I found them in the bar of Peace and Plenty, which was where all the other lodge anglers were. They had gone fishing early and had been driven in by the weather around the same time we were. Becky had asked their guide, a young Bahamian named Steve Ferguson, if bonefish bit well during storms, and Steve had given her this oracular answer: “The bonefish is a peace-lovin’ fish, mon. He don’ like fuss. He like to be swimmin’ along on the bottom just mellowtatin’.”
We did a little mellowtating of our own in the bar, and again I bought Tony a number of Kaliks to help soothe his disappointment over the still-missing boat part.
Around six we all headed back to Barre Terre with a friend of mine from Atlanta and his wife, who were staying at Peace and Plenty. It was the friend’s fiftieth birthday, a noble occasion, and we had decided to celebrate it at Norman’s Fishermen’s Inn. We did that, with an enormous meal and many and various libations, and at ten-thirty the Grays, Tom Montgomery, Tony, and I got into Tony’s boat to go back to Clove Key. That is normally a fifteen-minute boat ride, but with the roaring wind and steep, high-tide seas slowing us down, it took us thirty minutes of drenching, sobering pitching between the waves just to determine that we would certainly swamp long before we ever made Clove Key. We returned ignominiously to Norman’s, and no one there seemed to have noticed we had left. The Grays went off to bed in Norman’s spare bedroom. Tom and I took our night’s rest in the van, along with a ripening bag of ballyhoo I had bought in Georgetown for bait in the blue water, if and when we managed to fish there.
Steve Ferguson had told the Grays that this was only the second day in five years of fishing that weather had forced him off the water. And it was the first time ever that Tony had not been able to make it out to Clove Key. For Tom and me as we stiffened and chilled in the van, one cheering prospect seemed certain—the weather could only improve.
But it didn’t. Here, in a mercifully abbreviated version of my journal notes, is an account of the next five days. (For the record, I would love to have thrown a few screaming reels into this account, but journalistic standards would not allow that.)
Sunday, March 14. We leave Barre Terre and make it around the point at six-thirty on a low tide, though the seas and wind are still frighteningly high. Tony’s boat running on only two cylinders now, so it takes over an hour to get out to Clove Key, where Patricia, Greta, and Scott had a sleepless, panicky night, wondering if we had drowned and how they would get off the island if we had. Phone is out at the house, so we couldn’t call last night. Phone also out at Norman’s, though no one there cares.
Real travelers travel for the journey, not the destination, I remind everyone after we have taken hot showers and had some breakfast, after Tony leaves to go try to get his boat fixed, as we sit staring out at the whipping palm fronds and roiled, unfishable water; and that important bit of philosophy seems to cheer everyone up. Our glass is half full, not half empty, I add. We are not prisoners of this island, but here to enjoy all of its subtle and unexpected pleasures . . . “Please, Charles,” Becky says then in a small voice, and I realize that my job is done: I have raised all of our spirits as far as they are going to go for the time being.
In the afternoon a thin young man shows up in a turned-around baseball cap and a Bob Marley tank top. This is Bertram, one of Tony’s eleven brothers, and he has come in yet another Whaler belonging to another of those brothers. “Tony,” says Bertram, “is working on his boat. . . would anyone like to go fishing?”
A few of us troll for a while in the cuts with Bertram, provoking one swirl from a small barracuda.
Delicious grilled chicken and peas and rice for dinner tonight, with a couple of bracing Pinot Grigios. Then Patricia, Becky, and Greta bundle up in all the clothes they can find and go down to the dock to fish for big jacks with conch, one of the many pleasurable options on this do-it-yourself fishing vacation. Ed, Scott, Tom, and I stay behind in the house, hard at another of those options, drinking rum. We enjoy more success with our option than the girls do with theirs: they are back in an hour with wind-chilled faces but no jacks.
Monday, March 15. Still as windy as Tierra del Fuego and cold, the wind having swung now into the northeast. But our hopes are stirred by a few breaks in the clouds. Tony is back, his boat running better, but still no part for the Outrage. We go out to a few little flats to look for bones in the morning. Too windy and cloudy to see, even if there had been anything on the flats other than one lonely leopard ray.
Back at the house for an inspired lunch of deviled eggs and lobster salad that Patricia and Greta put together. The sun comes out for an hour and we all run to the lee deck of the house to sit greedily in it.
In the afternoon, Ed and Becky and I go out with Tony to look for bonefish again. We walk four or five flats without finding a fish, and then come to a final flat, in a lee, just as the late sun slides out from behind the clouds. It is a coral flat, which means the water will be warmer than that on the sand flats, and with sun to see and little wind in the lee, I decide we may have a chance here and determine to bring my thirty years of bonefishing experience and all of my skills to bear at once. I choose a rod with a gray line to minimize the flash from casting; tie up a new sixteen-foot leader tapered to six pounds; choose a secret-weapon fly given to me years ago by a withered old Exuma pro. I put the sun at my back and wade out carefully, my osprey eyes scanning for wakes, or the sparkle of tails, or the chimerical little fish themselves, whose shapes can often seem willed up, formed from under the shimmering skin of water as surprisingly and suddenly as ideas. And then . . . I walk right over the only school of fish any of us have seen in four days—run over them like a cement truck and send forty little unformed ideas scattering. Tony seems a bit sour for some reason on the yawing boat ride back to the house.
Greta, Scott, and Bertram spend the afternoon productively diving for lobster and catching bottomfish. They bring back seven lobsters, three triggerfish, and fourteen snapper, almost all of which we grill and eat with fish cakes Greta makes from the remaining snapper, a soup Patricia makes from chicken bones, pasta, a salad, and a brilliant Becky Gray hollandaise. Our gourmandizing anyway is still on a high plane, and is a solace.
Patricia comes to bed delightedly happy and finds me glum. She has spent her day sketching, picking flowers, gathering shells, and reading books on tropical fish. With no particular agenda here, since she rarely cares to fish, she is truly enjoying the journey, just as I counseled her to do. One definition, I decide, of a good, do-it-yourself fishing destination is that it is a place where everything that can go wrong can do so and yet some (perhaps simpleminded) member of your party with low to no expectations will still feel that he or she is on vacation.
Tuesday, March 16. Weather desperate again—no light and a raging wind, now from the east, that seems determined to wreck us from every point of the compass.
Basically, we sit around all day. Ed and Becky do a little digressive trolling in the morning: one ’cuda strike. Tom takes more pictures of stormy weather and all of us sitting around. Tony gone; Outrage part not here; and Bertram’s younger brother’s boat running rough. Everyone still having fun, though—all glasses here still proudly half-full.
In the afternoon, Tricia, Greta, Scott, and I go snapper fishing with Bertram in a heaving sea. I show them my special, tried-and-true bottom-fishing technique of lifting the bait just off the bottom and jigging it, but somehow we catch fewer fish than they did yesterday.
Good fish-cake sandwiches for lunch. Bertram fries some barracuda for dinner. We are out of wine.
After dinner we try out titles for a magazine story I am obliged by contract to write about our experiences here. “The Curse of the Mellowtating Bonefish” is one. “Jerome’s Revenge,” is another—Jerome being a friend of ours whom we were forced to bump from coming along on this trip.
Wednesday, March 17. The worst weather yet! Gale-force winds out of the southeast, electrical storms, and astonishing amounts of rain. It’s like being
locked in the movie Key Largo with no way out.
A status report on the fishing prospects: Tony is gone again; we haven’t seen him in two days. His seventeen-foot Whaler is here, but it now has a hole in the bottom, making it useless; the Outrage part has not arrived and I’m convinced never will; and the boat belonging to Bertram’s younger brother is now completely on the blink and also unusable. In short, we no longer have any way to fish: so much for that. We are grateful, however, that there are still many pleasurable options left to us.
The highlight of the morning was watching the cat eat a baby chicken and then go pee in Ed’s suitcase all over his tackle. I asked Greta if she thought that was an omen.
She and Scott have to leave this afternoon to spend the night at Peace and Plenty in order to make their early-morning flight to Fort Lauderdale tomorrow—if, that is, we can figure out how to get them off the island. Poor Scott has not exactly had the trip he envisioned when he spent $300 on bonefish flies back in Jackson Hole. As for Greta—I will no doubt hear her impressions of the fishing in the near future.
This afternoon Patricia, Greta, and I take a little family walk around the island to appreciate some of its subtle, unexpected pleasures. I fall through a piece of weak coral and badly carve up my left leg. Have to use my photogenic bandana to stanch the bleeding, then find a stick for a cane to hobble back to the house.
Phone here is permanently down, but somehow Bertram shows up in still another boat in time to get Greta and Scott back to Exuma before dark. The rest of us stand on the dock in the pouring rain waving good-bye, suspecting that the kids will be miserable at Peace and Plenty tonight after their do-it-yourself fishing adventure, but wishing them well. We have little food left, and no milk or bread. But it doesn’t matter, since no one is much in the mood to cook anyway. We imagine Greta and Scott in the bar at Peace and Plenty, having to put up with all that forced lodge gaiety, then going into the very good little restaurant overlooking pretty Elizabeth Harbor and having to order a meal. . . and we feel, well, a twinge of sympathy for them.
Tom and Bertram go out late with flashlights to capture and photograph three big gray land crabs. We put them in a bucket with some food to sustain them, as we may very well have to eat them.
Thursday, March 18. We can’t fish, of course—haven’t been able to for days. Nor can we snorkel or swim in the cold, wind-whipped water. My leg, which may be infected, is too sore to go looking for any more unexpected pleasures the island might hold, but we have two days left here. Luckily, Patricia and I remember when we wake and stare up at the chameleon on our ceiling, wondering how we will get through the next forty-eight hours, that the beautiful sea and beach are still outside and can be looked at. So we go down to the dock and sit there in the rain and wind, looking at the sea and beach. The beach, we admit after a while, looks remarkably like a used handkerchief; and the sea is the poisonous milky blue of antifreeze—an interesting color, perhaps, but not exactly beautiful.
At breakfast Tom offers another title suggestion for my story: “Fishing for Godot.”
At nine o’clock, Tony, our Godot, calls Bertram . . . calls (the phone, magically, is working again, and after Tony hangs up we all scramble to be the first to stick a finger in it and call anyone) and instructs Bertram to pick him up immediately in Barre Terre and deliver him to Clove Key. We have not seen Tony since Monday and wonder what he possibly could want. But he and Bertram never return, so we don’t find out.
Over a fairly grim lunch made up of the last leftovers in the house, we decide that we are almost certainly part of a control experiment on deprivation response being conducted by Tony and his family for the University of the Bahamas psychology department. Of course! Why didn’t we see it before? we ask ourselves. Take these simple, childlike Americans to Clove Key, Tony was obviously instructed, cut off the boats, the fishing, the phone, the wine, and finally the food, and let’s see what shakes out. Patricia even points out that the sophisticated methodology of the Outrage—continuing to dangle it day after day as a possibility—is classic child psychology. Determined to meet whatever fate awaits us at the end of the experiment as calmly as possible, we all take long naps after lunch.
At five-thirty, Bertram and one of his younger brothers pop over and drop off an unlikely load of groceries—lettuce, eggs, ice cream, cookies, and candy bars. It is, we see darkly, the sugar water in the rat’s cage, the test-prolonging appeasement of sweets. But with no longer any culinary pride left, we eat it all anyway for dinner, washed down with the last of our vodka, and go to bed wondering what will become of us.
Friday, March 19. I realize before I open my eyes that something is radically different. I lie in bed and concentrate. There is no . . . wind! For the first time in a week there is no wind moaning and rattling over the house. I sit up and look outside: the palm fronds are still, and there is a splash of sun on the deck! I leap out of bed and shake Patricia, fairly slobbering with joy.
“It’s over! They’ve called off the Clove Key Experiment—we’ve beaten them!”
“What?” Patricia says.
“The sun is shining. The wind is down. We’re saved—we can fish,” I shout.
Bertram appears at nine, a bit hung over, it seems. Tony, he says, is coming too, in his own now-repaired boat, and will be here within the hour. We wait on the dock, basking in a morning as perfect as a baby’s toe, as soft as a catkin. And Tony does show within an hour in a grand mood, pointing out the glories of the day as if he had arranged for them, and maybe he had. Because of those very glories, no one can possibly be in a mood to say anything to him other than “Let’s go fishing.”
So this is the strange truth about how we came to be on that gorgeous little bonefish flat described at the beginning of my story, at 11:00 A.M. on our last day in the Bahamas, just as the tide began to come in and with it hordes of bonefish. And here is further truth about what happened there.
As mentioned, we started wading the flat with the sun, breeze, and tide behind us, spotting bonefish in numbers. There was no good reason for them to be there on that flat, with the water still cold and discolored, but there they were . . .
Just as we had known they would be, really, when we sat up the night before planning our strategy for the next day. Anyway, now that there were finally fish within reach of our long rods, the three of us knew exactly what to do, and we did it. We picked the little flat clean, and then moved on to another one behind Barre Terre that Ed and I had chosen the night before for the clearing weather we knew was coming. As we stepped out of the boat, we could almost feel the lurking presence of Mister Bone. And as soon as we spread out and began walking the flat, we started picking up a school here, a pair of gorillas there. I put a cast to the second school I saw, dropping one of my secret Surething ties as soft as a whisper three feet in front of the lead fish. I let the fly sink and waited until the school was over it; twitched it once, twice; and then—I’ll never know how this happened—three fish grabbed it at the same time and headed for Cuba . . .
THE CONVERSION OF EPSTEIN
WE FINALLY LEFT THE DOCK AT COZUMEL AT 9:00 A.M. and were tossing around in the strait a thousand yards off the coast of Yucatán by ten. There was not a single trout angler in sight, and that was just fine with Epstein.
In fact there wasn’t any kind of angler in sight, though this was May and the middle of the annual sailfish run. A thirty-knot wind was blowing, there were eight-to-ten-foot seas running in the strait, and nobody but José wanted any part of it. All those fifty-foot Strikers and Merritts and Hatterases sitting back there at the dock like a meeting of the board of directors of the Bass Weejun Company, and every one of their captains with something else to do today but fish. Including the guy Epstein and I had chartered: Emilio.
“Ees too windy. Maybe mañana,” Emilio had said and gone back to cleaning the already spotless cabin of the fifty-two-foot Egg Harbor he captained. It belonged to a man from Pennsylvania—a trout angler, Epstein was sure, who had instruct
ed Emilio never to go fishing when the wind was blowing.
I had reminded Emilio that we had to leave mañana, and also that neither Epstein nor I had yet caught a sailfish on a fly rod. That was what we had come down here to do, but for the past two days we had let Emilio and the wind keep us from trying, and had settled for catching sail after sail on twenty-pound trolling tackle. Today was our last chance.
“Good-bye,” Emilio had said to that, and closed the cabin door.
More seriously, it was fishing’s last chance with Epstein. Epstein had given up fishing almost two years before. Until this week he hadn’t touched a rod since a July afternoon when a long-simmering hatred for what he called “trout anglers” had finally boiled over.
We had been fishing emergers on a snobbish little brook in Vermont, the guest of George Talbot, a man I knew who was always talking about “riseforms” and his latest reading of Dame Juliana, but was otherwise, to my mind, okay. Not to Epstein’s mind, however. He and Talbot had developed a strong antipathy for each other over the course of the two days we fished together, and I was much relieved at the end of the second day when it appeared that Epstein and I were going to get back to New Hampshire without any outright unpleasantness between the two of them.
Talbot and I had been taking down our rods, talking peacefully beside his car in the warm dusk with a bottle of Beam on the hood between us when Epstein came galumphing out of the brook, his forefinger stuck through the bleeding gills of a large brown trout.
“Look at this,” he shouted to me. “Do you believe this fish came out of this pissant little stream?” He tossed the trout at our feet, where it pitched feebly a couple of times in the dust.
Talbot looked at the fish, then up at me, his face pale. “Do you intend to kill this lovely fish?” he asked Epstein without looking at him.
“You bet, pal,” said Epstein happily. “Kill it and eat it.”
The Next Valley Over Page 11