Traveling Light

by Bill Barich

  I looked forward to these vacations until I hit my thirteenth birthday, and then I rebelled. I wanted to assert my independence, to establish that I had an existence apart from my parents. What good was Minnesota to a teenager? Did they have any rock ‘n’ roll there? Doubtful—they hardly had any Negroes. So what was an intelligent, hard-nosed, rock ‘n’ roll, Long Island kid like me going to do at a lake? Go fishing? The notion was too dumb to credit. Besides, I had obligations. I couldn’t afford to miss any Babe Ruth League baseball games, not when my team (Mr. Wong’s Chinese Restaurant) was a pennant contender. Furthermore, I had this girl friend, a stacked brunette, who’d let me slip my hand under her sweater while we were watching an Elvis Presley movie at the Meadowbrook, and I thought that by August, if I could keep coming up with the ticket money, she might let me touch her bra. Were there any teenage girls in Minnesota who’d grant me such favors? Don’t make me laugh! I didn’t put the argument quite so boldly, but I did grovel and whine with such hideous determination that the following summer I was given a choice about the vacation. I chose to stay home.

  My father gradually expanded his vacation horizons. He took everybody to upstate New York, to Maine, and once, splurging, to the Canadian wilderness, in pursuit of giant muskies. I never went along. I was too busy with adolescence, with my own face in the mirror. I figured that I’d given up on fishing, but there came a time, soon enough, when drifting aimlessly through the middle of nowhere seemed as fine and peaceful an activity as anybody could hope to engage in.

  …

  The weakfish season on Long Island generally lasts from May to October. The fish tend to run in schools and have a liking for shallow, sandy areas. They feed on a wide range of marine life, so they can be found at different levels in the water. In shoals, they’ll rise right up to the surface to prey on baitfish, like killies and minnows. Catching them is a tricky business. They usually strike quickly, with force, and streak off in unpredictable directions—sometimes straight at you, so that you have to gather slack line as fast as you can to keep them from getting away. Most sporting writers remark on their beauty. Weakfish are said to resemble sea trout. Slim and bright, they flash a spectrum of color when they swim by—smudges of green, purple, lavender, gold, blue, all dabbed on a field of sparkling silver. They are prized for their flavor as well as for their beauty. Their flesh is lean and flaky, very delicate, an incandescent white.

  I was thinking about a weakfish dinner the first night I drove over to Long Beach, a strip of sand and pebbles that fronts on Gardiners Bay. I got there at dusk, just as the sun was setting. I’d invited my father to join me, but he lived almost fifty miles away, and he was unwilling to commit himself to the quest until I had some practical experience. All along the shore, the boys O’Neill had talked about were casting lures and bait, with an energy that bordered on the obsessional. The boys ranged in age from about sixteen to seventy. Behind them, in a parking lot, they had assembled a fleet of vehicles of a type you see only in the East—rusted-out V-8 sedans that seem nothing so much as the final tortured outcry of the Industrial Revolution.

  I put on my hip boots and stood between two boys who were knee-deep in the surf. I tried some squid first, threading chucks of it on a pair of hooks that hung below a pyramidal weight—a special weakfish setup—but the squid just sat on the floor of the bay, unattended to except by thieving crabs. I switched over to a purple plastic worm trailing from a lead-headed jig and started casting the way the others were doing. The worm flew out about fifty yards, then sank slowly to the bottom. I retrieved it slowly, too, dragging it inch by subtle inch across clamshells, rocks, and submerged beer cans, as I’d learned to do while fishing for largemouth bass in California. This was an interesting exercise in underwater topology, but nothing more, so I changed over to a minnow-like plug. (Plugs are lures that usually resemble a small fish.) It brought no takers.

  Nobody else on the beach was having any luck. A few of the boys had jammed their sticks into rod holders, then repaired to their rusting hulks to suck on beers and complain about the state of the universe, with particular regard to the shortage of weakfish in Gardiners Bay. I gathered that this was an integral part of the saltwater game, so I repaired to my own unrusted Datsun for a drink. A boy called Eddie noticed my California plates and struck up a conversation. He believed absolutely in the power of squid.

  “Why is any fish going to bite a piece of plastic?” he asked, speaking in the general direction of the sky. “Wouldn’t you rather eat good, fresh squid?”

  “I think the idea is to fool them.”

  “I don’t go in for tricks,” Eddie said. “Maybe you do, being from California. Everything’s fake out there. The people. The fish. Everything!”

  I was saved from further assault when Eddie leaped to his feet and shouted, “Somebody’s got one on!”

  We ran down to the shore, where a tall boy in a Mozart sweat shirt was wrestling with a weakie. It was evident from the way his rod was bent that weakfish is a misnomer. The name is not intended to characterize the fish’s fighting ability. It refers instead to the tender tissue around the fish’s mouth; the tissue tears free of a hook at the slightest undue pressure. The tall boy knew this. He coaxed the weakie, reeling it in ever so gently. The fish didn’t want to quit. The tide gave it some extra leverage. It made several good runs, working against the tall boy’s muscle. Once, the fish made the line sing, and we all murmured in awe. There’s an angler’s prayer you whisper at such moments: At least let me see the fish. Losing a fish you’ve hooked is bad, but it’s infinitely worse to lose one you haven’t seen. That’s simply too much mystery. Something that’s rightfully yours sinks into the realm of the invisible.

  When the tall boy beached the weakie at last, there was a shared sense of relief among us, and we moved closer to examine the spoils. The fish lay on a pile of glistening kelp. Its gills were opening and closing rapidly, gasping for air. The tall boy bent down and took out his hook. It came away easily, without any effort. A tentacle of squid was stuck to the fish’s mouth, and Eddie nudged me with an elbow.

  “You listen to what I been telling you,” he said.

  I was caught up in the fish’s colors—blue, green, and purple along the sides, so brilliant in the moonlight that I had to blink.

  “It’s only a school fish,” Eddie said. “Maybe seven pounds.”

  “They get much bigger?”

  “I’ve seen ’em come out of here twelve, thirteen pounds.”

  The fish pushed the boys back into action. I tried squid again, then real worms, then the minnow plug. Down on the beach, I heard shouts that indicated another weakie was on, but after they died down, it was quiet for a long time. Around ten o’clock, the crowd began to thin. Those V-8 engines spewed out clouds of exhaust, adding an overlay of petroleum distillates to the salty atmosphere. I stayed on the beach until midnight. My arms ached from the casting, and my back was sore from the standing. I hadn’t got a bite, unless you counted the nibbling of crab pincers, but I was very happy, baptized in a way, and I looked forward to the evening when it would be my fish that started the boys to murmuring. I dumped my bait on a rock, where the gulls would make short work of it. Just as I was leaving, an egret passed overhead, its white wings flapping against the moon.

  I returned to Long Beach the next night, and the night after that, but I still had no success, so I checked in with O’Neill to be sure I was using the right techniques. Once again, he made a careful survey of my rod.

  “Stick’s fine,” he said. “Maybe you’re getting over there too early.”

  “No chance.”

  “Maybe you’re not staying late enough.”

  “No chance.”

  O’Neill scratched his ear. “Maybe the fish don’t like you,” he said.

  I decided to experiment. It seemed logical to me that if weakfish were not thick around Long Beach, they might be thick somewhere else, cruising the shoreline while they looked for good spawning ground, so I picke
d a likely bay beach near East Hampton. It was bordered by scrub oaks, dogwood, and a few maples. There were two or three houses hidden in the trees. The bay had a sandy bottom. The average person could wade into it for two hundred yards before the water rose to shoulder level.

  I got to the beach early on a gray Sunday afternoon. I had my tackle and bait, a lawn chair, and a copy of the wartime journals of the Greek poet George Seferis. The book was an affectation. I always think that I’m going to sit in a chair or on a rock and read ecstatic literature while I’m waiting for a fish, but it never happens. I look at two words, three words, a sentence, and then some beautiful bird flies by, or a horseshoe crab creeps out of the surf, and I lose my place. Language pales in comparison to the syntax of nature, I guess, which is why Louis Agassiz could write thousands of pages in an attempt to describe the simple jellyfish. Agassiz must have been terribly frustrated when a contemporary, eyeing the creature in question, remarked, “Why, it’s little more than organized water!”

  The bay tide looked right. It was outgoing, and that meant that small baitfish would be washed to sea toward the weakies—if the weakies were there. Surprising, then, given such perfect circumstances, that no other anglers were around, I saw herring gulls, and some romantic couples strolling along the sand, but my stick was the only one in evidence.

  After I made my first cast, I snapped open the lawn chair and sat down. I tried Seferis.

  In essence, the poet has one theme:

  his live body.

  Minutes later, I was interrupted—not by the usual pantheistic revery, but by the unmistakable sound of Perry Como singing, “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.” The record was blasting out of one of those secluded houses back in the trees. Perry sang “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes” five times in the next half hour, at an ever-increasing volume. When Perry wasn’t singing, Frankie Laine or Vaughn Monroe was. A musical era that deserves to be forgotten was instead being re-created right there on the beach. I started to mumble harsh judgments against homeowners who destroy fragile ecological balances by introducing lame songs into an aural spectrum that gulls, terns, ospreys, and so on ought to dominate.

  I was about to yell something obscene when I noticed that a young woman had left the arm of her partner in romance and was about to take my picture. She had me framed against the bay; I could have been an old salt down from Montauk. My dream of catching a weakfish was suddenly base, reduced to postcard material, no more than local color. That would have been the ultimate tribulation of the afternoon if it hadn’t started to rain. I’m talking big rain, your basic cats-and-dogs.

  In a drenched, despondent condition, I reported to O’Neill. He gave me coffee and sold me an emergency poncho that folds up to the size of a dime and fits in your trouser pocket.

  “You was wasting your time,” he said. “Nobody the hell’s ever caught a weakie off that beach.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that’s how God made it, is why not.”

  Another pantheist.

  “Anyhow, the fish is more offshore now,” O’Neill said. “What you really need is to get yourself a boat.”

  “I’ll bet you sell boats.”

  O’Neill shrugged. “There’s outfits that’ll rent you one,” he said.

  I found a rental outfit in Sag Harbor. I went there with my optimistic father, who brought a landing net, and my brother, who happened to be in town from California. Among us, we’d collected an amazing assortment of tackle, including a tiny boat rod, stiff as a piece of hickory, and a lightweight rod-and-reel that would have been perfect for sunnies at a Minnesota lake.

  The skiffs rented for twenty-nine dollars a day, but the guy let us have ours for twenty-five, since it was already past noon—too late, really, to be headng out. “I doubt you’ll do much,” he said, offering advance consolation. He handed us a map that showed the primary spots frequented by stripers and porgies, as well as weakfish.

  My brother thought that my father should pay for the skiff, because it was my father’s birthday. Such inverse reasoning is not uncommon in our family, conferring privilege in a backward sort of way.

  I don’t know how long it had been since we’d all gone out together in a boat. We took up a lot more space than we had in the past, three men instead of two boys and an adult. There was some jostling for position. I felt the closeness of skin, that familiar intimacy, tempered, as ever, by the need to assert my independence. But the need was much diminished, an advantage of being older.

  My brother fired up the outboard, then asked for a beer from the cooler. He wanted to go to the opposite shore—a thirty-minute ride. My father, a nonswimmer, wanted to stay closer to the harbor, on the assumption that he’d have a better chance of being saved if he fell in.

  We started for the opposite shore.

  My father had a beer. I had a beer.

  The water was choppy, but the spray, coming at us, felt good. The sun was hot. I took off my shirt: the live body.

  When we reached our destination, my brother cut the motor. Our barely articulated plan was to drift from the shore’s eastern end to a rocky point at its western tip, through a region marked weakfish on the map. I baited a double-hooked O’Neill rig with squid and dropped it over. It hit bottom at about ten feet, so I reeled in some line. I used the same kind of rig on the tiny boat rod. The others tried Salty Dogs—soft plastic lures that shimmer like baitfish underwater.

  For a while, we just drifted along, rocking in the big silence that always follows a motor shutting down. The rocking was pleasant, with its complement of sailing gulls, and the salt smell everywhere. It took me back to those summer vacations, and the red-nosed uncles, and the aunts with their playing cards. The sheer and simple grandeur.

  It was only right that my father should get the first strike. He’d paid for the skiff, after all, and he’d just turned sixty-eight. His rod bowed suddenly. The line on his little reel—it couldn’t have been more than six-pound test—went ripping out at an alarming rate.

  “Check your drag,” my brother advised him.

  He fumbled with the knob on his reel, loosening it so that the line went out more readily, with less resistance. He couldn’t apply much pressure, not with such flimsy gear. This put him under stress, because he’s a legendarily impatient angler.

  “Keep your rod high,” I told him. “Make the fish work.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” he said sharply.

  The fish took out more line. My father got some back. The dance was a classic one—gain and loss, loss and gain. For twenty minutes, it continued, until the fish got tired, and my father led it slowly to the side of the boat. Again I saw those colors—blue, green, purple—more vibrant than ever in the swirling water.

  My brother, handling the net, said, “It’s a salmon.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  It was a weakie—a broad female full of roe. She had a mottling of dark green spots along her back. We put her in the cooler with the beer.

  My father was smiling from ear to ear. He looked about twenty-five. The fish was the biggest he’d caught in years.

  Almost immediately, the boat rod began hammering against the skiff’s gunwales. I grabbed it and set the hook. This fish didn’t fight as well. The rod’s stiffness was too much for it. I brought the fish to net in less than ten minutes—another weakie, as brilliant as the first, although smaller. I wished that I’d taken it in the surf on my O’Neill rod-and-reel. The odds would have been better. The fish would have had an edge.

  When fish strike back-to-back, with unexpected intensity, I always believe that the action will never end, but it always does, sooner or later. Things change rapidly. Suddenly, the sun feels too hot, and the salt burns your eyes.

  We drifted for two more hours, fishless, before returning to the harbor. Once we got there, my father insisted on having the weakies weighed. I was embarrassed, because I knew they were school fish, not trophies.

  The skiff guy sla
pped them on a bucket scale one at a time. “Five pounds on her,” he said, “and four and three-quarters on her.”

  I asked my father, kidding around, if he could tell which fish was his.

  “The big one,” he said, carrying her off to the car.

  At my place we took photos. The women were polite and made some admiring sounds. There was a discussion about how to cook the fish. My brother wanted to cut them into steaks and barbecue them; my father thought they’d be better if they were filleted and baked. I consulted Alan Davidson’s North Atlantic Seafood, an extraordinary compendium of marine and gastronomic information. Davidson says, “A good fish, when fresh-caught; a bit flabby later on. The flesh is lean and flaky. Weaks may be grilled whole or pan-fried or used in fish chowders.”

  I read aloud Davidson’s recipe for pan-frying.

  “We should cut them into steaks,” my brother said, “and barbecue them.”

  Family has its own peculiar and rewarding flow.