NEW YORK'S CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY

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The lake, Cybart stresses, is an asset and an environmental success story that cannot be overemphasized. A mere 15 years ago it threatened to die of pollution, to turn into solid sludge. However, drained steadily and aggressively by the Niagara River, Erie's water is replenished far more quickly (every three years) than any other Great Lake. So, once pollution controls for industry and municipalities were in place around its shoreline, it made a quick turnaround. Today the beaches have bathers and the fish are back. In fact, Erie's sport-fishing reputation grows by leaps and bounds, delighting anglers and supporting, Paul says, a dozen Chautauqua County charter boat captains like himself—twice as many as there were two years ago and most likely half as many as there'll be two years hence. Such charters consist of groups of three or four fishermen who pay about $300 a day to pursue the lake's finny treasures.

This morning, though, the fish seem either sated or asleep, and I feel my spiritual pull to Chautauqua County beginning to slack en. But at 9 a.m., after a breeze from the northwest lifts a chop on the dark water, one of our outrigger rods bends double. The first fish of the day is always the most exciting, and I pounce on the rod and begin to wind in madly. "Pump it, pump it!" Cybart impatiently reminds me as he sees me trying to reel the fish in directly. But then, suddenly, two more of our five rods bend and for the next two hours or so we are busy, almost steadily, hauling in fish. We easily take our five-fish-apiece limit of 18-inch walleyes, and we catch and release more and bigger smallmouth bass—19 fish, averaging probably 16 inches—than I've ever caught elsewhere in so short a time.

At the end of the sunny, successful morning—with my arms worn out from winding the reel, my vitamin D quotient filled for the next decade and a half and the pleasant prospect ahead of devouring walleye fillets of my own catching, fried in butter—it now seems to me that Chautauqua County is every bit as fine a place to live as Cybart claims it to be. It strikes me, too, that Paul is one of those flexible, skillful souls advocated by Lily Dale medium Barbara Conner, fully capable of adjusting to the county's evolution from an industrial past to a future in small business. In fact, for the first 10 years of his adult life, Cybart worked for The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. In 1980, when the plant's workers were, as usual, on strike and the signs were there that the factory was about to shut down for good, he cast about, finally working his way into the angling shop and charter boat businesses that today support him, his wife, Marylyn, and their three kids.

It now dawns on me that my own natural calling, once I move to Chautauqua County, might be to run a charter boat. I will arise at five each morning, breakfast on bacon and eggs with my out-of-county customers at Mark's Restaurant on the corner of Central Avenue and Route 5 in Dunkirk, and spend my days pleasantly hauling in walleyes or salmon or trout, selling monofilament and leeches and Bombardier lures on the side.

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