Everything They Had

by David Halberstam

  Stripers seemed to require more time and attention than I had to give.

  But recently I called Tom Mleczko about a charter. Tom is Bob’s lineal descendant; he is in his early 40s and has been fishing here for 23 years. He is, by consensus, our best fisherman. He represents a different generation of fishermen. He is a gentle man who teaches elementary school in the regular year and is a serious conservationist. I have a memory of him more than 20 years ago, a boy just out of college fishing on the beach and catching a huge striper, unhooking the lure as gently as he could, and then walking the fish back into the water to revive it.

  Later I had asked him why he had done it. “Roe fish,” he had answered.

  When I called him, he asked if I wanted to go after stripers or blues. We were scheduled for a late-morning tide in July, hardly ideal bass time, and the trip was for my daughter Julia, soon to be 10, and her best friend, John Vaughan, already 10.

  One of the things which my father had passed on to me was a love of fishing, and I have tried to pass some of that on to my daughter: she casts well and handles the rod well, and I take inordinate pride in seeing her pleasure as her skills increase. I pondered Tom’s question and decided stripers would be too hard to get on that tide.

  With young children, I decided it was more important to have a guarantee of good fishing and plenty of action. So we would go for blues.

  It was overcast and a little windy, and as we came out of the cut near Smith’s Point, Tom suggested taking a quick shot at the stripers. He explained to John and Julia the ecological history of the striper, how it had been depleted by pollution and commercial nettings and had come back because of serious conservation measures. Within minutes, both John and Julia were on to fish. “They’re both on stripers,” he said. In time they boated both fish, about six pounds each, probably just under 30 inches and well under the requisite 36.

  We caught a dozen stripers on what was hardly a perfect tide, 10 of them by the children. We put every fish back. One was a borderline keeper. Those decisions, I find, are easy these days. It was the first time in 20 years that a boat I had been on had caught more stripers than blues. There was a special sweetness to it, not just going out with the children and watching them fish and seeing their pleasure, but being able to tell them that with hard work and good laws, nature can replenish what man has done to it.

  SEA OF DREAMS

  From GQ, January 1995

  Our boat is to leave the harbor at Quepos, on the west coast of Costa Rica, at 7:30 A.M. for our first of four days’ fishing there. We wait in small, edgy groups, two or three men to a boat, each little group uneasy with the others. Most of us, I suspect, are unsure of our own skills and talents and knowledge of the local waters. I have come to know this feeling well in recent years as I have tried ever more distant and difficult saltwater fishing: the anxiety of the neophyte as he explores alien places, investing in others qualities of expertise that they, too, may lack. This trip marks the second time I have gone after billfish in a year, and on the first attempt I had several chances to hook a fish and failed each time.

  It is a few days after my sixtieth birthday, and I am not comfortable with being a beginner. I am seeking the realization of my childhood dream—to catch a sailfish on a fly rod, thereby taking on one of the strongest and most resourceful of game fish with tackle and a technique traditionally associated with much smaller freshwater species. I am (it is almost heresy to say this, for all fishermen tend to inflate not only the size of the fish they catch but also their abilities) a fisherman of quite modest abilities. Though I fished often as a boy, there is something like a thirty-year gap in my biography as an angler, years in which certain skills might have been built into me as second nature. Instead, I perform them now with the awkwardness of one who has come late to the sport. Accomplished in my professional life as a writer, I have journeyed to a place where I am an absolute novice.

  But fishing runs deep in my blood; it has been a lifelong passion. I have come back to it, finding in it the pleasure that I remember from my childhood, as well as badly needed solace for a man whose life is beset by constant deadlines and equally constant pressures. My wife tells me that almost all of the things that make me happy are associated with being on the water. This journey, then, to one of the great billfishing regions of the Americas is the culmination of a lifelong dream. The fact that I—a child of the Forties, whose values and expectations were set in a much less affluent time—am actually going ahead with a trip like this still surprises me.

  In 1939, when I was 5, my father took me fishing on Highland Lake in Winsted, Connecticut, where my uncle Aaron owned a house. It was one of the first things I was able to do with my father, one of the first ways I could share his love and also, by doing things right, gain his approval. Then, in 1942, he returned to military service. Our family left New York City and moved into my uncle’s house. It is always hard to decide in retrospect whether or not you had a happy childhood. I have always credited myself with one, principally because of those four or five years in Winsted, despite the separation from my father. I have come to think of the summers as particularly idyllic. Since my brother and I lived two miles from town, and since there were few other children to play with, the primary reason for that happiness was fishing.

  Both my father and his older brother, Moe, were serious fishermen. Uncle Moe, a beloved figure in my life, was far more serious about it than my father; fishing was, as far as I could tell, the essential purpose of his life. He sold used cars, but his work day had never been known to take precedence over his fishing schedule. My father and uncle started taking my brother and me with them when we were very young, and fishing became, in those years, a special vacation within the longer summer vacation. In that summer of 1942, when my father was stationed in Texas, I was 8 and my brother, Michael, was 10. We fished twice a day every day. We fished in the morning, and we fished in the early evening. Sometimes in the afternoon we swam, though half a century later I have no memory of taking any pleasure from swimming.

  Highland Lake is about three miles long and, if memory serves, about seven miles in circumference. It was in those days, actually, an essentially fished-out lake. It had some bass, pickerel, perch, bull-head, crappie (I never in all those years caught a crappie), sunfish and rock bass, a small panfish about the size of a sunfish. Bass and pickerel were the principal sport fish of the region, and the lake produced remarkably few of either that were of legal size.

  My uncle and my father, fishing with live bait—minnows—tended to catch a few good-sized fish each season. My brother and I, using clunky old metal telescopic rods baited with worms or night crawlers, which we dug ourselves, or crayfish, which we got from under rocks or scooped up in the marshes (every bit as much fun as the fishing, to tell the truth), probably caught one or two legal-size bass and one legal-size pickerel each season. We were nothing if not devoted. We had a rowboat and my uncle’s canoe. Day after day we went out, and the catch was inevitably rockies and sunfish. Since they were roughly the same size, the two of us argued constantly about which was the better fighting fish. Because Michael was older, he got first choice in the argument and said the sunfish were. I was forced to make the case, weak though it was, for the rockies. We debated this endlessly, summer after summer. He was, of course, right.

  We were allowed, as we grew somewhat older, to use my father’s short casting rod—this was in the age before spinning reels—and we could cast lures for pickerel and bass. But we were never allowed to use the more delicate bamboo rods. The true sign of coming of age in Winsted, we both believed, would be to own a bamboo rod and use live bait. Both of us presumed this magical event would happen when we were about 15 or 16. As it turned out, it never happened at all.

  But the limits of the tackle had nothing to do with the limits of our passion for the sport. We not only fished every day, we thought about it all the time and talked about it incessantly and read about it constantly. We haunted Rank’s, Winsted’s one
tackle store. Mr. Rank (I do not remember his first name; he was always Mr. Rank) ran the only truly enchanted store in town. It was filled with the most beautiful bamboo rods imaginable and the lightest of reels. Even the fly line he sold—a rich, luminescent green—seemed far fancier than the rather conventional black line we used. Mr. Rank was also the local tobacconist, so there was an aroma of pipe tobacco in the shop, which only added to the manliness of the atmosphere.

  We were the ultimate careful shoppers, two boys showing up at least once a week, geared to make the most minute purchases as slowly as possible. Each of us would be armed with perhaps a dollar; more often than not, we ended up buying nothing grander than a packet of hooks with catgut leaders. But we always took our time, carefully studying all the items that were far beyond our means. The only thing that we didn’t like about Mr. Rank was that he always called each of us “Sonny.” He did not do this condescendingly, but to us it seemed so, as if it prevented us from being what we thought we were—fully formed fishermen—and turned us into what we were, little boys.

  Mr. Rank also sold the countless wonder plugs, or lures, that we saw pictured in the great fishing magazines of the time, Field & Stream and Outdoor Life. In both those monthlies were advertisements for these very same lures, complete with photos showing fishermen displaying strings of awesome bass, each one, it seemed, weighing more than ten pounds. I still remember plugs like the Heddon River Runt, which lurched as it moved through the water; the Hawaiian Wiggler, a pickerel plug with interchangeable skirts; and the Jitterbug, on which I actually caught some bass.

  The magazines formed a gateway, in that pretelevision era, to the fantasy world of Better Fishing. We were allowed to buy one a month. (You could read the other one in the barbershop.) It is possible that the first byline I ever came to recognize belonged to the best-known fishing writer of the time, Ted Trueblood. He and his fellow angling writers portrayed a world that existed somewhere beyond Winsted, a world of larger fish (and a great many more of them) and cool, patient, skilled fishermen, men of uncommon expertise who knew where to go, which lure to use and where to cast; men who went readily to distant places to nail down the lunkers—very large game fish—that always awaited them.

  Back then, freshwater fishing was a great deal more popular than saltwater fishing, and the articles more often than not were set on lakes. The lunkers tended to be bass, muskie or pike. Muskies made for particularly good copy because they were big but not beyond reach as they lurked behind partially submerged tree stumps in northern Minnesota and Canada. These fish, it seemed to me, were the same ones that had eluded magazine writers the previous year, getting away with a desperate jump that would throw the plug or snag the line on a stump. These articles were always accompanied by an artist’s rendering of an intense, anxious angler standing in the boat, his rod bent double as the huge, prized fish breaks water and tries to throw the hook.

  It was a wonderful dreamworld, because it did not belong to people like us. We knew no one who fished like those super-anglers, with the skill of guides and the resources to go wherever they wanted. Not even Uncle Moe, the most serious fisherman in the family (by consensus, it was the only thing he was serious about), made any of these trips. The limits on our fishing were set by finances and geography. Even someone as gifted as my uncle fished only the nearby lakes of the region. On occasion he’d show up at our house in the early morning with a string of very big fish, about which he was unusually secretive. That led my brother and me to believe he had spent the night illegally fishing the nearby Winchester Reservoir. This only gave him added cachet in our eyes.

  Time passed. My father came back from the war, and we moved to suburban New York. He died of a heart attack in 1950, and our lives changed radically. There was no more talk of bamboo rods. Both my brother and I worked in the summer and went off to college in the fall. After graduation, we began demanding careers, and fishing became an even smaller part of our lives, although we never lost our love of it. Looking back now, I realize our father had given us an exceptional gift: He had shared his love of a sport with us when we were very young, so that his love of it became our love of it. And we were well taught. We learned not just the mechanical things—how to cast a minnow with a certain strong but soft toss so the bait did not fly off—but also a larger philosophy of fishing. There were certain verities: We were to use the lightest tackle possible in each situation in order to give the fish the best possible odds; we were to keep nothing we did not intend to eat; and, finally, the most elemental rule of our entire childhood (other than the mandatory ones about doing homework), we were never, never, to horse a bass. That is, never to try to force a bass in but to let it run and only then apply pressure.

  twenty-five years ago I bought a house on Nantucket. I also bought half of a boat and began to fish for blues and stripers in the waters off our island. Blue fishing with light tackle is particularly exciting, and I started using spinning gear for the first time. My friends Dick Steadman (the other owner of the boat) and David Fine and I became part of a generation of Nantucket fishermen who used much lighter equipment in pursuit of blues than our predecessors had. Our friend Bill Pew, who owns a tackle shop there (and who is a leader in the light-tackle movement), estimates that in the past twenty years the test weight of the line has dropped from twenty-five-pound test to ten, eight and even six, and the weight of the rods has dropped accordingly.

  My brother often came to visit me on Nantucket in the ensuing years. Our relationship, which had been exceptionally close when we were young (we were just twenty months apart, and my mother, for reasons that remain greatly puzzling to me, often dressed us as twins), had become quite difficult once we were grown.

  Given the transient nature of our childhood—in the course of which we followed our father (before he was shipped overseas) to New York, Winsted, El Paso and Austin, Texas, among other places—we had become much more dependent on each other than most siblings. That closeness and friendship began to unravel later in our lives. There was too much knowledge, too much heat and too little space between us. We felt a rising sense of competition as we grew into middle age—especially after my brother, a doctor, announced in mid-career that he intended to be a writer as well—and in our later years we became edgier and edgier with each other.

  But it was during that period that he came to Nantucket each summer, and by far our best times together were spent on the water. Fishing removed the tension of modern life and adulthood from our relationship and restored to us the far simpler moments of our boyhood. We once again became easy with each other, and we unconsciously measured the great good fortune of each day’s bounty against all those years of barren fishing in Winsted. What we could not resolve as grown men we could at least put aside, by dint of going out on the water and becoming, momentarily, little boys again. Some fourteen years ago, a terrible tragedy took place: My brother was surprised in his home one night by a burglar and was shot and killed. When I was told, my mind immediately floated back to the endless image of the more than forty years we had spent together, often in strange and seemingly inhospitable settings. By far the best and happiest—and most enduring—of all my memories were those of us fishing together as boys and men.

  A year ago, on the eve of my fifty-ninth birthday, I walked into Urban Angler, a marvelous store in New York City that sells only fly-fishing gear. I wandered around for an hour or so, just as I had in Rank’s some fifty years earlier, knowing all the while exactly what I had come for. When I left I had spent some $1,500 for an outfit I could use in pursuit of sailfish. I had bought a twelve-weight rod, the standard for going after sails and tarpon, a modern graphite of great strength and flexibility and remarkable lightness. And it was the most money I had ever paid for a toy in my life. But I wasn’t anxious about the money; I was anxious about taking a chance on something new, something I could easily fail at. No one likes to do that late in life, least of all someone who has been successful in his career. It is this fear of failure
more than anything else, I think, that deters us from taking on our secret adventures as we get older.

  For the kind of fishing I had dreamed about as a boy was now readily available to me. Travel had become infinitely less expensive; it was no longer a barrier between an angler and the great fishing waters of the hemisphere. With changing tax regulations, places that were once the exclusive haunts of the very rich—the distant lodges of the wealthy created to be shared only by pals or favored corporate customers—had become commercial retreats open to the public. Fly-fishing for saltwater big game had become an increasingly popular sport.

  This did not mean I was ready to take a sailfish on a fly rod. I had nothing going for me save desire and my expensive new rig. Fly-fishing for sailfish, it should be noted, is very different from all other forms of the sport. In some ways it is more like trolling, since the actual cast is to a spot only about fifteen feet behind the boat. First, the captain trolls teasers—hookless lures to attract the fish; when a fish surfaces, the teasers are reeled in just fast enough to excite it and bring it ever closer to the boat. At the critical moment, these rigs are yanked from the water; the sailfish switches its attention to the fly and strikes.

  That may sound easy, but it isn’t. It does not account for the sheer disruptive madness when a fish so large comes so close to the boat and is about to hit so delicate a lure. It is very easy to blow it, and I had blown it several times on my last trip; to be honest, I had panicked. Each time, I jerked the fly too early or too late. I was not cool and loose the way those great fishermen in Field & Stream had always been.

  So it was last April that I was on the dock at Quepos waiting to go out for my second shot. The fishing had been good, said our captain, Javier Chavarria, who seemed pleased that we wanted to fly-fish. To him it was clearly more exciting and more sporting than using the usual heavy trolling rigs.