Monte Burke’s “Lords of the Fly”: The Gift and Curse of Obsession
The lede to Monte Burke’s “Lords of the Fly” is that tarpon are a fish that have befuddled everyone from Hall of Fame ballpayers to gangsters to business titans to dilletantes since the time of Michelangelo, if not earlier.
The more significant message, however, is that the fish don’t give a fuck who you are. If they had middle fingers to give, they’d shoot two of them in all of their suitors’ directions. In a corollary to Thoreau’s famous line that “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after,” Burke tells of one life after another that becomes so wholly consumed by these large-scaled prehistoric mysteries that they forget what drew them to tarpon in the first place.
Burke, who has previously written books about the quest to catch the world record bass, the life of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, and the efforts of TD Ameritrade CEO Joe Moglia to move into the world of college football coaching, has focused heavily on fishing and other sports, in those books as well as in his writing for publications like Forbes. His specialty, though, is obsessiveness. He loves to take apart the internal gears of a mind that is hyper-intensely focused on doing one thing better than anyone else in the world can do it.
Any ardent angler – whether you chase crappie or largemouths or Atlantic Salmon or arapaima or billfish – will be able to relate to the characters in “Lords of the Fly.” All of us, if given the chance, would spend the entirety of our version of tarpon’s high season on the best flats in the world, doing the dark-to-dark squint and grimace until it hurts, and then doing it again. Few of us choose that life. We blame it on families or work or financial limitations, but the reality is that while we aspire to be that obsessive, few of us really are. We make excuses for our inability to be more selfish, which in polite society is generally seen as a good thing.
As I pledged earlier in this blog, of the many books I read each year this is the rare entry that makes its way to my brain in a hard copy rather than electronically (Full disclosure: There have been two others in 2021, but in both of those cases it was because they weren’t available on my Kindle. This one was by choice, man, conscious choice).
Did Burke’s book live up to its advance billing? The short answer is “Yes.” I read it in just a couple of sittings, and despite the fact that I got it while the local bass scene was at its yearly peak and read it on the way home from a life-changing trip to Panama for tuna, it put me in the state of mind that I want to catch my first tarpon – any tarpon, not necessarily a record-beater.
One of the main problems for anglers who specialize in one type of fishing is that people who don’t fish often expect us to know everything about every species and this puts you in a position where you’re likely to look foolish. If you’re an expert on Tenkara for native mountain trout, you can’t be expected to understand rigging techniques for big marlin off Madeira. If you’re a smallmouth expert on the Great Lakes, then chasing permit with a fly in the Bahamas might not be in your wheelhouse. I know that for me it has led to some embarrassment at times when people expected me to be better at something than I actually was. It’s like asking a great jazz drummer to sing opera, or asking a bluegrass fiddler to play with the philharmonic. The concepts are the same, and they probably have a leg up on an absolute newcomer, but much of the vernacular is markedly different. But what those musicians have in common is that they feel in their bones a need to communicate through their instrument, and that extends to anglers as well. If you fish passionately, for any species, with any method, you should read Burke’s book, because some of the characters will not only resonate with you, but help you put your own obsession into perspective.
In fact, the narrower your obsession may be – whether it’s swimbaiting for giant largemouths, chasing peacock bass in remote locations, fly fishing for sailfish, or even something (gasp) not fishing-related at all – the more you’re likely to rip through this book and potentially use it as a therapeutic crutch to understanding yourself.
“[T]he world is full of these tiny, niche obsessions,, and there can be some enlightenment gained from them, some focus and refined ability to perceive,” Burke writes. “In fact, these tiny obsessions, all taken together, are arguably what makes the world go round. Chasing world-record tarpon, in a sense, is not too different from trying to summit Mount Everest, or attempting a long-distance swim, or collecting rare books, or trying to win the World Series of Poker. People become obsessed because of a desire to subject themselves to tests of character, to seek answers about who they are. Obsessions are, essentially, stories that we – the most and least successful among us – invent about ourselves to get through the day, the week, the decades. The stories are about our lives and the meaning that we, and others, bestow upon them.”
Of course, there are universalities across different types of fishing. Burke writes about Florida Panhandle guide David Mangum developing an extra-tall casting platform to better see the tarpon, which reminded me of Bass Fishing Hall of Famer Roland Martin (who has caught plenty of tarpon) doing essentially the same thing in the early days of high-performance bass boats. There’s also an appearance from Teddy Roosevelt, who “once missed a presidential press conference because he was in the midst of a one-and-a-half-hour battle with a tarpon.” Even after reading “The River of Doubt,” I still don’t understand how Roosevelt managed to chase every fish and animal that he captured across multiple continents, given the technological limitations of the day. All I know is that if he were still alive in 2021 you can bank on the fact that he would’ve been chasing teeners at O.H. Ivie this spring.
So what is it that we are trying to find on the water? That’s really the self-reflective part here. I have no one in my immediate family who gives a rat’s ass about fishing, yet there’s some deep biological or psychological drive that makes it all I think about. Part of it may have to do with something in the brain that relates to addictive personalities. If that’s the case, it should come as no surprise that he early years of tarpon hunting in the Florida Keys, were “a revolving door of women, alcohol, marijuana, and mescaline.” While there are teetotalers in every angling clique, the ones we remember, from Hemingway on down, are the ones with big appetites for substances illicit and otherwise.
Is it a need for an artistic outlet that we cannot find in some other voice? Burke quotes writer Thomas McGuane as follows: “It was creative work. We were kind of inventing it as we went along. The shallow water fishery was really blank paper. That excitement you feel when a piece of writing is going well, that was very much the feeling when things came together on the flats, with the wind and the tides and the fish.” Indeed, anyone who’s had that “a-ha” moment on the water, when they figured out how to run the tide, or a novel rigging technique, or the location of an untapped population of fish, knows that the moment of the “click” is as good as the actual act of catching the fish. The fish is the proof of concept that you never really needed.
At the same time, there’s something to be said for a craft that cannot be perfected. Fishing, despite our beliefs otherwise, does not have a specific end game like a jigsaw puzzle, where when you place the last piece it’s over. You may think that it does. Winning the Bassmaster Classic, or catching a record fish, might be the goal, but nothing’s over at that point. There’s always someone else on your heels, ready to take away the title. Moreover, just because you did it once doesn’t mean you can do the same thing in perpetuity. Even the best anglers in the world get skunked. In fact, Wall Streeter Tom Evans, arguably the central character of the book, spends more time struggling to catch a handful of fish per season than he does in the glory years. He’s chasing something that he knows no longer exists, yet he can’t stop. Is that an obsession similar to drugs? Does it reflect a misplaced loyalty? I really don’t know, but from my own experience on the water, I know that sometimes the very fact that we can’t know it all is what keeps us coming back.
“What makes tarpon most interesting to humans, and particularly to anglers, is that they are denizens of the ocean’s great deep water – which remains 80 percent unexplored – that periodically comes into the shallows,” Burke writes. There is no textbook, no universal set of rules, that guide their behavior. Just when you think you have them figured out, that’s when the middle finger comes out. Perhaps that’s both what we love and what we hate about our obsessions: they’re both endlessly amusing, ridiculously frustrating and impossible to quit. “[G]etting whipped inspires a whole host of uncomfortable thoughts and emotions….There are times during the fight with a big tarpon when you wonder how much more you can take, when you wonder what it would mean for your psyche if you just gave up. The likelihood that you will feel shame and disappointment is usually enough to keep you going.” Any rational person would cut their losses and stop throwing good money after bad, stop wasting precious brain cells and emotions on a fish that they’re just going to throw back anyway. If you have the obsession, though, you just can’t do it.
In fact, the worst thing that might happen could be to actually achieve the purported goal. Jim Holland Jr. who caught the world record tarpon, was subjected to all sorts of abuse after the fact and “has never returned to the scene of his world-record fish and says he never will.” The only person in tarpon world who seems to have the happiness/obsession equation in balance is former Olympic skier Andy Mill, who “retired from tournaments in 2006, walking away at the very apex of his game….He’s now settled into fishing for fun.”
Most of us cannot settle into “fishing for fun.” We tell ourselves that’s what we’re after, but as Thoreau made clear, there’s far more to the game than the fish themselves. So we tell ourselves stories, and find comfort with like-minded individuals, whether they be raising orchids, breeding Siamese cats, or chasing some species of fish that we’ve yet to catch. The characters in Burke’s book are mostly people who have everything going for them, yet live with a certain emptiness that cannot be fixed. It made me feel less alone, as someone who lives in his own mind and his own narrow world, and it also made me anxious to risk the perils of catching a tarpon. Once you’ve lived an obsession, any obsession, you don’t fear taking on a new one.
