In his home on wheels are a half-dozen dress shirts on hangers, shotguns and shells, three sets of boots, hip boots, a couple of pairs of waders, a dozen baitcasting, spinning, and fly rods with two or three reels and extra spools for each, and close to ten thousand lures and flies. It is the van of a passionate and tireless bloodhound, who chases down and brings to earth along the highways of America what he calls “the inner game” of the things he cares about.
Paul was upstairs in the borrowed house, sorting through his tackle. After welcomes and a few beers, we all went to dinner with Gary and Vicki at the Indian Village Catfish Restaurant and pool hall, where David Allen Coe was singing on the jukebox and a shy, seafood-loving chihuahua ran around eating what few scraps of catfish, alligator, and shrimp anyone would spare him.
We left from a boat landing at dawn the next morning, and Rebel was there to meet us, exactly on time and ready to rouler. We made up an imposing fish posse: Gary with his Hewes skiff and two big-engine, shallow-draft cats, Jimbo with a fourteen-and-a-half-foot Wilderness Systems kayak that he likes to fish from, Rebel, Tom, Jody, Paul Bruun, and me, and three friends of Gary’s—Ralph Smith, Jim Lamarque, and Dave Hall, the legendary Louisiana game warden.
The Louisiana, or Biloxi, Marsh—which Gary Taylor has almost as much to himself as Mark Brockhoeft and Danny Ayo have theirs—is a vast offshore system of grass islands, creeks, and ponds. Another forty-five miles or so offshore are the Chandeleur Islands, which Gary also day-fishes with his fast cats. In combination, the two areas give him and his clients a twelve-month fishery for redfish and speckled trout, shark, ladyfish, blue runner, mackerel, snapper, wahoo, and even a few largemouth bass in the marsh.
We didn’t catch any bass that morning, after a choppy twelve-mile run across Lake Borgne to the marsh, nor did we catch many redfish, as the cold, windy weather had them “sulled up.” Around midmorning a cloud bank moved in, making it even colder, so we pulled all three boats up to a houseboat that Gary uses in the marsh and had on it an early lunch and some storytelling. When we went fishing again, the sun was back out and the fish hungrier. After kayaking for a while with her fly rod, Rebel got in one of the cats with Jim and Dave and Jody, and fielded those boys all afternoon like a major-league shortstop. They also got serious about putting some speckled trout in Jody’s coolers, keeping twenty-two out of forty they caught. The redfishing picked up, too. Bruun caught more of them than anyone else, playing his inner game with a variety of arcane plug-rod techniques.
And Jody got to show off his road-trip-improved vocabulary. Late in the afternoon, he and I and one of Gary’s guides were poling a little pond, casting to occasionally finning redfish. A nutria swam by.
“There goes a nutria,” said the guide.
“Naw, his back’s too big,” said Bright. “That’s gotta be a plethora.”
After a considering pause the guide said, “Maybe. But we haven’t seen many of them out here lately. The commercial trappers like to got ’em all.”
We ate our penultimate road-trip dinner at Gary’s house that night. Vicki made the best gumbo we had yet eaten on the trip, out of chicken, oysters, and andouille sausage, and it preceded a wonderful Greek vegetable casserole and redfish fillets cooked skin and scales down on the grill. With more than a little wine, Gary and Vicki, Rebel, Jim, Paul, Jimbo, Tom, Jody, and I toasted the meal, the fine day, the trip we were finishing, and the paid-off promise for it of richness and plenty that I had felt on the first day.
I hugged Rebel as she was leaving to drive back to New Orleans and told her I would miss her. I told her she had sort of been to our trip what one of those carved female heads was to the bow of a nineteenth-century whaling ship, and the comment seemed to make some sense at the time.
“Y’all are not through with me yet,” she said. “You and Tom and Paul are mine tomorrow night when you’re in New Orleans. You know I told you about my two favorite things? Well, I left one out.”
Could I be hearing this right? I wondered. Was it the wine? Did Tom and Paul have to be in on it? I tried to smile casually. “Get out,” I said.
“Y’all have been taking care of me in the swamp and all, now I’m going to take care of you. Charlie has to work, so I’m going to take y’all to dinner and then we’re going dancing.”
The next morning, after telling Jimbo and Gary good-bye, I dropped Jody and his coolers off at the New Orleans airport, wishing him well with all his new words in south Texas and congratulating him on his good work habits throughout the trip. Then I drove on in to the Hotel Monteleone. Tom and Paul were exploring around Slidell and were coming in later.
I had a dozen oysters, a catfish po’ boy, and a couple of Abita beers at the Acme Oyster House, then walked down Julia Street to look at some art. Later I took a workout on the top floor of the hotel and then a rest, and after that I felt ready for pretty much any way Rebel could come up with to take care of Tom and Paul and me.
At eight o’clock we all met in the hotel lobby and walked over to the C&E Courtyard Grill. Paul was dressed like an English squire, in a tweed cap and jacket; Tom and I were in old fishing clothes two weeks from a last washing; and Rebel was dressed all in black, simply to kill. We had a good Creolemeets-Asian meal at the C&E, a meal you’d rave about anywhere but in New Orleans and anytime but at the end of a thirteen-day eating binge. Then, around ten-thirty, we turned ourselves over to Rebel.
Driving her white Explorer with dispatch, she took us uptown—an area, she said, that the serious partiers prefer to the Quarter—up St. Charles past the Camelia Grill to a bar and dance-floor joint called The Maple Leaf, where Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. and the Zydeco Twisters were playing.
Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. was a stringy black guy wearing a black cowboy hat, an apron, and a metal washboard called a frottoir on his chest, who could strictly make music. Zydeco is jukin’ Cajun, Cajun soul music, Cajun dirty-dancing—a beat rather than a melody, and Rockin’ Dopsie Jr. and his band owned it. The dance floor was chockablock with bodies shaking and clapping and twisting and shouting and high-five-pointing, and every face had a grin on it. Rebel was the queen of the place. She tore it up—dancing up on the bandstand with Dopsie, pulling me and Tom up every time we tried to sit down and dancing with us both, clapping and pointing at the ceiling and whooping “Ain’t life fun, or what?” her yellow head bobbing like a beacon.
We danced until the place closed at two. Then we got back in Rebel’s Explorer and she whipped it down the weekend uptown streets, past all the dowager, decorated-for-Christmas mansions on St. Charles, through stop signs and over curbs, anywhere she wanted to be, finally pulling up on somebody’s yard to park in front of the F&M Patio Bar—where things were just getting going and the crowd looked like the mother of all frat parties.
We danced there, too, on another floor so crowded with bon temps roulerers that some of them had taken to dancing on the pool table, including a girl in a silver dress with a heartbreakingly beautiful waist-hip relationship who swayed and clapped between the rails, her eyes closed.
Rebel introduced me to the F&M’s owner, Trevor, who also owned a fishing lodge in Belize and had a face like a choirboy with no conscience. Later she and I found ourselves at the bar eating cups of red Jell-O marinated in 151-proof rum while she told me, with her hard, clear, bright good spirits, about an imperfect childhood. I told her about meeting Jim Dickey. Then I took her face between my hands, kissed that child on her forehead, and broke the news to her that she was now one of my own.
We finally said good-bye to Rebel in the Hotel Monteleone parking lot just after four-thirty, two and a half hours before my plane left. She backed away down the street, waving and blowing kisses, and I stood watching her, realizing that she would have walked on coals that night to show the three geezers in her charge a good time, and that maybe she had; that in her untiring gaiety and readiness for anything, her generosity and inattention to the regs, in her death grip on the patate, Rebel belonged on the cover of Louisiana Sportsman’s
every issue, as the state’s poster girl. If Tom and I and our various hearties had learned anything about Louisiana after two weeks and 1,600 miles, it was that the place goes for broke whether it has a toothbrush or not. And if that’s not a working definition of a sportsman’s paradise, I don’t know what is.
HOOKING MR. WILL
IF YOU ARE A PASSIONATE ANGLER, THE CHANCES ARE THAT someone caused you to be that by hooking you on fishing when you were young. Those of us who are hooked young, by someone who knows what he (or she) is doing, rarely get off, and often we turn into fishers of kids ourselves.
My father set the hook on me before I was six by taking me out with his friend Captain Otto Hahn, on Otto’s old commercial fishing boat, to fish for redfish around the jetties off Mayport, Florida. By the time I was eight, my dad had graduated me to fly-fishing for bream and bass in Alabama lakes, and I have skewed my life with fishing ever since. I have also jumped at every opportunity to skew other young lives along the same lines, beginning with my own three children, all of whom could fish before they could ride a bicycle. Now, with those children grown and no grandchildren yet, I have to rely on friends who married later in life than I did to keep me in fresh prospects.
My friends Hayes and Patricia Noel from California have a great kid named Willy. When Willy was six years old he said to me, “Charles, when I turn ten I want you to take me on a fishing trip. And I’d like for you to put some real thought into where we’re going to go.” (Honestly, he said something very close to this; Willy is also a bright and mouthy kid.) The next year Willy reminded me that there were only three years left before our fishing trip. The following year he reminded me twice that we’d be ripping lips in only twenty-four months. And when he was nine, he said, “So. Where are we going to go next year, big guy?”
“Someplace good,” I told him. “I’m putting some real thought into it.” And I was. The cardinal rule to hooking kids on fishing is simplicity itself: make sure they catch plenty of fish. I wanted a place where Willy could do that; also one where the fishing would be easy and fun and the tackle requirements uncomplicated. And finally, I wanted a place palpable enough to burr up for a lifetime in his memory, as Otto Hahn’s boat had in mine.
I had recently learned about the amazing bass fishing in Mexico’s Lake El Salto, where, I was told, it was almost impossible not to catch a lot of fish; where you had thousands of acres of textbook bass cover virtually to yourself, and some true footballs swimming around in that cover; where you stayed in a comfortable lodge in palpable Mexican countryside, enjoyed excellent food, and fished from good boats with Mexican guides. I decided this would be just the ticket for Mr. Will, and he agreed. I also decided to invite his father, Hayes, and my younger son, Shelby, to join us on the trip.
Shelby was gut-hooked on fishing by a sailfish twenty years ago when he was five, and he has never spit the hook. Hayes, on the other hand, has never felt one: he remains one of those mysterious people who are content to regard fishing unheatedly, as an occasional pastime. As much as I love him, I have never tried to salvage Hayes from this condition. I have never even so much as made a cast in his direction, believing him to be too old and stubborn to bite. But I was also determined that Hayes’s twisted disinterest in fishing would not be passed along to his only son and one of my favorite people on earth. In short, I had a high-stakes job to do in Mexico. Having Shelby along, I figured, would be a big help. Hayes’s presence would only make the challenge more interesting.
I missed a connection in Boston and arrived at Billy Chapman Jr.’s Angler’s Inn on Lake El Salto eighteen hours after Shelby, Willy, and Hayes. They had come in the night before, fished that morning, and were taking an after-lunch siesta when I arrived, driven up for two hours north from the west coast city of Mazatlán by Tony Encinas, the lodge’s general manager. A smiling young man named José, the assistant manager, met my arrival with a big frozen margarita, and on his heels came a sleepy-faced but excited Willy who hugged me and, being rarely at a loss for words, told me nonstop over the next fifteen minutes all about the fish he had caught that morning. I regretted not having seen those first fish caught and, in their catching, Mr. Will himself open his mouth to take the bait. But in less than an hour we were all out on the water again, Willy and I in one boat and Hayes and Shelby in another.
Situated picturesquely in the foothills of the Sierra Madre and sprawling in the shape of a cartoon moose over 17,000 acres at low water to 25,000 acres during the rainy season, Lake El Salto was created in 1986 by damming the Elota River. The impoundment was established by the Mexican government to provide irrigation for the opening up of new farmland, but Billy Chapman Sr., a top fishing and shooting outfitter in Mexico since 1966, and his son saw other potential for it. Along with the government, the Chapmans stocked the river with Florida-strain largemouth bass in 1985, and during the next rainy season those bass introduced themselves into the new lake, finding there a bass El Dorado. With all kinds of freshly flooded structure for cover, no predators, and an enormous food supply (in the form of shad stocked by the Chapmans, and tilapia stocked by the government to establish a commercial fishery in the lake), the El Salto bass have flourished like Samoans, growing at a rate of up to two pounds a year.
Just coming into its prime, El Salto regularly produces catches of one hundred and even two hundred bass a day per boat. Most of those fish are in the one-to-two-pound class, but there are plenty of hogs as well. To wit: the lake record is twelve pounds three ounces; last year Billy Chapman found a sixteen-pound bass that had died from choking on a two-pound tilapia; and the week before we arrived, two anglers with a film crew caught ten bass around ten pounds apiece on a single morning on “jigs ’n’ pigs,” and even got it all on film.
Those are the kind of to-wits that can build expectations in young and grizzled alike, and I was as fresh on the bit as Willy as we sped up the lake in one of the lodge’s tricked-out Super-17 Trackers, piloted by a guide of few words (and those in Spanish) named Xavier. The steep and ragged Sierra Madre reared all around the lake; the empty countryside was tan and dusty, and the water of the lake a milky, fishy green. We shut down in one of the lake’s northern coves and drifted into a line of flooded trees. Xavier let down the electric motor and sat on the head of the Yamaha outboard to run it. Willy and I were in business.
He took the bow and started to cast. Two months before, while I was on a trip to California, we had gotten him and his father geared up with spinning outfits. Willy’s was a six-and-a-half-foot glass Fenwick rod and an open-faced Shimano reel loaded with fifteen-pound mono. On that same trip I had taught Willy how to cast, strike, and play a simulated fish and tie a clinch knot, and he had been practicing those things at home. Now he had a tackle box full of lodge-recommended lures—Zara Spooks, Rattletraps, Woodchoppers, rubber worms, and Power Grubs—that he could tie on himself and knew how to cast surprisingly well. I leaned back on a gunwale and watched Mr. Will work the cover like a miniature Roland Martin, his eyes glittering, talking a mile a minute. On the fifth cast, a bass jumped all over his silver Zara Spook and Willy reared back on him. The bass shivered out of the water, then ran for cover. “Keep your tip up,” was all I had to say: Willy beat him like a drum. Xavier released the fish, a fat two-pounder. “You can’t do better than that,” I told him.
“Thanks, man,” said Willy with a neon grin.
Willy started fishing around four o’clock that afternoon. By five he had caught four or five small fish and lost a few others and was on top of his game—not missing a cast and working the big topwater lure appetizingly. We had talked about how bass see and hear, what range of water temperature they like and where they find those temperatures at different times of day, and what all that stuff has to do with where and how you fish. I told Willy that at dusk, in the last hour or so of light, bass pick up a visual advantage over much of their food and keep it until dark, and that in that magic Twilight Zone is often where the best and most memorable fishing happens.
I had just finished saying this when Willy and I slipped into one of those zones ourselves. The light went to steel on the water, the sky went orange, the little breeze that had been up went down, and the fishing went wild. In about an hour, Willy—on the first afternoon of his first fishing trip—caught a three-and-a-half-pound bass, lost one over seven, caught one over six and another around five, and caught or lost four or five smaller fish. Somewhere in there I got tired of being a spectator. I strung up an 8-weight fly rod, tied on one of Ron Kruger’s phenomenal Desperate Diver bugs, and caught ten or so bass myself, including one of around seven pounds that was hooked in the gills and bleeding badly. I put the fish in the live well instead of releasing it as we had the others, and it banged around in there for a while until Willy asked me please to kill it. I did that, and Willy mourned the fish. “It’s all right,” I told him. “There are a lot of bass in this lake.”
After a minute Willy said, “That’s like saying it’s all right to kill someone because there are a lot of people in the world.”
“Who’s teaching who here?” I asked him.
José met us at the lodge door again with frozen margaritas. After one or two of those with platters of quesadillas that José brought to our rooms, we showered and then ate bass cooked in tinfoil. During dessert, José brought into the dining room a carefully wrapped little box and presented it to Willy. When Willy opened it, a green chameleon lizard popped out and darted down the table and into a crack in the floor as if it had played this gig before. After dinner we sat outside on a covered patio in the warm, bug-clicking night, Hayes and I smoking cigars and drinking Carta Blancas, and all of us telling jokes and stories. Swinging himself in a hammock, Willy delightedly held up his end, and it was as much fun watching him study this fine and subtle part of going fishing as watching him learn to cast.
The Next Valley Over Page 18