I’m not much of a joiner...

     Oh, I belong to a bunch of conservation organizations, but I’m shy, and the few parties my wife Lori is able to coerce me into attending find me at the periphery of the knots of people, silently sipping my beer and calculating when we can leave without offending the hosts.
     Perhaps my fear of social situations got its start when I was in high school and teachers uttered those horrible words: “Let’s break into small groups.” You remember small groups. They were usually dominated by the person who knew the least about the subject in question. In my case frequently that person was female, and pretty, so when my turn came I’d slink up onto the soapbox and wholeheartedly agree with whatever it was she said: “Y…y…yes, I agree with Jennifer. She’s absolutely right in saying that the Revolutionary War was the high-water mark of Richard Nixon’s career.”
     So it was ironic that I found myself, a few years back, teaching a small group of youths at the church we attended. The situation was even more ironic because when I was the age of the kids I was—I hesitate to use the word—“teaching,” I couldn’t get out of church fast enough. I’d have my dad’s Jimmy outside, loaded with my fishing gear or shotgun and decoys and waders, waiting for my chance to exit. During the general hubbub of announcements was a good bet, although you could exit largely unnoticed at other times as well, provided you stayed low enough to the ground.
     My stab at bettering the spiritual lives of the youth of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church was a brief and ignominious one. Some people are born teachers. My wife, for instance, is one, and not only because the skills of the three-year-olds she teaches dance to mirror those of her husband. I abandoned my post at St. Luke’s shortly after the conclusion of the Sex Education unit, which is not to say that I didn’t learn a lot. I won’t go into detail, because this is a family magazine, but suffice it to say that you would not believe how babies are made.
     I think about that class sometimes now, and I believe that my inability to connect with those kids had something to do with a lack of moral credibility on my part. For instance, my fishing journals are shot through and through with The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Anger, Greed and Sloth.
Lust
     Again, I won’t go into detail, but my wife does look pretty fetching in her fishing hat.
Gluttony and Greed
     In September of 1987, a bunch of friends and I waded out to my honeyhole along Lake Winnebago’s northwest shoreline. Usually, it was a good spot for walleyes and smallmouth bass, but on the evening in question the rock bar was inhabited by huge schools of white bass. We caught fish for hours on literally every cast, and by the time we stopped fishing I could barely drag my stringer onto shore. The others had similar bags, and we filleted and filleted and filleted long into the night. My friend Slime went back to Washburn with enough fillets to feed his hometown, a chunk of Superior, and all of Cornucopia three times. My friend Tom kept a pile of fish too. I can’t speak of his mother’s skill as a cook, but she was nothing if not inventive, and after the unveiling of White Bass Pie Tom called, presumably about the trip:
     “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”
Anger
     I’m a pretty easygoing guy, so there isn’t much in my journals to document this particular sin. But like you I’ve fumed over jet skis and spot-hoppers who anchor an oar’s length away, and among my pet peeves are charter boat captains who have all of Lake Michigan to fish but insist on running planer boards right up against the breakwall.
Envy
     Nobody likes being outfished. Oh, it’s alright if your buddy catches four walleyes, say, and you catch three, but continually being bested—on your home waters, no less—results in a serious case of envy. Here’s my journal entry for April 17, 1984, during a period when I was a regular below the spillway of the Menasha Dam on the Fox River:
     “Caught one 12-inch walleye on a jig and minnow. One gate open. Saw one northern caught and a few suckers snagged. Not the greatest action, but that one kid got three again. Can’t figure out what he’s doing that I’m not.”
     Well, for starters, catching fish.
Pride
     My journal entry for Labor Day weekend of 2007 reveals that I caught two chinook salmon and a brown trout off of the Algoma breakwater, and that my wife lost a king when I was unable to net it due to the high surf pounding the south pier. What it does not reveal is that the people we met there—my friend Mark, his friend Steve, Steve’s brother, Kurt, and their dad—got skunked. After Lori and I returned home, Mark called.
     “Kurty,” he asked. “Why do you always outfish us?”
     My chest puffed out, and I delivered some advice in what I hope wasn’t too patronizing a tone.
     You know how this is going to end up. As the saying goes, Pride Goeth Before a Fall. I met Mark at the Algoma breakwater two weeks later. We fished all night, with a break only to grill lake trout fillets, and caught nothing. We fished all morning, too, still catching nothing, until Mark, tired of studying under the tutelage of a master who had caught exactly zero fish, left for greener pastures—a buddy’s boat in Port Washington. I stayed on the breakwater until 10 p.m. with only one legitimate hit to show for my efforts. After a burger and a couple of beers at a local tavern, I reached Mark on his cell phone in the Port Washington harbor, where he was helping to fillet the seven chinooks they had caught that day.
     I slunk out of Algoma the next morning without even bothering to fish, although to look on the bright side I did make it home in time to see the Packers defeat the New York Giants.
Sloth
     Well, at long last there’s something I can’t be accused of. Oh, I might let the grass get a little too long between cuttings, and as my wife constantly notes, I never, ever put the cap back on the toothpaste tube. But when it comes to hunting and fishing, I plead not guilty to laziness. They say that the devil finds work for idle hands to do. My hands, when they’re not working, are usually operating the bail of a spinning reel or the trigger of a shotgun. Perhaps there’s hope for me yet, and one day I’ll meet you at the Pearly Gates.
     Just steer clear if I’m teaching a class.