Celebrating Seneca

Something About Fishing

"The gods do not subtract from the allotted span of man’s life the hours spent fishing." — Assyrian proverb

Ted Theismeyer, professor of English, wonders about it. "I have no idea why I fish," he says. "Nobody else in my family does. When I was three, my father found me fishing in the driveway with a little string in a mud puddle."

Theismeyer first came to the Colleges in 1968 and the Lake Trout Derby was on. "I saw this huge cooler full of fish up to 15 pounds. My eyes got really big."

Lake trout. Rainbow trout. Brown trout. Pike and pickerel. Smallmouth bass. Yellow perch — exceptionally large yellow perch. Seneca Lake has them all and some others, too.

There is a transformative moment, according to Theismeyer, when fishing becomes more than "something nice after a hard day’s work," and a person "gets that gleam in their eyes." He regrets that relatively few students have that gleam and suspects something profoundly sad at work.

He guesses that "relatively few kids grow up fishing," because fisheries have declined and the opportunities are fewer and farther between. "When I was a kid, we’d go cast a worm and lay under a shady tree. I remember nothing quite so enjoyable then as messing around on the fringes of a pond."

Maybe that’s what it is about fishing. Almost anything can happen when you’re messing around on the fringes. — P.R.

The Seneca Lake series was researched and written by Dana Cooke and Peter Rolph '85 — writer/editors in the Office of College Relations. Portions of the series also appear in the Fall '97 issue of The Pulteney St. Survey. To request a copy, e-mail Susan Murad at murad@hws.edu.