Cleromancy Divination
We should have made scrimshaw and firmly rooted our energy in the surf
Surf anglers shouldered their long rods and walked the boardwalk in Asbury Park and Sea Bright, they walked the beach in Manasquan and Sandy Hook, they scanned the surf for fish, for other anglers fishing; all anybody could talk about this past November was the “collapse” of the Atlantic striper fishery. It was, anecdotally, the worst season in northern New Jersey in recent memory.
It’s always tough to predict when big fish will consistently move through the surf and the bays of northern New Jersey but it usually happens many times in the fall - the trick is being in the right place at the right time. Coming from seven hours away to visit my friend Mike who lives minutes from the ocean means picking the right time months in advance and that involves a lot of luck. We’ve hit it right a few times, but most of the time I catch the shoulder of a run or maybe strike out altogether only to have Mike send me pictures of him hoisting big fish the following weekend.
To hedge against bad luck we now employ a divination ritual to choose a date. Mike casts his dearest wild trinkets upon the ground and reads them like an ancient pagan zhrets - fossilized shark’s teeth, black bear claws, interesting rocks tumbled smooth in the surf. They are cast from a turtle’s shell or from the amplifying chambers of a conch, he nudges and prods the objects with an antler he found on the beach - he employs cleromancy to divine guidance from the will of Dazhbog, the Slavic sun god to whom Mike’s Ukrainian ancestors owed their fertility, their happiness, their bountiful harvests. We swim in the frigid waters of Raritan Bay during Prosinets to honor the sun’s power returning to the world, its banishing of the darkness. We pour mead into the fire during the spring to encourage Dazhbog to melt the final snows.
I brought Mike a small bundle of porcupine quills I pulled from my unfortunate dog Fred last summer to add to the casting. We greatly regret not scavenging bones and teeth from a dead dolphin we found on the beach ten years ago on Sandy Hook. We should have made scrimshaw and firmly rooted our energy in the surf.
Three of Mike’s four grandparents immigrated to the US from Ukraine just before WWI. His father’s dad changed their name from Pelensky to Pell at his wife’s urging in the early 1940s to “sound more American.” They came from the Galicia region of western Ukraine, near the city of Lviv and the Carpathian Mountains to the west, an area tied to the cultural, economic, and religious development of Kyivan Rus’ after Volodymyr the Great annexed it from Poland in 992 CE. He had made the decision to convert to Christianity in 988 to forge a military and political alliance with the Byzantine emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer. Like the spread of any religion anywhere in the world, the Kyivan Rus’ encounter with Christianity led to syncretism rather than wholesale conversion. Pagan traditions still persist in modern Ukraine.
Striper fishing in northern New Jersey involves a lot of driving around and looking for fish. We looked at every beach from Manasquan to the Rip, we kept ourselves busy through the consumption of espresso drinks, beer, hamburgers, and fried fish at various coffee shops and bars and restaurants. We tried to go clamming but the tides were wrong and we couldn’t wade out to Mike’s spot. We carried clam rakes and buckets right to the water’s edge but thankfully called it off before flooding our waders.
We eventually made our way that night deep inland on the bay and walked out to a spot where dozens of other anglers were already set up on the concrete break wall and amongst the giant rip rap, mostly fishing bait, mostly speaking Spanish quietly, not acknowledging us. On Mike’s first cast he hooked and landed a decent fish. The first one of the trip. We fished for another twenty minutes but no one caught anything.
As we emerged from the darkness and onto the edge of the lighted gravel parking lot there was a NJ Fish and Wildlife officer driving slowly towards us in a marked vehicle. He rolled down the window as he approached and my instinct was to put my head down and walk faster as if I didn’t see him, but Mike went right up to the truck and the officer asked, “A lot of them out there tonight?”
Mike answered, “Yeah, a lot. But no one’s catching anything.” Poaching is a big issue here, apparently, and the officer assumed we weren’t poachers for a few different reasons.
We talk a lot of nonsense when we fish together but we also talk about a lot of serious things and the ICE enforcement surge was top of the list. Mike is not a fascist bootlicker and I’m not an anarcho socialist crustpunk but we are far enough apart on the political spectrum to disagree sometimes. We are far enough apart on the political spectrum to have different instinctual reactions to the presence of law enforcement. Though our positions have more in common than not. We both appreciate the enormous complexity of the issue and agree that the majority of American opinions on “the problem”, on both sides, are too simplistic. We both tend to wield this as a kind of intellectual high ground and it’s a shared keen awareness of and disgust for this moment’s bizarre political discourse that is unifying.
One central tenet of Mike’s thinking has stuck with me over the years - nothing changes. There is nothing new under the sun. I remember him making this case to me for the first time in maybe 2005 in a diner in Columbia Missouri when he was in grad school at Mizzou and I was in grad school at Indiana University. I’m more enchanted by scientific, technological, and philosophical developments than he is, probably more enchanted generally than he is, and while I resisted his position at the time, and I still think that it can be used to support multiple conflicting conclusions, my thinking has evolved significantly since then. Something I keep returning to is this: everyone at every point in history had more or less the same interior life as we do now, the same emotions, the same motivations, and they were living at the bleeding edge of human culture at the time - their foodways, clothing, music, art, technology, science, philosophy, politics - they were all the latest and greatest and the past seemed dark and backwards to them, just as our present will look dusty and wrong to future generations. Of course there is “progress,” but it’s somehow a superficial phenomenon, a matter of degree not of kind, and this distinction is important in a way I can’t articulate here.
We pushed deeper up the bay to a dead end dirt road near some sort of municipal construction project, I think, it was hard to tell in the dark, and Mike would be pissed if I included any more details about this spot. NJ Transit trains passed nearby in a rumbling whoosh every few minutes, commuters sat dumbly in dingy yellow light behind dirty windows.
We waded waist deep in the calm water and lobbed SP Minnows into the dark distance. After a few short minutes Mike came tight and said, “Big fish. Big fish. Big fish.”
I whooped and yelled and said “Fuck yeah dude! Nice.” The drag on Mike’s Van Staal was cranked down but the fish was winning. Mike moved backwards toward the pebbly shore very slowly, methodically, buoyantly in the deep water, concentrating intensely on his rod, the reel, gaining line when he could, managing the hard runs when he had to. I was talking to him, asking how big it was, if the SPs tend to stay hooked up, where are his boga grips? He studiously ignored me.
As we approached calf deep water I asked, “You want to beach it? Why not just land it right here? Do you have your bogas?”
Mike answered, speaking quickly, choppy, careful not to lose focus, not to jinx it, “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Should I turn my headlamp on?”
“Whatever you think is best,” he said curtly, very cautiously putting only a minimum amount of neutral energy into the system.
Beaching the fish worked, I did not jinx it with my jibberjabber, and when Mike finally had his fist wrapped around the big handle of the jaw bone he let out a celebratory “yes!” and hoisted the fish for a picture.
Turns out he didn’t have his boga grips. And he needed something else from the truck so he left and I kept fishing and just a minute after he walked up the trail I hooked a big fish. I yelled, “Pell! Fish! Big Fish! Pellllll!”
“Hold on Big Daddy! I’m coming!”
After we took the pics and exchanged high fives and said “fuck yeah!” I ran back to the truck to get my fly rod. I had a nine weight strung up with a sink tip for the heavy surf out front but figured I had better give it a try here. What if there were more big fish and I didn’t try the fly rod? I’d have regretted it. But there were no more big fish and the sink tip was too heavy and the water was too calm and I kept snagging on something out there in the darkness.
