by Henry Hughes
Although many more men than women enjoy fishing, and the angling tradition favors fathers and sons, it was my mother who made me a complete angler. In a way completely different from any boy or man, she would ask me questions about my passion. “What is your favorite fish? What do you use for bait? Do those fish fight hard?” And when I answered with bursting enthusiasm, she looked into my eyes and smiled.
The great Russian angler and author Sergei Aksakov lamented that his mother hated fishing and, worrying over her son’s obsession with the sport, often forbade him from angling. My mother never fished with me, but she always encouraged me to go. Over the years she inquired earnestly about new rods and reels or the lures and hooks I fondled on the kitchen table; and she stiffened in humorous mock alarm when Aunt Lil scolded, “Get those damn hooks off the dinner table. You wanna choke us to death?” Once my mother carefully picked a Rooster Tail spinner from the top shelf of my tackle box, asking, “What would you catch with this?” And when I told her trout, she nodded, holding the lure up to the light, her soft, rounded face squeezing gently in reflection. “It’s so pretty.” She swung it to her ear. “I need some earrings like this.” She knew little about fishing but registered my discourse as significant and open to creative association. She bought me the wrong hooks and impossible lures for tarpon and trevally that did not exist in our waters and suggested grapes for flounder bait—“They might really like grapes,” her eyes wide open to the various fruits of temptation. I rudely corrected her and stomped off in frustration, but my taste for the holistic, aesthetic, and quirky was taking shape on the vine; my flinty boy knowledge and brutal energies for the chase would soften and ripen under the warm, sensitive gaze of this woman.
“Saw a few nice snappers at the pub last night,” Herbie said as he lifted his amber tilted glass. “But they didn’t seem interested.” He and my father sat on chairs in the garage.
“Maybe your bait’s no good,” my father said, popping another beer.
“Too soft to stay on the hook,” Herbie shook his head and laughed. I didn’t know what they were talking about. The word “snapper” has many meanings in our language, and it names many fish around the world. For most Long Islanders, snappers are young bluefish, but I had never caught one. “Sweet young blues,” Herbie sang, opening his hands to an estimated size of nine inches. “And damn tasty,” he grinned once more, winking at my father.
Long Island reached right into a summer swarm of blues. Adult bluefish up to eighteen pounds—voracious, stout-toothed predators, long and narrow, that travel in schools of like-size thousands—followed the East Coast from Nova Scotia to Argentina, migrating south in winter and entering Long Island Sound in early summer. Bluefish lay eggs in the ocean, near the edge of the continental shelf, and even the larvae have well-developed teeth. It’s a fish born to bite, and the maturing snappers chomp their way into the harbors and bays, feasting on smaller fish, baby lobsters, shrimp, and anything else they can swallow.
My father did not like fishing, but he was usually willing to take me. Herbie told us to meet him over at Ralph’s Fishing Station the next evening. The long summer had thinned out the boatyard, but the store and docks were in steady swing. Sunburned and dark tanned men carried coolers full of steel gray bluefish and coppery porgies. Occasionally a huge striped bass was brought up to the scale, its gaping mouth and golden eye entrancing the crowd.
The air was hot and sticky. Herbie and Ralph sat on a bench, drinking beer, red-faced and loud. “Half in the bag,” my father would later say. Ralph grumbled over a health inspector who wrote a citation after finding Arnold the pig sleeping in the kitchen. Arnold had a splash of blue paint across his back from another misadventure and had reportedly rummaged through a woman’s purse and eaten her makeup. “You missed the tide,” Ralph said. “Try over at Stony Brook tomorrow. It’s better there.”
“Sorry, Charley,” Herbie said and rubbed his face, looking a bit embarrassed for being drunk and of no help. Quick to hook a distraction, Herbie pointed his flushed nose at a large boat still racked in the yard. “Look at that shit.” A woman wearing only a long baseball shirt emerged from the cabin, and I followed the length of her chocolaty legs and the bounce of her breasts. “I told you she was shacked-up with him in there,” Herbie shook his head.
“How ’bout some rent, sweetie?” Ralph yelled out, and the woman flipped him off.
My father steered me into the store.
Fish photos, some cracked and faded, decorated the walls like cave paintings. Umbrella rigs for bluefish, crab traps, and killie pots hung from the ceiling; wall racks glowed with big red bass plugs, bright yellow and green bucktail jigs, and an array of hooks, swivels, sinkers, and lines. A pimply teenage girl working the counter and eating fries sold us long-shanked snelled hooks, mooring-sized bobbers, and a package of frozen silvery minnows called “shiners.” The girl handed us a tide calendar and pointed to the times for low and high tide. From a briny back room humming with refrigerator compressors emerged Old Captain. “Fried snapper, fried snapper,” he muttered. “You gotta get those snappers and fry ’em up, right Ralph?”
“Right, Captain,” she answered, rolling her eyes. “Ralph’s outside.”
“Fried snapper, boys,” he kept saying, leaning to port and shuffling out the front door.
“Why doesn’t someone take him fishing?” my father asked.
“All his fishing friends are dead,” the girl said.
“Or drunk,” my father glowered, and we walked out.
On Friday night, my father came home from work in his greasy overalls, set his lunch box and a ninety-nine-cent six pack of Schmitz beer on the kitchen table, kissed my mother, pressed a cold beer bottle to the back of my neck, and said, “Okay, so we’re going fishing tonight.”
“But the Mets are playing the Cardinals,” I said.
“That’s okay,” he said and smiled. “Let’s get those snappers.” He twisted the cap off the bottle and gave me a sip.
My mother and Aunt Lil had arranged an early and simple supper of salad topped with hardboiled eggs and tuna fish. We always ate at an oval wooden table in the kitchen, always covered in a plastic tablecloth printed in some bright geometric pattern. I hurried my father along, and he drove us to Stony Brook Harbor, parking the Chevy pickup head-on toward the narrows, where many people were casting from the bulkhead railing. We set up my Zebco with a long hook and a big red-and-white bobber. The shiners had thawed in the fridge, and my father hooked one through the tail.
“They’ll pull it right off like that,” a woman next to us barked. “Hook it through the eyes.”
My father smiled and drove the barbed point right though the sockets.
“Come on, Dad,” I urged.
“Relax. They ain’t here yet,” the woman leaned over and spat.
I was fired up. Pushing the button on the reel, I whipped it forward and cast right across the woman’s line. “Sorry,” my father said, squashing out his cigarette, taking my Zebco, lifting the line over her rod, and retrieving. The woman frowned, perhaps fearing a long night of fishing next to us. My next cast was straight, but the shiner flew off the hook and into the pink mouth of a herring gull. My third cast was okay, though within seconds the bobber drifted into the pilings below. “Cast up-current,” advised a man to our right. He had long sideburns, smoked a pipe, and wore a button-down blue shirt and dungaree shorts. “If you cast up with the current, your bait will have more time in the strike zone.”
“Thanks a lot,” my father touched his blue Mets cap, leaning in close to me and whispering, “I think I dug this guy’s cesspool.”
The tide rolled in, and I watched my bobber with devotion. Then from down the dock, we heard, “Hey, nice one. Okay. Here we go.” People at the east end were swinging snappers over the railing, and the action was heading our way. Gulls gathered, crying and dipping, voices grew louder and happier, and then the little bobber of the man next to us went down. Pipe in mouth, he reeled in a dime-bright te
n-inch snapper. The woman to our left also had one, and people all down the rail were into fish. It was as if the fish had passed over me completely. “Pay attention,” my father coached. “You’ll get one.” I beamed on my bobber until it knocked against the barnacled piling. When I reeled it in, the bait was gone. “Damnit, Dad,” I said accusatively.
“Hey, watch your mouth,” he scolded, threading on another big shiner. I cast, watched, and when the bobber blinked underwater, I yelled, “Got one,” reeling frantically to find another bare hook. “Damn shit,” I cried.
“I’m warning you,” my father said. “If you can’t behave yourself we’re going home.”
The man to our right had caught a couple more, slipping them into a red lunch cooler. He came over and looked at my hook. “I’d try a smaller hook,” he said.
“They’re snapper hooks,” my father shrugged. “That’s all we got.”
“May I?” His eyebrows fluttered, and he produced a pair of clippers, snipped off the long shanked impaler and its heavy snell, pulled out a little packet of hooks—Eagle Claw, size six—and tied one on with a knot I had never seen. He pushed the hook right through the gill plates of a small shiner. “I find it holds better there.” He also snapped off my huge bobber and put on one of his smaller floats. “It might be a little harder to cast, but the fish won’t feel it. Just flip it up-current. I’ll stay out of your way.”
“How much do I owe you?” my father asked.
“Nothing,” the man smiled. “You did a nice job on that cesspool.”
“Aha, okay. You’re the professor, right? I remember.” The two men laughed. “How about a beer then?” my father offered.
“Okay. Sounds good,” the professor said.
My father got two beers from the truck, and the men began talking about drainage and sand. Conversation over a beer about construction, sports, or fishing seemed to bring together men from very different backgrounds. I made my best cast of the evening, and in seconds the bobber went down. I started reeling, the rod dancing with a fighting fish I could really feel. Wild with excitement, I swung the snapper over the railing and into the grill of the woman’s car. The men were laughing, the woman smiled. I leapt on the fish like a cat. My father brought the galvanized bucket from the truck and filled it with water. I picked up the snapper—smooth and soft—and dropped it into the bucket, watching it circle frantically. It was a beautiful silvery fish with a slate back and aquamarines shimmering through its milky flanks. I would add four more to the bucket that night, constantly looking at them, inspecting their toothy mouths, each fish stiffening in death with flat or flared red gills. They were so different than the flounder that clung to the bottom of the bucket and lived for hours. Snappers swam madly and expired quickly. “Like some people,” my father psychologized when I shared my observation.
I felt a strange blend of sadness and delight—sad that these fish were dying and delighted that they were mine—and this would remain an emotional paradox throughout my life as an angler who kills and eats and, in that sense, fully possesses the fish he loves. As Santiago vows in The Old Man and the Sea: “Fish, I love you and respect you very much. But I will kill you … .” Rather than a kind of cognitive dissonance, though some animal-rights moralists may see it that way, I came to understand this paradox as a truth about what it means to be human and a predator. The killing of fish both upsets and thrills me. When the bobber went down again, I thrilled beyond the moon, which had just risen in the east.
On the far side of the narrows something ripped and splashed across the surface. “Bunker,” the professor said. “They’re being chased.” People looked and pointed at the rusty colored school, and one man pulled out a surfcasting rod and tried to reach them. The bunker, an Atlantic menhaden of the herring and shad clan, teemed in our coastal waters, feeding on plankton and relentlessly being pursued and eaten by bluefish and striped bass. Too oily and bony for most American palates, bunker are not sought by anglers except as bait and indicators of feeding gamefish. The big bluefish had returned ravenous from their ocean breeding grounds, flashing like underwater lightning, attacking and biting the juicy bunker as they leapt into the unsustaining air.
The bunker and blues quickly vanished, the snappers stopped biting, and the woman next to us packed up and went home, leaving a small bag of trash that my father threw into a bin twenty feet away. The professor stowed his gear in the back of his Honda. “Japanese, hah?” My father noted the car and asked about the gas mileage.
“I think that’s the direction we’re heading, Charley.”
“I’m afraid so,” said my father, glancing back at his beloved gas-guzzling Chevy.
The professor showed me the fisherman’s knot. “Okay, you try it,” he handed me the line. After a couple times, I got it. My father and I studied the neat barrels stacked in the fastening. “That won’t weaken your line like a square knot,” the professor said, and my father nodded, thinking crane cables and splices. A teacher’s lesson had never felt so enjoyable. The professor shook our hands, told me I was “a real angler,” and hoped we’d see each other again soon.
As we loaded the pickup under the dock lights, teenagers were parking, Rolling Stones blaring from open doors and windows. I heard the clink of beer bottles and girls’ voices. It was still very warm. Some of the girls wore revealing tops. I stared and felt the strange desire to see more. A girl in cutoff jeans and a halter top walked up to a couple of guys near the rail. “Catch anything?” she asked.
“Lotta snappers, honey,” one man said, pulling a towel off his bucket.
“Wow,” she smiled.
These early fishing experiences shaped and intensified my sense of what it meant to be alive. There was Old Captain and his fading, confused desire to fry a few more snappers; the vitality of the men and women, talking and laughing, catching joy and supper from the teeming July waters; and the fish, so wild with eating and being eaten. I thought of the professor’s kind and wise administrations and the sexy girl walking through the music to the water’s edge with her, “Wow.” I don’t know how many of those people are still alive. Like the snappers and blues, we were all just living up our summer.
As we drove home, my father caught the end of the game on the radio. Tom Seaver pitched the Mets to a win. When we pulled into our driveway, my mother and Aunt Lil came outside. They had been to the movies and wore bright summer dresses that seemed to bloom into open petals across their chests.
“Well?” they asked.
“We caught some nice fish,” I said, showing them the bucket of little snappers.
“That’s wonderful,” my mother said. “We’ll have them tomorrow. You boys gonna clean them?” My father reached an arm around my mother, but she giggled and spun away—“Not with those fishy hands”—then swung back for a kiss anyway.
Worn out but happy, my father and I cleaned my five snappers on the picnic table under the buggy flood light, running the garden hose, swatting mosquitoes, talking about the evening. Our cat, Tommy, joined us, and we tossed him some of the leftover shiners. The moon was as bright as the pale flanks of the little fish, slipped into a square Tupperware to be fried in butter at noon the next day, the small sparkle of heads and guts turned into the garden with a spade.
Tickle Trout
“He’s desperate to fish on Saturday,” my mother said to my father as he dug through the newspaper for game times.
My father showered after work and put on a pair of plaid polyester shorts and a clean white T-shirt, the tattoo on his forearm now the blurred blue phantom of a drunken night after basic training in the Army. School started in September, and the Mets were three games out of first place. “Come on, Marion. Just a few more games. ‘Ya gotta believe,’” he’d plead, echoing relief pitcher Tug McGraw’s rallying cry.
Still, he took me fishing, listening to games on the truck radio while I landed more snappers. One night at dinner he asked if we should take Old Captain fishing. “Okay,” I hesitated, not sure how much
fun that would be. But when my father stopped by Ralph’s, where Captain kept a small room, they said he had passed away. “He’s dead?” I asked in disbelief, and my father nodded. I remembered Old Captain lunting around the boatyard, muttering about fish and storms. That fall I drew a picture of him—yachtsman’s cap, forehead mole, beard, and pipe—for my second grade memory project. But instead of legs, I crayoned the smooth gray body of a fish with a tail, something like the first vertebrates that came ashore in the Devonian period. One boy laughed and said he was a mermaid and I wanted to kiss him. I punched the kid in the face, and my mother had to come up to school. “It’s hard for him,” I heard her say to my teacher. “He misses his fishing.”
The Mets made it to the World Series but lost to the Oakland A’s, my parents worried over rocketing fuel prices, and I survived winter by devouring catalogs and more fishing books. In the spring of 1974, my father rented another boat at Ralph’s, and we hooked flounder after flounder, as if the whole harbor were paved with fish. That summer, when I turned nine, we also started catching sea robins, bergalls, porgies, seabass, and blackfish off the local beaches, jetties, and docks. My father knew the crane crews unloading gravel barges at Gotham Stone in Port Jefferson, and they’d let me drop baited lines off their gravely bulkhead, where I’d pull in small fish and eels, wiping my hands on a pair of cutoff corduroy shorts that Aunt Lil said stunk up the wash. Herbie introduced me to the abundance of sunfish in local ponds, and my eccentric Uncle Jack, who knew even less about fishing than my father, took me to Lake Ronkonkoma, insisting that bacon and dough balls on red spray-painted hooks were the way to go. I served this neon deli special to the edge of a weed bed and miraculously hooked a chunky largemouth bass, its powerful black-belted body and belladonna eyes coming out of the water like a celebrity. Fishing books, catalogs, calendars, and ads for beer and whisky paid great attention to bass and trout. They were the freshwater stars I wanted to catch.