On that Saturday, I went fishing with my friend David on a pier off the western edge of Manhattan. Workers at spot locations along Hudson River Park provide free rods and reels, and they’ll even bait the hook. Although you can eat one fish every three months from Gotham’s waters and live, the park’s deal is catch-and-release. Everybody wins. They hooked us up with clams. We cast into the Hudson, waited, weaved a rambling chat.

David, born in London, is married to a woman from Manila. I was born in Kansas City and live with a woman from Paris. David and I met in Berkeley; now he’s on the Upper East Side, and I’m in Park Slope. Even if we had nothing to talk about, our time together feels like a gathering of nations.

He brought Buffalo wings for lunch. As we ate, I said that if I tossed a wing there was a 50-50 chance it would hit an exposed wooden pile, some thirty yards from the end of our pier. 

Taking a practical approach to averages, weight, distance, and breeze, as if he’d just read a study on thrown chicken, David put my chances at zero. He studied philosophy in college.

I decided against tossing the chicken wing. Didn't want to litter. 

The conversation dipped into politics. We talked about the war, the environment, the absurd amount of money spent on election campaigns.

“What a mess,” I said.

“Indeed,” he said.

No percentages there.

While our political views are roughly similar, David and I approach these issues in markedly different ways. I find myself increasingly distressed and vocal about the lies, innuendos, distortions, and cronyism emanating from Washington.

I’ve seen David lose his temper exactly once—in Berkeley, when the moving company was two hours late to his apartment. All he could do was yell into the phone. I don’t know if that made him feel any better, but I did.

Otherwise, though I admire David’s ability to intellectualize unfolding tragedies and might benefit from merging bits of his method with mine, I’m simply not wired that way. 

“What a mess.”

“Indeed.”

Still, here we are, slouching toward the general election, the American populace swaying in a hammock held by two old creaky trees that don’t much like one another but have their roots and limbs entangled, fighting for nutrients.  The soil feels dry.

I told David I already knew the November election results. John Kerry will either win or lose. Even with Nader monkey wrenching again, it feels like a 50-50 proposition. He pointed to the chicken wing and smiled.

In our election climate, the bait becomes the catch. American politics does the dance, its candidates and their wonks spinning propaganda to lure us into the notion that we need them; we really, really need them.

Maybe. Maybe not. We get the chicken-in-every-pot talk every four years, one side insisting we desperately need change, the other insisting we need to stay the course. The more things change, the more they feel like the American Revolution.

It’s as if the universe tosses two and a half big Buffalo wings at our American pier every 48 months, and that’s all the food we’ve got. Even though we’re vegetarians.

A man on the other side of our pier caught an eel. He didn’t touch it, just dragged it along the ground to the tent and let our baiters release it back into the murk. I decided that was the Bush administration, undesirably nabbed in shallow waters.

In the end, David and I caught nothing but the breeze off the Hudson. Put aside the fate-of-nations gravitas for a moment. The power of two friends chatting it up in the sunshine by the river is a truer determinant of the fate of humanity than all the American political rhetoric that undoubtedly will continue to be cast. 

Then the gravitas returned. We’re in a world of trouble. 

It’s time to go deep-sea fishing.

Author's Biography

Hal Klopper is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. His new literary goal is to be taken away from a dependence on the passive sentence. 

Mixed success has met him. Recently he completed a novel, Echo's Version.

E-mail Hal.

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