David Siskind | Sunday, 12 April 2026
My visits to New York are always nostalgic. I lived here for thirty-five years and will again someday. My days are filled with a greater variety and number of activities than I enjoy in LA, mostly curated by Jackie, who has ants in her pants and doesn’t value naps. Many of her friends are active in migrant Asian community’s political and cultural organizations. The museum exhibitions and cultural events we go to are often eye-opening. Some shine a new light on my past experiences.
Today we attended a Day of Remembrance at the NY Buddhist Church commemorating the Japanese Internment horror during WWII. Speakers included attorneys who had defended and overturned convictions of defiant Japanese-American citizens. There were also speakers recalling their internment experiences as children. Rachel Maddow was invited and showed up to receive an award for a six-part podcast she produced on the prisons and the families affected. It was all very moving. And, in the midst of the current white-Christian nationalist putsch, provided a platform for discussion of the importance and methods of community resistance to the regime. It was all very moving, highlighting the reality that then, as now, we were failed by the indifference of our political, educational, and corporate elites and that it’s all up to us little people to fix it.
When I first moved to LA it took me a while to find my local fishing opportunities - even longer to find those that I now cherish. The first find was the lower Owens River running through the town of Bishop in the eastern Sierras. On the ride up I’d pass the Manzanar Relocation Center. It took me another few years to learn that it was an internment prison that housed American citizens of Japanese descent who had been removed from their communities, properties and businesses which were then often stolen. They were imprisoned for four years, from 1942 through 1945. The visitor center had fallen into disrepair but was recently renovated and is worth seeing. It is a dark stain on our legacy that seems about to be repeated. Some intrepid inmates found an outlet for the drudgery by sneaking out and fishing for trout in the nearby streams. They formed the
Manzanar Fishing Club. Watch the trailer. A documentary about it dropped in 2012. A link to the full doc, Fear No Trout, is at the bottom of the trailer.
Five and Dime
There are some nice soccer fields just down the hill from Jackie’s place, in Riverside Park. They’re usually great for my casting practices but this week they’ve been cluttered with kids on spring break. Imagine that! Still I found some corners for some practice up to mid range - maybe 80’ or so. And, unlike LA, some wind to deal with. I’m going to make a stop in Chesapeake Bay to fish for redfish on the way home so I brought my HT10 and have been practicing with my new MED5. Orange line really is easy to see. I performed walking drills, triangle drills and target shooting at white-line-intersections and cones the soccer coaches had set up. I tested various ways to apply power at all angles and made them work feeling “at one” with the rig. I love throwing the MED5 with the HT10. It makes me wonder why I don’t fish like that. What do I like about feeling the rod bend deeply? I mean as a shock absorber for light tippet, yeah. But why else?
Effort casting the heavier rod? There’s something exhausting about casting a 4 weight bending deep into its handle. I need to ponder this and work it out but I won’t be able to experiment with other combos until I get back home. So it’ll wait.
Pray for Peace,
David Siskind