I have written about “nostalgia for nostalgia” before. Nostalgia means homesickness, a longing for home. Nostalgia for nostalgia means longing for homesickness, wishing you had a home to long for in the first place.
I wrote a song titled “Always Already Blues” (for my 2014 album, Late to Love) that expresses something kin to this: “They say the economy is bad / and things ain’t going like they should. / They say the economy is bad / and things ain’t going like they should. / Don’t ask me, I wouldn’t know / I was broke when times was good.”
This doubled sense of homesickness just makes feeling bad twice as bad. It comes dangerously close to jealousy and can breed resentment. Lately, I have come to appreciate those dangers and see nostalgia for nostalgia in a better light: as a way to have many homes.
One of epic tales of nostalgia is the Odyssey. Like the Iliad before it and many stories after it, it is a nautical journey. Longing for home happens by traveling through the sea. In this metaphor, water is a fluid path and land is where one’s home resides.
The expression “home water” in fishing parlance refers to the water you consider your home-base. It is the water you know best, where you fish with a certain familiarity, confidence, and hard-earned knowledge. Often, it is the water you grew up on, but not always. Home water is also something you protect through conservation and even secrecy. There is an intimacy and vulnerability about home water.
In angling, water is not just a road for a pilgrimage back home; it is a home unto itself.
Both senses of home remain true. For most anglers, home water is not the same kind of home as the one we return to at the end of a day on the water. At the same time, there is also a sense of home on the water that can be every bit as mystical and total as our final home.
I know of at least one angler who asked for his ashes to be emptied at his home water which, for him, was his favourite fishing hole. He went to his final rest in home water, emptied into a river on a journey to the sea.
My thinking about nostalgia has developed. I suppose I still feel nostalgia for nostalgia sometimes, with all of its risks and promises. I think of my music and my academic work through this homesick lens most of the time—the blues and tragedy. Fishing is different. Home water is not just where fate places us. It also means a place where we’d like to stay.
In the inaugural post of this new fishing journal, I mentioned how the fisheries of the Lower Mainland, British Columbia, Canada are the most diverse and technical waters I’ve ever fished and how I hope to stay here. Typing those five words—“I hope to stay here”— hit me like a truck. I think I have felt that way before in new places that seemed nice or in a moment I wanted to never end, but I have never felt that feeling realistically before now.
I lived in over eight cities and towns before I turned twenty, not including college or working summers. I have now lived in Vancouver for almost nine years, the longest I’ve lived anywhere. Time can accumulate like a night shift or a prison sentence, but to also want to stay somewhere is so much more than a pile of time in a certain place. I never saw my own desire until I started my own journey to find some home water.
When I introduced myself to my new academic department in 2014, I said somewhat morbidly that I was not sure where I would be buried, but maybe it would be here. Nearly ten years later, my morbid thoughts wonder if this or that run or tail-out on the river would be a nice place to be put to my final rest.