We ate asparagus, grilled tuna steaks with wasabi and fresh ginger, and drank a bottle of Chardonnay. I took it as a good sign that I didn’t break a lamp after dinner. At ten-thirty, Jeffrey pulled his kayak off the roof and paddled off into the dark with a fly rod to renew his personal relationship with the Marquesas. Tom and I went to bed. I lay on the bunk and hoped hard that I would catch a tarpon the next day and catch it gracefully, for my own pride and for the pride, too, of this nice, dignified man who had brought us to this loved place and was lending us the right to exploit it and trusting us to do that with the proper respect of grace.
Yeah. Well, I’ll spare you most of the ugly details, but what I did, in fact, the next day was stink up the atoll. Wearing the despicable stowaway dog around my neck like an albatross, I didn’t see fish until too late, lined them, threw at their noneating ends, and had them turn up their blunt noses at the fly whenever I managed to get it in front of them. When I finally did stick a little tarpon, by accident, he threw the hook on his first jump.
Jeffrey didn’t say much, as there was nothing much to say, since you can hardly invite someone smelling up your boat in the Marquesas to walk home. What he did do was twice take the rod between my various boners and effortlessly, quite beautifully, catch a tarpon with it. I felt as coarse and slow and clumsy as a mudhen flying alongside an osprey. At one point I wanted to announce, “You know, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I can usually do this. And what’s more, I caught my first tarpon on a fly rod the very year you were born . . .” but I was afraid I’d start to drool or something and mess that up too.
To the Cherokee Indians, a na su hv s gv means “going fishing,” and it is never a waste of time because it is an escape from self and goals and pressure—the exact opposite activity to, say, running for the United States Senate. Of all the good reasons in the world for going fishing, I decided that afternoon, not one should be to create or sustain a reputation for doing it well.
After another fine dinner, we took the skiff out “splooshing.” We ran out to a finger channel between fiats, and when Jeffrey cut the engine, the only light came from the crowded stars and the only sound at first was the subtle crablike clicking that mangrove islands make. Then we heard a sploosh. Then another, closer by—the sound of tarpon feeding in the channel on shrimp being washed off the flats by an outgoing tide. Casting a floating fly in the direction of the splooshes, Tom hooked up quickly and had a long, tough fight with a fish that finally sawed through the eighty-pound shock tippet. I lay on the bow looking up at the sky, delighted with this dry-fly fishing to slurps in the dark and delighted not to do it. I was tired not of fishing, but of my own poor, ego-hounded self fishing—and I was very happy just to lie there and listen to a fishing hole instead of trying to beat it half to death.
The next morning my back didn’t hurt for the first time since Appalachicola. I was looking forward to going home that night and I didn’t care anymore whether or not I grew old gracefully in this business.
It was maybe the most soothing morning I have ever seen, so still and uniformly lit when we first got up that there was no seam between the sky and the sea. Soon after we got out on the water in the Maverick, the sun came up through low clouds looking like a blood orange, turning the oily water mauve, and as it came up farther there was a dove-gray-and-mauve haze between water and sky, in which the islands of the atoll looked to be suspended. The sea took on a faint ripple, like a sheet just laid on a bed, and all around us was a blending of the palest blue and smoke gray, green, lavender, and turquoise, and through it pelicans dove, a skittering of bait flashed out of the water with a ’cuda or jack behind it, and a white heron stood ankle-deep on a flat, poised with one leg lifted.
On the north end of the islands, where Jeffrey rarely catches fish, we came onto a school of tarpon that was acres large, some of them rolling so close to us in the motionless sea that you could believe you saw expression in the great silver and black eyes. I cast to these fish over and over without a take. Then Jeffrey came down from the poling platform and jumped one, and when I took the rod again I found I could concentrate on putting the casts where they were supposed to go and yet not care what happened to them. I felt relaxed and divested, that everything was just fine, and that I was only doing something I love to do.
A little later, on the other side of the boat now, I cast again into the same school and the line came tight. I struck the fish with my line hand and felt that electric first connection with a wild thing that Jeffrey had said the day before was for him the defining moment of fishing.
And Ohh, Son! did that ol’ tarpon jump then, rattling into the air and shaking himself like a dog passing peach pits. I felt the line pullin’, as Reverend Williams had it, and knew what to do about it and how to do it, and knew, too, that this particular grace fish, this unsummonable gift, was already caught.
PART THREE
Rounding Third
EARLY IN MY FIFTIES, PRAISE GOD, I WAS FINALLY caught and released. I started writing books again, and magazine articles on subjects other than fishing. I started traveling again quite happily with my wife to waterless destinations, and not caring very much anymore (most of the time) about the angling destinations I hadn’t gotten to yet, or fishing from dawn until dark, or how many fish I caught. I started caring more about other things instead—such as the caretaking of angling resources.
During the blindered, hectic decade of my forties, I had been more or less unconscious to what was happening to the world’s waters and fish stocks beyond how it might affect my fishing on a particular day. And becoming aware, toward the end of that decade, of how much had gone to hell in a hand basket felt like waking up to find your house has been burgled and painted with graffiti while you slept. For a while I went around saying out-to-lunch things like “What do you mean, the redfish were almost wiped out in the Gulf of Mexico? . . . That swordfish and bluefin tuna and Atlantic salmon are all headed the way of the moa? . . . That white marlin stocks have declined 86 percent worldwide since 1960?” Mercifully, I had friends who took the time to sensitize and educate me on these matters—Bill Taylor of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, Jody Bright, Karl Wickstrom, the people at the Louisiana Coastal Conservation Association. Now, at least, I have a finger in that dike, and it will stay there until I die.
I also started caring about the people who fish for their lives rather than for sport, for whom fishing is the same as fate—who are as endangered a species in North America now as the Atlantic cod—and I spent time with those people on my home shore of Nova Scotia, in the Cajun country of Louisiana, and on the northwest coast of Newfoundland, where I passed some time in the rain hitchhiking after salmon, eating pickled sea bird, drinking black tea, and listening, in homes that had never seen electricity, to stories the Apostle Peter might have told.
I am both more and less demanding about my fishing now than I used to be. I prefer the company of children, old people, and the few nonchalant experts I know over the fanatics I used to sprint with. I no longer mind not catching fish, but I want to catch them or not on water I have some feeling for. I still love and practice fly-fishing, but increasingly I am going back to the whatever-it-takes, grab-bag angling that my father and I did together. I learned cast-netting, handlining, surf casting, and trotlining from him, and we trolled, minnow-fished, plug-cast, and bobbered with a worm or live cricket as often as we fly-fished. In the past few years I have enjoyed revisiting some of those methods. Coming back to them from the often parched, prissy, peacock world of fly-fishing makes them taste to me like a dipperful of spring water, exactly the same as they did when I first tried them.
My father was the most complete fisherman I’ve ever known. Second to him would be Paul Bruun, who does it for a living and with an indiscriminate curiosity and passion much like my father’s. Paul says that what he most values from his lifetime’s engagement with fishing are “the spiritual returns and the getting there.”
Getting there has been a mean
s, not an end, for Paul, and it has for me, too, though I believed for years that it was not only an end but the whole point. Now I think back to the porky rainbows in Lake Alice near the top of Mount Kenya, and to the Labrador brook trout in their spawning colors; I think back to float-fishing the Jardine River in northern Australia, with its crocodiles and baby tarpon and saratoga, and to other float trips on the Beaverhead, the Missouri, the Penobscot and Nolichucky, the Mulchatna, the Gol Gol and Motueka and Tongariro; I think back to the elegant houseboat fishing for big browns on Chile’s Lago Yelcho, and to the choppy sea off Bahía Pez Vela with droves of sailfish riding every wave; to the twenty-five-pound jack salmon that ate a skated bomber one morning with Chris Child and Vicky Mills on the Miramichi, and the four bonefish over eight pounds in two hours with Big Glenn at More’s Island; I think back to fishing for wahoo with black pearl diver Jean Tapu off the South Pacific island of Apataki, and for bluegills in an Iowa farm pond with Ralph Ellison; to catching snapper in the surf of New Zealand’s Ninety Mile Beach, and dorado on flies with Buby Calvo in northern Argentina; to dapping live mayflies for brown trout in Lough Corrib, and throwing Chernobyl ants to giant pike on Minipi Lake, and nymphing for piranas in the marsh behind Los Ombues; I think back to the jungle rivers on the east coast of Costa Rica, to the Great Barrier Reef, to the lakes of Tasmania and the Northwest Territories—and it seems to me now that those places and experiences were not at all destinations, as I had believed them to be—a series of valleys stretching farther and farther away into the horizon—but more like waystops on a round journey that has brought me back to within walking distance of where I started.
For a couple of years before my father’s death in 1988, he and I fished together often again at Lake Tadpole. His kidneys were failing and he would sleep on the drives to and from the lake, but he was wide awake and as thrilled as always during the two or three hours we were there. I ran the electric motor and fished him in the bow, as he used to fish me. He still whooped every time he hooked a fish and cackled as he played it, his self-assured face as soft now as a Bahamian sunset and split as wide as ever with the joy he took in that place. Though I was closing in on fifty years old by then, he would still bark at me to get my worm in the water whenever it was not, and to fish in my half of the boat. There was still plenty of lake for both of us.
Now I live back in Birmingham for six months each year. Lake Tadpole belongs to me. I built a boathouse out there this past spring, on the same concrete pilings that supported the old one that burned, along with my father’s cabin, in the seventies. And next year Patricia and I are going to build a cabin of our own on the west shore of the lake and live in it while we are in Alabama.
Lake Tadpole is the water I find myself fishing most often now, both in fact and in my dreams, and for the first time I am trying to really learn how to fish it. A few weeks ago I bought an electronic fish finder, not so much to find fish with as to learn the bottom and the structure of the lake, and I realized that ever since I was thirteen years old I had fished at this place, my home water, only superficially and insincerely—as I have fished at many of the waystops—and that now I have the time to know it.
No more than five miles down the road from Tadpole, tacked to the wall of a ramshackle barbecue joint owned by a fiercely cheerful, three-hundred-pound black man named Woody, is an article about Woody’s great-aunt Eunice, who is 104 and still loves fishing more than anything else in life. There is a picture of Aunt Eunice sitting on the shore of some pond in her lawn chair, undemonstratively fishing with a long cane pole. Beside her chair is a minnow bucket, which the article says she still carries herself, along with the chair and the pole, down to whatever water she is fishing for the day. Aunt Eunice is quoted as saying, “I don’t know why, but I’d rather pull ’em in even than eat ’em. I reckon I’ve always been that way.”
I plan to invite Aunt Eunice out to Lake Tadpole before she turns 105, and let her set up shop on the dock and teach me something about minnow fishing. Judging from her face in the picture, she will find the time to do that. Judging from the picture and the write-up, Aunt Eunice owns time—to get less done; to go nowhere but a nearby lake or river whenever she can find someone to tote her; to know things rather than do them: time like prayer; connective time.
Ted Hughes, the late poet laureate of England, was a fervid salmon fisher. When asked shortly before his death how he accounted for his lifelong passion for fishing, he mentioned “the fascination of flowing water and living things coming up out of it—to grab at you and be grabbed.” Then he said, “Oh, I think it’s an extension, isn’t it? It’s an extension of your whole organism into the environment that’s created you . . . It gives you the opportunity of being totally immersed, turning back into yourself in a good way. . . to the most valuable things in yourself. The unspoiled. That feeling of something absolutely sacred and unspoiled is a big part of that, isn’t it?”
I’d love to have Ted Hughes and my father out there too with me and Aunt Eunice on the dock at Lake Tadpole. I’ve love to have the four of us together one fresh day this April, when the dogwoods are out and the bass and bluegills are on the beds, with not a cloud of bad luck in the sky and time on our hands to whoop and cackle.
When I asked my agent and good friend, Dan Green, what he thought the introduction to this book ought to cover, he said, “Well, it has to answer one question, Charles.”
“And what would that be?” I said.
“Why a grown and reasonably intelligent man would waste as much of his life as you have on fishing. What else?”
The truth is I don’t know why. But I do know some of the things that fishing has given me in compensation for my time, wasted or not. It has given me the names of rivers I can say to call up images that calm and steady me. It has taken me on countless occasions, and continues to, into the sweet, welcoming trance of instinct and back to the sacred and unspoiled parts of myself. It has given me a kinetic, engaged, and vivid life that in my natural dreaminess and laziness I probably would not have had without it, and connections to the surfaces and sounds and smells of waters and woods, of boats and ropes and tents, of marshes and flats, of daybreak and deep night and mountains and campfires, of birds and fish and the holy, open ocean—of many of the animating mysteries of this world. It has given me a way to find both pride and humility. And it has given a big part of my life a progress, a growth and forcing through, a rendering; it has allowed me to catch and to be caught, to leave and to return.
Granted, all of that may not justify the years I’ve spent with a worm in the water, Dan. But then again, it may.
BON TEMPS WITH REBEL IN A SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE
WE PULLED INTO THE PARKING LOT OF PREJEAN’S Restaurant in Lafayette, Louisiana, a little after noon on December 2—three dusty, road-hardened anglers with appetites. We had not had a single unforgettable meal since dinner sixteen long hours before, and we were understandably impatient for our next one. This was, after all, the heart of Cajun country, where even the alley cats eat brilliantly Moreover, Tom and I had learned long ago that you cannot bring all you have to this sapping business of fishing and dancing and eating and drinking your way across an entire state without regular sustenance of a high order.
We meant business, Tom Montgomery, Jody Bright, and I. Our plan was to get in and out of this lunch, prepared especially for us by one of the best Creole chefs in Louisiana, as quickly as possible—thirty minutes, max—and on into the Atchafalaya swamp, where we faced twenty-four grueling hours of birdwatching, bass fishing, and more great eating. On this ninth day of a thirteen-day angling road trip, Montgomery and I had already fished for redfish in two locations, labored through a Cajun Thanksgiving where the good food was knee-high, grazed the oyster bars of Abbeville, and stuffed ourselves with fried alligator while dancing the Cajun two-step at Randol’s here in Lafayette. There was more hard work coming up: more redfishing after the Atchafalaya, and at least one night of eating and partying in New Orleans. This wa
s Jody’s first road trip. He had joined Tom and me only four days before, and we were having to teach him a little about pacing. As we entered the restaurant, I reminded him gently that this was just a job like any other job. All we had to do was keep our eyes on the ball.
We were there at Prejean’s to meet Jody’s mother’s old friend Becky Stokes and Becky’s secretary, son, and boyfriend, and a person named Rebel Kelley. Becky had been helping us organize our trip. Rebel Kelley, assistant director of the Louisiana chapter of the Coastal Conservation Association, was coming down from Baton Rouge to fill us in on the redfish conservation work of that valuable organization. And for our dining pleasure, Becky had asked her friend James Graham, the esteemed executive chef at Prejean’s and also at his own Fish and Game Grill in Lafayette, a man who has been called in print “the most innovative master of wild game cookery in America,” to demonstrate those very skills in a special presentation—on which the others were already waiting at the table when we arrived.
We greeted Becky, her boyfriend, her son, and her secretary. Staring at a delicious young blond woman on the other side of the table whom I took to be the son’s wife, I asked Becky, “Where is the guy from the CCA?”
“I’m Rebel Kelley,” said the blonde.
“You’re not.”
“Rebel Anne Kelley, really.” She grinned up at me, and my old heart just flopped right over.
The Next Valley Over Page 15