Fishing doesn’t always require solitude and silence. Fishers do, sometimes, and I’m among those who occasionally need no more company than trout or bass, bugs, swallows and bats, perhaps an osprey, maybe a muskrat, if it’s not too chatty. And dusk — I like a slow-moving dusk.
It sometimes seems odd to me that I seek isolation, since writing’s a solitary occupation, and I need to get out more. But as writing happens in my head, it’s truly a conversation with readers — what I call collectively “the sympathetic mind,” though I’m not sure all of them are. It’s an active affair, and nosy, chasing ideas and stories that I hope will find momentum. But momentum is also a hazard. Too often, thoughts get yanked astray, veer away or suddenly ricochet. When an idea’s elusive or complicated, or pathos is important, or when I want humor — all these almost at once — the process feels roughly equivalent to a mental decathlon where I’m playing every event at once.
Taming these digressions is problematic. Here’s an example: a paragraph back, I considered inserting a Caitlyn Jenner comment. Too easy, too done, so I refrained. But then I recalled Jon, the only semifamous athlete I’ve met, and a spectacularly gay Peace Corp trainee in Malaysia. Jon’s sexual adventures were myriad and fantastic, and since sex was what he’d come for, when the time approached for us to be sent out to teach, he decided to arrange his exit home to San Francisco. His tactic proved brilliant: Jon danced naked in front of Musa, our most rigidly fundamentalist Muslim-language instructor. This while Musa was praying toward Mecca. Jon leaped around him waving a lime-green sarong, singing a show tune and performing 200-pound pirouettes while waving the sarong like some steroid-addled stripper.
This worked out well: he was gone in twenty-four hours. And how could I not report that tale to you? Tell me you don’t you want to read about the time he hooked up with dangerous Thai drug bandits, to whom he promised the sexual favors of several female volunteers in exchange for a trip to one of Malaysia’s homosexual brothels. In the end, the narcos settled for bras and panties Jon stole them, but —
Perhaps that is not appropriate: OK. The point is, containing writing is sometimes difficult. Now if I could insist that Jon, performing for Musa, looked like a monstrous steelhead fly — a black-bodied Green-Butt Skunk — casting itself to provoke the rise he sure as hell got —
Uh-huh. And this kind of thing explains why there are days, and especially evenings, when I want fish solo. Just to be still. On still waters, more often than not.
That’s mostly convenience, but partly, perhaps, because streams and rivers are so dynamic. Though by far my favorite places to fish, they’re never silent, not always restful the way a lake or pond is at sunset when the wind is down and the most violent things on the water are rising fish and the ripples retreating from my float tube.
That’s all there is this evening — these and the last flights of swallows working fading light, a murder of crows heading toward dark sky, gossiping, this big gibbous moon slipping up behind me. Two fair-sized smallmouths, one almost three pounds, have eaten a slider I’ve been working along a little cove’s lily-lined shoreline on the way to a deeper bank, which is also a fairway for a golf course.
Not wild environs, exactly. But play stopped hours ago, which means that the figure I see stealthily working his way toward me on the bank isn’t one of the small-ball tribe. It’s a spinning rod he carries, and I’m immediately certain he’s already used it to plumb the prime lies I’d hoped to hit. And I, of course, have already hit his.
This kind of thing will happen, until I am king.
I stop finning when he’s forty feet away. He reels in a spinnerbait, fixes it to a guide, straightens up, and looks my way. At least I think he does. Standing west-northwest of me, backlit by sunset’s crimson, he’s mostly a silhouette.
We’re not happy to meet each other. But so it goes, so after several seconds, we decide to nod at exactly the same moment. Then, again simultaneously, we each raise a hand.
The coincidence of movements is almost worth a smile.
“How’s it going?” he calls softly. “Going OK. How about you?”
“OK. Missed a couple …. Did you catch any on your fly rod ?”
“A pair. Medium size.”
He nods, hesitates, and takes a few steps closer. Long steps, I notice. “Fishing poppers?”
“Started out that way, but switched to a black Bunny Leech.”
He nods again. There’s something familiar about him, but I can’t place what. This isn’t rare, I’m sorry to say.
Somewhere during a two-year course of Crestor, I lost memories, mostly of people I met. If that’s not wholly my fault, it’s still pretty goddamn embarrassing.
“I fish flies, sometimes,” he says, lifting and dropping his shoulders.
Broad shoulders — he’s tall, very tall, I see now, and rangy, with the kind of build I’ve learned to associate with Scandinavian farm kids common around here. But bigger.
I loop a cast back the way I came, stripping half-heartedly, because I’d worked that water well. A bat cartwheels above the line wake. The faint flap of its wings and the sound of line slipping through guides are the only sounds for half a minute. He’s not going anywhere, and I’ve stopped paddling.
It’s curiously comfortable, this quiet tableau. He seems to think so, too, so he slowly steps closer. When he’s twenty, twenty-five feet away, I’m thinking, again and now with emphasis, “Man, he is big.” Just then — as if aware of how he now towers over me in my tube — he takes a knee.
That action, and my presumption of why he took it, spark memory. In fact, somebody had once introduced us, so I can add details to the figure still dim. Imagine a Louis L’Amour cowboy, then add five inches and fifty pounds. A ruggedly handsome face half hidden behind a pair of thick lenses and a week or two of blond heavy beard. He’d been polite, conspicuously earnest, and disarmingly awkward. His hand, I recalled, was roughly the size of a larger-than-legal Dungeness crab; he’d gripped mine carefully, almost delicately, with a pressure that seemed consciously calculated not to break anything. Size, color, care: he had at that moment reminded me of Rascal, my hundred-plus-pound golden retriever — the gentle way he approaches toddlers eager to pet him. It had taken me a few minutes to decide he was likely closer to thirty years old than twenty.
“We’ve met, I think,” I say. “I think so.”
“In front of the market.” “I believe that’s right.”
A little silence. I cast and strip again. “Been fishing much?” he asks. “Some. At Silver, a couple of nights,
Alder a few times. Stocked fish, mostly.” “Yeah. There are a lot of those in there.”
“Also spent a day in the Sacramento Delta, catching smallmouths.”
He ponders this. “Never been there.
What’s it like?”
I’m about to tell him, so take a breath, hunch forward a little. Then I stop, and the evening changes.
When you’ve repeated a story a few times — when I have — it’s easy to fall into a riff of sorts. A pattern, more or less organized and pat. This is at least triply true if I’ve written about an event, as I had done about the Delta, distilling the story. What tends to come out is clean copy, informative and maybe clever, if you’re lucky. Also vaguely impersonal: you could be talking to anybody.
I don’t feel like doing that. The air is soft, and I’m tubing wet, floating in water that is calm and comforting. My listener seems as relaxed as I want to be, patient and interested. There’s not one thing jarring or tight in the small world around us. I feel my shoulders drop and settle deeper in the tube.
All this takes about two or three second to compute. Then I do tell him about the Delta. About how Bob Akers and I cruised channels, looking for moving water, casting to riprap and rocky banks, tapping our way up or down through tidal currents slipping through tree shadows where smallmouths and sometimes spotted bass lined up close, often inches off the shore, looking to pick off crayfish or baitfish. Bass from five inches to fifteen, the two of us landing somewhere over eighty — Bob says “a hundred at least” — throwing poppers and divers like his “Sister Kate.”
It could be that I used much of the same facts and language I’d put into print. But it wasn’t a long tale, fired off fast, or canned.
Whenever I pause, he asks questions, softly, which I answer the same way. What rivets his attention, I find, is when I tell him that in five hours of fishing Delta water, cruising miles of shoreline, we’d not run into another angler. Fifty miles away from San Francisco Bay: nobody.
“Nobody,” he repeats. Then, in a wistful voice, “I’d like to see that place.”
His tone suggests he doesn’t expect to. By now I’ve remembered a little bit more. He’s local, or was — grew up in this valley, an old housing development that owns this golf course, back when most of the houses were “cabins,” some just shacks, spaced widely apart. People burned their trash, and poaching was hardly illegal in the minds of most residents. People from the town nearby still call the area “dark,” and not just because of the heavy second-growth forest around it. He’d told me he no longer lived here, then looked chagrined, since that meant he was technically trespassing when he returned.
I ask him about how it was when he lived here. “Good,” he says simply. “Those were . . . good days. I liked it here. But . . . well . . . then we moved out into the county.
Around here, “Out in the county” suggests more than geography. There’s plenty of new, nicer homes and neighborhoods, tucked in between manufactured houses perched on large lots, and east of these, small ranches, big dairies and berry farms, run-down lumber-mill hamlets mostly collapsing, isolated bars that might also be brothels. (Think the area above Lake Almanor.) The politics turn redder the farther out you go — red and farther right than that. The Catholics thin out, replaced by fundamentalist churches, secretive sects. Unlike other regions where “urban” crime rates are highest, there, it’s the other way around, with a few fishers trying not to encounter militias, bikers, and assorted survivalists too paranoid for any organization. Meth labs and marijuana grows are common there. So are tragic levels of child, domestic, and sexual abuse, with a higher incidence of bestiality — casual and commercial — than any place I’ve ever heard of.
I fish out there, sometimes, and sometimes alone. But late in an evening, I’d rather be elsewhere.
And as it turns out, this vignette of place might be relevant to this interlude.
Meanwhile . . . the moon’s well up, and so golden I can see his face better than he sees mine. Neither of us moves much, though every few minutes I flick out a cast. The water’s still warm, though the air is chilling a little. Still, I’m not inclined to leave.
“I believe,” he says, “That you are a writer.”
“Mostly,” I answer, noting the lack of contractions.
“You teach at the college?” “Used to.”
“Used to.” He nods. “My father, he liked to write. And he wanted to be a teacher. Went to school back we lived here in the valley. Got his degree and everything.”
“Good for him.”
That praise seems to give him pause. “History. He got a couple of jobs at high schools in town. They . . . didn’t really work out very well.”
“No?”
“He . . . my father . . . he had some strong opinions. Political opinions, I mean. Kind of extreme, you could say. And he talked about them a lot. A lot.”
A couple of bats circled between us. “People . . . people were not too comfortable. Not very comfortable at all, I believe. So he never lasted too long. He substituted, after that, when he could.” He seemed to look over my head, staring for a long moment. “That’s when we moved out to the county. Quite a ways, actually. My mother died, and my father . . . my father homeschooled me after that. For six years.”
Since middle school, maybe?
There was regret in his voice. I struggled to imagine the life he described, so isolated. Then I tried not to. Or at least to omit from this scenario elements that were both speculative and just a touch ominous.
“I’m sorry about your mother.” “Yeah. Thank you. I still had her dad for a while, my grandfather. He’s the one who taught me to fish.”
“That’s good. So, is your father still around, or . . .”
The moon was on his face, glazing his glasses lenses, casting a gold river toward where he knelt. Beyond this lay a darkness that became silence as he looked at me for many seconds.
“No,” he said firmly. “No. My father doesn’t live around here. Not even in this state, I do not believe. I . . . have lived by myself for a very long while.”
A very long while: it wasn’t the words, but the rhythm of these that fell like an axe.
Avoiding “ominous” was no longer an option. At one time of my life, I heard many confessions, to murders more than once, and to combat killings; I heard declarations from people who made difficult or impossible decisions when they’d found themselves pushed up against walls.
This felt like one of those, an assertion unequivocal, a little bit terrible. It spoke to a separation as final as an iceberg breaking away from a glacier to catch currents that would sweep it off to new seas.
Or here, perhaps, an iceberg that somehow pushed the glacier away.
I can’t know that, of course. I know nothing more than what I’ve written. All the rest is interpretation. But it’s not hard to imagine a son raised by one parent only, here dependent on a father extreme, a boy isolated by that extremism . . . who at some point decides — is, perhaps, forced to decide — he will be his own man, nothing like the one he’s known best.
I was lost in these thoughts, drifting, when he said gently, “You probably have a family to get home to.”
That startled me a little. For an instant, I wondered if he meant to illuminate a difference between us. But when he followed with “And I am afraid I have talked to much,” I chose to believe it was just good manners.
“No. You haven’t.”
“Well I am sorry if I did.” “Don’t be.”
“All right.” He nodded, stood, then pointed with his rod down the bank. “You see that tree over there? There’s a rock just off the bank below it. There’s always a big bass over there.”
I knew this. The tree marked the prime lie on this cove. I’d taken a five-pound fish there once.
“Thanks.”
I’m pretty sure he smiled. I know that he laughed a moment later, for the first time. “OK. But I believe you already know about it. I have seen you out here before, a couple of nights.”
From a distance. From shadows. It was only an accident, this conversation — the simultaneous nods and waves.
A good accident, to my mind. “See you,” he said.
“I hope so.”
He took a few steps, then turned. “Thank you for telling me, about the Sacramento Delta.”
“You’re most welcome.”
I hope he gets there, someday. More importantly, I hope he fishes it with a friend.
As long as I’m speculating wildly, a note that may or may not be relevant: It’s an almost universally accepted idea that kids raised in difficult circumstances — those physically or emotionally abused — become abusers themselves. Most of the therapeutic community promotes this idea, and it’s beloved by defense attorneys hoping to mitigate sentences.
It’s also wrong more often than not. How much more often is hard to say, but I saw a radically different outcome hundreds or thousands of times during a twenty-three-year stint working in mental health, and it so happens that my wife did her Ph.D. dissertation on this subject, a survey that, while forced to rely on too small a sampling, revealed a completely contradictory result.
If — if — a child has in his or her life one decent adult whom they can trust and depend on, a compassionate stalwart with whom they connect intimately — a grandfather, say — that child will most often identify with this person instead of the abuser who torments him or her. Rather than propagating abuse, such a person becomes immensely protective of others . . . sometimes fiercely and valiantly.
Some readers may have intimate knowledge of this. If so, and they happen to have hands the size of a legal Dungeness crab, they likely shake those of others almost delicately. Those who by good fortune don’t have this personal experience may catch a glimpse in works such as The Great Santini.
As it happens, I saw this in my father, and I am forever grateful.
