by Henry Hughes
Willard started talking about his wife. She left with their son, Max, a few days ago.
“I’m sorry, brother. I didn’t know.”
“It’s been bad for a couple years. I kept thinking it was being in school and just the changes we were going through with Max. But she hasn’t been very loving. Then she met someone.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Shit, one night she went out to get groceries. I was home waiting with Max. And it was like hours. She was probably at this guy’s house. I almost fuckin’ lost it, man. That kind of anger is scary. One of us had to leave.”
Thin panes closed around our lines. No bites. We patrolled each hole, broke up and skimmed the fresh ice with the dumpling ladle. Back at our station in the middle of the pond we tried jigging little blue teardrops. Nothing. Willard talked about catching big lake trout through the ice in Maine and how sometimes they had cigarette butts in their stomachs. I told him that New Orleans catfish will also eat cigarette butts. “Why would such a beautiful creature eat such filth?” he wondered. We speculated that the warm water fish of central Indiana had tucked themselves in for a long winter’s nap. In summer, these ponds were full of biting game, but today we aroused nothing but the pain of our relationships.
“You were right about Jin Lei,” I said. “We had an agreement, but she took things much more seriously—more emotionally—than I did.”
“Wake up, man,” Willard looked at me with something like disgust. “She’s in love with you. The marriage is real to her. Or was real.”
“But I told her from the beginning …”
“You told her? I think you need to listen to yourself.”
“I feel terrible about it.” I dropped my head. “She’s such a good woman.”
We fell silent. “Should we get a bottle of something?” I asked.
“I think we’d better.” Willard jigged a little more.
I walked up to our apartment on the second floor and pulled a half-empty bottle of Old Crow from the cupboard. Jin Lei was typing away at something. “Catch anything?” she asked without looking up.
“No,” I said, then I went over and put my hands on her shoulders.
I looked out of our sliding glass doors and saw Willard standing there alone on the ice. I had gazed at the ponds so many times, and now it seemed bizarre to see a man standing on water simply because it was cold.
A month later I slept with a friend, a graduate student in psychology who liked to drink and talk at the Knickerbocker Saloon in Lafayette. I avoided drinking and driving, and one night walking her home she invited me up to her room where we just consumed each other. It felt great to have those carnal passions reignited in my body and mind. I left her place at six in the morning, took a shortcut across the still-frozen South Pond, and plunged through the ice. Blue shock and fear. Water over my shoulders. Ice cutting my neck and arms. But my toes touched bottom, and I thrashed madly through the remaining ice to the shore. Cold, bleeding, head ablaze, and suddenly confused about what I’d done all night, I stumbled into the apartment. Jin Lei woke in a panic and helped me undress and get into bed. I slept until two in the afternoon and woke to find her reading. She put down her book and asked where I was all night. I told her some of the truth. “I don’t want to be with you anymore,” she said and started to cry.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this.”
Jin Lei moved out of our Williamsburg apartment. I helped, dividing our meager possessions and lifting the heavy end of her desk onto Sean’s truck. She avoided my eyes and was quieter than I’d ever known her to be.
A couple months went by, and we didn’t talk. Then I saw her in the library, and she smiled. Our friendship slowly healed. I read and edited her essays and put up shelves at her new place; she translated Chinese sources for my research and taught me how to braise eggplant, Yunnan style, with soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, and garlic. Jin Lei finished her master’s in comparative literature, secured an assistantship teaching Chinese, and was well on her way to the doctorate.
“You’re really doing it, Jin Lei,” I raised my glass over lunch at Harry’s Chocolate Shop. “To you!”
“To you and America,” she revised the toast.
These days no one ever toasts America, I thought.
On September 11, 2001, I was finishing my dissertation and looking out over a painful highway construction project that had filled part of the South Pond when a knock rattled the door. It was Jin Lei. “Did you see what’s happening? We need to call your family and see if they are all right.”
“What are you talking about?”
We followed the news on the web and then went to Sean’s house to watch CNN. My father and brother were safe on eastern Long Island. I tried calling Eugene and a couple other friends who did business in lower Manhattan. They were also safe, but thousands were dead, and another war over religion, power, and oil had begun.
Like Jiang Taigong at the bloody end of the Shang dynasty, Guy de Maupassant during the senseless Franco-Prussian War, and Ernest Hemingway after the earth-shattering World Wars of the twentieth century, Jin Lei and I looked to water and fishing for a little healing. I borrowed Sean’s pickup, hauling us and the China, too toward the Tippecanoe, turning off the radio news. “Don’t think about that right now,” I said. We arranged for a shuttle and launched into the clear running river, drifting and rowing downstream, casting and swinging lures and flies. “Tippecanoe and China, too,” I sang, enjoying the word play, then realizing it was another paean to battle and slaughter.
The air and water were still warm, and I rowed up on a gravel bar where we stepped into the river wearing our shorts and old sneakers. It had been a while since Jin Lei and I fished together, and she was happy to see me using a Yuanwei fly reel that her father sent me. The reel was made in Shandong, the home province of Confucius, and it felt good to be pulling line from another legacy. The first mention of fishing reels comes from Chinese writing in the fourth century, and now the Chinese were making them again.
“Can I try the fly rod?” Jin Lei asked.
“Of course,” I said, showing her the basics. She soon found the rhythm, looping out a decent cast that placed the streamer behind a swirling logjam where a bass waited. The fish struck, ran, tailed-danced, and then disappeared. “Whoa!” she yelled.
We worked our way downstream, raising a few small fish but mostly our presence with each other. Jin Lei climbed atop a large rock, made a long cast, watched, and retrieved with jaguar concentration. She looked beautiful and strong. A lady of limitless reach.
By spring we would be legally divorced but good friends. Jin Lei was heading back to China to visit her family, and I was leaving for a teaching job in Oregon, but I felt close to her in words and feelings. The poet Seamus Heaney visited the university in late April, and Jin Lei and I went to the hall early to help setup. Mr. Heaney was warm and friendly, offering us a glass of whiskey from a bottle he’d just received. I accepted an amber inch in a plastic cup and told him that I loved his poems, reciting a couple lines from “The Salmon Fisher and the Salmon.” He gave us that squinty smile.
“Thanks,” he said. “Are you a fisherman?”
“Oh, yes.”
“It’s good to get out,” Heaney said. “I’m not much at it these days. Do you know Ted Hughes’ work? Now he was a real angler—heart and soul.”
We talked about Ted Hughes and his son, Nick, fishing for pike in Ireland. Then Mr. Heaney turned to Jin Lei. “Do like to fish, my dear?”
“Yes,” Jin Lei said and recited a couple lines from a Tang dynasty fishing poem we were translating together. Heaney chuckled and sipped his whisky. “You two are perfect for each other.”
It was painful to hear the great bard pronounce us “perfect for each other.” But we formed a near perfect friendship that endures to this day. Indiana was in full May bloom when Jin Lei handed me a folder and floppy disk of those Chinese fishing poems. I turned to our translation of “Green Creek” by Wang Wei, an
eighth-century master of many arts.
In the clear, stilling waters,
My heart and the river are equally at peace.
Let me sit upon a large, flat rock
And drop my line and hook forever.
Jin Lei was high in my heart, above the river on that shining stone, making impossible casts and raising fish after fish. “Zai jian, lao pengyou,” she whispered and hugged me. “Goodbye, old friend.”
“Zai jian, Jin Lei,” I said.
“And don’t be afraid,” she told me. “Our lives are starting over again. Keep your heart open.”
Thinking I’d take the China, too for one last trip, I got my oars out of the closet and walked down to the pond. Over the weedy berm and down through the trees I looked and looked again. The boat was gone. Then I saw that someone had cut the rusty chain from which she depended, leaving only a flat trail through the mud toward the ever-giving and taking water.
Arc and Pulse
Fishing an Oregon river with my wife, Chloë, turns to dancing. I touch her back and shoulders, leading her gently. She smiles, follows my gesture, swings back, and sees in the bubbly kiss of this emerald tailout a big slivery flash. A fish that’s come from the ocean. Chloë has taught me a lot, but today I’m teaching her to cast for steelhead. We met a few years after I arrived at Western Oregon University. She was coming through a divorce, and I was surfacing from a drowning relationship. At Richard Bunse’s art studio in Independence we used pencil and charcoal to draw nude women and men, sipping wine and learning about each other. We talked, explored ideas and the tastes and positions that shape them, and I remembered old Herbie Clark’s crude adage, “Head before tail,” in a new way—that you must love a person’s mind and personality if you hope to continue loving his or her body and place beside you. Chloë and I dated, shared our histories, took her children fishing, spent a night and a few months together, and fell in love. A good bit of Roman poetry is worth repeating, “Let your hook always be cast,” Ovid tells us in The Art of Love. “In a pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.”
We had fished this coastal river once last year in early September. The woods were dry, the water low and clear, and the fish wary of our shadows as if they were the smoky dances of fire. The fires of any romantic relationship can burn in the wrong direction. As Chloë and I got to know each other better, we had our first arguments. The issues were familiar—my excessive time spent fishing, long days on the water without a phone call, or just my need to be alone when Chloë said she needed me around. And when plans for marriage firmed up, we had our first disputes about money. Most disagreements worked themselves through to a place of better understanding, but some clashes turned red and sore. One quarrel over my debts exploded into harsh words, slammed doors, and days of silence. When I emailed Chloë to ask if she still wanted to go fishing on Friday as we planned, she typed back, “Okay, but no champagne.”
We walked deep into the warm canyon, whispering about the Siletz Indians who once speared, trapped, ate, laughed, and lay along these basalt ledges. What is it we really want and need from the world, from other people? The Indians surely worried about many things before the ships and wagons arrived but not loans and credit cards. They needed each other; they needed fish. Hours into the canyon, Chloë and I didn’t see another person, and when we found a sun-drenched stone over a deep pool, we stripped down and plunged into the cold water. Wild awake with just the river and ourselves, it felt so easy to see, touch, and love completely. Would I ever need anything more?
I would need this October when rains bring more fish and the opportunity to catch them. Chloë swings the rod forward and sends the blue spinner into the riffles. It has a nice vibratory resistance, and she’s steering it right into the sweet spot. No bobber or bells for this woman. She likes to “feel it,” she tells me. I glance up at the narrow gray sky, the rocky canyon lush in moss, fern, and fir—a great cathedral echoing wonder and promise. She brings the spinner across the deep tongue and there!—the arc and pulse of the rod, a splash, line tearing out—she’s into a fish.
There are many ways people grow closer, and each way comes with the risk that it will lead inversely to pain and undoing. We learn each other’s burning passions and dull apathies, the consistencies and idiosyncrasies of our minds. We count on each other, raise children, take care of a house, garden, even a pet. A couple years ago a skinny gray tabby cat jumped in our boat while I was cleaning up in the driveway. The cat gobbled some leftover prawn baits, rubbed against my leg, and purred. Chloë called him Shrimp and said we should take him in. I was reluctant. Just another thing to worry about. But she and the boys convinced me. We love the cat, of course. And yet I do worry sometimes when he’s out at night—will he get bit by a raccoon or hit by a car? Then that worry seems silly in light of the children’s health, the life concerns of our family and friends, a leaky roof, bills, work. So much matters. But during exciting moments of possibility—diving into water, reaching for someone you love, hooking a great fish—nothing else seems to matter.
Chloë is focused, excited, anxious. I touch her flexing back and say, “Great.” There’s nothing quite like a big, bright, sea-run fish in a rushing river. She keeps her balance on the slippery rocks, stepping back into the shallows. I coach, and she retrieves a little line, and then there’s a confused moment of slack and a rocketing burst of steelhead, its body completely out of the water in an electrifying silver somersault.
This fish left the river as a small smolt two or three years ago, returning heavy, handsome, and hard to hook—until now. Steelhead may be the sexiest gamefish in the world—and it’s taken me a lifetime to find them. When this fish splashes back and disappears, the rod resumes its pulsing arc. “It’s still on. It’s coming,” she says. A chrome steelhead streaking through the blue-green river.
And then it’s gone.
“Oh no! What happened?” she groans. My jaw clenches and eyes squeeze shut as I exhale a tremendous sinking disappointment. You can’t pray for everything. Like young Huckleberry Finn, who prayed hard for fishhooks but never got them, concluding “there ain’t nothing in it,” I had long ago replaced divine entreaty with high hope. My hopes were sky high that Chloë would hook a fish today. And she did. Long ago, I got over losing fish on my line, but only recently have I dealt with what it means to lose the women in my life. Chloë’s never caught a steelhead, and she’s worked hard at it for days, the river rising and falling, the fish constantly on the move. Today’s conditions are ideal, her rod-work perfect. I examine the line and hooks. Everything is fine. “Sometimes it just happens,” I say. “You did great. What a gorgeous fish. Cast again.”
The endless, repeated promise of fishing—the hope that the next cast will be the one that connects you to a fish, a magnificent fish, the fish of a lifetime—can lead to a hobby, obsession, addiction, healthy emotional and physical persistence, the faithful practice of something like religion, even passion and love. It has to lead somewhere. “The craft of angling is the catching of fish,” the writer Ted Leeson wrote after wading these same Oregon rivers. “But the art of angling is a receptiveness to these connections, the art of letting one thing lead to another until, if only locally and momentarily, you realize some small completeness.” And then you start over.
West and east, open ocean and weedy ponds, urban canals and pristine springs, hot swamps and arctic lakes, rowing into a fresh breeze and motoring through outboard fumes, drunk and sober, serious and silly, swinging baits, lures, and flies for hits and misses, landing little sprats and lead-bellied leviathan, eating some fish and letting others go—it’s been an endless journey of angling. And along the way there were relationships of every variety—backseat and front seat, crazy and calm, primal and cerebral, one night stands and lifetime friendships, years of dating and nights of being alone, divorce and marriage. The endlessly repeated, recurring, predictable, surprising, erratic, and bizarre experiences that are so much a part of fishing can drown in an inst
ant or, over time, become the sustaining forces of our existence. Like the constant and constantly changing river that Chloë and I wade in today, you never know what will happen.
“Take a step upstream,” I say, “and cast again.”
Acknowledgments
In a book about relationships over many years I owe tremendous thanks to many people. Thanks to Barbara Davenport, who reminisced with me at Ralph’s Fishing Station near the sandy mouth of Long Island’s Mt. Sinai Harbor about her late husband, Ralph, and the old station that flourished from 1961 until 1977 at the muddy back of that harbor. Ralph’s Fishing Station and Caraftis’ Fishing Station in neighboring Port Jefferson represent great legacies of angling and boating culture for many Long Islanders, from the late Herbie Clark to parents taking their children snapper fishing for the first time this summer. Thanks to old Long Island friends, especially Eugene Jones, my angling and cocktail companion for more than thirty-five years.
Prairie praise for the folks at Dakota Wesleyan University, South Dakota, and special thanks to those that assisted with my research: Jennifer Ditmarsch, Birch Hilton, John and Patti Duffy, Joseph and JoAnn Ditta, and Ben Janice, director of Lower Brule Sioux Tribe Department of Wildlife, Fish and Recreation. Gratitude to the many people at Purdue University, Indiana, that cultivated my riverside education, especially Colleen Morton Busch, Rob Davidson, and the anglers Sean McNerney and Willard Greenwood.
The Japan and China years were supported and seasoned by many wonderful people, including Carl Delaney, Jon Trachtman, Yano Tadayoshi, Sugiura Takao, Chen Lin, and Lou Guangqing. I am beholden to Ishikura Naoko for reading and commenting on the Japan chapters. Deep gratitude to my dear friend and continuously generous colleague, Jin Lei, currently an associate professor of Chinese at the College of Charleston, South Carolina.
Thanks to my Oregon fishing buddies: Bob Fultz, Jackson Stalley, Wayne Harrison, John Larison, Mark Weiss, Tom Friesen, Paul Shirkey, Ted Leeson, Peter Betjemann, and the consummate angler-artist Richard Bunse.