For a fish to be literary, it must be immense, moss-backed, storied; for it to attain the level of the classics, it had better be a whale. But in fact, mostly that’s not what we catch. Especially when first learning the sport, we catch little ones, and we continue to catch them even when we gain more skill and know how to find and fish for big ones. In the retelling, the little ones are enlarged, or passed over as if mildly shameful. There’s just something not flattering about the contrast between overequipped us and a trophy that would fit with five others in a King Oscar of Norway Sardines can. You rarely read a story in which the author catches a fish of five inches—it’s as if a fisherman’s numbers don’t go much below twelve. A recent euphemism is “fish of about a pound.” When I hear of a slow day on the river where the angler is catching fish of about a pound, my mind corrects that estimate to “nine inches, tops.” I’ve told my personal big-fish stories so often to myself and others that now I may remember the stories better than the events they describe.
