No Bluefish for No. 41

I don’t dwell on regrets usually. They lead to the nowhere of melancholy. But I kick myself about one missed opportunity.

I was fishing with George Bush--Herbert Walker, not W. We were in the ocean off Kennebunkport in the summer before he became President No. 41. That was 13 years before his son became President No. 43.

The sun was warm and the winds gentle as we shot into the Atlantic in his 28-foot cigarette boat, Fidelity. Barbara came along and a reporter from Time magazine. Bush knew these shoal waters. We whooped it up and felt our smiles squeezed onto our faces by the G-forces as Bush hair-pinned through the dangerous reefs. The Secret Service couldn’t keep up in a chase boat. What fun.

I was in an admiring frame of mind. I admired Bush because he was the first man I ever saw who looked at men on bigger boats around him without a trace of envy.

He cut the throttles on the twin V-8s. He grew anxious. I knew that look too. The face of a fishing fanatic.

He pawed through his old tackle box. He paused only to show me the proud scar on his hand. He once landed a bluefish and it bit him.

Look at that, he marveled. He rubbed the mark with his fingertip.

Then he fished. Barbara fished too.

As the nation soon learned, Bush was not a patient man. Fishing was supposed to mean catching. And he wasn’t. Like the hinges on his tackle box, he was rusty, he said. Outta practice.

He trolled faster, then slower. Dammit, he used to be able to get the speed just right and hoist them over the transom one after another. Now, the knack had left him. Not even a nibble.

I groped for words. I wanted to argue the other possibility: His fishing was perfect. But the bluefish had been worked over so many times by so many good fishermen that they weren’t here anymore.

The argument deserved to be voiced, but I never found the chance. I have regretted my timidity ever since--and never so much as now, with his son at the throttles of a new but similarly uncomprehending administration.

It never occurred to Dad that maybe the fish really had vanished, of that I’m pretty sure. No, they were down there, just as always, great squirming masses of them with sharp teeth and hard muscles that would test any man. He just forgot how to outsmart them. I mean, just imagine how big this ocean is. Endless bounty, can’t you see?

I should have argued anyway.

Isn’t conservation one of those founding principles of conservatism? Threaten something that they think is important and a conservative will knock you flat to conserve it. American values. The flag. Property rights. The importance of God in our culture. The sanctity of free market to our prosperity.

So why aren’t conservatives locking arms to protect the fish, the air and other resource bounty of America?

Well, in this case, I’ll give Bush No. 41 the benefit of doubt. This was a decent man I saw standing in his boat. I don’t think it ever really registered that our natural resources were threatened. A fisherman could catch fish if he knew how and government didn’t get in the way.

Deer? They’re overrunning the place. Mountains? Got ‘em. Water? Hell, we’re still fighting floods. Trees? You ever looked out the window of an airplane?

It was a generational way of viewing America. My father and those before him regarded it that way: spacious skies, purple mountains’ majesty, fruited plains, shining seas. All for the taking.

Bush No. 43 came of age in a different time. He deserves no benefit of doubt. No amount of nostalgia can change our circumstance. We are no longer in harmony with the natural world. Supply and demand answers our needs only until we run short on supply.

And now we are. Short on pure air, open space, healthy oceans, lasting sources of energy--all these things now interlocked and diminishing.

I’m afraid we’re also short the wisdom to restore the balance. To view the world as his father did is to ignore science and logic, to turn eyes from what is plainly visible and, importantly, to defy the values of the nation he leads. It is the worst kind of elitism.

For awhile, things will be all right in his world. Even if the bluefish are gone, there will always be a pond on a rich man’s private ranch where he can cast for bass. And that will have to do.

But the distinction between progress and plunder will widen, and quickly now, with the pressure of population and Bush’s 19th century boomtown regard for resources. A bass pond will not be island enough for his grandchildren and their children. They’ll be asking, why didn’t conservatives think to conserve?