Like these poets, anglers have their own brand of Romanticism, though they don't have to strive for such elaborate language to express their thwarted desire. Usually their words are rather monosyllabic:

"Gawd! yew should of seen it! It was huge! I had it right up to the boat when it broke off!" Yes, for anglers, true negative capability may be expressed as "the one that got away."

What is it about a fish leaping and lunging at a distance that makes it larger than life--or at least larger than when it's panting in your hand? Why are many anglers more likely to return to a stream where some phantom force set their drag to screaming then broke off under a log than they are to a stream where they actually caught a big fish? Perhaps it's like a painful type of love where one lover gives the other a brief glimpse of romantic possibility then splits, leaving the other to stew, brood and write morose poetry. Perhaps it resembles the straining of the imagination that sends crackpots scurrying to desert mountaintops to scan the skies for UFO's after they've seen a photograph of a hubcap someone tossed in the air. Whatever the impulse, so, too, will anglers be driven to odd and reckless behavior when they believe that they have lost a brown trout twice as big as God.

Sometimes it's probably just flat out better to lose that big one than to confront the ugly reality behind the illusion: the snagged boot, the six pound sucker, the side-hooked whitefish have all turned gasps of awe and wonder into plodding profanity when the line holds and the myth is shattered. Here, I picture a woman who has finally snagged the man of her dreams--only to discover that he is alarmingly flatulent. But I digress.

During these bright Montana summer months, I tend to drift into my own reminiscences about the deep surge and pull of a rod bent double then the sudden shock and sinking feeling which accompanies a line gone slack.

I would like to tell you that, using a Joe's Hopper, I hooked and lost the thirty pound brown trout that reportedly resides where the Gallatin runs into the Missouri near Three Forks--or had my Muddler broken off in the rapids of Yankee Jim Canyon on the Yellowstone by one of the atomic submarine trout which divers have seen there. But no, my story is long ago and far away from the sport and shine of Montana summers. It takes a Southern Gothic turn on a tawdry charter boat out of Port Isabel, Texas on the Gulf of Mexico.

The skipper stationed me between a nurse from Shreveport and a welder from Detroit then plunked a rod with an electric reel in each of our hands and baited us up with chunks of anchovy. "The red snapper are so far down," he said, "you don't want to crank 'em up by hand." Electric reels were such a novel concept to us that no one objected, and soon our little machines were abuzz, zipping fat snapper out of the depths so fast that they blew up like blimps and their eyes popped out from nitrogen narcosis--our industrial strength line working so well that I dredged up a twenty pounder as if it were a shrimp. No sir, in the face of this stunning technology, nothing was escaping. The nurse, I and the welder stood by equally humongous piles of flopping snapper, democratized by our efficient little mechanical buddies.

Suddenly, in the middle of this carnage, I set my hook for the umpteenth time and the thing on the bottom didn't budge. It just sat there for a few seconds, mulling over the sensation in its mouth. Then it started to move toward the bow of the boat at a leisurely pace. I excused myself and passed my rod over the welder as it started to whip and bend toward the brine. When I reached the bow, I noticed my reel was smoking and whistling like a little locomotive. "Loosen your f---ing drag!" screamed the skipper. "You'll ruin my reel." I looked down and was trying

to see the reel through the smoke when the skipper cut my line. My jaw went slack and I leaned against the cabin in disbelief. "It was probably a giant grouper," said the skipper, ignoring my stunned silence and poking at his reel as if it were a hurt pet.

That was twenty-seven years ago, and I still find myself mumbling "giant grouper" at the edge of sleep as if it were some kind of mantra to all that has been huge and inaccessible throughout my life.

Thus I have my own emblem of Romantic loss hovering like a dark shadow over the few successes I have managed to garner over the years.

As Edgar Allen Poe might have written under the circumstances:

And neither the angels in heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Could ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of my beautiful giant grouper.