So I hit Send — the last task of my workday — wearily stretch out The Sciatic Leg, and wonder why I would need some operation to fuse vertebrae when mine are melding on their own: self-help at its most primitive level. After indulging a manly whimper or two, I flip through and off some spam, then wince my way into a couple of awful news stories: the sciatica and I seethe. “We are not a viable species,” I tell myself again, including my stiff-backed self in the front line of the fatally flawed. Not entirely gratified by this process, I stare out my office window into long shadows of late afternoon. In this kind of mood, I’d tie a Golden Stonefly nymph in gray, then deliberately amputate one of its legs.
Gray’s the color of the long shadows I see outside. Long and dark — late afternoon, heading into evening. I watch one of my cats stalking something I can’t see on the lawn. Suddenly, I smile, pick up the phone. Seven taps later —
“Steve,” he answers, in the monotone that I’ve learned is SOP by the end of his workday. By midweek, I’ve noticed, he sticks to single syllables whenever he can, as if seconds are grossly indulgent or weigh too much. In sum, when it comes to glum — see paragraph one — in Steve, I’ve met my match.
I find this delightful. I find this inspiring.
I find that the weight of his angst inevitably raises my side of a psychic seesaw. Indeed, his pessimism, no less profound, but perhaps more obvious than mine, fills me with such bona fide relief there’s bon homme in the la-de-da lilt in my voice when I respond without preface, “So I doubt there’s much going on. Just too much of a temperature drop from yesterday. It’s also nearly full moon — did you see it last night? — so trouting will stink. But I guess none of this matters, because I don’t think Wednesday’s one of the nights your wife works, so just never you mind.”
Steve allows a pause appropriate to the Then why did you call? At last he says
“Right” rather firmly, to emphasize his commitment to separating fishing time from family life. That he truly enjoys his wife is one of the things I like about him.
Not that I let this stop me.
“Yeah, so, I just figured I’d let you know I might tube off the point for an hour, in case you look out off your deck, because Monday I was picking up bass on monster nymphs starting about six. Bite lasted until the big hatch started at eight or eight-thirty, but I don’t think I should tell you about that.”
“I see.” Pause. “Thanks. I thought I saw you land a few.”
“Ohhhh yeah.”
“Fair hatch, looked like.”
“Not bad. Nabbed a pair of fat cutts early on, ’nother couple of small bass, then a bunch of those giant chubs — man, their night vision’s amazing. Couple of them tried to fight like bass, in a chubby sort of way. I admired their effort.”
“I see,” he says again. Then, slowly, “ Well. It happens Carol traded a shift tonight. She subs ’til nine.”
Now ain’t fate a pistol? “Ah-ha. Given it’s almost six now —”
“Of course, I would not have to be home right at nine.”
“Excellent. So if we wanted to dredge sink-tips for few hours —”
“I’m game, he says suddenly.“Let’s do it.”
Just like that.
I grin like a cat with a mouth full of mole, which now makes two of us at my address, one of us a bad, bad person. “P.M. Beach, in like fifteen or twenty?”
“Thirty. I just put my feet up.”
I graciously grant him ten extra minutes. His feet are large, like the rest of him — and after all, this is rather short notice, given he’ll not only need to pack his gear, but load the boat we’ll use, trolling motor and battery, anchor and oars, along with fluid sufficient for a venture that will I expect will end near ten, possibly with an hour of conversation tacked to the back end.
There’s another reason for my vast largesse. After five short trips together in a less than a month — Steve lives close by and shares the same home water — he already knows it will take me thirty-seven minutes to arrive. I already know he won’t mind much — I’m even beginning to suspect he’s now adjusting his own ETA — or at least not seem to. I hope that’s partly because when I do arrive, he knows I’ll have rods already rigged — a pair I carry pinned to my windshield by washer blades, à la Ralph Wood — also snacks and liquids more interesting than his standard water supply. There’ll be a freshly charged battery backup in my trunk, possibly a book he might like to borrow or some tidbit for his tying. Obviously, he can count on me fishing until dark-thirty or much later and after our other trips together can be confident I’m not stymied by wind and spray or hours of skunk.
Beyond that . . . Steve knows I’ll be comfortable with his first taciturn hour. With silence, if that’s what I sense he wants; if not, ready to fill gaps with the patter that has built up in my head during eight hours of solitary writing. (It’s kind of like creeping a crayfish pattern in front of a sulking bass.) Meanwhile, I’ll offer an apology for lateness that leads directly into an embroidered explanation of how the delay was part of a conspiracy by some TWiDD (my new acronym for “teenager or wife in desperate drama”). Steve’s lived a few of these while raising three daughters, so these embroidered moments seem to lighten his mood more quickly.
Kind of like a bird chirping, is how I imagine I sound to him.
That’s not all of it. But return to “Let’s do it.”
Steve is game. Not a pushover, mind you — he really does protect his time with his wife — but regardless of weather or odds, if there’s a shot in hell, he’ll take the chance. Wherever. Whenever. Game he is, so much so that I just can’t help myself. “You know, Steve,” I say with real fondness, “I really like this about you.
This, how shall I say it —”
“Moral defect,” he asserts, with his first sign of animation, faintly, but distinctly wry.
“‘Quality,’ is what I was looking for. I
really like this game quality a lot.”
“Do you,” he says flatly, returning to monotone. But that does not phase gushing me.
“What can I say? It’s just . . . well Steve . . . just charming.” With that — I’m also surprised by the word, so launch a true and hearty laugh.
Steve doesn’t. Then, slowly, he does. It’s a lighter sound than you’d expect, not that much like boulders grinding against each other and almost relaxed. “‘Charming.’ Yeah. That’s me in a nutshell right now. See you in thirty.”
Digression: I don’t count fish, but Steve gets 102 words in the dialogue above — okay, okay, it’s from my memory — for total of only about 114 syllables. Or 119, counting his laugh.
I could be wrong, but I suspect Steve, like me, is already feeling a little bit better about the day. But not as good as he will when his first fish hits.
Not bad for two fellows who’d both been glum five minutes before.
And not too shabby for guys who had, until four weeks and five trips ago, shared a longish and uneasy history — one of those “Where do you stand?” standoffs in a bitter conflict that, left unresolved, can leave you both standoffish for life, offering only head nods whenever you meet. Long story, not too relevant, but one of the reasons why that didn’t happen was that some of those meetings were at a fly-fishing club, others at odd spots where we both stop to survey the home waters we share. It’s more awkward to be icy cool at the former, especially when Steve brought his warm and lovely wife — Well, if she likes him,I found myself thinking — and at the latter encounters, it’s hard not to say something like “Looks like caddis.” A few slips over the years produced verifiable evidence that, hola, we shared an enemy or two — and maybe most of a housing association’s dirty board of directors. When they fired him as general manager, not long after I publically announced I hoped to testify against them in criminal trials, I wondered How bad can he be?— this compounding Well, if she likes him….
Slowly, the eight-hundred-pound guerrilla chaperoning our fishing exchanges shrank to chimp size, then to lemur dimensions. By that time, we’d agreed on a subject or two we would not discuss and would even indulge a few “Have you tried” this place or fly exchanges. After of few years of this came the occasional, almost sincere suggestion that “we should fish together some time.” I actually lost his phone number three times, until one day, my son Max was standing by during a chat. By way of showing off, he insisted on programming it into my cell phone. A month or so later came one of those What the hell, why not? moments and. . . .
Our first trip provided poor fishing and a pretty good time; what was awkward, in fact, was how comfortable I felt. For one thing, I’m a fool for good manners, also for those all but invisible acts of thoughtfulness you’re not expected to notice. Turned out we had the both odd and important bits of history in common: we’re both happy stepfathers, for example, in constant touch with kids now adults or almost — a subject opening the conversation wide. As to odd, add that we both grew up hoping to become fur trappers. Steve was discouraged partly by a Raccoon from Hell, me by the discovery that “No, dear, you can’t just catch them, shave off their fur, and keep them as pets.”
If only Mom had known about dubbing.
Steve laughed a lot at that — first time I’d seen and heard this. And soon we were onto rambles about hunting, which he still does and I only consider occasionally, after a necessary stint killing meat in ’72. This confession led to Steve’s report on a Northern Exposure episode wherein the citified doctor, pressured to hunt by his patients, falls in love with the chase, then implodes after killing a bird. “So there’s this moment at the bar,” Steve said, “When he’s mourning this grouse or whatever while trying to drink himself into a stupor.”
“Yeah?”
“And one of the locals comes up to say something like, ‘Well, maybe hunting’s not for everybody.’ So the Doc looks up and says ‘No no no!’ insisting he loves to hunt, loves it — he goes into this rhapsody about how great it is. So the local says ‘Maybe it’s the killing you don’t like.’ But the Doc objects. He likes the killing, see? It’s this ultimate moment. But then he finishes with the greatest line, along the lines of hunting’s great, killing’s terrific, ‘It’s only the dying I can’t stand.’”
Well then. If you can’t catch fish, exchanging stories about passions you share, people — kids and friends — and move from there to ideas for me, these are diversions just shy of great. For my money, telling a tale is writing without the paper, and hearing one is like reading without the book. When it turned out that taciturn Steve, serious as he looks and sounds, likes to laugh at himself, a lot….
The second outing was more of the same. We caught almost nothing, except each other’s drifts. During the third, we never even got on the water, but instead stood on a dock for hours and watched lightning ignite, talking to encourage ourselves and entertain. Our fourth trip, however, was something special.
I arrived seven minutes late and just in time. On shore near the launch site, I saw two young dandies hitting golf balls into the lake, their sports car parked not twenty feet from Steve’s truck.
My teeth are already bared as I pulled in behind him, upper and lower bicuspids sharpening each other. Steve’s on the tarmac by then, arms spread wide as golden eagle wings, his beard in this kid’s face. While eagles don’t snarl, however, Steve was heading into a bass baritone shriek range. “What are doing? Why are you doing it? Have you no respect at all? What the hell are you thinking?”
The kids protest absurdly. They weren’t really littering, because — get this — they’d collected their big bucket of balls from the golf course water hazard nearby and now were just putting them back in the water.
I hear this as I’m heading toward them. Steve’s face has turned the color of a strawberry thundercloud. Restraining him would be a serious challenge under any circumstances and almost impossible while laughing as hard as I am.
Laughing?
On the inside. The truth is, I’m delighted. Inspired. Also relieved. Too many times I’ve stood where he is, with poachers and idiots of other stripes. And while I know I’m not the only man or woman who reacts like this, it seems that way when it’s been too long.
And so I am calm, utterly calm. Good-natured, almost, and soooo reasonable, intervening with this stuffed little shit while barely keeping the lid on a giggle. Steve’s bewildered, maybe, steaming like a Hot Creek spring, but the situation settles anyway. The boys drive off.
I look at Steve, wondering if he’d like to club me. “They were just putting them back in the water,” say I in such a pleasant monotone.
“Oh yeah. That’s what they were doing. Can you believe that?”
“I have an abiding faith in their intent.” “Jesus.”
“Also, they know where we are parked.”
He pauses, then nods. “Yeah, I thought of that,” he says ruefully. Then he sighs and shakes his head. “Sometimes I just don’t understand people. That’s all there is to it. ”
“Not a good sign if you do,” I assure him kindly. “We’re not a viable species.”
“I’m beginning to think that.”
“On the bright side, that’s another reason to fish,” I add.
Steve lives close by, and as I said, we share home waters — thus the five trips in a month or two. But somewhere in there I began to wonder about how and why fishing partnerships form.
Right away I realized I’m no expert on the subject. Like other friends, my fishing pals tend to last decades, terminating most often because of distance, advancing age, or illness, twice by death. Because of that — also, because I’ve no problem fishing solo for years — I’ve just not auditioned often, using the verb both ways. And not once have I ever sat down and asked why things worked out, why they might have, or why they didn’t. I’ve certainly never sat down and contemplated a list of what qualities I’d like to find in a voluntary relationship that often requires so much proximity while hungry, weary, smelly, frustrated, and stressed sometimes. “Me and Joe” not withstanding, even trips that go well include moments and situations subject to hard tweaks and torque.
Then it struck me how glad I am to have gone listless. For one thing, I’m sure I would never have chosen men so unlike me, whose personalities, skills, and quirks turned out to be complementary — from whom I learned so much and so thoroughly enjoyed for very long times.
And I’m not about to start now, I decided.
Steve and I were due some silence, after the golf-ball-moron encounter. But not too much, so twenty minutes later, I apologized for my lateness. No TWiDD this time. I’ve delved deeper into my psyche.
“Seven minutes again. Like always, except when it’s a multiple of that. All because I was a forceps baby.”
“What?”
“Forceps. Torn into the world seven minutes early, I’m quite sure. I’ve been trying to catch up ever since. They say that primal insults never really fade, you know.” Pause. “So. Now you’re saying your always seven minutes late because of birth trauma?”
“You’ve got it exactly.
Steve nods. “And you believe that.”
I smile. “Oh no. No, I just like the symmetry of the theory. Also, you gotta admit that as an excuse, this one’s got legs.”
Maybe this helped improve our mood. This night, the fishing certainly did. And though it was late when we got off the water, we hung around in the dark.
That might have been too bad. For one reason or another, maybe just to spit out the last taste of dandies busting balls, I launched almost from nowhere a diatribe blacker than the moonless sky, black as burnt carbon, the kind of thing you might expect from somebody who does not believe we’re a viable species at all and fears for his children. I’d spent more than a year desperately fighting for my mother’s health and life, losing against a corrupt HMO, winning against a grossly corrupt insurance company, then challenging four doctors whose treatments would have wrongly doomed my mother — bright and funny and strong today, hero to a university medical center — to years of agony, dementia and madness, paralysis, poverty care, and morphine addiction. . . .
But at a cost. . . .
Just call it a burst of furious ennui, vitriol ignited. I don’t apologize when this happens. I’m even defiant, Thoreau speaking through bars, demanding of Emerson why he’s out of jail.
Steve reels a little. He says there’s nothing he can say. It’s true, so I shrug. Driving home, I remember the last time a new fishing partner suffered something similar from me, September 11, 2001. That time it was a scorching description of my life under Islamic “fundamentalism,” the mutilation of the girls I taught.
I wasn’t charming, and the companion was nervous, at least, apprehensive, perhaps appalled. I know I never fished with him again, also that he caught me last year after a Gierach reading to tell me his son had married a Pakistani woman and say to me “My God, you were over the edge that day.”
These episodes don’t happen too often, either more or less often than they should, but it’s like an epilepsy seizure: might as well get it over, see how it plays.
Hard to say in the dark that night. I honestly wasn’t worried, though. I’d seen that strawberry thundercloud. So I wasn’t surprised when he called three or four days later, toward the end of a workday, when the shadows were long and I can be monosyllabic, too. I saw his number the caller ID and answered only “ Where and when?”
He paused. He laughed. “What are we? Like some old married couple?”
Not yet. But it’s a fine audition so far. I hope.
