Tom told me later that after a long silence following my departure, Pete had finally said, “Jesus Christ. It was like the guy was on some kind of mission”
Over the next day and a half, Tom and I had a wonderful time in great weather, in one of the world’s most magical places and in the excellent, easy, and funny company of Pete and Mike. We ate, drank, and stogied very well and we caught plenty of snook and bass. But we did not catch a tarpon, and since just missing them in Homosassa and Boca Grande, I had gotten zealous about catching a tarpon on this trip. It is a fish I go back with; for forty years I have caught my share of them in various places around the world, and they have come easily to me when and where other fish have not. Because of that, I sort of consider the tarpon my grace fish and I was counting on it to pull me out of my slump—to give me back my missing touch and timing. If I could just catch a tarpon, I figured, spurning reason, everything would come right.
On our second morning I talked Pete into running a long way south and then into snaking up a tiny, mangrove-choked creek to a confluence where he had heard there were baby tarpon. I hooked a ten-pound snook there and, after pulling it out of the brush and over logs and unwrapping the leader from around the electric motor, almost lost it to a five-foot alligator, and would have except that Pete, who named the gator Wally, threw a plastic gallon water bottle at it and Wally took that off into the mangroves instead of my snook and loudly ate it.
Boating that snook and releasing it was surely a triumph over adversity, but it was not a tarpon; Wally, we figured—a dog in gator clothing, chewing up his plastic bottle back in the mangroves—had chased off all the tarpon.
The next day, our last with Pete and Mike, we did find tarpon but they wouldn’t eat. In a creek leading into the lower Rodgers River there were tarpon rolling everywhere, and we all cast ourselves blind without scoring a bite.
Then we went into the Gulf and looked for snook for an hour or so over a green sand bottom.
I saw what I thought might be a fish. “Is that a fish?” I asked Pete.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “Could be.”
“Should I throw to it?”
“Hey, this is America,” said Villani, who was raised in Michigan but sounds like he comes from Brooklyn, and who is fond of saying, “Hey, this is America.”
I did and caught it. And then we headed back to Chokoloskee. It was a nice snook of six or seven pounds that jumped spiritedly, but it was not my grace fish.
Country music leaks continuously out of every orifice of Roland Martin’s marina, motel, condo, and tackle store resort complex in Clewiston, and bass boat trailers surround the place like lawn ornaments. In town as well as at the resort, there is no shortage of pictures of Roland Martin’s tanned, smiling face, some of them bearing the inscrutable exclamation, “Ohh, Son!” Which is, Tom and I learned, what Roland Martin is given to saying when he is happily amazed, as in “Ohh, Son! What a hawg that bass was”—something he has probably said a lot as a legendary tournament bass fisherman and nine-time B.A.S.S. Angler of the Year. And since Martin is Clewiston’s most famous son and bass fishing is second only to the U.S. Sugar Company as the biggest game in town, a lot of other citizens there probably say it too.
Surrounded by thousands of acres of flat, lime-green cane-fields, Clewiston is a pleasant, friendly, Little-League-and-fried-catfish kind of place that might be oppressively middle American were it not for a good number of resident Cuban sugar workers and their families, whose presence in town allows you to have a couple of bracing thimble-sized cups of sweet, strong Cuban coffee at the Farmacia while you wait for your Cuban sandwiches to take out fishing on the lake.
The lake there, of course, is none other than the voluptuous, fecund, funky-smelling Okeechobee, the great, south-tipped bowl whose drippings are the Everglades. At twenty-six miles wide and thirty long, comprising nearly 500,000 acres, Okeechobee is the largest natural freshwater lake completely within the borders of the United States. It is also one of the most productive bass lakes anywhere, and, with around a hundred guides working it, probably the busiest.
One of the best of those guides, a sleepy-eyed, slow-talking James Dean lookalike named Danny Watkins, took Tom and me out on the lake’s broad, glorious flanks for a few hours. We put in at the town of Moore Haven and ran a few miles down a canal past fragrant malaleuca trees and palms, with a few little lavender clouds in the early-morning sky and coots, egrets, and osprey on the wing, into Monkey Box Bay.
Danny is a “Hewes Celebrity Angler” and an Orvis-endorsed guide who used to compete in professional bass tournaments. As we drifted with the wind over beds of hydrilla and pepper grass, casting plugs and poppers and catching a bucketmouth here and there, he talked about competitive bass fishing: the $30,000 boats that top out at over sixty miles per hour, with their jackplates, automatically aerated live wells, depth finders that read sideways as well as vertically, metal-flake paint jobs, wall-to-wall carpeting, cellular phones, and color TVs. He talked about the new high-tech rods and reels; about spinnerbaits, crankbaits, propbaits, buzzbaits, jerkbaits, rattletraps, and pigs-’n’-jigs; about flippin’, pitchin’, skippin’, and jerkin’ techniques. And then Danny Watkins smiled and said, “But you know, when you get right down to it, all a bass fisherman is is just a jerk waiting for a jerk.”
On our way out of Clewiston, Tom and I stopped at Les’s Saloon and Marge’s Kitchen, a kickass porkchop sandwich, beer, and hotwings joint with apparent feminist sympathies. Signs on the wall over the pool tables remind you there are “So Many Men, So Few with Brains,” and “A Husband Is Living Proof That a Woman Can Take a Joke.” Up at the bar are photos of some of the place’s skydiver and biker clientele and the legend “If Assholes Could Fly, This Place Would Be an Airport.” As we drank beer and walked around the place, I read out loud to Tom another sign’s sporting advice that “It’s Not How Deep You Fish, It’s How You Wiggle Your Worm.”
“Now that’s the truth,” agreed one of the two been-there, done-that waitresses behind the bar—proving you never know in Florida where you’ll run into a fellow angler.
One place where you can count on doing that consistently is along virtually any road in the state that crosses water. Tom and I drove up around the northwest end of the lake through Lakeport, Buckhead Ridge, and the town of Okeechobee, and in every pond and canal we saw, and from every bridge we crossed, there was someone fishing. On a bridge over Fish Eating Creek it was a black, retired Church of God minister named Reverend Charles Williams. Reverend Williams sat in a lawn chair, wearing tall green boots, a baseball cap, and a gold tooth, and tending two outfits: a cane pole and a spincast rod, both carrying ancient thirty-pound-test line and baited with worms—what the high-tech boys out on the lake probably called “dirtbaits.”
Just off the bridge, the Reverend’s wife Margaret sat in another lawn chair in the shade of their station wagon and watched him fish. Margaret had recently had a pacemaker put in her heart, and this was her first outing since the operation. She didn’t fish: she had almost drowned once and had a fear of the water, and she didn’t like to take fish off or bait hooks. But when the Reverend caught one, she would clean it and put it in the cooler in the back of their car, and she would cook it when they got home to Fort Myers, thirty-five miles away.
The Reverend was seventy-two and had been fishing all his life. Now that he was retired, he fished three days a week and sold vegetables on the other three. On Sundays he and Margaret went to Morrison’s Cafeteria after church. Fishing relaxed him, he said. “But you got to have patience. You got to love it. Love it.” He said Jesus knew about fishing. Then he told me the story about Peter, James, and John getting skunked. When they came ashore Jesus asked them how they did.
“They tell him they been trollin’ all day and haven’t caught nothin’. Jesus says, ‘Go back to trollin’, but fish on the other side of the boat.’ They say, ‘Oh no,’ ’cause they tired of fishin’, but at Jesus’ command they launch into the deep
again and then they caught such a multitude of fishes they had to get their pals to help ’em pull the net.”
“‘Fish on the other side,’” said the Reverend, looking up at me with a grin, his gold tooth winking. “That’s what He told ’em. Maybe that’s what I ought to do.” But a moment later his spincast rod bowed and he started reeling without standing up. He asked me to look over the bridge railing to see what it was. “A gar,” I told him as the fish started up out of the water, but then the frayed old line broke and it fell back in. That was just fine with Reverend Williams. A gar wasn’t what he was after, though he would have taken it.
“I just like to feel the line pullin’,” he said, laughing and tying on another hook. Margaret brought him a sandwich and a cup of lemonade and then went back to her chair.
“They not bitin’ good yet,” said the Reverend contentedly. It was just noon and he could stay until three, when he and Margaret had to drive back to the wholesale house in Fort Myers to pick up their vegetables for the next day. “But they will.”
If you believe the conventional wisdom that all of Florida is too crowded, try driving through the rodeo, barbecue, and gunrange country on Route 441 between Yeehaw Junction and Holopaw, where all you will see for miles is huge, palmettoringed pastures full of fat, heat-resistant cattle. Tom and I drove for twenty-six minutes on that road without seeing a car or a person; then, before we knew it we were in Satellite Beach and it was immediately clear where they had all gone.
Located just north of Melbourne, Satellite Beach is one of the dozens of East Coast strip towns whose high-rises and malls and fast-food restaurants run into each other all the way from Daytona Beach to Miami, forming an extruded, humid bazaar of services, goods, and amusements that is either your dream or your nightmare of modern Florida. Nowhere in all that crowded hawking would one expect to find an enormous, silent place of unpeopled white beaches and virgin oak hammocks with the cleanest water on the East Coast, miles of superb sight-fishing for redfish and speckled trout, and not a building in sight. But exactly such a place is Mosquito Lagoon, which is north of Cape Canaveral and the Space Center, and a part of Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge.
Tom and I were guided there by Frank Catino, a city councilman for Satellite Beach and a well-respected light-tackle fishing guide. Frank’s friend Ronny Winn joined us with his skiff, and rounding out our group was the redoubtable Paul Bruun, gourmand, raconteur, ace all-around angler, and trout guide from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. It seemed a formidable force of long-rod predators who sallied forth that day to battle the redfish of Mosquito Lagoon; but it was a chastened one that returned. Frank hoped that we could find, before anyone else did that morning, a dream school of close to two hundred redfish, each of them weighing between fifteen and thirty pounds, that he had found a number of times in the past few weeks loitering in a broad channel just offshore.
We did find them, almost immediately, and there wasn’t another boat in sight. The sun was just right, the wind was light, and from the bow—as Frank poled me quietly up to what looked at a distance like an undulant, slowly moving, reddish brown carpet the size of half a football field—I thought, Yes! Here finally is redemption in spades! Nobody could screw this up, not even if the dog jumped in the water right now and . . .
“Cast,” said Frank. I did, and stripped the fly past the pugfaces of at least ten redfish as long as your arm. Then I cast again . . . and again and again. The school continued to loll along on the top, unspooked, as I continued to cast into it, changing flies six times, praying cravenly after a while that I’d snag one. In Ronny Winn’s boat, Paul Bruun was casting a spinning rod at the school and holding a plugging outfit between his knees. When the fish wouldn’t eat one lure, he’d try the other one, then change them both. He and I beat the water to a froth, and the fish just mosied around our offerings, their dorsal fins wagging above the water at us like so many middle fingers.
But this utter rivening wasn’t over yet. For the last ten minutes or so of our efforts, we were watched noncommittally by a shirtless, wired-looking young man in an old johnboat whom Frank knew to be a security guard at the Space Center. When Paul and I finally gave up, Frank invited the man to have a go.
“Naw, I don’t want to screw up your fly-fishing,” he said, somehow making that noble art sound like needlepointing. But when Frank told him we were leaving, he jumped into the bow and, with Frank directing him, poled upwind like mad to our school, using a piece of PVC pipe as a pushpole. Then he picked up a scrappy old spinning outfit, lobbed out a live mullet, and caught a fifteen-pound redfish.
We pulled over to his boat because Tom—believing now with irrefutable reason that it might be the last fish he would ever see with me in the boat—wanted a picture of it. The man had two big speckled trout and his one redfish limit for the day already on a stringer, so, after Tom had taken its picture, he let this one go. Watching the fish swim off, I felt a peculiar and unstable desire to shoot it with a deer rifle.
Impossibly, we went in that day skunked. All of us knew we had been under the spell of some powerful bad juju, but, like the farter in the elevator, only one of us knew where it came from. I basically gave up then. The next morning when Frank took Tom and me out early to a pretty little mangrove-lined canal off the Banana River where baby tarpon were rolling and sporting, I never even half expected one of them to eat the eight or nine different flies I threw at them. And fishing for them while they proved me right in that lovely place, on that lovely morning—felt like nothing so much as breaking rocks.
Later that day, Tom and I drove to Orlando, turned in our rented car with 1,527 fish-chasing miles on it, and flew to Key West. Abject and attenuated, I read an article on the plane in Florida Sportsman about the flathead catfish, and wondered if that might possibly be my next grace fish.
After I had pulled myself together following the encounter on the street in Key West, I went to meet Tom at Faustus Grocery, “the oldest business in Paradise,” to buy provisions for our trip to the Marquesas.
The Marquesas are the only atoll in the continental United States—a fifteen-square-mile collection of twelve uninhabited mangrove islands and hundreds of little islets circling a shallow lagoon. Lying twenty-five miles off Key West, the atoll is a part of the Key West National Wildlife Refuge, which status means no houses, no hunting, no seaplanes, no land-based camping. Though I have fished in the Keys since I was twelve years old, I had never visited the Marquesas, and I had badly wanted to for years, particularly after reading a well-water-pure little book called Marquesa, written by a man who spent six weeks in the summer of 1994 living alone on a small houseboat in the atoll’s lagoon.
That man’s name is Jeffrey Cardenas. He is an accomplished journalist, and has sailed a twenty-three-foot Ranger single-handed across the Atlantic. For nearly ten years he was one of the most skilled and sought-after flats guides in Key West, and now he owns a state-of-the-art fly shop, guide service, and guest house there. I liked his book and what I knew about him, so Tom and I called him a few months before our trip and he graciously offered to take us out to the Marquesas for a couple of days and nights on his houseboat. For him, it would be his first return trip to the islands on the boat since he wrote the book there. For us it was the highlight and last leg of the trip. For me it was, simply, now or never.
Tom and I met Jeffrey at the marina at Garrison Bight. We brought cigars, wine, rum, food, and water, and he brought lawn chairs, the last of the season’s stone crabs, yellowfin tuna steaks, and shrimp. With his Maverick skiff in tow, we steamed out just after noon aboard the Huck Finn, a locally homemade job of twenty-six feet with a four-cylinder diesel capable of producing a meditative top speed of five knots. The houseboat had a bright, airy cabin about eight by twelve feet, with two bunks, a dining table, rod racks, a nice little galley, and a small open deck at either end. The roof of the cabin, with a Bimini-top shading the lawn chairs, served as a high, cool third deck.
I sat up there during most o
f the five-hour steam to the Marquesas, feeling better than I had in a long time. Jeffrey had told us that this was the first decent fishing day they had seen in three months. The wind had blown hard for ninety straight days and stopped the night before, and this was a sunny, light-breeze marvel of a day with more like it to follow. From the roof of the Huck Finn, floating like a cork over tan flats, feeling buoyant and in out of a long blow myself, I believed that maybe all of that good news was more than accidental. I wondered that I had let the man’s hand go after I shook it; I wondered that I had not dropped to my knees there on Simonton Street and acknowledged publicly what I had felt was happening to me: that I was suddenly and inexplicably hooked up to a lunker answer or two, after half a year of blind casting. The answers were still not in the boat; I couldn’t even identify them yet, and my recent record for losing what I stuck was not good. But at least I was playing something and the wind had stopped. And the black dog, I felt certain, was gone for good—left behind on the receding mainland.
By five-thirty, we had anchored the Huck Finn fore and aft in the lagoon and were drifting the northeast corner of the atoll in the Maverick, looking for tarpon. In two and a half hours we saw six or eight schools of rolling fish, some more than once. That was the good news. The bad news was that with all three of us casting to lots of fish, we could only get one to eat. And the worse news was that after Tom hooked it and handed me the rod so that he could take pictures, the heavy-duty handle of a brand-new Sage fly reel promptly sheared off in my fingers. For the first time in my life I experienced what is known as a cold sweat.
But back on the roof of the Huck Finn at sunset, it was hard to feel depressed. It was a perfect, all but dead-calm evening. Venus blazed, and there was lightning over the Everglades. Permit were tailing to the west, a shark was feeding just off the bow, and we were smoking Montecristos and drinking good rum. It was the trip’s most accomplished single moment. Though it had definite doglike nuances, I told myself, anything, after all, could cause the handle of a cherry five-hundred-dollar fly reel to just break off in your fingers . . .
The Next Valley Over Page 14
