The one thing I was able to do, however, when I went with my father hunting or fishing, was something most kids would give a fish for.
“Do you mind driving?” Dad would ask.
“Not at all—not even a little bit,” I would say.
“Don’t tell your mom,” he would say.
“Mum’s the word,” I would answer.
Putting two pillows under my behind, so I was able to see over the steering wheel, I drove along while my father snoozed. Once I took a wrong road and ended up at a house. I was inside, eating a peanut butter sandwich and playing cards with an old lady, when my father woke in the yard. In he came, to see me dressed up for fishing and playing snap with an old lady called Massie, while the grandfather sat in the corner by the old wood stove, lifting the lid every now and then to spit his plug.
It was nice to drive a car and play snap with new friends, but I never got a fish.
Four
THE NEXT SUMMER I walked downtown—on at least eight separate occasions—to the hunting and fishing tackle shop. I would stand inside the door, looking at the knives and flies, looking at the three canoes for sale—an eighteen-foot, a fifteen-foot, and a fourteen-foot imitation birch bark (the one that caught my eye). Many other kids would do this too, and one, Peter McGrath, who became one of my friends, would march out on his own as soon as he could and discover this fishing and hunting world by himself.
I, on the other hand, would think of myself in those canoes, fishing those pools, casting those rods, without having any idea of how I was going to transport myself from one place to the other, or how to fish once I got there.
The days were hot, the sidewalks still. The clothing stores and general store doors were open and men stood in small groups lazing away the day.
On Saturdays I went to work at a grocery store cleaning out the garbage bin—standing waist high in boxes and cans and dirt—for $1.80. And I would put that money away for the canoe I never got.
I would take my spin cast and practise on the lawn, until one day a boy showed me his fly rod, and told me that all fishermen used fly rods, and that only kids—like me—used spin casts. I already knew this because of what Mr. Simms told me.
So I decided then and there to get a fly rod, or to give up fishing.
At eighteen, I bought a second-hand fly rod, perhaps the heaviest I ever owned, with large wire eyes. I don’t remember what kind of rod it was, just that one afternoon it was in my possession, with an old yellow line on an old black reel. So one September morning, my first year of university, I trudged out to the Nashwaak River. I hitchhiked out to a pool, walked many miles, and to my amazement raised a salmon.
I had just thrown my fly at the water and splash, this huge fish came up and rolled over it. I never rested the fish, of course, because I didn’t know anything about it. I threw the fly right back and something took. Unfortunately it was a parr, and the barb of my fly went through its eye. In fact, I may have been slightly fearful of hooking a salmon. When I look back at it now, I wouldn’t for the life of me have known exactly what to do. I was also so far out into the rapid that day, that I definitely had a struggle getting back, walking up along the bar. If I had hooked that fish, I might have been in a real predicament. But there is a certain amount of instinct too that comes with fishing, and many have caught their first fish in similar conditions.
Yet I was to fish for the rest of that day. I was to dream about that salmon at night. I was to skip classes and walk twelve miles back to the Nashwaak, to try my luck again, without success. But I believed I was a fisherman.
I don’t know what kind of fly I was using. I think it was a Black Ghost. The Nashwaak is a level meandering river, with some well-known beautiful pools. It is a late river, so September fishing is productive, and skipping class seemed to me as natural an occurrence in my life as most things.
Then winter came and I lay my fly-fishing rod and my excursions away. A few times that winter I got back home, and would look at the frozen river, capped with snow, and think of the dark water of spring. I as yet didn’t tell anyone I had fished for salmon, but I listened to various young men talking about it. How they knew a fish would take, how they knew exactly where that fish was, how they had poled downriver after a rain when the water was dropping, etc., etc. It all seemed as exotic as big-game hunting.
Early the next summer on the Miramichi I took my salmon rod, and got a few flies, and went to Quarryville, waded out into the water in my jeans, and made a cast, and lo and behold I hooked a big fish. I thought it was a big fish. It turned out to be nothing more than a common sucker, but it weighed about a pound.
I then waded out a little more, threw another cast, and my entire line fell off the reel. There it went, floating out from me twenty feet away. I looked first to my right and then to my left to see if anyone had actually seen my rod fall apart and went home for repairs.
That same summer I went down to the Church River, near my old cottage at Burnt Church. I walked up along the bank, getting my line tangled in the trees, and then waded towards a pool. The pool came full into a dogleg turn, and passed a large birch windfall. The day was sunny, with the scent of spruce and clover, the bank of the river was reddish, and small turbulent eddies swept along in a golden hue.
Everywhere on Church River there was the life of the north woods, which so many of us take so much for granted. As I came into the doglegged pool, I looked down.
About my feet were dozens of large sea trout coming up to spawn. Unfortunately I had no idea what fly to use, and I put on such a large streamer the trout had no interest. When I cast it over them they simply moved out of its way, as unconcerned with it as they were with me. Perhaps I should have thought just for a second or two, looked over to the flow of water, and studied the hatches, the small, winged insects. That is what everyone always says they did, when they were a neophyte like myself.
But I did not do that. I kept turning about in circles studying the fish, until I got dizzy, literally.
Finally unable to entice them, I sat down and watched them move through and into the pool. And then after a while they were gone. They had moved out of that pool and went on upriver.
I sat near the bank drinking a beer, disgusted with how nonchalantly they ignored me, and how incapable I was of doing anything. About an hour later an older man came wading down the river, with a fedora hat littered with bright tiny flies, wearing hip waders and carrying a trout basket.
“Any luck?” he said.
“None at all,” I admitted.
He came over and sat beside me, offered me a Player’s cigarette, opened his knapsack, and showed me four or five trout he had taken, each about three pounds, their bodies whiter and limper in death. He was using tiny nymph flies, so tiny he used thick glasses to thread them through his leader, and fishing under the limbs of trees sweeping down over small runs. To his advantage, he had a tiny trout rod, about six and a half feet long.
“Well, they’re in the river now,” he said. “Strange you didn’t find them—but you’ll find yours some day.”
He stayed a moment and then moved downstream and around the bend out of sight.
After he left I was to fish until almost dark, my fly clumsily splashing the water and scaring everything that remained in the pool.
I married a woman from Bartibog, that gem of a river, when we were both still kids. It is strange to think that I passed her house and her as a child a thousand times on my way to and from Church River when I was a child and never knew her then. Or that our paths must have crossed even before and after that. That we were at the same church picnics in the summer—perhaps no more than a dozen feet from one another. It even seems to me that I stood beside her in church one day when we were only ten, neither of us knowing the other.
Peggy was the person who finally prodded me into asking for some kind of direction in my fishing life. Her uncles and her cousins were all good or fairly good fishermen, but her own family didn’t fly-fish. She told me
one day to ask one of her cousins and added that I was at the point where I was going to have to ask someone or give up.
“You should ask Peter or David,” she said.
Peter McGrath was a friend of my younger brother, and David Savage was Peggy’s first cousin. Both of them fished, and they had often talked about fishing, getting fish, and knowing where the fish were, and I was always too shy, and also too stubborn, to ask them anything about it.
I met Peter McGrath the next night and had a beer with him.
“I’m sick and tired of worms,” I finally blurted.
“Who’s a worm?” he said looking at me.
“Oh, no one’s a worm. I just want to use a fly.”
“Oh, yer talking about fishing,” Peter said, “Well, I’ll show you where to go—”
“You will?”
“I said I would,” he said, as he always did, answering people’s questions directly. Everything Peter says has a relevance to the moment more than to the past or future. He is in that part, like most men who are active and prefer action, to a degree that many are not, responsible for himself and what he says.
And like all the men I have met and admired on the Miramichi, for their dexterity in the woods, Peter does not read the woods as a biologist or a naturalist or a conservationist might. Not that there is anything wrong with how they might read it, or relate it to us. Biologists and naturalists have worlds of information to provide us, about the greater problems the fish stocks face, but I have not yet met one who actually feels the woods about him, like some of the fishermen and hunters I know.
Peter, like others, is comfortable in the woods, to the degree that his being becomes a part of it. That is the truest testing for natural ability, in both fishing and hunting. Or any occupation.
However, I would get to know a few pools, and then when Peter got tired of showing me I could hike out on my own, maybe even get my own truck. Of course, as always in a person’s imagination, I imagined fish, and my own canoe and truck and everything else.
Fishing is a poetic act. There are a great many books that talk about the poetry of fishing, and yet silence might be the best way to understand it. Only to know that it is there, within each person, in an infinite number of ways. What draws men and women to fly-fishing is its testing of self-reliance, coordination, strength, and skill, combined at a variety of levels with the notion of a poetic grasp of the world. No one I have met describes taking a fish or fishing for salmon without in some way being poetic. They might not even know they are being poetic when they talk of the eddies, the falls, the way the water has flooded an area, the banks of the river, how a fish moves from its lay and rises for a fly.
When I started that year I had no car, let alone a truck. I had to tie blood knots with one hand and my teeth. I had not been in a canoe since my uncle snapped that picture. I did not know anything of the Norwest, let alone the Little Souwest, the Sevogle or its branches. I told myself it did not matter.
Yet it mattered very much.
Since I was a boy I had always watched for the signs from other people when they spoke about sport. Skating is easy, they would say. Skiing is easy. Swimming is easy. Rock climbing is easy. Baseball is easy.
“Fishing is easy,” Peter told me. But I know all the levels of difficulty attached to easy, when you can barely open your left hand. Then again, left hand be damned.
The first day I went salmon fishing, since those few occasions on the Nashwaak—in an old pair of waders with an old rod, with a small plastic dish filled with four flies: two butterflies, a Black Ghost, and a Green Butt Bear Hair—I caught a grilse about three and a half pounds.
It was a warm day in June as we drove to the Stickney Road where we could walk into the Norwest Miramichi. Peter had a Russian-made Lada truck, which you could take a sledgehammer to without denting, but which was also incomprehensibly pernickety. We parked at the gate and began a three-mile walk into Dr. Wilson’s pool. I had not seen Wilson’s Pool before then. On either side of the road the trees, stunted spruce and maple, waved slightly in the early-morning heat and beaver dams had flooded the road at various places. There were the on-again, off-again faraway calls of ravens. The day was sunny, the sky with distant nebulous clouds that seemed to dissipate before our eyes, and stretches of the road were miraged with pools of water that would fade away to nothing as we walked through them going to where the real water must be. Now and then a colourful bird would glide into a landing a few yards ahead, as silent as the mirages we walked through.
Wearing the waders made it twice as hot, and tore at our feet. But finally we turned from Stickney Road which would lead one down to Stickney Pool, and we went, along a cooler more overgrown road, towards Wilson’s Pool where an old camp stood. The camp was still in fairly good shape, and sat on a flat about twelve yards from the water. Poplars and maples grew about it, and it was dogged at the back by bog and spruce. But it had never been swept away. I stared at the river. How surely, and unconscious of us, and the trees above it, it flowed. As unconscious of self as all great things are, as some of the best fishermen and women are.
The river was quite full and flowed quickly, and was not as wide as I thought it would be. But then I remembered a past time long ago when, as a boy of twelve, Mr. Simms told me about this place, and how he took a salmon here, and I realized that he had described it exceptionally well to me. It was as if the salmon somehow still existed, and always would. That the river, this great Norwest Miramichi, proved to us that life was infinite and continuous.
I looked at the camp and thought the same thing. The patched walls inside, the faint smell of bark and charcoal, the scent of sun hitting the roof reminded me of the story Mr. Simms had told about his sawed-off cousins, and how they had stolen his camp, and how he got it back. I decided I would tell that story to Peter some day. The camp stood in silence at the edge of this world. The world about us was in bloom, with wild daisies and foot-high ferns, the buds sprouted out into early leaf.
“We’ll get fish here,” Peter told me, as I was thinking this and he was reading the water, “I guarantee it.”
Well, guarantee is good, I thought, but since I had only cast a fly rod once or twice before, I was a little uncertain about it.
I heard the rapids at the top of this fine pool as we walked up to it. And there is nothing more thrilling to a fisherman than that sound.
The river was still high, over the grassy path, the water swift and beer brown flowing over the boulders that dotted the river, leaving most of them submerged, their tips like icebergs.
As we approached the pool we could see some commotion. It was strange that the first person I would ever meet on the river was my wife’s first cousin, David Savage, and his dog, Blue. The little mutt was running back and forth on the shore, where Savage had his Norwest canoe pulled up, and at the lower part of the pool he was playing a fish. His rod was bent over, his line was tight in the water, as if it was hooked to a boulder. But now and again that line would move, as the fish moved, and the reel would sing. The fish had jumped a few times, but was now staying down, moving with the current and then turning into it. Then it would take long runs and Savage’s line would go out.
I sat down on the bank and watched him, and had as much fun doing that as fishing. After another ten minutes, David landed the fish, a female salmon about eight pounds. He had taken it on a Rusty Rat, a small dusty rust-coloured fly.
It seemed incomprehensible to a novice like myself that a fly that small could take a fish that large. Or that the invisible leader wouldn’t snap away. And I might have said this when he later showed the fly and leader to me. But it was a number 6 Rusty Rat and, consequently, was a big fly compared to some used later on in the summer. Also a ten-pound test would go down to a six-pound test as the water conditions got lower after June, and the summer went on.
Another thing I was bemused by was how this water could hide fish that size, even if it was heavy darkish water that day.
I suppose
I could take a moment to think of Karen Blixen’s description of fish in her story collection Antedote of Destiny, and how they are perfect representatives of the best of God’s world. How they live in a kind of three-dimensional world of space and time, that there is no up or down for them, or sideways. They move as surely as any of God’s great creatures, and the salmon is one of the surest of all God’s fish. On the Miramichi, fish means salmon. So if you ask someone if they have seen any fish and they say, “No, but I got a few trout,” it is not at all a contradiction.
People I met that day, and in the months to come, I would meet for years, and get to know some of them well. But some of them I would know only as others who haunted our rivers of grace. In the years to come, around a turn on a faraway branch, I would meet someone who I had not seen since the frost came the year before. There he or she was again, working their way through a pool, throwing a wonderful line unconscious of themselves. Or perhaps they would be offshore, in among the ferns, because they had spotted in the dew a patch of wild berries. You would become close to them by this aspect of humanity even though you may or may not have spoken to them very much.
Way up on the Norwest, where I fished for the first few years, I would often meet a man from Chatham, who came the same time as we did every year. Then as the year went along, we switched rivers—he going to a river some place else, and I wouldn’t see him again, until he reappeared early the next season, as if he had come out of the earth. I would look up and he’d be there, wearing the same waders and hat, giving us the same rough smile.
We would talk and have coffee, take turns moving through the pool. Once we boiled a fish on the side of the shore in an old bent aluminum pot on his Coleman stove, in the pouring rain. His wife had made him brown bread and molasses cookies, which we ate along with the freshly boiled grilse. He lazed on the beach staring at the hypnotic water and talked about bringing his son with him. That he was going to teach his son how to fish as soon as he got a little older.
Lines on the Water Page 4