The Longest Silence

by Thomas McGuane

  MOST REELS are sold to the public by suggesting some unheard-of emergency involving a running fish and guaranteeing that this reel is the only available product capable of bringing the trophy to a standstill before it changes area codes. Right now, a large variety of magnificent reels is available to choose from. Most have one thing in common: they’re far better than they need to be. Reels evolve slowly: the ninety-year-old Vom Hofes are still among the best. I have a number of Pfleuger Medalists made in Ohio, and even in the most awful conditions they have never failed me. There were Japanese knockoffs of these reels and they’re great, too. Though built to appalling tolerances, they keep on ticking.

  The backing on a trout reel usually dies of old age before it sees the light of day. Rarely does a salmon or steelhead go a hundred yards, yet most reels designed for this purpose carry a quarter-mile of backing. If a tarpon, permit, or bonefish gets more than a hundred yards from you, your problems have nothing to do with your backing. The last time I got spooled was on the Henry’s Fork when a big rainbow got downstream where I couldn’t wade after it. It didn’t matter how much backing I had, I was meant to view the spindle.

  I’m not sure about the great drag systems, either. I don’t believe any freshwater reel needs a drag at all. A good, strong click will suffice. Anyone who is not enough of a hand to palm the reel or put a couple of fingers through the arbor is already fighting a fish too big for him.

  Leader strength is based as much on margin of error for nicks and abrasions as it is on real breaking strength. Many anglers feel that the ultra-thin leader materials now available do not equal their breaking-strength counterparts because the thin stuff weakens steeply if at all abraded. There is a very long list of things which can quickly change the breaking strength of tippets; touching bottom, hinging at the knots, scraping on teeth and gill plates, and so on. The real reason why many anglers, especially steelheaders and salmon anglers who cast a lot between bites, stick with the low-tech stuff is this: it doesn’t have to be terribly heavy because there are few rods which are comfortable to cast that can break anything over a ten-pound test at all.

  As to flies, I asked the greatest trout fisherman of my era, who is himself an out-of-control proliferator of equipment and technical doodads, what percentage of his annual catch would remain if he were reduced to Adamses and Gold-Ribbed Hare’s Ear nymphs. His answer: “Certainly over ninety percent.” When pressed about the staggering variety of patterns available in his fly shop, he said, “I don’t sell flies to fish.”

  I’ve become fairly avid about my fly-tying because it is, as I do it, a modest craft that I can master. More importantly, it enables me to tie flies that look exactly right to me, which means I will fish them with conviction. For example, my usual searching pattern combines several favorite traits: moosehair tail, because there’s something that feels right about those crisp black fibers; the body is wrapped turkey quill barbs as on my first favorite fly, the Borcher Special, a Michigan favorite; white calf-body hair wings, à la the Wulff flies; brown and grizzly palmered hackle as on an Adams. When looking at it, I believe I’m going to catch a fish. That feeling affects the way I cast and read water. You have to have that feeling, wait-and-see being an approach preferred by losers. If you are anxious to kick major butt on your local stream or lake, try my fabulous fly. It turns blank days into bonanzas, depression into jubilation.

  In fishing, many traits separate the men from the boys, but in my opinion, one thing we should all work toward is what I would call, for want of a better term, smoothness. Many of the great anglers I have fished with have had this trait above all others and it is the one thing that I continually strive for. This is the trait that unites sportsmen as diverse as the Grand Prix driver Juan Fangio, who was so smooth he rarely strained the cars he drove, golfers like Bobby Jones, and baseball players like Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. There are always a few anglers blessed with genius and inspiration: towering casters, lead-footed deep river waders, anglers with astounding vision, and so on. But the angler who accepts both his gifts and limitations, who recognizes the importance of keeping his fly in the water, who abjures tackle tinkering once he reaches the river, and who strives to fish coherently throughout the day will usually, finally, succeed. Steelhead and salmon fishing exaggerate the importance of this. And sometimes, relatively unskilled anglers who are otherwise persistent and capable of sustained focus will outfish flashier types, better casters and even more experienced companions. I have seen steelhead rivers act with great leveling effect, rewarding the scrupulous-if-limited anglers and penalizing mere technicians, tackle nuts, distance casters, and fishing experts. A great angler like Bill Schaadt was a tremendous caster, an outstanding schemer and intimate with the rivers he fished, but what impressed me about him the few times we fished together was that he was tougher and more persistent than anybody I’d ever seen. He kept the fly in the water longer than anyone, ever. He was smooth and efficient. All of his strength and talent—indeed the overall design of his life—was at the service of keeping the fly fishing, which begins with casting a straight line. There are armchair anglers who can cast four kinds of curve but never a straight line except in dead still conditions. A late start in the morning prevents the fly from fishing; a crooked cast delays a fly from fishing; fly changing, leisurely meals and a forgotten bailing can all play a part in separating the fly from its job. Schaadt’s term was “lost motion.” Every angler should strive for its elimination, not so as to become an automaton but to facilitate smoothness.

  Why do fishermen lie? This interesting question ought to be dealt with because it’s the single thing we are most famous for among the general public. I have a hunch that most anglers do not wish to compete but have found no successful way to avoid competition when fishing with others. I, for example, do not wish to compete and therefore do most of my fishing alone so that I may better absorb its mysteries, poetry, and intimations of mortality. On many occasions, however, I find myself fishing with others and it is then that I helplessly find myself competing, crowing at hookups, admiring some great thing about my tackle when I really mean myself. The lone angler, or even the one who just scooted around the bend from his companions, may fish and dawdle as he pleases, take in the migratory birds, the soaring hawk, the hunting mink, the glancing light on the riffle, the sound of a hollow bank. He may even catch fish. Moreover, upon meeting up with his retinue, he may dispense with matters of competition by lying about his results. How did he do? “Major poundage. A semi-load.” The most incredulous of his comrades have probably come by their disbelief honestly: they’ve been lying, too. So, all is well. A day in the life has been suitably taken in, and in this avalanche of lies, a kind of truth has been served. The only people any the wiser are the general public.

  Sons

  BOTH MY PARENTS were Irish Catholics from Massachusetts. My father had had enough of the Harp Way and was glad to get out of there and move to Michigan. My mother never accepted it and would have been happy to raise a nest of Micks anywhere between Boston and New Bedford. Every summer she did the next best thing and packed us children up and took us “home” to Fall River. My father seemed glad to watch us go. I still see him in our driveway with the parakeet in its cage, trying unsuccessfully to get my mother to take the bird too so he wouldn’t even have to hang around long enough to feed it. At the end of the summer, when we returned from Massachusetts, the bird would be perched in there but it was never the same bird. It was another $3.95 blue parakeet but without the gentleness of our old bird. When we reached into the cage to get our friend, we usually got bitten.

  We traveled on one of the wonderful lake boats that crossed Lake Erie to Buffalo, and I remember the broad interior staircases and the brassbound window through which one contemplated the terrific paddlewheels. I hoped intensely that a fish would be swept up from deep in the lake and brought to my view but it never happened. Then we took the train, I guess it must’ve been to Boston. I mostly recall my rapture as we swept thro
ugh the eastern countryside over brooks and rivers that I knew were the watery world of the fish and turtles I cared so madly about. One of these trips must have been made during hard times, because my mother emphasized that there was only enough money for us children to eat; and it is true that we had wild highs and lows as my father tried to build a business.

  Many wonderful things happened during my endless summers with my grandmother, aunts, and uncles in Fall River, but for present purposes, I am thinking only of fishing. Those original images are still so burning that I struggle to find a proper syntax for them. In the first, my father arrived and took me up to see some shirttail cousins up in Townsend. A little brook passed through their backyard and, lying on my stomach, I could look into one of its pools and see tiny brook trout swimming. It was something close to the ecstasy I felt when I held my ear against the slots of the toaster and heard a supernal music from heaven ringing through the toaster springs. The brook trout were water angels and part of the first America, the one owned by the Indians, whose music I’d listened to in the toaster. I had seen the old Indian trails, their burial mounds and the graves of settlers killed in the French and Indian wars. For some reason, I understood the brook trout had belonged to the paradise the Indians had fought to keep. I knew King Phillip—or Metacomet, as the Indians called him—had eaten them.

  All this seemed to be part of a lost world, like the world I was losing as my father became more absorbed in his work. We had good times together only when fish were present, and those brook trout are the first memories. It was casually easy for us to get along fishing; the rest was a bomb. I think of the fathers-and-sons day at his athletic club with particular loathing, as it was an annual ordeal. Silver dollars were hurled into the swimming pool for the boys to vie for. Each father stood by the pool, gazing at the writhing young divers and waiting for his silver-laden son to surface. Rarely coming up with a coin, I was conscious of appearing to be less than an altogether hale boy and hardly worth bringing to this generational fête, with its ventriloquists and Irish tenors or more usually, the maniacal Eddie Peabody on the banjo. All of this was an aspect of the big dust we were meant to make in our mid-American boom town where sport of the most refined sort quickly sank into alcoholic mayhem. Steaks in the backyard, pill-popping housewives, and golf were the order of the day, and many youngsters sought to get their fathers away somewhere in search of a fish. Most of our fathers were just off the farm or out of small towns and heading vertically upward into a new world. We didn’t want them to go and we didn’t want to go with them.

  I thought that if I devised a way to free my father from his rigorous job, we could fish more. I saw an ad for a Hart, Shaffner and Marx suit that said it was for the man who wanted to look like he would make ten thousand a year before he was thirty. (Remember, this was many years ago.) I told my father that he ought to make ten thousand a year, then ten thousand a year in eleven months, then ten thousand a year in ten months and so on, and with this properly earned free time, he and I would go fishing together more often. “With an attitude like that,” my father boomed, “you’d never make ten thousand a year in the first place.”

  None of this mattered in Massachusetts. Across Brownell Street from my grandmother, between Main and Almy, lived Jimmy McDermott, an elegant Irish bachelor and his spinster sister, Alice. They seemed very sophisticated and witty, especially compared to their immediate neighbors, the Sullivans, who were unreconstructed Irish, with a scowling mother in a black shawl and an impenetrable brogue. Jimmy McDermott took me fishing and bought me my first reel, a beautiful Penn Senator surf-casting reel whose black density seemed to weigh coolly in my hands. Jimmy McDermott detected that I needed someone to take me fishing.

  He thought it was crazy for a boy who loved to fish to be hanging around Brownell Street in Fall River in August, so he packed a lunch and we went fishing for tautog along some small and lonely beach with its granite outcroppings and sunshot salty fog and tidal aromas. We caught several fish on the fierce green crabs we used for bait and I heard about several more, because Jimmy was the sort of person who made sure at such a sacramental moment as angling that the full timbre of the thing must be appreciated by the recounting of such holy incidents in time, of striped bass and flounders, the gloomy conger eel who filled three skillets with grease or the rich sports in the old days who baited their bass rigs with small lobsters. A Portuguese family picnicked on the nearby strand, and in my somewhat more global view today I think of us amusing ourselves on that mare nostrum, the Atlantic Ocean, casting our hopes on those ancestral waters toward Ireland, the Azores, toward the Old World. The sea heaved up around our rocks, pulling a white train of foam from mid-ocean along with its mysteries of distance and language, drownings, caravels, unwitnessed thousand-foot thunderheads, phosphorous and fish by the square mile.

  IT IS A GREAT TRIUMPH over something—biology, maybe, or whatever part of modern history has prolonged adolescence to the threshold of senility—for a father to view his son without skepticism. I have not quite achieved this state but at least have identified the problem. Therefore, when I stood at the airport in Cancún and watched my frequently carefree son emerge with several disintegrating carry-on bags and his shirt hanging out of his pants, I did not take this altogether as a sign of complete disorganization.

  When we hugged, because he’s so much stronger, he rather knocked the wind out of me. And when we made our way to the small aircraft that would take us to Ascension Bay, I asked if he had practiced his casting. “Once,” he said.

  “These aren’t trout,” I said. “A thirty-foot cast doesn’t get it.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he smiled. “I don’t expect to have any problem with bonefish.”

  “How can you say that?” I asked. “You’ve never seen one before, you don’t know how tough they can be.” He smiled again, knowing exactly how to drive me crazy.

  We had a comfortable, really wonderful cottage with cool concrete walls and a roof of thatched monkey palm. Birds were everywhere and the blue Caribbean breakers rose high enough that you could look right through them, then fell. Just past the line of breakers, the coral garden seemed like a submerged quilt.

  Thomas was slow in getting ready to fish. He was bent over the sink, doing something and taking too long about it. I said we ought to hurry up and head for the boat. I said it twice and he straightened up from the sink holding a pale green scorpion he had just extracted from the drain. “In case you were thinking of brushing your teeth,” he said, and grabbed his rod.

  Our guide was a Maya Indian named Pedro, a solid fifty-year-old of easygoing authority. I thought of a Little Compton voice of yester-year—“We’ve been here for generations”—Pedro’s family had been on the shores of this bay since thousands of years before Christ. As Pedro was a mildly intolerant man, all business, one soon learned not to pester him with trifles. I did ask if he had ever visited the United States.

  “I’ve never been to Mexico,” he said coolly.

  Walking to the boat, I was excited to see a lineated woodpecker who loves to eat Aztec ants from their home in the hollow pumpwood tree. A brave soul, he defends his nest against toucans. Ruddy ground doves scattered along our trail and we saw the splendid chacalaca on the edge of the jungle, noisy as a chicken in flight. When we set out in the skiff, mangrove swallows scattered across the narrow channels. My son explained to me that some birds had taken to flying upside down over New York City because “there was nothing worth shitting on.” Birds have much to tell us.

  Pedro ran the skiff through the shallow water wilderness with the air he seemed to bring to everything, an absence of ambiguity. There was no scanning the horizon or searching for signs. If a tremulous ridge of tidal movement betrayed a shoal in our path, Pedro adjusted his angle of travel without ever looking in the direction of the hazard.

  When we emerged completely from the congestion of cays, remarkably similar bands of pale blue, of sky and sea, stretched before us at a sublime sca
le, white tropical clouds reaching upward to heavenly elevations. A scattering of small islands lay in the distance.

  I was still thinking of Pedro’s answer about never having been to Mexico. Quintana Roo was his country. In my minimal Spanish, I decided to pose a peculiar question. “Pedro, to us this is an extraordinary place, a beautiful place. But you have never been anywhere else. My question is this: Do you realize and appreciate that you live in one of the world’s great places?” He pulled his head back and, pursing his lips to state the obvious, said in an impassioned growl, “Sí, señor!”

  Thomas was in the bow of the boat, line stripped out, and Pedro was poling along a muddy bank near the mangroves. A squadron of bonefish had come out of the light, our blind side, and flushed in a starburst of wakes. It wasn’t really a shot, so Thomas remained in the bow, ready. After a while, I felt Pedro kick the stem of the bow out to position him and declare, “macabi”—bonefish—in his quiet but insistent way that made it clear he expected no screw-ups. We stared hard, testing Pedro’s patience, then made out the bonefish about seventy feet away. He was feeding slowly, his back out of water at times and his tail glittering when he swirled deliberately in the shallows to feed. The fish came almost to a stop, faced right, then moved steadily but imperceptibly forward. The bonefish seemed to be staring at the skiff.

  This seemed like a tough prospect: the water was much too thin, the fish insufficiently occupied; and since he was alone, his green-and-silver shape all too clear, I couldn’t imagine the bonefish would tolerate the slightest imperfection of technique.

  Thomas was false-casting hard. Faced with such a good fish, his intensity was palpable throughout the boat. I told him he’d only get one shot at this fish, treading the parental thin line of reminding him of the present importance without exaggerating its difficulty. He released the cast. His loop reached out straight, turned over, and the fly fell about four inches in front of the bonefish.