by Randy Kadish
Chapter 12
I still wondered when winter finally thawed into spring and then into the first day of trout season. I fished the Saw Mill River. Though in miles I was a lot closer to the New York world than to the Beaverkill world, both seemed to meet on the Saw Mill.
Best of all, I finally saw Doc and told him how sorry I was about his loss.
“She was quite a woman,” he said. His eyes became watery. He lowered his head, shamefully I thought. He cried.
I didn’t know men that old could still cry. I told him how the anglers in the Antrim Lodge loved his story.
“Maybe one day, Ian, you’ll write it for me.”
“If I do, it will still be your story.”
I showed him Mr. Gordon’s dry flies and asked if he wanted to try one.
“I’m just too old to start changing now. I’ll stick with my streamer.”
“I will too.” I waded about thirty feet downstream. As I fished, I told Doc about Ray, Mr. La Branche and Mr. Gordon. Doc didn’t say anything. Realizing he wasn’t interested in hearing more, I stopped talking and listened to the gurgling stream and looked up at the bare, overhanging branches. In my mind, I saw arms reaching out and trying to touch each other, the way Adam and God tried to in Michelangelo’s fresco.
I hooked a rainbow. Calmly, I brought him in and held him up to show Doc. Doc was gone. Surprised, I let the fish go and wondered if Doc hadn’t said good-bye because he was jealous of hearing how Mr. La Branche and Mr. Gordon had opened my eyes to a part of fly fishing he knew little about.
I cast downstream, toward the bank, and watched my fly line drift downstream. Gently, I pointed the rod up and down. Suddenly, I realized Doc’s painful loss probably had more to do with his not saying good-bye than with anything I had said. Nevertheless, I decided when I saw Doc, I wouldn’t say anything about Mr. La Branche, Mr. Gordon or the Beaverkill.
But a few weeks later an angler told me Doc had passed on. Numb, I didn’t have to ask how he died. It was because of a broken heart.
During the week, my numbness slowly wore off, leaving me sad and often thinking about my mother. Then, just when the sadness got as heavy as lead, I thought of how Doc had brought so many lives into the world. Finally, the sadness lightened, and though all of it didn’t drift away, I was able to see the beauty of the Saw Mill River and to enjoy fishing. And suddenly it seemed okay to combine war and fishing into a story.
During the next few years I frequently moved back and forth between my two worlds. To make the moves easier, I got a job as a bus boy at the Antrim Lodge. Still hoping to see Izzy, I often described him to anglers and asked if they knew him. One angler thought he might have met him several years ago in Hendrickson’s Pool. From then on I often fished the fast, rocky waters of that pool.
But I never saw Izzy.
I guess I could tell you a lot of details about what happened to me during the next few years, but after reading what I already wrote, I don’t think all those details are what my story is really about. So let me summarize and tell you I often fished with Ray and occasionally with Mr. La Branche. I guess the strange thing was that, even though I enjoyed their company, I never felt close to them. It was as if both had put a wall around themselves. To be honest, I was probably glad they had. Ray, I was afraid, would resent my father’s wealth. Mr. La Branche, I was afraid, would want me to join The Beaverkill Trout Club and leave behind the public water and the friendly anglers of the lower Beaverkill. Several times Mr. La Branche invited me to his club. Always I accepted his invitation; and though I found his club’s water beautiful, I often found it deserted and lonely.
There’s one night, however, I’ll always remember. Mr. La Branche and I sat on his club’s porch, watching the river. He lit a cigar and told me he had come to believe in his theories and was almost finished organizing them into a book.
“Ian, I’m going to let you in on a secret. The title of the book is The Dry Fly and Fast Water. Do you mind?”
“Why should I mind.”
“You gave me the title, remember?”
“Then you’ll have to give me a free copy of the book.”
“If I find a publisher.”
“You will.”
“I hope.”
Now even though the Beaverkill world was still my smaller world, my bigger world, New York, seemed to grow and overlap my smaller world, I guess because I spent less time in the concrete and steel of Manhattan and more time in the meadows and lakes of Central Park. Three times a week I practiced and experimented with long-distance fly-casting techniques. Finally, I discovered that when there was no wind, I should aim my back cast upward at about 20 degrees and my forward cast upward at about 10 degrees. When there was wind from behind or from in front, I should aim my casts parallel to the ground.
Consistently, I cast about 80 feet. Often I wondered how far I could cast with an 111⁄2-foot tournament rod; but instead of buying one, I took all my savings and bought a 9-foot bass rod, a Vom Hofe reel, a new fly line, and then went to my practice spot in Central Park.
I cast 90 feet.
From the next day on, I often went to the Harlem Meer or the Hudson River and combined casting practice and fishing. What I liked most about fishing in New York was what I also liked about fishing in the Beaverkill: meeting people. In New York I stood out and often felt like a celebrity, especially when people were impressed by how far I cast. Soon, however, I also became a casting celebrity on the Beaverkill. When asked, I eagerly showed anglers how to eliminate their casting defects, and always they thanked me. Some even offered money. I never took any. You see, teaching long-distance casting made me feel as good as, or even better than, becoming a straight-A freshman at Columbia University, or becoming a starting pitcher and outfielder on the baseball team.
But those achievements didn’t stop me from wishing my mother had lived to see my father’s legal work help pass new labor laws that improved working conditions, and to see a more harmonious wide world. As one of my professors said, because countries were more economically dependent on each other, they would never again go to war.
Though I was grateful for all the young men, including me, who wouldn’t die on battlefields, I still couldn’t come to believe in God.
May 1914. I received a package in the mail. It was Mr. La Branche’s book. I opened it. On the title page he wrote:
Dear Ian,
I just want to let you know that you helped me write this book in more ways than you could imagine.
I don’t know what it was that made me doubt my theories and myself, but maybe, just maybe, that doubt was a blessing in disguise because it made me work harder to find some fishing truths.
Now my hope is that this book will help you and other anglers catch the big one, though sometimes we don’t know what the “big one” is.
Gratefully yours,
George M. L. La Branche
I read the book that day. During the next week I reread it, took extensive notes and became sure that, thanks to Mr. La Branche, I was on my way to becoming a great angler, especially when one afternoon I caught and released three big trout in Hendrickson’s Pool.
So even when I came home to East 76th Street and read in a newspaper that Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, had been assassinated, I was on top of my world and I stayed there. You see, during the next few weeks, no one thought the assassinations would lead to war—until Austria-Hungary issued Serbia an ultimatum. Serbia didn’t accept it. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Serbia’s ally, Russia, mobilized. Surprised, Germany declared war on Russia and on her ally France. Feeling threatened when Germany invaded Belgium, England declared war on Germany.
Though the war seemed to explode out of nowhere, almost everyone, according to newspapers, believed the war would end before the leaves fell.
They seemed right. On the Western Front, Germany marched through Belgium, then deep into France. On the Eastern Front, Germany, led by an unknown general, von Hindenberg, won a deci
sive battle at a place I never heard of, Tannenberg.
Not a single leaf had even turned red, yellow or gold.
“Germany has to be stopped,” my father said, throwing down his newspaper. “These Huns love war. That’s why they marched into Paris forty-five years ago.”
“My professor said that the French started the Franco-Prussian War.”
“Why are you taking the Hun’s side, Ian?”
“I’m not. I just want the whole, crazy thing to end.”
A few days later, the French stopped the Germans at the Marne River. To protect themselves from the new inventions of war—machine guns and rapid-fire artillery—soldiers on opposing lines dug long trenches. So when the leaves fell, finally, the armies were locked in a stalemate, like the Confederate and Union armies at Cold Harbor.
To me, the world seemed upside-down, and it wasn’t because of reflections on a river.
The Germans, French and English tried to break the stalemate at Ypres, Neuvelle Chapelle, Loos and Artois. Their results: waves of soldiers mowed down or ripped apart. Suddenly, the carnage of Cold Harbor seemed small compared to the carnage of the Western Front. My mother’s death, terrible as it was, seemed even smaller. Maybe that was why, like an insect trapped in honey, I was trapped in reading about the war. Often I cursed the politicians, the generals and the world.
Strangely, few of my teammates worried about the war until the Germans sank the Lusitania; then most of my teammates wanted America to declare war on Germany, even though Germany claimed the Lusitania was full of weapons destined for France and England.
Was it just a matter of time before I bled to death on the Western Front?
Again and again I prayed politicians came to see that trading the assassinations of the Archduke and his wife for millions and millions of other lives was a bad, bad deal.
Before I say more about the war, I must—or rather I want to—tell that one afternoon I walked down to the banks of Ferdon’s Eddy and was told by two anglers Theodore Gordon had died. Like millions of others, he had died from the clutch of a different kind of war: the war of consumption. He was of sixty-one years old.
I realized being part of the world of fishing also meant being part of the wider world of death.
I opened my fly box, looked at some of Mr. Gordon’s dry flies, and told myself I should save them forever, or at least until I died.
The Germans attacked Verdun and began to “bleed the French dry.” Before long, however, the French also bled the Germans dry. In the meantime, on a hot July day near the Somme River, English troops climbed out of their trenches and tried to break the German line. By nightfall 20,000 English boys lay dead. The next day 10,000 more English boys joined the dead. The generals, however, refused to stop the senseless attacks until mid-November, when 300,000 boys lay dead. The German line was unbroken.
The Battle of Verdun still raged. A month later, Germany’s new commander, the now-famous von Hindenberg, ended the slaughter. The combined German and French death toll was about 500,000. The battle line ended right where it started.
The Great Slaughter, as it became known, continued. Was the world facing a second Hundred Years War? Thinking it might be, I tried to explain to my teammates why America shouldn’t enter the war.
“Are you just scared of fighting the Germans?” Karl Crowley said.
“Damn right I’m scared of dying for something I don’t believe in. When this war ends, it will only pave the way for another war, like most wars. Man has got to be the stupidest animal on the planet.”
My teammates didn’t believe me.
To keep my mind off the war and to try to maintain even the thinnest pillar of faith in the world, I retreated into the smaller world of literature, of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Swift, Keats, Shelly and others. In their words I found the exact opposite of war: beauty. In their stories I found characters like Hamlet and Don Quixote who also couldn’t make peace with the world, and who therefore helped me feel less alone.
Often I wondered how was it, why was it, man created war as well as beauty? Were the two opposites somehow linked?
It didn’t seem possible, until poems written by soldiers on the front appeared in newspapers. Was literature a counterbalance to war? Without literature, would war overwhelm the world and doom us all?
Probably; and so I yearned to join the counterbalance and wrote two short stories. The stories were rejected, again and again. Crushed, I ripped them up, and for the first time I thought of becoming an English teacher, of looking into the eyes of young students and of unveiling the meaning and the beauty of literature. I didn’t, however, give up my dream of becoming a writer.
One night I wrote a short essay explaining why America should stay neutral. I sent my essay to the school newspaper. A week later, the day before our big baseball game against Princeton, the newspaper published it. Thrilled, I thought of showing it to my father, but knowing he wouldn’t approve, I didn’t.
I walked into our team’s locker room. It was quiet, surprisingly. No one looked at me. I walked to my locker. Taped on it was my essay. Written on the essay was: Yellow Traitor. I turned to face my teammates. Their backs faced me.
Abruptly, I walked out of the room and cried.
Two hours later I boarded the train to the Beaverkill. By the time I stepped onto the porch of the Antrim Lodge a mountain blocked half the setting sun. The rays of light seemed to rush down the slope like a waterfall. For some reason I thought of Izzy sliding down the hill in Central Park, and I wondered if there were a chance my teammates shunning me would lead to something good, to seeing Izzy. Hoping so, I hitched a ride to Hendrickson’s Pool.
Downstream, two anglers fished the slower water near the far bank. Way upstream, the smooth tail of Barnhart’s Pool curved sharply and flowed toward me. The river sped up then curved again, this time away from me.
Was I looking at the biggest S in the world?
I climbed down the steep bank and waded into Hendrickson’s fast, rocky tongue. The water swirled around me like a big wheel, reminding me of the way immigrants on Orchard Street once swirled around me. I didn’t see a hatch. I opened my fly box and stared at a fly named after Mr. Gordon: the Quill Gordon. Wanting to honor him and all the dead soldiers, I tied on a Quill Gordon and decided to create my own, make-believe hatch. Again and again I cast to the downstream side of the giant, flattop boulder.
No take.
I wanted a longer, drag-free drift. I false cast, shooting more and more line, then landing the line on top of the boulder and the Quill Gordon upstream of it.
The anglers fishing the far bank waded across the riffled tail. I had the pool to myself. The retreating sun left the water dark-gray. I looked at my watch. Thirty minutes to land a fish!
My heart beat like a Morse-Code machine. Again I cast, then I looked up. The full moon’s light had fooled me into believing the sun hadn’t set.
Deeply I breathed. My heart stopped beating. My spinning obsession slowed; and soon I didn’t really care if I caught a fish. I was just grateful to be standing in the Beaverkill—in a world away from my teammates and the horrible war; so when the water turned black, I told myself that tomorrow the sun would thankfully create another fishing day. I waded out of the river and climbed up the bank. My foot slipped. I fell. My right ankle snapped, then numbed. I broke it, I suspected. I wedged my wading stick between two rocks and pulled myself up. The steep bank was close to my face. I stepped up with my right foot, into what seemed like nothingness. Again I fell. I was trapped.
Will anyone find me before morning? I wondered. Will insects bite me? Poisonous snakes? But snakes don’t bite unless they’re attacked. Water—I don’t have any, like the soldiers at Cold Harbor. Don’t worry about dying of thirst. I’m not pinned down by Rebel fire, or in a trench on the Western Front. I’m facing only darkness, a darkness that didn’t turn this riverbank into my enemy, even though I can’t see much of it, or much of the world and its bloody war; so if the pain in my le
g doesn’t get too bad, then maybe I’ll be able to sleep and seemingly speed up time. And if I can’t? I can forget about my plight and pretend I’m the ears of the Beaverkill, and I can listen to the rustling trees, the gurgling water, and the singing birds. If I wasn’t here would the Beaverkill have ears? Would the trees, the river and the birds have a voice? Maybe they’re happy I’m here. How beautiful the river looks in the moonlight. It reflects light so gently I could stare at it forever and ever. The long, thin reflection of moonlight cutting the S in half seems to turn the giant letter into a dollar sign. In the reflection—is that a small shadow? But the shadow isn’t locked in place. It moves toward me, slowly. The shadow, no doubt, is a poacher. Thank God! This isn’t the right time for me to judge poachers.
A dull pain throbbed in my ankle and up my leg. I wished I could transfer the throbs out of me and into my Leonard rod. The poacher, I made out, was built like a football player. He waded closer and closer. I saw the face of a young man. He reached the bank, finally.
I yelled out, “Hello! I think I broke my leg.”
He climbed up the bank and stood over me. Feeling like his prey, I looked into his face. His nose, like his chest, was wide and flat, as if it had been busted in a fight. His hair was as straight as a porcupine’s and seemed to grow in all different directions. I wondered why he didn’t wear a hat or at least use a comb. His chin was cleft. He wore a heavy wool shirt. The shirt was stained with what looked like grease. One of the front pockets was almost torn off and dangled like a leaf. His fly rod and silver reel, I noticed, glistened under the moonlight and looked brand new.
He scrutinized my fly rod and seemed to forget about me.
“I can’t stand.”
“I’ll help you. Put your arm around me.”
I did. Slowly, one step at a time, we climbed up the bank.
“I’m Billy Reynolds.”
“I’m Ian Mac Bride.”
“Where’s your creel?”
“I release my fish.”
“Me too. We’re off to a good start.”
We reached the road. I leaned on my wading stick.
“We got to get you to the hospital. Those new x-ray machines amaze me.”
“How are we going to get there?”
He looked down the road. “Wait here.” He marched to an automobile, opened the hood and started the engine. He drove up to me. “Let me help you in.”
“Why’d you open the hood to start it?”
“To get to the engine.”
“What about a key?”
“Do you have one?”
“So, the auto isn’t yours?”
“Did I say it was?”
“So you’re stealing it?”
“Stealin’? We got to get you to a hospital. I’m borrowin’.”
“I’m not borrowing anything!”
“You’re just ridin’, that is, unless you have a better option.”
I didn’t. He helped me into the front seat.
Someone carrying a lantern and a fishing pole walked down the road. He had a long, dark beard.
Was he a religious Jew from the Lower East Side?
I said, “Isn’t it late to start fishing?”
“Don’t mind him. He’s the Hermit. He likes to fish the big river at night.”
“Why?”
Billy made a U-turn and drove toward town. “Story is that many years ago the Hermit was one of the best anglers out here, then a woman accused him of rape, and no one wanted anythin’ to do with him. Later, when it came out the woman had lied and had gotten pregnant on her own, the Hermit rejected the apologies that came his way and stayed a hermit.”
“Wow.” I thought of Mr. Gordon. The Hermit’s plight seemed a lot worse than his. “How’d you know how to start the engine?”
“Do you mean, do I steal them?”
“No—well, yes.”
He glanced at me. His smile formed the shape of a half moon. “I like an honest angler. I fix cars. My father says that cars are gonna revolutionize America, and that I should be part of the revolution. He’s half-right.”
I waited for the half-wrong part. I didn’t get it, so I asked for it.
“About which revolution,” Billy answered.
Did he always talk in code? “How many revolutions are there?”
“Many. Just look at your Leonard rod. It ain’t only automobiles that are gettin’ better.”
“So you build fly rods?”
“I want to build the best castin’ rod in the world. I don’t care if a lot of people say I can’t. It’s what I believe that’s important. I don’t care if it takes me ten years to build my first great rod, but I will. You’ll see.”
Yes, I will, I thought. He’s at least willing to fight for what he believes in. Am I? I should have fought for my essay. Damn me for walking out of the locker room!
I asked, “What does your father think?”
“He’s against it.”
“So you told your father?”
“I got nothin’ to be ashamed of.”
Do I? I wondered. I wish I had Billy’s courage, then I’d tell my father I want to be a writer.
I said, “I’ve never seen how fly rods are built.”
“It’s a real science and a real art. You’ll have to come over and see my shop.”
“What about tomorrow before I head back?”
“To New York?” He grinned.
“How’d you know?” My ankle throbbed more sharply, as if a double-edged sword swayed in my leg. Not wanting to show pain, I clenched my fist.
“The way you speak. I never finished high school.”
“Mark Twain never even went to high school.”
“He didn’t turn out so bad.”
There was a silence.
I didn’t let it sit. “I’m not planning on buying up land and closing off a part of the river.”
“If you did, I’d poach it anyway.”
“And supposing I had you arrested?”
“You? Be real.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothin’, except that I think I like you.”
Did I want him to? At least he also didn’t kill fish and also wanted to create beauty. Besides, he was helping me. At most, he could be only a little bad.
I asked, “So are you going to show me your shop?”
“Tomorrow, well, I’ll, ah, be workin’ in the car shop,” he said weakly.
Was there another reason he didn’t want me to come?
Billy helped get me inside the hospital. In the indoor light I saw he was suntanned or perhaps part of the long line of Lenni-Lanape Indians. I didn’t care which, or that his fingernails were dirty.
A pretty nurse tried to take off my wading boot. I screamed. The nurse got small scissors and slowly cut off my boot and sock. The doctor came over and asked if I could move my ankle.
“No.”
“It’s broken,” he said.
“I brought him here so you could take an x-ray,” Billy said.
“I see enough already.”
The doctor put on a cast and gave me a pair of crutches. I stood up.
“Ian, put your arm around me,” Billy said.
“No,” the nurse insisted. “He has to learn to walk by himself.”
Using the crutches, I limped to the car. Billy drove me to the lodge.
“What time’s your train tomorrow?” he asked.
I told him.
“I’ll stop by and give you a lift to the station.”
“In a borrowed car?”
He laughed. “Yes. One I’m workin’ on. It needs a test ride.”