Copyright Jamie Lawson 2007
I enjoy catching fish. I don't always succeed, but it is better than my day job and I enjoy the sport in trying. If ever there was a way to give the fish a sporting chance it is to have me be the one who's pursuing for it. Even if I do very well, there's typically someone not too far from me who does better. Most of the time I can attribute that difference in performance to "luck".
By "luck", I mean something quite apart from serendipity: those random events that just happen to coincide with purpose. Instead what I mean is the intangible, the subtle, the things that are really there, but defy explanation and yet time after time allow one angler to out perform another. If I want to tie better knots, I can study from a book on knots. If I want to rig more effective baits, I can study from a book on rigging, and so on. I can probably learn to be lucky as well, but not by reading a book about it. That is the philosophical part of fishing--knowing how to perceive what others can neither perceive nor express. Based on past experience, the first step in learning to be lucky is recognizing that there are things that can be known and acted upon, and yet do not fit into the confines of language. That would seem to make these chapters useless, which may indeed be the case. But my hope is that through language I can at least ask the right questions and acknowledge the shortcomings of my perceptions. Then perhaps I can find some other means to overcome them and become more lucky.
The people who have taught me the most about fishing--and therefore about luck--didn't tell me anything. When I was a kid I lived near a small suburban lake in my home town of San Diego. Lake Murray was known for its largemouth bass. Back in the late 1960's and early 1970's, kids were comparatively free to explore, and I rode my bike around the Lake Murray access road to study the fish and the fishermen pretty much every day during the bass season. There was an old guy--at least 30, that seemed old at the time--who regularly fished that lake. He had a beat up Garcia rod and an old rusty Mitchell 300 spinning reel and he never said a word. He always wore a dirty old Pendleton jacket and a hat looked like it might have been green at one time, before the mule gladly relinquished it, but at this point its color could best be described as ullggg, I don't think I ever heard his voice, or anything else from him for that matter, because he made silence his mission, and yet I considered him my friend. When I'd stop my bike near his spot, he'd point to a bush or shrub. I'd quietly go inspect and invariably find at least one big bass hanging from a branch.
The old man fished night crawlers. He'd pin the big worm onto the hook in just such a way that the barb was covered, and then he'd stare out at the place where the water met the tullie reeds. Then he'd pick a spot and cast right up to the tullies. He'd wait to flip the bail until the wriggly crawler sank to the bottom, then he'd click the bail shut but he wouldn't reel any line. Instead, he worked the line in by turning his right hand like a weathervane in a shifting wind. He would reach his index finger to the line, then slowly pull his index finger toward him while reaching out with his little finger and putting it around the line, then pulling it toward him while he rolled his index finger back out again, and so on. He used his hand like a weaver's shuttle, forming figure-8 coils around his two bookend digits. Then suddenly he'd stop. I would never see that first tug, but he'd drop the figure-8 coils and then wait patiently. Without fail, the line would slowly slip out through the guides and when all the slack was taken he'd take a big overhead swing. His rod would bend and there would be all kinds of commotion as he worked to keep the fish out of the reeds. The old Garcia rod would hold a deep parabolic arc for about a minute as he brought the fish to shore, and then he would walk over to his tree, hang another bass from a branch, and start the routine all over again.
I learned to fish in exactly the same way as that old man, or so it seemed. With a little practice, I could cast my night crawler right up against the tullies as well as anyone. I perfected that weathervane and shuttle retrieve. I even got a really bad hat, and I caught more and bigger bass than before. But the really big bass always ate the old guy's night crawler rather than mine. He was "luckier" than me every single day, no matter how outrageous my hat was!
It turns out that what we see with our eyes is not necessarily what our eyes see. There is ongoing research in the science of consciousness about the "blind spot"; an area of the retina without receptors. This is where the optic nerve passes into the eye like a bundle of wires connecting the eye to the brain. The eye can't see anything there, but the brain can. The brain fills in the blind spot by interpolating from information it has gathered about the surrounding region. But there is more to it than that. The brain is bombarded with perceptual stimulation, far more than could ever be processed let alone utilized. Aldous Huxley described a set of louvers that the mind uses to filter out things that are not useful. Without these louvers the brain would have to process mountains of pointless details and we would become paralyzed by the over-stimulation. It would be like an obsessive-compulsive nightmare, though it would be brief because as our brains were rendering the details on each and every hair on the bear's nose, the bear would snap our necks and serve us with a dessert course of pine nuts and loganberries. Instead, the brain of primordial man (or more likely that of primordial lizard) learned a simpler way to process the complex signal input that skipped the minutiae, correlated coarser features into a recognition of Bear!! and used all of the surplus neural bandwidth made available by this simplification for sending the "run for your life!" signal to the legs.
So the picture the brain paints for us on the canvas of our consciousness is a picture taken from the narrow lens of our survival experience. We see just as sharply and as clearly in our lucid dreams where the eyes are closed to all light. One way to think about this is that our lucid dreams enlarge the blind spot to include the whole eye. This view is supported by research on blindness which shows that when a sightless person becomes "fluent" in Braille, the neural receptors associated with vision are activated when Braille text is touched.
In our lucid dreams we see the things we know about, and we can also see things that might be conceived by direct extension of the things we know from our experiences, but we don't see things that our minds cannot conceive of. The same applies to our waking hours where the blind spot is smaller. The brain is under so much pressure from evolutionary forces to perform higher-level feature recognition that it will organize incomplete or inconsistent perception into something consistent with past experience, or at least with our existing belief system. Our eyes and ears inform our conscious picture, but our brains form it. In the process, most of the boring sensory detail is left out of the final picture, and it is profoundly difficult for us to perceive things that don't have much to do with what we already know and believe, and what evolution has programmed us to think is relevant to our survival. This gives new and very different meaning to the old expression "seeing is believing". If something is beyond our belief system, the brain will picture it as something else and we won't see it anyway. So in order to be "lucky", we need to learn to expand our belief system so that we see the things that are really important to understanding the world around us.
If that world contains a lot of water and some fish, then survival experience is likely to be different than for someone whose world contains mostly sand and desert. Captain Kalin Lucero, who has guided many of my voyages on the Baja peninsula, once explained to me that his father and grandfathers for at least five generations had entrusted their survival to knowing those waters and the fish therein. He was fairly sure that this history extended well beyond that, but they simply didn't have any stories that were passed down from those more distant times. His collective survival experiences are thus quite different from mine, and his perceptions of the world are also different. Kalin will sometimes stop the boat and ask: "donde la escuela" (show me the school). I look, I smell, I listen for subtle differences in the waves and sometimes I still cannot detect the yellowtail 40 feet below.
"Aqui," I point. "Over there?"
"No", Kalin offers. "Over here," and we cast our bait in that direction, and with these centuries of perceptual wisdom about the Sea of Cortez, Kalin is very, very lucky indeed. Remarkably, I'm getting better. More and more frequently, I point to the school though I cannot see it or smell it or hear it or touch it with my hands. Somehow I perceive it and I am getting luckier. But Kalin seems to always know where the school is and he will always be luckier than me.
In order to be lucky, the captains of the Baja peninsula have survival experiences which are closely coupled to the survival experiences of the fish. In order to understand the fish, they have learned to appreciate the environment from the fish's point of view. Imagine the perception of the world painted on the canvas of a catfish's consciousness. Its eyes are weak and useless in the silt, but its taste buds run from its mouth around the head, and down to the tail. It tastes its way through life, and this unique way of tasting has a lot to do with its survival. If I could taste with my big toe, I'd be less likely to eat liver or other disgusting things that might cause me immeasurable grief. If, in addition, I was blind, I would probably spend more time in cheese shops where just about everything tastes good, and less time in auto repair garages where just about everything tastes bad. Suffice it to say that the louvers in the catfish's brain filter out a very different subset of stimuli than my brain does and I must imagine that the projection of the world on the catfish's brain is radically different from the projection of the world on my brain. Due to this radical difference in belief systems, the things that are of great interest to the catfish are likely to pass through my brain totally unnoticed.
The largemouth bass I tried to catch as a kid would have a somewhat different perspective from the catfish's (bass being more sensitive to light and pressure than catfish, and less sensitive to taste). A bass could surely distinguish my night crawler from the night crawler presented by the old man who always caught all of the big fish. I know this because I witnessed that result far too many times. I can't describe that difference in presentation, but if we could talk to the bass, it could attribute the difference in our fishing performance to something besides luck because the bass's brain no doubt left in some critical details about the old man's style that my brain inadvertently filtered out, in spite of me carefully watching him many times, and trying to copy him right down to the nasty hat. I learned a lot from that old man, but the thing I never did learn was how to open my mind to what he was actually doing and how he perceived the world. That will forever be a mystery, and leads us to an important idea that motivates the essays in this collection:
"Luck" is knowing how to shape your mind so that your perception of the world captures the details needed to pursue your intended purpose.
