The Next Valley Over

by Charles Gaines

  We misunderstand heaven indeed.

  The idea had been to start at the top of Florida and fish to the other end, casting as wide a net as possible in just under three weeks. Photographer Tom Montgomery and I had performed a similar road-angling exercise in Montana nearly two years earlier, and that trip had been a spirited, movable feast of friends coming and going, memorable encounters, meals and lodgings, with some very good fishing serving sort of to cleanse the palate between courses. We would sally forth to feast again, thought Tom and I, this time on the nearly limitless angling possibilities of Florida in the month of May—with other pilgrims, with carefree hearts, with the insatiable appetite of skill. . .

  And this time, too, as it turned out, with the yapping black mutt that had lived underneath my bed all winter.

  At first Jimbo Meador believed the dog was his, but I knew all along the ugly scoundrel was mine and it was just pissing on Jimbo’s tires. It started doing that right out of the gate. Tom and I had just arrived in the happening little town of Apalachicola, driving down from Tallahassee in a rented Gulf Stream blue Chevrolet Lumina, and were having a drink in the convivial bar of the Gibson Inn when Jimbo called to say his car had blown a gasket in Pensacola. It was about 6:30 P.M., the first day of the trip; the dog hadn’t even unpacked yet.

  Jimbo talks like Forrest Gump, which is not surprising since that fictional character—created by Winston Groom, one of Jimbo’s closest friends—was partially inspired by him (the non-idiot part, Jimbo would point out), and since Tom Hanks studied Jimbo’s voice to prepare for the role. As far as I’m concerned, Jimbo should be studied by all movie actors and other impressionable young people, and not just for his voice. In fact, he ought to be a mandatory course called something like “The True and Vanishing Southern Gentleman and Ail-Around Outdoorsman 101.”

  As a regional business manager for the Orvis Company, part of Jimbo’s job is fishing, and much of that fishing is done in north Florida. He had organized the first three destinations of our trip, and had volunteered his vehicle, a nineteen-foot Hewes tunnel skiff, and his own self to go along with Tom and me for at least the first week. A Jimbo breakdown was serious bad news.

  “Don’t worry,” he told me over the phone. “We’ll figure something out.” I found that advice easier to take than it might have been, since Happy Hour at the Inn had gone into fifth gear.

  On the big front porch of the Gibson, the drink-carrying men and women were all nice looking and had smug, in-on-the-ground-floor looks on their faces. Circulating in the bar around a bouncy piano were ruddy-cheeked men with red suspenders, Rolexes, and ponytails, and women in tight shorts and Lily Pulitzer green and yellow. Tom and I took our solace among them for a while, and then in the excellent dining room. And in the night, sure enough, Jimbo arrived with the skiff but no car.

  And so did another of our group, my old friend Bob Carlson, M.D., stumbling into the room we shared around 2:00 A.M., his customary six to eight hours late. I turned on the light and watched him arrange his black Ninja throwing knives on the table between our beds and put his brass knuckles and .38 Smith & Wesson in the drawer. Carlson has a strong antipathy toward becoming a victim of violence.

  “The fishing’s going to be great,” he told me. “I feel lucky.”

  In fact, the fishing over the next two days was the best Tommy Robinson had seen in more than three months; and for a few hours on the second day, the sight fishing for tailing redfish was the best he had ever seen, a fact that wound up causing him as much frustration as joy since he was guiding Carlson, me, and the black dog.

  Robinson was a colorful, highly regarded flats guide in Key West from ’78 to ’88, then a corporate pilot in Alabama and then a pilot/guide for a fly-out bonefishing operation in the Bahamas. In 1995 he made an inspired move to Apalachicola, starting a guiding business with his brother Chris and getting his real-estate license just as the values of property and sport-fishing began to appreciate. Now he can equip you with tackle out of his family-owned Orvis shop, guide you expertly, and then sell you the house you will probably want to buy after sampling the wonderful fishery he has practically to himself.

  In the Apalachicola River are bass and bream; offshore are king mackerel, cobia, amberjack, grouper, and snapper, and inshore, on the endless flats of Apalachicola and St. Joe Bays, are pompano, jack crevalle, speckled sea trout, and redfish. Owing to spectacularly successful conservation measures initiated within the past decade in the state of Florida, the latter two species are there now in numbers and sizes that haven’t been seen in years. We spent our two days with Tommy Robinson in St. Joe Bay, without another boat in sight even though it was a weekend, covered up in redfish and specs. But yea, though there were fishes everywhere, I either cast my line into the sea and caught not or I hooked up and boated not.

  Tom Montgomery fished with Jimbo. Carlson and I were in Tommy’s boat, a slick sixteen-foot Aluma Weld johnboat with a thirty-horsepower engine and poling platform. Up at Cape San Blas on the first day—a cloudless, windless, baby blue wet dream of a fishing day—we found big schools of redfish on perfect white sand flats just off a sugary beach. It was precisely what we were there for—sight fishing for tailing and cruising redfish. In that pursuit, as in bonefishing, you stand on the bow, fly rod in hand, line stripped out onto the deck, while your guide poles the boat and both of you look for fish as if for a cure for AIDS. It is a method of angling I know a little something about, having spent a ludicrous amount of my life practicing it, and I enjoy believing I am competent at it: a dinky little pride to own, perhaps, but a comforting and longstanding one that rarely leaves me feeling as I do after I rollerblade with my daughter.

  I caught one of the maybe two to three hundred redfish we saw on the flats that day, and so did Carlson. And Tommy Robinson, who is by nature a good-humored, chatty sort, seemed a bit wrung out and thoughtful on the run back in.

  The next day he kept telling Carlson not to reel the leader into the tip of his spinning rod before he cast. Carlson—an ex-college football player and wrestler with a temper and a fondness for weapons, to whom pain, both received and inflicted, is an old friend—just looked at him and smiled.

  Possibly Robinson’s attitude was a bit abrupt because he badly wanted a photograph of one of the big redfish we kept encountering, tailing or following rays across the turtle grass flats of St. Joe Bay, and Carlson and I were not helping out. I managed to hook the first one we saw, a fish of about fifteen pounds, and the fly pulled out of its mouth after two long runs. Then Carlson lost a couple on his spinning rod. Then I hooked two real lunkers in a row and gave the fly rod to Carlson so that he could fight the fish, but he was not accustomed to a direct-drive fly reel and broke both fish off. Then I hooked another monster and the fly pulled out of its mouth . . . There were big, hungry redfish feeding everywhere, their tails winking impertinently at us in the sun: Tom and Jimbo were catching them, but Carlson and I never put one in the boat.

  At one point I turned around to look at our captain and noted to myself that it was the first time I had ever actually seen anyone tearing his hair. “Don’t reel the goddam leader into the tip anymore” he shouted at Carlson. “I’ve been fishing all my life and I have never reeled the leader into the tip one time. You’ve done it at least forty times just today”

  Happily, Carlson was too engaged in the idiot’s fun he and I were having not catching fish to take offense; and later in the day he redeemed himself by catching a trophy six-pound yellow-mouthed speckled trout. I was already beyond redemption, knowing for certain now that the dog was along for the ride and that it was going to be a long trip.

  At the sublime Boss’s Oyster House that night, where the motto is “Shut Up and Shuck,” where the oysters are fixed in thirty different ways, where you hear people say things like “My friends call me Skeeter” and “I’m fixin’ to shoot pool with one eye,” I also heard someone say, “I might cain’t grow old gracefully in this business,” and I knew exactly what the ma
n meant.

  Tom and I drove east on the nearly deserted two-lane Highway 98 to Perry, and then south on 98/19 through old Florida towns like Athena, Tenille, and Shamrock, over the Sewannee River, through shaggy green country of pines, palmettos, and moss-bearded live oaks, past mom-and-pop seafood stores, old boats beached in sandy front yards, and broken-down pickups with cast nets in the beds, to Weeki Wachee—the geographical center of the state.

  Jimbo was supposed to be right behind us, towing the Hewes with a borrowed truck. When he hadn’t shown up in three hours we went to dinner. On a television in the bar of the restaurant I watched the black, canine-toothed weather symbol for a cold front closing down on Homosassa Bay, where we were supposed to fish for tarpon the next day. And when we got back to the motel we learned that Jimbo was broken down again up the coast, this time with frozen trailer bearings.

  Exhausted maybe from overwork, the dog took the next day off and stayed in the motel out of the rain and wind while Tom and I and Jimbo (on only two or three hours of sleep) went alternative fishing with Captain Mike Locklear, president and secretary of the Homosassa Guides’ Association. The annual throngs of migrating tarpon had not yet shown up in Homosassa Bay, though they were expected any time, and the cold front had shut down other saltwater options. So Mike Locklear took us to the jungly, peat-colored Chassahowitzka River, lush with white spider lilies and bird life, and we had a lovely, pointless, and dogless time there, fishing like boys from rented canoes for bass and red-breasted sunfish.

  As the man said, we misunderstand heaven, and the following day we were fishing with purpose again. Mike took us out in the bay on the clear, breezy tail end of the front, looking for cobia following rays on the flats. Both Tom in Jimbo’s skiff and I in Mike’s found a few and cast to them, and when they wouldn’t even look at the fly, much less eat it, no one was surprised but Mike.

  Fishing guides have different ways of dealing with angler adversities that can range, in my experience, from breaking a client’s inneffective rod in two and stomping it into the deck of the boat to deeply ambiguous silences. Mike was a soothing, anecdotal man, and as the unhungry cobia were followed by more refusals from a sheepshead, a jack, and a redfish, and then, after a change of flies, by hooking up with first one good redfish and then another, only to have them both spit the hook on tight lines, he only murmured, “Bad luck,” and went on with his story.

  But that night at dinner he told a tale that seemed somehow, in my mounting anxiety, to resonate with metaphorical comment. A burnt-looking friend of his named Ken, whom we had met on the dock that morning, had gone away to the navy and wasn’t the same when he came back. Now Ken owned practically nothing but a Labrador retriever and dozens of self-inflicted scars, acquired because he had come to enjoy cutting himself with a knife. The other day, said Mike, Ken had gotten into a fight and when his opponent pulled a knife on him Ken had grabbed it away and began cutting himself rapturously with it, sending the other man fleeing like a spooked redfish.

  As Tom and I pushed on south through more backroad old Florida, we passed a pickup near Hill ’N’ Dale that advertised its owner as a “Christian Equine Podiatrist”; and then, in the traffic of Tampa, an aged van with a pop-up top and a hand-lettered sign taped to the back window that read “Two Teepees, Looking for Squaw,” and gave the address and phone number of the driver, a shirtless Native American in his sixties or seventies with a hard face that gazed out, as contemptuous as Osceola’s, at the passing Cadillacs from Michigan and the Busch Gardens billboards. Up there among those billboards the new Florida advertised its smug, avaricious self with a picture of traffic stuck in a snowstorm in some bleak northern clime and the words “We Know Where You’re Coming From.”

  About two hours south of Tampa on Gasparilla Island is the town of Boca Grande, where the residents may know where you’re coming from but couldn’t care less. A peaceful, low-rise bastion of old money and old Florida pacing and reserve, Boca Grande is still not above claiming to be the tarpon capital of the world and, officially, tarpon were what we were there for. Privately, I was there at least as much for the emollients offered by the Gaspariila Inn, one of the state’s best resort hotels and a place of great old-fashioned character and comfort. After checking in to a cottage there, Tom and I went fishing, and Jimbo, who had arrived without incident this time, spent the afternoon on the phone trying to straighten out the mess this trip had made of his life.

  The tarpon fishing Boca Grande is best known for happens in midsummer in the deep water of the passes and is done using jigs or live bait. But from late April/early May through June, tarpon can also be found, sometimes in astonishing numbers, traveling and rolling on the surface of the Gulf from just off the beaches to four or five miles out, and these can be fished for with a fly rod. Which is what we intended to do, until we learned, with little surprise, that these “beach fish” were almost, but not quite, there yet. They were in Fort Myers, said Lew Morgan, and should move on up any day: the water temperature needed to be eighty-two degrees; it was now eighty-one.

  So Lew took Tom and me fishing that afternoon for redfish and snook in the backcountry of Charlotte Harbor. Within the first dozen casts I hooked a big redfish by a mangrove island, pulled him out from under the roots, and fought him for a fall five minutes before this one came unstuck. Lew glanced at me a little strangely when I told Tom that things were looking up. A little while later I even managed to bring a little snook all the way into the boat before a squall came up out of nowhere and drove us in.

  After searching all the next day for tarpon along the beaches and not finding any, Jimbo’s friend, the renowned Boca Grande tarpon guide Phil O’Bannon, told us they would probably arrive the next day, the day we had to leave—Jimbo to go home and Tom and I and the dog on to further angling misadventures. It was a shame we had to leave, he said, because when the fish first got there they were generally hungry. And plentiful: he had seen, he said, one hundred acres of tarpon rolling off the beaches. And easy: every cast could sometimes be a hookup.

  It was a turn of great good luck at last, I decided, that I would avoid the opportunity of losing so many fish. But if the dog appeared to be easing up on me, he raised his leg one last time on Jimbo, who discovered just before he left that his five-hundred-dollar graphite composite push pole had been lost or stolen off the boat.

  Or maybe buried like a bone.

  Only a short way out of Naples, headed south on the Tamiami Trail, the state goes suddenly from condo-user-friendly to impenetrable palmetto thickets, sawgrass barrens, and twisting, mosquito-clouded waterways, and even at sixty miles an hour it is clear why Osceola could be captured only by a U.S. Army deceit.

  Everglades City is very old Florida. Maybe too old. I spent a few runaway months there writing an epic poem when I was seventeen, and the place is just as tatty and forlorn now as it was then. At the languorous old Rod and Gun Club, where Harry Truman dedicated into existence the Everglades National Park in 1949, a group of owl-eyed fishing guides and their clients were celebrating the conclusion of a three-day fishing tournament. As Tom and I ate dinner, we watched the awards being presented. “Most unusual fish” went to Arlene someone, with cute legs, for her flounder. She came up laughing adorably and said the trophy was bigger than the feeish. Then Bobbie Sutter won biggest redfish. She walked up to get her trophy looking sheepish, but flashed me a defiant expression when she caught me staring at her, perhaps mistaking my envy for lust.

  The next morning we met guide Pete Villani and his friend Mike McComas at the dock on Chokoloskee Island, a tiny jump-off for fishing the Everglades and the Ten Thousand Islands that has become the place to be du jour among fed-up Keys guides and other Florida fishing cognoscenti. In Pete’s Silver King and Mike’s johnboat, carrying enough gear and food for two and a half days and two nights in the Glades, we ran an hour and a half from Chokoloskee to the Rodgers River chickee. Built in the water on pilings by the Park Service as one of a number of managed camp sites thro
ughout the Everglades, the chickee was two wooden roofed platforms about eighteen by twelve feet, connected by a walkway with an outhouse in the middle, twenty-eight nautical miles out in the largest roadless wilderness and second largest national park in the United States.

  We unloaded the gear and set up two tents on one of the platforms, saving the other platform for cooking and eating. Then, with a bit of eagerness for a change, I rigged up my fly rod. Exhilarated by the winding ride out through the mangroves, the alligators and rolling manatees we had passed, the herons and wood storks and white pelicans we had seen, and the flawless and luxuriant isolation of the chickee, I felt renewed and recharged, and even hopeful that we had given the dog the slip.

  When we returned to the chickee that evening after fishing, the question of the dog’s whereabouts was still up in the air. Sure, I had broken off a monster snook of maybe fifteen to eighteen pounds and had another one come unhooked, but I had also released a small snook and Tom, fishing in Mike’s boat, had caught a seven-pounder that we kept to dine on. Casting into the mangroves with conehead streamers and blabbermouth poppers and seeing the snook flash out in the dark water for the flies like yellow, black-striped lances had been wonderful; and back at the chickee, after a swim, with a gin and tonic and a Cuban stogie, watching Pete expertly cook snook fillets and lin-guine with clam sauce as the sun made a florid exit from a cloudless sky, I had almost come to believe the dog was gator bait.

  Then during dinner I stood up from the table to get a napkin and knocked one of Pete’s two Coleman lanterns (this one borrowed) off the nail it was hanging from, totaling it. Just an accident, right? Too bad, no problem, sweep up the mess and go on with the stories, the eating, the camaraderie. But an hour later I stood up again to get something and destroyed the other lantern. This time there was nothing but deep silence. I could feel Tom and Pete and Mike staring at me in the dark. I went to bed.