Word: fish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From the very beginning, the appeal of the fin was irresistible. The very word angling derives from the ancient Greek onkos, or barbed hook. Circa 200 B.C., Cato the Elder (manifestly a non-angler) was astonished by tales of "a city where fish sold for more than an ox." (To the fisherman, the situation is unsurprising; acquiring the fish called for more ingenuity, greater effort and less tenderizer.) History's most prominent fisherman was, of course, St. Peter, who later turned to netting souls. In the years A.D., angling was seen as something more than the mere coaxing...
...Oliver Cromwell's time. Through Walton, millions of readers have learned to put as much lead "as will sink the bait to the bottom and keep it still in motion, and not more," and that "when the wind is south, it blows your bait into a fish's mouth." Through Walton's American disciple, Washington Irving, millions more have been apprised of the fact that "there is certainly something in angling ... that tends to produce a gentleness of spirit, and a pure serenity of mind...
That something persists today, and it remains one of angling's surest lures. Its name is failure. No matter how fine his equipment, no matter how limitless his patience, it is the angler who is cast most often as the poor fish. The odds, as always, still favor the quarry; yet to the true fisherman that very failure is a kind of triumph. His sport lacks the com pulsive pursuit of hunting, the dizzying zest of mountain climbing. But it grants something else: a philosophy - an acceptance and ultimately a grudging admiration for unyielding nature. It is that philosophy...
...very contemporary reso nance. For too long, fishermen have been journeying down to their favorite spots, only to find them defiled. Lake Erie crawls with sludge worms and vegetation that has choked the life out of all game fish. Ohio's Caya-hoga River is so oily that it occasionally catches fire; New Jersey's lower Hackensack River is a stream of odiferous waste...
...destructive activities of that all-purpose villain, man, are not wholly irreversible. A decade ago, Oregon's Willamette River was the most polluted waterway in the Pacific Northwest. Even scavenging fish could not survive its toxic atmosphere. After a concerted drive by environ mentalists, government officials and just plain anglers, the river has become so pure that the delicate trout and salmon can be found throughout its reaches...