by David Giblin
The first strong surge of the tide caught the woman’s attention.
“Oh my, oh my, look at that water! Just look at the way that water is moving.” She turned to me and asked, “What do they call this again?”
The man spoke up before I could answer. “That’s the Campbell River, dear. Say, Dave, and how far is the town itself?”
Before I could find a diplomatic way of explaining to the man that he didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, the line began screaming off his wife’s reel again. I got the husband to reel up this time, and then turned the boat and chased after the fish.
It was bigger than the first one and put up much more of a fight. I had to coach her, telling her what to do to land the fish.
Her husband stood beside her, repeating anything I said. It was as if I was speaking a foreign language and he had to translate for her.
I would say, “Now keep your rod tip up.”
And he would say, “Keep your rod tip up, dear.”
“That’s it, now start reeling.”
“Start reeling, honey.”
“The fish wants to run, let him take some line.”
“We want you to let the fish run, sweetheart.”
“Okay, reel in the line again.”
“Reel in now, dear.”
“That’s good, now lift the rod up so I can get the net over its head.”
“It’s time to net the fish, darling. Lift the rod up so we can get the net over its head.”
The poor fish didn’t stand much of a chance against the three of us. I managed to get the fish in the boat and shook the woman’s hand. The man was patting her on the back again, but you could tell he wasn’t as excited as with the first one. There wasn’t much ceremony either, and we got back to fishing quickly.
I watched him again as he let his line down. This time he went to eighty feet. He seemed to be giving the situation some thought.
“Why do all you guides use such long rods? Wouldn’t it be easier with a shorter rod? I mean, you saw the way my wife was shaking trying to control the fish at the boat. Wouldn’t a shorter rod give you more control over the fish when you go to put it in the net? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
I didn’t think it would be wise to point out that his wife was the only one who knew how well the rods worked so far.
“A sensitive rod like these,” I tried to explain, “allows me to see whether a fish is biting or not.”
“How can you tell that?”
“Well, by the way the tip of the rod moves.”
“You can tell just by the way my rod moves if I’ve got a fish on?”
He was clearly skeptical.
“So, you’re trying to tell me that from where you’re sitting you can see the fish before I know it’s there. Just by the way the rod moves?”
“Sure,” I said, “it looks just like that.”
I pointed at his wife’s rod, which was bouncing up and down about a foot.
Once again he had to reel up. Once again I turned the boat and we followed the fish as it ran out into the tide. This salmon was even bigger than the last two, and it took twenty minutes of careful work to bring the fish to the side of the boat. The man remained in his seat this time. He looked glum.
His wife and I landed the fish. It was a beautiful eighteen-pound spring salmon. I hit it on the head. I put the fish in the fish box and cleaned some blood off the side of my boat.
When I turned back to my guests, the husband was rolling something around on the floor of the boat with his finger.
As soon as I saw what he had, I realized what must have happened.
When I’d hit the fish, the lens of one of its eyes had popped off and was lying on the floor. A lens clear and round, like a small marble. It was definitely one of these that he was rolling around on the deck.
I’ve learned over the years to sit back and simply observe. You never know when you might learn something, especially when you are dealing with an expert.
The man cleared his throat, “Gerry, do you see this?”
He sounded like the narrator of a Jacques Cousteau undersea special.
“This is what they call an immature salmon egg.”
“Oh really,” said his wife. “How can you tell it’s immature?”
That was a good question. I wanted to know the answer to that one myself. Salmon eggs come in big clumps called skeins that contain fifteen hundred or so small eggs. They can be pink in colour, or anywhere from red to yellow, but I’ve never seen a clear one in all the years I’ve been cleaning salmon.
“Well, you see they are clear like this when they are very young.”
“Oh my, you mean we just killed a mother?”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. I started the big motor and took us back to the fishing hole. A strong current gets pushed out of Vancouver Bay to the north to collide with the Far Side back eddy. The two currents come together at the back end of the hole and a large whirlpool can form there. It’s the spot where Wet Lenny earned his nickname.
When we pulled into the back eddy the tide was running hard. The front end nearest the cliffs was a churning mass of whitewater by now. The boats trying to fish there all crowded against the shore. Small, fast moving, and very dangerous whirlpools formed in the back eddy, and all the guides were scrambling to stay out of their way. With three fish in the boat already, I decided not to fight the back eddy and all the other boats huddled against the cliffs. I stopped just inside Vancouver Bay, short of the spot where the two currents came together. I had them drop their lines.
“Are we fishing here?” the husband asked.
I resisted the temptation to make a smart remark.
“Yes, that’s right,” I replied blandly.
“Why don’t we fish where we were?”
“There’ll be fish here as well,” I said, trying to reassure him. “Besides, we don’t want to fight with all those boats up there.”
“Well, shouldn’t we be closer to the cliffs?”
He pointed to the spot where Wet Lenny’s whirlpool formed.
“A whirlpool lives there,” I said, nodding my head in the direction he was pointing. He turned and looked closely at the water as if waiting for one to appear on cue. A thin line of driftwood and floating kelp was the only indication of the tideline. He gave me another one of his sly grins. He obviously thought that now I had some fish in the boat, I was trying to slack off.
“I don’t see anything like that. Why don’t we just try it there and see what happens? This doesn’t look like a good spot at all.”
“I know what happens there,” I said affably. “We get eaten by a whirlpool.”
“You don’t really think we’re going to catch anything here do you?”
Once again, before I had time to reply, his wife interrupted us. She had been sitting there quietly, patiently watching the tip of her rod the way I had asked her.
“Ummm . . . David, something is pulling on my line.”
Her rod bent over in half and the line disappeared under the boat. I turned the boat and spun out of the way of the line. The husband grudgingly reeled in his line. She was getting quite good at playing a salmon. It only took a short time before we had another one in the boat.
With four springs on board we had reached our bag limit for the day. It was time to head back to the dock.
By now the warm afternoon sun was low on the mountains. As we ran back the husband was hunched over, shivering and looking miserable: Napoleon on his retreat from Moscow. His wife looked warm and toasty, nestled into her heavy sweater and Floater coat.
He didn’t move when we reached the dock. He sat staring at his feet while I tied up the boat.
Gerry reached over and patted him on the knee. It was the playful gesture of a woman half her age. “Look at it this way, dear”—she smiled, a slight, enigmatic smile that reminded me of a certain painting I had seen—“at least it’s teaching you humility.”
He sat bolt upright. “Humility,
” he sputtered, “humility!” His nostrils flared and he glared at the two of us. “Why, I haven’t got any humility.” He stood up, stepped out of the boat, and stalked off down the dock.
I must have sat there with my mouth open. Gerry patted me on the knee with that same gesture again. She was enjoying herself. She was almost flirting.
“Don’t worry about him, dear. He gets the same way when I beat him at tennis.”
ten THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE SEA
IT HAD TAKEN much time and effort, but the four men had planned the perfect long weekend of fishing. They had known one another for years. They had gone to the same high school and been members of the same fraternity at university. They were able to trust one another in ways they could trust no one else. One of them had offered the use of his yacht. They explained to their wives how they planned to take the boat out of Lake Washington, through the locks, and cruise up to Stuart Island. The yacht would be moored at Herbert Crane’s resort for the summer, and if they left Thursday morning and ran all night, they could be at the island by Friday afternoon with plenty of time for fishing. They would then fly back to Seattle on a regular float plane run.
It was going to be a guys’ weekend, they explained to the wives. The wives knew what that meant: no shaving, old fishing sweaters, fish blood and herring scales everywhere. Of course, the women didn’t want to come this time. Instead they packed the yacht’s freezer full of food and made sure their husbands had clean socks and a change of underwear.
The men knocked off work early on Wednesday; they were self-employed or owned their own companies, so they could do as they liked. The boat was fuelled and ready to go. The wives kissed them goodbye. The men eased the yacht away from the dock and headed out into the crisp morning air. They set a course for the locks. The fresh air in their faces made them all feel alive.
The women decided it would be a laugh to surprise their husbands at the locks when the boat went through. They could have a pleasant morning drive, wave to their husbands as they passed by, and then have lunch somewhere nice, maybe even do some shopping on the way back. They all piled in the car and headed for the freeway.
The men, meanwhile, made a little stop along the way. It was going to be a long weekend, and they needed some extra supplies.
The women knew from experience how long it took to get to the locks and timed their arrival accordingly. Their husbands’ boat was nowhere in sight, so they relaxed and watched the other yachts passing by. They waved to the people on board. One of the women remarked on the camaraderie around boats; you didn’t find it anywhere else. Strangers would always wave at one another and smile. People never did that elsewhere—could you imagine waving at people as they drove past in their cars, for instance? You certainly wouldn’t think of doing it to people as you passed them in the street. They would think you were mad! Yet, somehow, when you were on a boat all this changed.
The people on the passing yachts waved back at the women who happily waited for their husbands. The wives soon saw the boat in the distance. As it came closer they jumped up and down, waving.
Four bikini-clad women, sunning themselves in the shelter of the flying bridge, noticed the ladies waving along the shore.
“Oh look!” said one of them. “It’s so fun how friendly people are when you’re on a boat!”
The four women on the boat all stood up and waved to the nice ladies on the shore.
eleven THE FOOL
WITH THE BOATS in the water and working properly, the house organized, and the first few days of guiding done, Vop and I slipped back into our routine. A kind of timelessness settled over us, a sense that the winter had never happened. We had never started or stopped. There was no beginning or end. We had always guided and we always would guide, endlessly.
There are people who say the time you spend fishing is not deducted from your lifespan. If this is true, the guides here have pushed that notion to its farthest limits; time exerts the same pull on us that gravity exerts on a feather. Vop and I floated in a region outside time.
We were playing a game of dominoes. As if to give reality to the winter that had just passed, Vop told me about the woman he had met while at university.
I had met some of Vop’s previous girlfriends. They were from the surrounding islands and had all grown up in the rain-forest. They had names like Fern or Apple, Sparkle and Aura. They would appear and disappear like wraiths, paddling in to the beach below the house in kayaks or canoes. They used kayaks the way people in the city might use a bicycle. They were without guile or artifice, wore no makeup, and were completely at ease with their bodies. They were as comfortable with nudity as they were in the loose skirts and sweaters they wore. These women had no tan lines.
Vop had spent the winter attending classes at a small university in Nelson, BC. We had talked about his decision the previous summer. The larger institutions in Vancouver had accepted him, but Vop had chosen the small town so he wouldn’t be distracted. For Vop, a trip into Campbell River was considered going to the city. Not that he was naive in the ways of the world. He just felt he would get more work done in a less hectic environment.
While he was there, he met Carol. She was a couple of years older and a year ahead of him at the school. For Vop this gave her an air of worldliness and sophistication that left him feeling intimidated and tongue-tied in her presence. She wore perfume.
Carol had grown up in Nelson, where the school was located. Her grandparents were Doukhobors who had emigrated from Russia and settled in the Slocan Valley. Her parents had drifted away from the orthodox views and raised their daughter as a Canadian. She had gone to movies and hockey games, eaten in restaurants, and gone skiing in the winter. On the ski hills she had met people from all over the world. She still retained something of her grandparents’ tradition. She was a sensible girl suspicious of flash and careful when it came to taking chances. She wasn’t a prude, but she had little patience with foolish people. Her friends teased her about being too serious.
Carol had taken a job on the ski hills to earn money to go to school. Family vacations were spent on the lakes and mountains not far from home. She had never seen the Pacific Ocean. She had never met anyone like Vop either. He was totally unlike any of the men she usually associated with. He was more like the visiting wild men of the ski slopes, the ones always getting in trouble by skiing out of bounds or racing down impossible cliff faces, out of control. As she got to know him she found he had a more serious side. He had a knowledge of gardening and the use of wild plants and mushrooms that would have impressed even her grandparents. She found herself intrigued and frightened by him at the same time. It was an irresistible combination. Vop entertained her with stories of the coast, and in his laid-back way they became friends. Vop soon realized he wanted more than that.
They both had a full schedule of classes and homework, which left little time for a courtship. Even if the time could be found, neither of them had money to spend on entertainment or eating out.
Vop was frustrated. He wanted to take things further but didn’t know how to do it. He had never faced a situation like this with the girls he had known. This made Carol all the more desirable. Vop needed some dramatic gesture to find a way to her heart.
One day Carol was joking about her financial situation. All her money was going to tuition, rent, and food, so she was cutting costs where she could; she had resorted to an old standby in her bathroom. Vop was shocked that such a beautiful and sophisticated lady was forced to use the Canadian Tire catalogue in such a fashion.
He saw an opportunity.
He was living in residence in the university dormitories. The bathrooms at the end of the hall had an endless supply of bathroom tissue. Vop went around and collected an armload. He found the prospect of visiting her at home a bit daunting, so he fortified himself with several beers.
By the time Vop was ready to leave, a light rain was beginning to fall and the sun was on the way down. Hunched protectively over his armload of vulne
rable paper, he walked off into the gathering twilight.
Carol lived in a small cottage, once the caretaker’s shack for a now closed gravel pit. The university and its residences were situated above it on the side of a low mountain. A road went from the college down the hill, to the edge of the gravel pit. There it turned to one side of it and joined up with the main road into town.
Vop was concerned about the paper getting wet if he took the long way. There was a soft mound of sandy clay mixed with gravel that sloped from the campus nearly to Carol’s doorstep and the mouth of the gravel pit, both 150 feet below. He knew about the pit: the rim dropped straight off for eight feet or so. Vop felt confident. He had negotiated hillsides like this before with no problems. The low fence separating the road from the edge of the pit was no obstacle, even with his arms full. He strolled over to the edge and stepped off into space.
Carol was enjoying a quiet night at home. She shared the house with a couple of other students who were all out for the night. She was catching up on some schoolwork. Her desk lamp was the only light on. The sound of classical music settled around her like a shawl. The wind had picked up and was driving the rain against the windows. She heard a scratching sound outside but paid no attention; there were many low branches on the nearby trees that could scrape against the sides of the house.
But the faint noise persisted.
It sounded like it was coming from the direction of the front door. Still she dismissed it as the scraping of a branch. Then came a definite knock. She put down her book and got up to investigate. She opened the front door carefully.
A horrible pink and grey apparition lurched at her out of the shadows, shuffling into the light cast by the bare bulb on the porch. Carol backed up instinctively. Chunks of gravel and clay clung to the tattered rags it wore. It seemed to be oozing blood from several places. The thing thrust out an arm toward her. The hand was holding what appeared to be a soggy, mud-stained half-roll of toilet paper. A pitiful mumble issued from the clay-encrusted hole of a mouth.