by Jim Harrison
Afterward I noticed my forearm was twitching from the electric strength of the fish. With the sun and heat and wave-lap against the boat, thinking became oddly cellular, not cranial. I'd learned again how badly the body wants to feel good.
On the way back to Key West we paused near the wreckage of a shrimp trawler. Here, a few years back, we saw an explosion up on the flat and checked it out. It was a hammerhead shark, nearly as long as the seventeen-foot skiff, chasing tarpon in the shallow water. He paused to investigate us and we teased him with the push pole. The shark circled the skiff with one goggle eye raised and tried to figure out if we were a meal. There was a stiff wind, and the sun focused him in brilliant flashes under the swiftly fleeting clouds. The water only intermittently covered him, and his long, thick, gray body glistened in a bulbous wake. Aside from a mostly imaginary threat, I could no more kill one of these creatures than I would a house pet. He belongs where he is and we are only visitors.
The next day was a long relaxing blank after the harsh, grisly nightlife that Key West specializes in—or that I seem to specialize in when I go to Key West. At dawn you always study the palm trees out the window. If they're merely rustling, the weather will be fine for fishing. If the palms are wild and bending in the wind, you check to see if anyone's in bed with you and, if not, you usually decide to make the run in bad weather. Once I fished thirty days in a row, celebrated God knows what most of every night, and took a whole month in Michigan to recover from the “vacation.”
But a blank day on the flats can be a wonderful thing. The long hot hours of nothing are alleviated symmetrically by long hours of talking about food and other pleasures. It is a natural sauna that soothes the muscles and makes you grasp neurotically for the memory of whatever it was that drove you batty. Sometimes we dive into a reef to gig lobsters for dinner. Or stalk Cottrell Key, a strange combine rookery of frigate birds and brown pelicans, hundreds of each filling the sky while the females stick glaring and restive to their nests. The air and still water of the lee are permeated by a hot low-tide smell of bird dung and the unearthly noise of the birds getting used to your presence. Later, you tie long gaudy flies to wire leaders and play with the barracuda off Cottrell, the tarpon having evidently fled to Tibet for the afternoon.
Now, there's a little panic associated with the slow fishing. After a month of it, I'm always stuck with an Andersonville or Russian Front sort of homesickness that swells in the throat and can only be handled by getting there. On a final trip, in contempt of our luck, we made the long, thirty-mile run to the Marquesas, and found a kind of tarpon epiphany. We saw nearly two hundred fish drifting in from the west, from the direction of the Dry Tortugas—a dozen schools, darkish torpedo shapes against white sand. On the flight home I still heard the gill plates rattling from the tarpon that jumped lithely over the bow of the boat, his six-foot silvery length seeming to hang freeze-framed a few feet away.
And at home, finally, in northern Michigan, the world was full of the cool green pastels of spring. On the first morning back, I went mushroom hunting with my four-year-old daughter and noted that the shades of green equaled the multifoliate blues of the tidal flats I'd just left. I looked for morel mushrooms among the first fiddleheads and wild leeks. Anna is as good at mushroom hunting as I am, perhaps because she's three feet closer to the earth and not daydreaming.
At the local bar, Dick's Tavern, I watch Anna at the weekly ritual of her pinball game. She disregards the flippers to lean on her elbows and watch the flashing lights. I would like to get that much out of a pinball game. I think of a recipe I have modestly devised that uses sweetbreads, leeks and morels, with a dash of white wine to deglaze the pan. I discuss the local fishing with Richard, the bartender. A few hours later we are standing close to shore in our waders in the cold serene waters of Lake Michigan, looking out at the Manitou Islands, their piney humps bathed in evening mist. Unlike tarpon, you don't let the lake trout go. You eat them. Sometimes your wife fillets and broils the trout and sometimes a neighbor farmer smokes them for you with apple wood. It is all part of an embarrassingly ardent cycle of fishing and hunting that keeps you alive the rest of the year during the enervating pursuits that are life in this century.
1976
A Sporting Life
It begins very young up in the country, whether you are raised on a farm or in one of the small villages which, though they often double as county seats, rarely number more than a thousand souls. There is a lumber mill down by the river that manufactures crossties for the railroad, and the creosote the ties are treated with pervades the air. It is the smell of the town, depending on the wind: fresh-cut pine and creosote. In the center of the town there's a rather ugly yellow brick courthouse, plain Depression architecture. The village is in northern Michigan and does not share the quaintness of villages in New England or the deep South, being essentially history-less. There are three baronial, rococo houses left over from the hasty passing of the lumber era, but most dwellings are characterized by their drabness, simply a place for the shopkeepers to hide at night.
In the spring and summer the boys in the town carry either baseball mitts or fish poles on their bicycles. Two different types are being formed and though they might merge and vary at times, most often they have set themselves up for life. During the endless five months of winter one boy will spend his evenings poring over the fishing-tackle sections of the Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward catalogs while the other boy will be looking at the mitts, bats and balls. One tinkers with a reel while the other sits in a chair plopping a baseball over and over into his glove just recently oiled with neat's-foot. One reads about the Detroit Tigers while the other reads Outdoor Life and fantasizes about the time when he will be allowed his first shotgun. He already has an old .22 Remington single-shot, but he knows it is an interim weapon before the shotgun and later yet, a .30-. 30 deer rifle.
The village is surrounded by woods and lakes, rivers and swamps and some not very successful farms. The boy wanders around among them with a World War II surplus canteen and a machete he keeps hidden in the garage from his mother's prying eyes. His family owns a one-room cabin a dozen miles from town, where they spend the summer. He shoots at deer with a weak bow and arrow. On many dawns he accompanies his father trout fishing on a nearby river; he is forced to fish the same hole all day to avoid getting lost. The same evening he will row his father around the lake until mid-night, bass fishing. The boy and a friend sit in a swamp despite the slime and snakes and mosquitoes. They pot two sitting grouse with a .22 and roast them until they are black. The boys think they are Indians and sneak up on a cabin where some secretaries are vacationing. A few feet behind the window in the lamplight a secretary is naked. A true wonder to discuss while walking around in the woods and gullies or while diving for mud turtles or while watching a blue heron in her nest in a white pine.
Two decades later. Wars. Marches. Riots. Flirtations with politics, teaching, marriage, a pleasant love affair with alcohol. Our boy, now presumably a man, is standing in a skiff near the Marquesas thirty miles out in the Gulf from Key West. He's still fishing with a fly rod, only for tarpon now instead of bass, bluegills or trout. He wants to catch a tarpon over 100 pounds on a fly rod. Then let it go and watch it swim away. Today, being an open-minded soul, he's totally blown away on a triple hit of psilocybin. A few numbers rolled out of Colombian buds add to the sweet stew. It's blissful except for an occasional football-field-sized red hole in the sky and for the fact that there are no tarpon in the neighborhood. A friend is rubbing himself with an overripe mango. Then he rubs a girl who is fixing a lunch of white wine, yogurt and strawberries. Where are the tarpon today? Maybe in China. They want to hear the gill plates rattle when the tarpon jumps. The overripe mango feels suspiciously familiar. Peach jokes should be changed to mango jokes.
An osprey struggles overhead with a too-large fish. Ospreys can drown that way, not being able to free their talons in the water. The flight slows painfully. Between the great
bird's shrieks we can hear the creak and flap of wings and the tidal rush through the mangroves. Lunar. The bird reaches the nest and within minutes has torn the houndfish to pieces. A meal. We watch each other across a deep-blue channel.
Barracuda begin passing the skiff with regularity on the incoming tide, but no tarpon. We rig a fly rod with a wire leader for the barracuda's sharp teeth. And a long wonderfully red fly that matches the red holes that periodically reappear in the sky. The fish love the fly and the strike is violent, so similar to touching an electric fence it brings a shudder. The barracuda dashes off across the shallow water of the flat, is fought to the boat and released.
The midafternoon sun is brilliantly hot, so we move the boat some fifteen miles to a key that doubles as a rookery for cormorants, pelicans and man-o'-war or frigate birds. We watch the birds for hours, and the sand sharks, rays, bait fish and barracuda that slide past the boat.
Why get freaked or trip while you're fishing? Why not? You only do so rarely. You're fishing in the first place to avoid boredom, the habitual, and you intend to vary it enough to escape the lassitude attached to most of our activities. If you carry to sport a businesslike consciousness, it's not sport at all. Only an extension of your livelihood, which you are presumably trying to escape.
But how did we get from there to here across two decades? In sport there is a distinct accounting for taste. That corn pone about going through life with a diminishing portfolio of enthusiasms is awesomely true. We largely do what we do, and are what we are, by excluding those things we find distasteful. You reduce your life to those few things that you know are never going to quit. And when you reach thirty-five, your interest in these few things can verge on the hysteric: a freshly arrived single white hair in a side-burn can get a book written or instigate a trip to Africa. What energy you have left becomes obsessive and single-minded. When I am not writing poetry or novels I want to fish or, to a slightly lesser degree, hunt grouse and woodcock.
But this is to be an ideologue about something that is totally a sensuous, often sensual, experience. We scarcely want a frozen tract by Jerry Garcia on just why he likes “brown-eyed women and red grenadine.” Visceral is visceral. Always slightly comic, man at play in America has John Calvin tapping him on the shoulder and telling him to please be serious. For beginners, you have to learn to tell John to fuck off. And if you're a writer, many of your friends in the arts look at you with an “Oh, the Hemingway bit” tolerance, as if that stunningly arrogant doctor's son had forever preempted hunting and fishing. They might better ask why someone who wanted to paint like Cézanne would find so much that is memorable and durable in fishing and hunting. My own life is so largely an act of language, I've found that I survive only by seeking an opposite field when not actually writing. When it feels as if you're typing with sixteen-ounce gloves, you have to get out of the house, sometimes for months at a time.
Twenty miles off the coast of Ecuador, near the confluence of el Niño and the Humboldt current, it's not all that far after dawn and already the equatorial sun is shimmering down waves of heat. I count it lucky that when you skip bait for marlin the boat is moving at eight to ten knots, thus creating a breeze. The port diesel is fluttering, then is silent. We rock gently in the prop wash, then are caught in a graceful Pacific swell. It wasn't the port engine. Or the starboard engine. It was the only engine. The pulse quickens. My friend smiles and continues photographing a great circle of man-o'-war birds hovering far above us, far more than we have ever seen in the Florida Keys. It must be hundreds of miles to the closest pesticide. The birds follow schools of bait as do the striped marlin, and are considered a good sign. The captain looks at me and shrugs, the universal language of incompetence. He speaks no English and I no Spanish.
My friend, who is a French count, pretends he speaks Spanish, but in a week down here has yet to make any significant contact except with some Braniff stewardesses who speak fluent English. My room overlooks the pool and I saw him flat on his back with camera poised: he had arranged a circle of stewardesses around him with the prettiest in her bikini directly over his head. The magic of photography. Either a camera or a guitar works, but you never point a typewriter at a girl. I ran down to the pool hoping to catch the camera's aura of snazz.
I stretch out along the gunwale trying to convince myself that I am relaxed, but paranoia comes in surges. They'll never get the engine started and we'll drift to Australia, missing the Galapagos in the night by a helpless few miles. I can't even see land. We don't have any water, which anyway is undrinkable hereabouts. A lot of foul-tasting Chilean soda pop. In a shrugging fit, one of the two mates hands me a plate of fresh pineapple. It is ripe, cool and delicious. Feed the fearful bear. I toss a chunk at three passing sea snakes, who look terribly yellow in the blue water. They are related to the cobra and extremely venomous though not very aggressive. They scatter, then one swirls around to check out the pineapple. I've been assured that they never bother anyone but the wretchedly poor Peruvian fishermen who deep-jig from cork rafts. Good ole swimming hole. Sharks. Snakes. Even whales. Often in nature you get the deep feeling you don't belong. This is especially true of the Pacific and the Serengeti.
Hours pass, and they are still tinkering with the engine. I glance into its guts and regret not knowing anything about them. The day before the engine had quit while I was fighting a striped marlin. It is a difficult and exhausting job from a dead boat, especially after the spectacular jumps are over and the fish bulldogs. You can't follow the marlin on its long runs. You have to pump him back. And I had hooked the fish out of vanity on twenty-pound test. It took over two hours in the ninety-degree sun and I felt murderous. Now I was pretending the boat had a marine radio, which I knew it didn't.
But it had been a fine week's fishing so far, though we had failed to catch a striped marlin on fly rod, something that had only been done twice before. My friend had teased a marlin to within forty feet of the boat before the marlin rose up and slashed with his bill, then took the fly firmly in the corner of his mouth. I was thinking numbly about how beautifully blue his body was and how from the side his eye appeared to be staring at us. Perhaps it was. But it only lasted a few seconds while he twisted his head and sped off in a flume of water. The leader popped. It was like fly-fishing for Dick Butkus or a Harley Davidson, I thought while trying to sleep on a sunburn that night. We had been getting a lot of sleep, having been warned by the hotel manager of the endemic shanker problem in the local villages.
I have a great deal of time to think between fish, and I wonder why I am never bored. My friend the novelist Tom McGuane has fished for months in a row in the Keys, particularly when he was learning saltwater fly casting. When I was learning from him there were moments of doubt until I had my first big tarpon in the air. Before that I had been quite pleased with a two-pound rainbow. And still am, though the true maniac deserves a tarpon. Such sport is a succession of brutally electric moments spaced widely apart. Someone with McGuane's quantum energy level quite naturally applies the same effort to fishing.
There is doubtless the edge of a lunatic here. In Ecuador, the crew was enormously alarmed when my friend went overboard to get underwater photos of a fighting marlin. Billfish have been known to charge a boat out of generalized ire. I was supposed to control the fish. I was sure my stomach wall would burst and spill its contents—an even quart of Añejo. But dangers in nature are vastly overrated, though while backpacking I tend to think of grizzlies as 700-pound Dobermans that don't respond to voice commands. In Africa, you are more likely to get bit by a snake than attacked by a mammal. Comforting thought.
There are unquestioned flops. We try to see the brighter side of our flops, telling ourselves we haven't wasted our time. And we are dolts if we aren't comfortable in a world outside our immediate preoccupations. A sports bore is far more deadly than a krait or a Gaboon viper. A true NFL freak can make a more casual fan pine for opera. A real quadra or stereo buff makes you want that Victrola the big white dog
was listening to.
One of the reasons I wanted to go to Russia was to scout the possibility of an extended trip for fishing and hunting. How splendid to shoot grouse where Ivan Turgenev had hunted, and I had heard that there was good steel-head and salmon fishing on the Pacific coast of Siberia. As a poet, I have a tendency to imagine conditions and pleasures without precedent on earth. When fishing is bad, you can't tell but that just around the next green island there might be a nude fashion model on a mohair chair on the water.
Once reaching Russia, my ideas seemed clearly impossible except for an important official visitor or someone on an established tour, a loathsome prospect. Red tape is a euphemism. And my first morning in Moscow had been encouraging, watching old men fish the broad Moscow River, which runs through the middle of the capital. They were sitting on an embankment below the faded red walls of the Kremlin, the mid-October sun catching the gold of the minarets as a backdrop. But I never saw anyone catch a fish, just as I had gazed at other fishless afternoons on the Seine in Paris. It is enough to have a river in a city.
After several days of badgering I managed to get to a horse race. But the weather had turned bad and the horses passed all but invisibly in what must be called a howling blizzard. The tote board said that Iron Beauty beats out Good Hoe, our plump female guide translated. Her pleasure was to wander aimlessly in great halls filled with the machinery of progress. It's hard to explain to someone so adamantly political that you see enough progress at home, and that to you, progress meant motors that quit rather captiously far out in the ocean. Or the shotgun that misfired when you had a good chance at a double in grouse. No matter that it was the first time in your life that a shotgun misfired. It brutishly picked the wrong time.