Running, fishing, and the benefit of the doubt

Sunday afternoon felt like mid-July so I was trying not to move too much, sitting quietly and reading. Then a nice thunderstorm came through and cooled things down and I decided to go for a run. When I was younger, I enjoyed running on trails in the mountains but that is a lot harder than it used to be so I headed down to my usual spot to run along the river where it is flat.

Several weeks ago while I was running there, I came across a fisherman wading in the river close to the near bank. He was trying to use his phone to take a photo of a fish he had in his net which is no easy feat while also trying to hold onto a fishing rod and not drop anything in the river. I immediately understood his situation. I am still pained that I do not have photographic evidence of my two best freshwater catches ever – a big brown trout from this same river a few years ago and a monster smallmouth that I caught last summer on the James. So I scurried down to the bank and offered to take a photo of him with the fish. After a couple of nice, quick pictures of a happy fisherman with a beautiful rainbow trout, he gently slipped the fish back in the water and it swam away quickly to continue enjoying the cool water and perhaps make another fisherman’s day.

It was just as it should be. A man communing with and respecting nature and leaving it intact for another day.

On my run on Sunday, I spotted four people on the far bank of the river. They had a large red cooler which meant they were either fishing with live bait and/or planning to keep what they caught, both of which are forbidden on that stretch of the river. I could not see them very well without my glasses but I was immediately annoyed.

But as I continued my run, I thought of other possible scenarios. Maybe they needed the food so that’s why they were going to keep some fish. Or maybe they didn’t know it was a special regulation area. Or maybe they weren’t even planning to keep any fish. Maybe they had some sandwiches and drinks in the cooler. And then I wondered if they knew part of the reason for not keeping and eating fish from the river was that it is contaminated with mercury. Maybe I should warn them instead of being angry at them.

I also have enough generational memory to understand why it seems silly to catch something and then just let it go instead of eating it, even if it is a turtle that was caught accidentally (but that is a whole other story). Catch and release fishing is something that people who have plenty of food do and not something that would make any sense to much of the world’s population. For that matter, going for a run on a Sunday evening to get some exercise also wouldn’t make sense to a lot of folks.

So I try to give people the benefit of the doubt and not immediately jump to ascribing malevolent intent to their actions. Maybe that makes me a sucker sometimes. But I would rather be a sucker than to accuse someone unfairly.