by Bill Heavey
But if I can’t be the one, I hope it’s some boy sitting on a bucket with a bobber and a worm, some kid who had to stay behind because there wasn’t enough room for him in the boat. That might be the best thing to ever happen to modern bass fishing.
The Middle Ground
In a country where fishing, like Mideast politics or women’s fashion, has been taken over by the extremists, guys who take the middle path—the way of discount tackle shops, wet tennis shoes, poison ivy, and spinning gear—are accorded all the respect of carp chum.
Every so often, I venture out to see what the modern American bass and trout boys are up to. It nearly always confirms my opinion that if Missing the Point were a criminal offense, most of these guys would be making license plates.
My last excursion with a local bass fisherman illustrated this perfectly. I sank into the upholstery of his $22,000 raspberry flake rocket sled, outfitted with a trolling motor the size of my car’s engine and 3D forward-looking sonar so sophisticated you can’t sell one to anybody from Libya or France. My host wedged me in tight, looked over at me like you would at a baby in a car seat, and hit the throttle. The big outboard exploded like hell had opened a drive-thru window just behind us, the G-forces flattening out my cheeks. I realized we weren’t on the water so much as above it, descending occasionally to punish it for getting in our way.
My host carried his own personal thicket of bait-casters, graphite broomsticks spooled with 20-pound-test so he could yank 3-pound bass out of the river’s dense hydrilla. Once he hooked one, he brought it in so fast it looked like the fish was water-skiing headfirst toward the boat. He stopped casting only once in 9 hours, to wolf down a pack of peanut-butter crackers. I was surprised he took the time to unwrap them.
Then I made the mistake of asking if he ever used spinning rods. “Hell, no,” he growled. “I call those fairy wands.”
Now call it dumb luck or call it fate, but on that particular day the biggest bass, a 4-½-pounder, fell to a pumpkin tube on a -ounce slip sinker cast by yours truly, Tinkerbell. With his fairy wand.
At the other end of the scale are my yuppie friends who have taken up fly fishing with all the gaiety of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Where did these people come from? I think what happens is this: If you make over $80,000 a year and drive a Saab, somebody from the Fly Fishing Bureau of Indoctrination shows up at your house and teaches you to false cast in your living room. If you also wear steel-rimmed glasses and have an untrained golden retriever with a red bandana tied around its neck, they immediately present you with a Tonkin bamboo rod (two tips), a brain surgeon’s headlamp, and a leather leader wallet embossed with Izaak Walton’s profile.
At a party, one of these instant experts actually sniffed, “Of course you can catch more fish on a spinning rod …” leaving the sentence unfinished, which is a clever way of saying, “… unless you are a total moron” without moving your lips. I just nodded my head as if he had a good point and stuck my fist in the yogurt dip.
Then I got a little testy. “Wait a minute,” I said as evenly as I could. “Did I miss something while I was in the bathroom? Was there a moment when catching less fish became more fun? I love catching more fish! Some of my best times fishing have actually occurred when I caught a lot of fish! What happens when you catch a lot of fish? DOES IT MAKE YOU SAD?” By now he was backing up as if he’d hooked a big gar in a small pool, and my girlfriend was rattling the car keys.
I most often see these guys heading up tiny creeks, muttering their catechism, “egg, larva, pupa, adult,” while I’m walking down to bigger water. They end up on their hands and knees casting size 20 Pale Morning Duns to fish that began life in concrete pools, max out at 8 inches, and don’t live through the summer. In a way, I admire these guys. What they do takes a lot of skill. On the other hand, so does knitting a hammock for a guinea pig out of dental floss. Doesn’t mean I’m going to spend my weekend doing it.
I’ll take the middle ground, thank you, and I won’t apologize. The smallmouth is a 20-million-year-old wild American fish that first appeared in the Great Lakes. Around my part of the country, smallmouths live in the faster-moving sections of big rivers and fight like crazed bronze missiles. They’ve got more heart than largemouth bass and more power than brown trout. For all that, they’re a democratic fish: cooperative enough that a young boy or girl with their first spin-cast rig can have fun, but challenging enough that even the best angler (spin or fly) can spend a lifetime hunting that thirteen-year-old 5-pounder. They do not get that old by being dumb and they do not go gentle.
Best of all, they have the sense to live where a fish should. If water could talk, and you took any sip of sleepy bass water or a drop of a hyper little trout stream (the kind that usually looks like it could be turned off if someone accidentally put a kink in the hose), then asked what it would like to be, the answer would be the same: a river. The remarkable thing is that rivers do talk: they murmur, gurgle, suck, and roar. Rivers are water at its prime, filled with purpose and urgency as they say their good-byes. I like their restlessness. I find it energizing.
I’m standing waist-deep in a Potomac River rock garden 23 miles from where the president ties up traffic for 15 minutes whenever he goes to the McDonald’s on 17th Street. The star grass is tugging at my legs in the current as I cast to ancient ambush stations behind boulders, the ledges I know from years of donating lures there, the seams where dead water meets quick. I am the only person out here, and behind me a bloodred sunset is pulling mares’ tails west over the roof of the world, and the swallows have come to wheel and sip bugs from the air.
I cast a silver Rapala—no satellite uplink, no quadrasonic propeller, no phosphorescent Hawg Scent—into an eddy, where it spins all woozy in the foam. I twitch it once, wait, then make it wobble like a drunk performing for the police.
You know the rest. There comes the dark shape rising, a concussion, the electricity in the rod that says, I think somebody’s home.
He leaps twice, all shivering gills and anger, pulls line, and surges toward an undercut. I turn him and he heads right at me, thinks better of it, and makes a last run downstream for heavy water, where I turn him again. What finally comes into my hand is 14 inches, maybe a pound, nothing to brag about. But this is not about bragging. This is about something else entirely. I heft him for a better look: his wild eye, the mottled olive-and-bronze camo not yet available in stores, the body honed by a life in quick water. It has been too long since I’ve been out here. I’ve forgotten how vivid and undeniable these fish are, how no one has told them they’re not fashionable this year. “Achigan,” I say, repeating the name Algonquin Indians had for him: ferocious.
I lower him back. He snaps from my hands and is gone. The river shoulders past, a busy man with other things on his mind. I fish on, catching several more. I don’t even remember to keep count. Suddenly it’s dark and I realize that for over an hour I’ve not thought once about my car’s transmission, or that my boss came into my office this morning to brag about his son’s putting an entire pizza in his mouth, or that the woman I’m seeing sometimes says she feels alone when she’s with me. Guys need this. It’s sort of what we have instead of a book club. I suddenly have the momentary and surprising feeling that at this moment I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. I’m calm. I’m happy. I’m happier here than any place I can think of.
Lilyfish
After the world takes an eggbeater to your soul, you never know what’s going to get you up and back among the living. In my case, it was the ham. It was 3:30 on a sweltering July afternoon, three weeks to the hour since my new baby daughter lay down for a nap and woke up on the other side of this life.
I decided it was time to go fishing. There were any number of good reasons. For one, I could still smell Lily’s baby sweetness in the corners of the house, still feel her small heft in the hollow of my shoulder. For another, I’d hardly left the house since she died and had taken to working my way through an alarming amount of dark rum
and tonic each night, not a sustainable grief management technique over the long haul. Jane and I had planted the memorial pink crepe myrtle and the yellow lilies, chosen for having the audacity to bloom in the heat of the summer, the very time Lily died.
But it was the ham that got me off the dime. After the funeral, the neighbors had started bringing over hogs’ hind legs as if the baby might rise from the dead and stop by for a sandwich if they could just get enough cured pork in the refrigerator. I knew my mind wasn’t quite right, knew I still hadn’t even accepted her death. But it seemed like I’d lose it unless I put some distance between me and the ham.
I shoved a small box of lures in a fanny pack, spooled up a spinning rod with 6-pound mono line, and filled a quart bottle with tap water. On my way out the door, I stopped, as I have taken to doing since her death, to touch the tiny blue urn on the mantel. “Baby girl,” I said. I stood there for several minutes, feeling the coolness of fired clay and waiting for my eyes to clear again. Then I got in the car and drove 20 miles north of D.C. to the Seneca Breaks on the upper Potomac River.
I didn’t particularly care that it was 102 degrees outside. I didn’t particularly care that any smallmouth bass not yet parboiled by the worst heat wave in memory would scarcely be biting. I was furious at the world and everything still living in it now that my daughter wasn’t. As I drove, the radio reported severe thunderstorms to the west and said they might be moving our way. Fine by me. If someone up there wanted to send a little electroshock therapy my way, I’d be easy to find.
Even at five o’clock the sun still had its noon fury. The heat had emptied the normally crowded parking lot at the river’s edge. I stepped out of the air-conditioned car into the afternoon’s slow oven. I slugged down some water, put my long-billed cap on, found a wading stick in the underbrush, and walked into the river. The water was bathtub warm and 2 feet below normal. Seneca Breaks, normally a mile-long series of fishy-looking riffles and rock gardens, was, like the only angler fool enough to be out there, a ghost of its former self. At least it didn’t smell like ham. But the fish weren’t here, and I realized I shouldn’t be either. It dawned on me that I’d better get in water that went over my waist or risk heatstroke.
Just upstream from the breaks, the river is called Seneca Lake, 3 miles of deep flats covered with mats of floating grass. I worked my way to the head of the breaks and slipped into this deeper water, casting a 4-inch plastic worm on a light sinker. Soon I’d waded out chin-deep into the lake, holding my rod arm just high enough to keep the reel out of the water. There were baitfish dimpling the surface every so often and dragonflies landing on my wrist, and once a small brown water snake wriggled by so close I could have touched him.
Nothing was hitting my worm, but that was to be expected. My arms seemed to be working the rod on their own, and I was content to let them. I stood heron-still and felt the slow current brush grass against my legs. Every so often, a minnow would pucker up and take a little nip at my exposed leg. It tickled. Baby fish. I remembered how I’d call her Lilyfish sometimes when changing her diaper, remembered how she had loved to be naked and squiggling on the changing table, gazing up at me and gurgling with something approaching rapture as I pulled at her arms and legs to stretch them.
The tears welled up again. I found the melody to an old Pete Townshend song running circles through my head and finally latched on to the chorus:
After the fire, the fire still burns,
The heart grows older but never ever learns.
That’s how it was, all right. The fire was gone, but it still burned. It would always burn. The memories—her smell, her smile, the weight of her in my arms—would always smolder. And I’d always yearn for the one thing I’d never have.
And what struck me as I stood alone in the middle of the river was that while my world had been changed forever, the world itself had not changed a whit. The river simply went about its business. A dead catfish, bloated and colorless, washed serenely past, on its way back down the food chain. The sun hammered down and a hot wind wandered the water.
I caught a bluegill, then two little smallmouths, within 10 minutes of each other. As I brought the fish to the surface, I had the sensation of bringing creatures from a parallel universe into my own for a minute before sending them darting back home. I wondered if death might be like this, traveling to a place where you didn’t think it was possible to breathe, only to arrive discovering that you could. I hoped it was. The older I get, the more I believe that there is such a thing as the soul, that energy changes form but still retains something it never loses. I hoped that Lily’s soul was safe. That she knew how much she was still loved.
I don’t know how long I stayed there or even if I kept fishing. I remember looking up at some point and noticing that the light had softened. It was after eight and the sun was finally headed into the trees. And now, just like every summer night for aeons, the birds came out: an osprey flying recon over the shallows 50 feet up; a great blue heron flapping deep and slow, straight toward me out of the fireball, settling atop a rock and locking into hunting stance. And everywhere swallows coming out like twinkling spirits to test who could trace the most intricate patterns in the air, trailing their liquid songs behind them.
Suddenly I wasn’t angry anymore. This is the world, I realized for the millionth time, and its unfathomable mystery: always and never the same, composed in roughly equal parts of suffering and wonder, unmoved by either, endlessly rolling away. It was getting dark now, hard to see the stones beneath the water. I waded carefully back to my car, rested the stick by a post for another fisherman to use, changed into dry clothes, and drove home.
Take your grief one day at a time, someone had told me. I hadn’t known what he meant at the time, but I did now. This had been a good day. Lily, you are always in my heart.
The Bass Boat Blues
In late summer, when the sun turns the water into a sheet of hammered copper and I have calluses on each shoulder from humping my canoe from roof rack to river and back, the brochures begin to hatch. Slick as wet bonefish, they slide magically under the front door and flop open right to the centerfold: a soft-focus image of a naked 20-foot bass boat. She’s a beauty all right, with a hull like Jennifer Lopez sporting twin 18-gallon antislosh live wells (the boat, I mean). There’s a guy at the wheel, skimming across a mirrorsmooth sundown lake at tremendous speed. His tanned face is mostly hidden behind the tinted cockpit windscreen and a fresh logo cap snugged down low. But you can see his mouth. And he’s smiling a smile that says everything you need to know. Hey, buddy, got me a real nice little rig here.
And you don’t.
Now I learned all about the heartbreak of pursuing girls you couldn’t have way back in the sixth grade courtesy of Helen Carlsen, so I usually take the sensible route and transfer the catalogs immediately to the circular file. But the other night, one slipped into a pile of bills and followed me downstairs into the basement. The American basement—land of spiderwebs and old reel parts, furnace filters and mildewed sleeping bags—was once a safe haven for a man having a minor midlife crisis.
Within five minutes I had surfed onto the Web site in the ad and was halfway through the “Build This Boat” feature on a $30,500 bass boat (rigging and freight not included).
I couldn’t help it. I’ve spent most of my adult fishing life with my butt planted on a cane seat in a boat that nearly capsizes every time a good-size duck paddles by. I was defenseless against the song of words like “three-across seating,” “radar speed 64-68 miles per hour,” and “trolling motor management panel enclosed in rear with 50-amp circuit breakers.”
Suddenly, I was 12 years old and back on the playground being mesmerized by Helen Carlsen’s impossibly blond hair and that sprinkling of freckles across the top of her nose. In short, I snapped.
For the most part, I plugged in the standard features: a 225-horse EFI engine with stainless prop, triple aerator-fill pumps with timers, front bike seat with power pedestal, a
nd pilot and partner cup holders. Nothing fancy. And since I wanted my wife to enjoy the boat, too, I picked out the most Martha Stewart-like colors: Mica Mist for the carpet, Mocha Frost aft deck accents, Moondust vinyl seats. Fifty-eight gallons of gas seemed sufficient, as did a maximum capacity of four people.
But then I clicked on over to the options page. A spare tire, galvanizing job on the trailer, and surge brakes on the second axle added $925. A tournament-level depthfinder was another grand. But I swear I don’t know how the carpet embroidery ($215), Hot Foot throttle control ($100), or keel protectors ($300) got on there.
By the time I got the boat loaded and headed to checkout, I was looking at $33,916. Assuming I could scrape together $1,000 for a down payment and hold out for $500 in trade for my canoe (it’s still in really good shape after nine years), I was looking at 36 easy payments of, well, let’s just forget about the whole damn thing.
Instead, I swept out the workroom. I oiled all my reels, reorganized my tackle boxes, even got down on my knees with a bent coat hanger and fished out the stray socks underneath the dryer. About the time I’d worked up a good sweat and figured the worst was over, the phone rang. It was Jim, wanting to go fishing Saturday.
“What time Saturday?” I asked.
“Hey, man, whatever time you want. You the one with the canoe.”
Suddenly, I felt a whole lot better.
The Late, Late Show
Late January, 12 degrees and falling, the northwest wind hurrying a red sun toward its slot in the horizon. Seated in a gently rocking tree stand 70 yards back from a field of winter wheat, I am exploring that fine line between hunting really hard and suicide by hypothermia. A hunter may take either a buck or doe during the late bow season in my state, and any guy with half a brain should be happy with either by this point in the game. Me, I’m holding out for a buck, a good one. Might as well go down swinging.