3/17/2023 0 Comments Del mar leopard shark bridge![]() Whether I should have just offered him $20 to talk to me, even, whether that may have been more straightforward than the forced familiarity of mutual tobacco consumption.When is the best time to go to San Diego? And I’m fully aware that the cigarette we’re both smoking helps prolong the conversation. Like I’m asking him to give me insight into to a world a distance apart from society that I’ve no business really probing. And some of my speaking into the middle distance feels a little presumptuous. It feels a little shady, our conversation. Eventually he tells me that he eats the fish, but only after I offer him a cigarette and assure him I’m not a policeman, a reporter, or looking to enquire into any fishing license he may or may not have. On closer inspection a lot about this man is closed off, pinched, and would really rather avoid this kind of do-gooding scrutiny. “I just pick ‘em up, take a picture, and throw them back in,” says the man, dressed in frayed denim jeans and a hoodie that has also seen better days. After all, I’m asking for his story to illustrate the importance of our campaign, and yet he doesn’t really owe it to me or to anybody. Most of this pitch I deliver generally into the middle distance, wondering aloud if he might know anybody like that, and feeling every ounce of my privilege weighing uncomfortably between us in the air. The campaign is quite theoretical, involving numeric standards for toxicity, and I’m trying to give our members and general readers a sense of why it matters to protect people by doing the work. We’re looking to meet people who eat the fish from these waters, because the proposed pollution standards aren’t strict enough, yet, to ensure that people who subsistence fish won’t get sick from eating what they catch. I say we’re running a campaign to protect people who fish in the Bay. I’m actually wearing a T-shirt with the organization’s name on it, having come down here for a promotional event, and I couldn’t feel more conspicuous. This man and his brother fish to eat, once or twice a week, off the piers in and around the San Francisco Bay, although at first, he won’t admit to it, when I introduce myself as working for Clean Water Action. “I haven’t had a cigarette since I got on the bus in Santa Rosa, and that was five hours ago,” he says. Meanwhile, the fisherman and his brother have been down here since the early morning. Then he moves on without engaging further, presumably looking forward to embarking on his cruise, later, and not giving the interaction much further thought. “I just fish for…recreation.” It’s a notably clipped, tired-sounding and evasive answer on an otherwise breezy morning, and the boomer seems to check himself, realizing from the fisherman’s tone that he may have stumbled unawares into a type of conversation he wasn’t anticipating. “Na I’m just like you,” says the fisherman in a quiet voice. Then he stops on the side of the pier to ask a gentleman fishing if he ever sells his catch. So the boomer, satisfied that his money hasn’t been wasted, moves on with a pleasantry. It was a blast,” says the father, elongating the ‘a’ in ‘blast’ with his enthusiasm. “Did’ja have a good time? We’re getting on at five…” The father, struggling manfully with his suitcase, shoots back: “Yeah, how did you guess?” “Hey buddy, did you just get off the cruise?” A baby boomer in a sun visor spots the cruise ship party and swings his big voice in their general direction: The mood on the pier is light, with kids eating ice cream, and most people seem comfortable answering a stranger’s greeting or even, question. The mother is frustrated that they haven’t “just taken a cab already.” They only came up the pier to admire the Bay Bridge one last time, and to pose for a photo before their vacation is officially over and they head to the airport. A teenage couple hold hands on a bench giggling over something on the young man’s iPhone, and a family of four bumps their suitcases back along the pier, towards the BART station at Embarcadero, having recently disembarked from a hulking cruise ship docked by pier 39, a half-mile away. It’s 11 am on Sunday April 17 on a wooden pier near the ferry building in downtown San Francisco, and the sun is streaming down on an 80-degree weekend. ![]() The Murky World of Subsistence Fishing in the San Francisco Bay < - The following article opened with a picture of an angler on Pier 7 so I assume that’s the “wooden pier” mentioned in the first paragraph.
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