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Fishing for an answer
Staff photos — Aaron Cerbone
Adirondack Daily Enterprise / Adirondack Vacation Guide • Winter/Spring 2021-22
Matthew Whitman stands in the snow as he fishes for smelt on Fish Creek Pond.
(Editor’s note: This story originally ran in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise in February 2019.) By AARON CERBONE Staff Writer TUPPER LAKE — “Why are we here?” It’s one of the essential mysteries of life, a question facing everyone from time to time. I asked myself this while sitting on an icy pond on a cold Sunday morning. The official answer was to fish for smelt. The reality was the wind driving snow into my cheeks, my line freezing to the tip of my pole again, and me not having a single fish to show for it. I felt a bit like a kid with nobody to dance with at prom. I had walked out on Fish Creek Pond with Matthew Whitman, an experienced fisherman on ice and on boats, to an area where he had pulled in dozens of smelt before. But this morning they were not hungry, or the weather kept them down, or they really didn’t want me to write an exciting article. I was there for a story, to give a preview of the sport before Tupper Lake’s Northern Challenge ice fishing derby. The annual event draws hundreds to Tupper Lake, and covering it last year, walking around and talking with the anglers on Simond Pond, made me want to ice fish. The Northern Challenge is an all-day affair, with each competitor setting up several “tip-ups” to tell them when a fish is on the line with a flag, and waiting in between. This day we were using rods, shorter than a regular fishing rod, with maggots as bait. Whitman had pulled up three smelt. I thought about how I had been sitting around a hole in the ice for over an hour, fruitlessly dangling that maggot in front of a school of uninterested fish. Introspection ... It would be easy to be reductionist and cynical, to write this trip off as a waste of time. It’s harder — but worth it — to find value in failure, to find meaning in a seemingly futile act, to make the best of a bad situation. Maybe these fish had something to teach me. Ice
fishing isn’t exciting, but it is relaxing. It’s easy. It’s slowly engaging. I used to live my life in terms of emotional peaks and valleys. I viewed it in terms of black and white, happy or sad. Obviously, this is not a healthy mindset to have. My mom remembers when I was young, I’d ask her, “What are we doing today?” — every single morning. (Being home-schooled, my schedule was loose enough to warrant this question.) When the answer was “nothing” or a sarcastically enthusiastic “school!” I would be disappointed and get moody, to the point that she eventually told me to stop asking the question altogether. I sought out fun, and when I didn’t find it, because of my binary worldview, I would become depressive, even angry. Being mad feels good when you’re bored. Later in college, when I was surrounded by people other than my family all day and was learning to be more of an individual, I came to the conclusion that it is better to be consistently content than fluctuating between happy and sad. Life is just our perception of the world, so why not perceive it well? Similarly, a fishing trip is what you make of it, so why not enjoy it?
... and conversation There’s nothing to do out there while you wait for your line to dip — except talk. So we talked, sharing stories of fishing escapades, work aspirations and good meals. Whitman has been out on the ice since as early as he can remember. Born on the West Coast, his family moved to Tupper Lake when he was very young, and he started fishing year-round with his dad. He still fishes with his father and has started bringing his daughters, Quinn and Sarah. Whitman works at the Sunmount day habilitation center, taking multiple overtime shifts a week, and is a member of the Tupper Lake Volunteer Fire Department, trained to enter burning buildings and fight fire from the inside. He is also married with children.
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