted time and space away from people where I didn’t have to worry about wearing a mask and getting too close, and I needed an escape from the burdens of being an activist at a time of political apocalypse. So I went fishing. Every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Blissfully isolated on the tip of Cape Cod, I’d fish for smallmouth bass in the kettle ponds in the early mornings, then fish the ocean beaches for striped bass as the sun went down, and mid-day I’d cast off the harbor jetty as the “schoolies” made the run from the estuary to the bay as the tides turned.
After forty years, I had to re-teach myself how to fish, and so I approached the practice with what Zen masters call Beginner’s Mind. With no habits or tradition to fall back upon, every fish successfully caught or line hopelessly snarled, provided a clear lesson. With hours spent doing little more than casting and retrieving — actually catching fish being a fraction of the time spent fishing — I had a lot of time to think about these lessons I was learning. One of the things I thought a lot about was activism. Even on my political hiatus, I was still consulting on activist projects and as I gave advice on a global campaign for free vaccines, or an art project aimed at reintegrating formerly incarcerated people back into their communities, or using artistic activism as a way to fight corruption in the Western Balkans and West Africa, I found myself drawing from my fishing experiences.
Fishing, I discovered, has a lot to teach about the art of activism.