Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  And all along on this dry cool day we are looking for fish, who are as much the children of God, as we. In the green hillsides ancient trees watch us pass, muted, and life goes on about them, the trembling squirrel that chatters at us, or the soaring osprey.

  “Remember the bog in there,” Peter says once we are down a ways.

  “The bog where I got caught up to my waist,” I say.

  “I brought George down through there one day,” Peter says. “I wanted to fish Disappointment Pool. I wanted to have a nice fish with my dog. My dog would sit beside me, and I would catch a large salmon. But it didn’t work that way. As soon as I got to the pool George picked up a scent and took off after a deer. I couldn’t go after him because I had hooked a grilse. You know where—that little rip halfway along in the pool.”

  “What were you using?”

  “Bug.”

  Peter told me that it was a perfect day. But there are no real perfect days any more, and perhaps there never have been. I have been left a child in thinking of them, or searching for them. I have not found them, even on the mystic river far from the sounds of man. We are the only creatures who as a part of life are never satisfied with it.

  Peter had to land the grilse before he could start to hunt for George.

  “I cursed poor old George that afternoon,” he said.

  “I curse this river,” I answer. “I curse it every day of my life—I curse coming in here now—I curse it because I know it. I know this is my last chance until the fall for fishing. I know when I am down in here it is a hard pull. Because we will have to pull the canoe halfway along. And halfway along we will decide we will have to go somewhere else, to the place all the fish really are. And that you will begin to plan fishing trips in your mind that are more complex than the equation for noncombustible fusion.”

  “But of course you love it too,” Peter said. And that was true enough as well. I loved every river I was on, and every slap of water that cut my waders or my jeans, and even in the end the damnable flies. But now, with children at home, it seemed somehow lonelier, and so far away.

  So that day, long ago, Peter put the grilse in a bed, placed his rod near a tree, and made his way along the river path, overgrown and mined with stones and pitfalls, to find his dog. He found the dogs tracks a mile down along the shore, on a small piece of tough sand along the beach.

  That moment, too, has passed into eternity. This is what happens. Each moment on the river passes into eternity in the blink of an eye. The moments just disappear. The echoes of the water become the longing babbles of ghosts at twilight.

  “I walked down to Island Pool for the dog,” he said. “And I was both perturbed and compressed over that animal. I stared at Island Pool—and noticed that it was full of fishes.”

  “Muchas pescado,” I answered in Spanish.

  And Peter continued on:

  “And here I was without my rod. I remembered the first salmon I ever took there twenty years before—did I tell you about that?”

  “Oh yes,” I said.

  “Are you ever going to write about that?” Peter asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I bet you’ll never mention getting sucked up in the bog that first year,” Peter laughed.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  And we tipped about another corner, a river spined with rocks, and a jet trail far above us in the heavens.

  “You will not write about getting your line all tangled up in that tree, when I snuck that picture of you.”

  “Perhaps not,” I said.

  “Or missing the buck that time because you knocked your sights.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Or having no sense of direction in the woods—so Savage and I had to haul you by your feet out through it or you’d die with bug imbalance like you got a few years ago.”

  “Bug imbalance,” I laugh. “Perhaps I won’t mention that.”

  So Peter watched the fish at Island Pool and smoked a cigarette and stared at the lonely river. And no George. He called to it for a long time, and it was getting later in the day.

  “Finally I decided I had to go home without him. And in order to prepare for this I cursed him down to the ground. Let him get lost—let him get eaten by the great Miramichi wood slough, I didn’t care.”

  “But you did care.”

  “Of course not,” Peter said, lying. “I didn’t care.”

  He started out. He walked back to Disappointment Pool and gathered his fishing rod and his grilse, waded the rapid at the top of it and cut into the woods on his right and then made his way up the steep almost indecipherable path towards his truck, stopping and calling the dog at various points along the way, while searching for his ribbon marking. But no George.

  He drove back home.

  “Where’s George?” Nicki asked.

  “Damned if I know,” he said.

  “Well, then,” he continued his story, “Nicki and the kids started worrying and made me worry, poor George was going to get eat by something and I was cruel. So I couldn’t stand it, and had to get back into the truck, take my flashlight, and go all the way back into this godforsaken place, down over that godforsaken hill, and try to find George. At night in the dark—with the big bears and stuff.”

  He combed the area again, with the flashlight in the dark. He shone the light on the trees at the opposite side of the river and walked all the way down to Island Pool once more.

  “But no George,” I said.

  “No George,” he answered.

  So back home he went exhausted, muddied wet, and tired. Into the dooryard he comes, opens the porch door, and lo and behold George, lying on his mat, wagging his tail. Happy as a clam to see him.

  “Three lads in here fishing found him wandering about, and realized it was my dog and brought him home. Mind you, I didn’t have to speak too loud to get the kids to do any chore, the next few days.”

  So we are on the river again, and I’m thinking of why we try to use the metaphor of God when describing it. Perhaps there is nothing else to describe it as. Norman Maclean in A River Runs Through It did it best, but Faulkner and Hemingway did it well too, and I think that perhaps in fly-fishing there is an element of combating unknown forces of life with such a small line, such minute precisely tied flies, that there is no other way to ever describe it. But still, in some way it leaves us at a loss for words. For once you describe something as God, there is nothing else you can describe it as.

  We pass the big dead water hole. The salmon come up into this stretch of the river and hug hard the far bank, where they rest aside hidden boulders under the river. You fish a dry fly or a bug and you can see them swirl as they chase it while you strip line. But they are hard to interest here, and today they are uninterested. We beach the canoe and walk up along this bank.

  Now, today, this river, this place far away from the world at large, is my home. I know the rock I sat upon last summer at this same time—and seven summers before that. And I think of the little girl sitting near Dennis Pool the day I went out for fiddleheads, drinking her hot chocolate, and wonder what she is doing, and that she is now a teenager.

  I know how the path is overgrown, and I step to my right automatically, without thinking now, because I know one step to the left will make me slide on the greasy mud into the deep water hole itself But of course I myself am becoming just one more ghost while I remember this. I too am disappearing on this river, like that little girl drinking the hot chocolate, and I can see myself as a younger man fading into the past, on every turn we take.

  I’ve always had my battles. Most of them were with myself. Falling against a hard rock one day and cracking a rib, but refusing to let go of my rod. A rib on my left side. And then my brother cracking a rib on my right side, in a friendly tussle, with a left hook. So I went to the doctor to get a check-up before I left for England where one of my books was being published, and the doctor said I had spots on my lungs. And he wanted to check them for ma
lignancy. So they put me through a number of tests, and when I went back he told me that the spots weren’t in my lungs but on ribs that had healed, from being cracked or broken. I don’t know if I was happy or disappointed, because I’d already begun to make out my will, but at least the excitement was over.

  Four salmon are resting here, today, under the shaded water, behind the orange-black boulders. They look so intent on making it to wherever they are going. It seems in a way that the entire world is against them. It is amazing to see them torpedo through this water with such infinite strength. They have come in past the factory ships, the drifters, the mills soaking the water in pollution and rinse, the filth from the sewers, the nets on the reserves, the pitchforks and nets and jig hooks of Henry the Poacher, and are not yet done their journey. They have miles and miles of river to go.

  We both fish over them for a time, and though one moves up, and now and again shows interest, they all finally act as if we don’t exist, or the flies we are presenting don’t exist.

  It is days like this that to me make the river great.

  But Peter is complaining that this river is dead, compared to how it used to be. Yet it still stretches before us, unconcerned with anyone’s assessment of it.

  The trees are in full summer now, and the sky is wide open, and the bends of the river have let go of their early swell and become steady and regular. Peter is now a grandfather, though he is a man in his early forties, and those children of his that I held as infants long ago have grown to young womanhood.

  It seems an amazing irony that he wouldn’t have boys, but he takes the girls into the woods with him whenever he gets a chance. And they will have every opportunity to hunt or fish if they desire.

  We push on to Island Pool and fish it, with the wind just slight on our backs. And we talk of other men who have been in here, and of a trip we made once long ago, when we walked the entire afternoon to get to this pool, and turned in the dark and started back. But we were younger and far more ambitious then.

  Just above Island Pool is where David Savage came to hunt one year. There were men at various points still hunting up on the road, and he knew he wouldn’t have much luck. The day was bitter and cold, with an inch or two of raw snow, and he went into the woods and walked down to the first embankment and waited, at about this point above the river. His hands were so frozen he could hardly open his thermos, and just as he poured a coffee, the largest buck he had ever seen came up over that embankment after crossing the river. He shot it, and began to lug it uphill a half a mile; it weighed three hundred and four pounds.

  “I was winded at the end,” he said.

  Yes, there are deer in here, and whenever we fished we talked of hunting, and when hunting fishing. Perhaps it is a peculiar way to always be somewhere else, and to never be satisfied.

  You try to think of how this river must have looked five hundred years ago. And then we get into the canoe and try to navigate the rocks as one would a minefield.

  it is summer yet but still the cold

  coils through these fields at dusk

  I think of that line from an early poem of Alden Nowlan.

  The day is cool but the sun has warmed us, and the spray from the water washes over the gunnels and hits our hands.

  I can do all right on this river now, and other rivers also. And the one thing you learn—perhaps the most important thing of all—is to take your time. For time is infinite, and everything is preordained. Never mind the scoff that will come when this is said. A year on the river, ten years on the river will tell you how true this is. You will meet an animal at the exact moment you were supposed to—see it in the way the sun hits it, form an impression of it, and its destiny, and its link to you.

  I tell Peter that my brother and I ran the Padapedia. It took us three days, and we caught a fish apiece.

  “So this isn’t the only hard river,” I say.

  Peter now is once again telling me the story of falling into the bear’s lap. The water glistens coolly against us as he speaks.

  “Bears,” Peter says, finishing up his story and lighting a cigarette.

  All stories blend into one another on the river, on the water, and become like the drone of some music, so it doesn’t matter how many familiar variations one hears.

  And I remember the bear with her cub, and the two stories related to me in the past year about seeing bears.

  And it seems I should tell Peter about them. So I do.

  One was about a woman, who is a good fisherwoman and a good hunter. She was up on the Dungarvon one morning with her husband. They had parked the truck on an old woods road and cut through the trees and across a blueberry field to the water. Then they walked up a ways to the pool she was going to fish, while her husband decided to travel further on.

  “I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” he said to her. “Good luck.”

  It was a great morning for fishing. The water was dropping and the sky was clearing off, the patches of sun burning away the mist. Everything was quiet as she walked into the water and began to cast.

  But suddenly she felt she was being watched.

  “I thought my husband had come back,” she said. “I had this strange feeling, and turned. There four yards behind me were three bears. A mother and two cubs about a year old. The mother grunted, sniffed the air, and tossed her head, but the cubs just jumped into the water. I waded out as far as I could, and then clamoured up on a rock. It was the only place I could go. I couldn’t get to the truck and didn’t want to start yelling for my husband.”

  For well over an hour she stood in the same position, as the bears walked, waded, and splashed all about her. Suddenly the mother gave a half heist up to her feet, turned sideways, and ran with the cubs behind her. Five minutes later her husband came sauntering down the beach.

  “What in hell are you doing standing in the middle of the river on a rock?” he said. “You should be fishing over that rock, not standing on top of it.”

  “Bears,” she said, “bears.”

  “Hell, darlin’, they’ll never bother you,” he said.

  But she was the one out in the river with them.

  The other incident happened to a man I know who was spending the afternoon clearing some brush far from his camp, along the Renous with a friend. They were in a hurry because they wanted to finish and fish in the evening, and talked about fishing as they worked. They could hear the water—and what they were doing is clearing a lot of brush to make it easier for them to travel back and forth.

  “I wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing—I was only thinking of fishing. The axe glanced and cut my calf almost to the bone,” he said.

  His friend wrapped the wound, and said that he would have to go and get the truck at the camp, and come back in on the woods road that skirted the area they were clearing because it was too far for the fellow to walk.

  The man hobbled over to a stump and waited, looking down at a small valley towards the river. He sat on the stump about fifteen minutes trying not to move, which would start the wound bleeding again.

  Well, I won’t get fishing now tonight, he thought. After a while he saw a male bear about two hundred yards away. The bear couldn’t see him, but was sniffing and moving its head side to side.

  “I didn’t think this looked very good,” the fellow said. “I waited for the bear to get a scent of me, and turn away, but I think what he got the scent of was my blood. I slapped my hands to scare it, but he kept wagging his head aggressively and coming towards me up that small hill. I waited until he was about twenty yards from me, and gave a loud cough. The bear grunted and kept coming. So I looked about. Behind the stump was a small tree—but any tree bigger I would have to run to. So I took my chances and climbed the one that was there. The bear came right up to the stump, sniffed it, and then came over to the tree and leaned up against it, looking up at me. I was about as high as I could go, only three feet from its paws, and the little tree was bending. So I was looking about fo
r another tree. Then I decided to give a shout. I shouted at the top of my voice. This scared the bear badly and it went about fifteen feet sideways in a second, landed on its feet, threw out a paw and snapped a good-sized sapling up by its roots and far into the air as if it were a twig. Then it started to come back. The thing was, it walked over the brush we had piled that morning and made no sound at all. My axe was in the dirt by the stump. I was in a bad position, because the bear was very interested, and I was again bleeding badly.

  “It got to the tree again, and leaned against it looking up at me. And then it heard the sound of the truck and took off, and was gone. So I got to the hospital all right, but couldn’t fish much for the rest of the summer. I put it all in the log at the camp.”

  Some day we will stop travelling this river, I tell Peter. We will stop travelling all rivers. I never thought of this when I was four years old fishing Beaverbrook, and caught my first plump trout, and lost my sneakers and walked home with my socks in my pocket. I did not think of things that way. It was through a glass darkly, not unlike the beery brown water.

  But I think now that some day it will just not be worth it to us any more, and we will not put the canoe in at Simpson’s or at the Miner’s Bridge. And we too will become like Mr. Simms holding up in his shaking fingers his beautiful Copper Killer, while sitting in the kitchen of his house. And others will be here and call the rivers their own.

  Each bridge we cross in the summer, we stop the truck, get out and walk over to the edge to look down at the pool below to count the grilse. We often think there are fewer fish now than there used to be, although that might not be true. My uncle, Richard Adams, said in an interview a few years back that there are as many salmon now as there ever were. But perhaps that is wishful thinking. No one can stare at a river, hear the slough of a paddle coming upon you in the evening, listen to the laughter of men and women who have lived by and have loved these waters, without being hopeful.

  We talk of conservation as we take fish and talk of taking fish when we are at a meeting about conservation.