Our longest residence was in the aforementioned house near the giant largemouth bass. And for most of my childhood, we were within a short walk of a potentially fruitful cast. She trusted my instincts for spotting fishy water and used me as a kind of divining rod before signing a lease. Sensing in it a masculine, character-building quality, my mother arranged it so that the cottages we rented always had access to streams and lakes or abutted other properties we could trespass upon that had such resources. She tended toward small cottages on large estates - converted stables, liverymen’s accommodations that were the unclaimed, declining appendages of older, fading wealth, unsold because of divorces or other family complications, rented out to us for a reasonable fee that would become unreasonable and impel our moving on to other cottages on other collapsing estates.įishing was the one constant during these years. My mother had rented the house as she would three other homes in Greenwich, because it gave the illusion of magnificent proprietorship.

I had found them, and the pond was my rightful hunting ground. We did not own the house, the estate, the pond, or the largemouth bass, but I still thought of the fish as my fish. They were the biggest largemouth bass I had ever seen, and they lived in a pond ten minutes’ walk from my house on a large estate in the backwoods of Greenwich, Connecticut, perhaps the most famously wealthy town in America. Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

Four fish by paul greenberg