When you have been fishing for a while you start to look at the world as a person who fishes. When I go to the beach with my wife to relax in our beach chairs, read books, and be lulled by the waves, I can’t help myself from looking out past the waves for baitfish jumping. In the late afternoons on blisteringly hot days when my sons and I go to one of the kettle ponds to cool off by floating out to the middle of the pond on our inner tubes, I scan the shoreline from my new vantage point looking for promising spots to follow up on in future fishing trips. Back in the city, on my morning runs to the Hudson River, I always make sure to peer into the buckets of the old men fishing on the pier, making mental note of what they are catching and what they are using for bait. There’s an old adage: to a person with a hammer, the world is a nail. Well, to an angler, the world is a potential fish. Like many anglers I know, I’ve come to keep a rod in the back of the car even when I am not fishing …. just in case.
Down at the bottom of my road, where the road gives way to an estuary, there is a path that traces the boundaries of the salt marsh, twisting and turning, all the way to the bay beach about a half-mile or so away. A neighbor tells me that she has walked that path with her dog nearly every day for 50 years and that the path has existed for as long as anyone can remember. This summer, however, a tenants association for a cluster of houses at the end of the road put up a big sign saying “Private Property” and tried to restrict access to the path. If I wasn’t an activist I’d probably get angry, mutter private threats, or, as my 80-year-old neighbor has done, simply ignore the sign and continue on walking her dog along the path as she has always done. Instead, I spend the day researching Massachusetts shoreline access rights (which it turns out, are some of the worst in the country). That evening I invite a few activist friends over to our deck where we strategize a “name and shame” campaign we might wage with the help of a friendly reporter, and discuss the possibility of more direct action. Looking at the world through an activist’s eyes means that where others can rant or ignore, you always know something could be done, and you could be the one doing it. To an activist, the world is a place to act, and the decision to act or not act is yours; what the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called the anguish of responsibility. A few nights ago, mysteriously, the sign disappeared.