After I was married, we still went there together to get along whenever I was in Birmingham, though getting along everywhere else was easier then. We continued to go out of habit, I suppose, and because we still enjoyed the perspective that being at the lake together in a fishing boat gave each of us on the other, the depth of field of hundreds of old afternoons of lenience with each other that it provided.
I had Lough Corrib for home water in Ireland for two years, and didn’t fish in Georgia. Dick Wentz and I shared a piece of fine home water called Rath’s Pond in Iowa for a couple of years, then we both moved to Wisconsin and had a triangle of Lake Michigan and the creeks in Door County for three more. During those years my wife and I had three children and got graduate degrees. I made a living having fun, published a few stories and poems, and fished around a little in Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas.
There was hardly anything to recover from during those seven years. Everybody got along beautifully, and it wasn’t ever necessary to take bearings in order to get from one place to another. Home water, therefore, good as it was sometimes, didn’t mean too much to me. In one gorgeous, fir-lined home creek in Door County, near the mouth of which Wentz and I, and only Wentz and I, would take perfectly colored two-pound brookies every September on deer-hair dry flies—I even rigged a fishing picture for a magazine. I hooked a long-dead ten-pound Lake Michigan steelhead to a streamer and let some guy photograph me netting it from the creek. When you can act like that and find it funny, you don’t need home water.
What made me need it again was a coked-up, self-indulgent year of helping turn my first novel into a movie. That was twenty-five years ago now. Since then there has been more going to the mat with Hollywood, and with publishers and books, the travel business, mortgages, marriage, critics, and appetites; and there has been all the far-flung fishing I ever dreamed about. I am now closing in on sixty. I use a compass some of the time, and I would no more net a dead trout out of home water for a photographer than I would sell my bird dogs and move to Beverly Hills.
I have a daughter and two sons. Neither of those sons has ever shot out a street lamp or run naked down a highway, and I have never had to wrestle with either of them except for fun. The older one likes to fish, but the younger one loves it, and has since he was little, in the same indiscriminate, dreaming way that both my father and I did when we were kids. That younger son’s name is Shelby, but we have always called him Judge.
When I got back to our home in New Hampshire after the movie debacle, skinny and psychically banged up, I fished nearly every afternoon of that July, and most days I took Judge along. Our home water then was a majestic three-mile stretch of the Contoocook River. Judge and I would put in the canoe around four in the afternoon and float until nearly dark. He hadn’t learned to use a fly rod yet, so he would throw a spinner while I popped the banks and the rocks like a thirsty man drinking water. We caught a lot of smallmouths that month, and while we caught them, Judge would dream out loud about the sea-run brown trout and the bluefin tuna we would catch the following month when we went to Prince Edward Island. Those days in July that year were for me unspeakably sweet and restorative, complete in themselves without needed or wanted reference to any other thing or place. To Judge, six, with no need for any of the peculiar graces home water bestows, they were, well . . . the Contoocook River.
And so was our stretch of the Blackwater River—with its overgrown banks and still pools, its smart smallmouths and brown trout—only the Blackwater to Judge when it was home water, and we’d float it and he’d make me tell him about fishing for black marlin in Australia, even when he’d cast a hairmouse fly behind a drowned birch tree and watch the eddy come apart as a smallmouth crashed it.
Catching big wild brook trout in western Maine, sailfish off Stuart, Florida, and bluefish after bluefish over nineteen pounds off the Isles of Shoals made Judge, by the summer he was twelve, nearly permanently blasé about home water.
That August, a movie producer friend of ours came from California to New Hampshire for a four-day visit and brought his new wife and teenaged son and daughter. The boy was a little older than Judge and a lot higher-geared. He was dark, good-looking, and amusing. He could tell a Ferrari from a Maserati, and he knew Jack Nicholson. He also liked to fish. He had fished quite a bit in California and Florida with his father, but he had never caught a good bass, so Judge and I took him one afternoon to our home water.
That water then was a lake, one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, three miles from our house and virtually unfished except by my family. There were pickerel in this lake, bluegills, perch, and a lot of big bass, both largemouth and smallmouth. Judge and I had both caught four-to-five-pound bass there, and he had lost a largemouth that spring that would have gone over six. We fished for these bass with popping bugs, in the evening usually, and we always released them.
Well, we got to this lake, the producer’s son, Judge, and I, around five o’clock, an hour and a half before the good top-water fishing started. Both Judge and I would rather catch one fish on top than five down deep, but the producer’s son was after a big bass, so, after throwing a floating Rapala for a while with my spinning rod and noting that none of us were getting hits from good fish, he asked if he could put on a plastic worm.
I said sure.
“If you just wait,” Judge told him, “until the water cools off, they’ll start hitting that Rapala.” Since he was sitting in the middle of the canoe, Judge was fishing with a spinning rod, too, using a frog popping plug.
The producer’s son put on the worm and caught a couple of pound-and-a-half bass. He was thrilled with the fish, and I told him they were beauties. Judge just looked at them and kept throwing his frog. He shook his head when the producer’s son said he wanted to keep the second bass. I told the kid we didn’t usually keep the fish out of this lake. He looked disappointed and said he wanted to eat it, so I killed the bass for him.
Around six-thirty the sun went off the good bank, the breeze lay down, and the lake went totally still. Martens started to skim for insects. A pair of wood ducks flew over, whistling. And fish began to dimple the surface. A big pickerel took my popping bug, throwing up spray. I hit the fish and pulled back an empty leader.
“Jesus,” said the producer’s son, looking at the place where the fish hit. “He was so big he broke off your fly.”
“Snake,” said Judge with disdain. “That was just a pickerel. He bit it off.” Five minutes later he threw his frog up by a rock ten feet from shore and twitched it once. A three-pound large-mouth hopped all over it. Judge smiled while he fought the fish, and when he released it he said, “Now that’s a bass.”
The producer’s son watched the whole thing, from the splashy hit through the release, without saying anything. Then he took a few more casts with the worm, and asked Judge if he could try the frog.
“You’re probably right,” Judge told him. “You’ll catch more fish with that worm.”
We drove home in the dark and the producer’s son asked if we could come back and fish the lake early the next morning. I told him I couldn’t. There was a silence in the car. “You and Judge could fish, though,” I said. More silence. “When you get home, make some sandwiches. I’ll bring you guys out at five and you can fish until nine or so.”
The next morning was foggy and still. I got the boys up at four-thirty and we left the house at five. Both boys were sleepy and grouchy and unhappy with the fog. When we got to the lake, I took the canoe off the Jeep and helped them load it. I asked Judge what he wanted for tackle. “I guess we’ll just take the spinning rods,” he said. His eyes were still half closed and he sounded bored. As I watched them carry the canoe down through the fog to the water, I thought it was likely to be a long morning for them out there.
I came back at nine-thirty and walked down to the lake. The canoe was just off the point of one of the three islands a hundred yards offshore. The producer’s son was in the bow, casting to the point. Judge was in the
stern, his paddle in his lap, and I could hear his voice. The lake was still perfectly calm. The fog had thinned a little without lifting, and it hung behind the canoe like a gray-white curtain. The islands, the canoe, the boys, and a dull silver patch of water between us were all there was to see.
I heard Judge laugh. Watching him in the stern, isolated on the water against the curtain of fog, I felt a quick surge of love for him rise and catch in my throat along with something I wanted to say so badly I almost shouted it out across the water. As it happened, I didn’t even speak it, then or ever, because I didn’t have to, and because I had learned on other lakes a long time before that the best lessons have little or nothing to do with words. But if I had, it would have gone like this: “This isn’t just a place to wet a line, Judge. This is home base—where you start and what you come back to: the place that gives meaning and relevance to every other place you’ll ever go.”
“How’re you doing?” I yelled.
They looked up and paddled in, taking their time. When they got close I could see they were doing fine. I beached the canoe and the producer’s son got out. “Good morning?” I asked him.
“It was a great morning. Wasn’t it, Judge?”
Judge grinned at me. “Jonathan caught some beauties on the frog.”
“Keep any?”
“Nope. We released them,” said Jonathan.
“How’d you do?” I asked Judge.
“Oh, not so good.” He stood up and stretched, and gazed out over the water, looking proprietary and happy. “I fished the worm for a while . . . then I just had a good time watching Jon fish.”
The Next Valley Over Page 23
