Lines on the Water

by David Adams Richards

  This duality has always fascinated me. That is, this understanding of camps with waitresses and cooks in white uniforms (my maternal grandmother was one) and guides in ties (my uncle was one).

  But it is quite complicated. It does not diminish these men who come in search of these fish, but it shows a tiered society in which activity functions—the cultivated man as fisherman.

  Each man (more so a generation ago than now) who goes to a camp of this kind finds that he is expected to play the role, whether he wants to or not, of a gentleman. Even if it is as simple a gesture as being helped in or out of a canoe, the role is somehow preordained. The guides expect the sport to play out his role, and he is driven not so much by privilege as by tradition to accept it. This is a generalization, of course, but all generalizations have a certain premise. This premise is as much a part of fly-fishing in camps like those particular ones on the Restigouche as anything else about fly-fishing. It is at times, and can be seen as, a wonderful parlour drama.

  But this was really a later observation. In a more complicated way, those nights of running into the yard in my pyjamas to see the bountiful luck of other boys told me that friends of mine knew of another world—a privileged but natural world of the river that my father had been denied in his youth because of the death of his father; a knowledge that he was unable to share with me, even though he tried clumsily to do so.

  He would take us fishing one Sunday a year in a dull green flat-bottom boat. And even now, in his old age, he remembers this with fondness. But he had no great notions or inclinations towards that world of fly-fishing. Still he offered us the best he could of the world he knew. Even a few years ago he admitted he did not know what a fly rod was. And how can he be blamed, never having seen or used one.

  So, Mr. Simms, the next-door neighbour, older than my father, as old as my mother’s older brothers, became my first link, my first real link with fly-fishing. The world of fly-fishing, the smell of the rods, the colour of flies, the tin boxes.

  Mr. Simms worked in the woods in the winter, and lived in camps. In the summer he went off by himself with a tent. His hands were battered and his fingers twisted. He had one pipe and one tobacco pouch. He had one tin cup for drinking tea, commemorating the coronation of Elizabeth II. He carried it with him always.

  He would go far up on the Sevogle and live alone, a life of a hermit, with a Coleman stove and tin cup, fly boxes and salmon rods. He would go into the woods for days and forge rapids, walk or canoe rivers, often without meeting a soul. The great dramas of his life would be played out alone. And then he would return with fish to boil, or smoke with hickory wood. He would study the river for one purpose—to find the salmon. He told me about the great pools—the square forks, the Big Hole at the mouth of the Sevogle, and pools far up on the Norwest that I was to see twenty years later—Moose Brook, American Pool.

  All those places I was still to discover, from Caul’s Pool to the Turnip Patch, from Big Birch to Clearwater, from the cave in to Clelland’s, from Quarryville to the mouth of Dungarvon, Mr. Simms had already fished thirty or forty years before. I believe he was the first to show me an artificial fly, a Royal Coachman.

  At the time I wondered how salmon could be fooled by it. It seemed to have in the very design of its feathers and body the imprint of man. This was my first impression of a salmon fly.

  The process of fly-fishing suddenly seemed to require a great amount of rhythm and patience and dedication for which the common man didn’t have time. Not the common man like Mr. Simms. So it seemed to me like a deception—and the deception was that Mr. Simms was fooling himself into thinking he was doing something natural when he was really doing something ornate and craftlike. So it must be craftsmen—not woodsmen—who really liked and were attracted to fly-fishing. Earls and princes perhaps, but not men like Mr. Simms who ran out log drives in the spring.

  Except it was Mr. Simms who showed me his Royal Coachman.

  These feelings hung with me for a while, and still return now and again when I meet certain individuals who fish as if they were part of an academy.

  I didn’t tell Mr. Simms these complicated feelings at that time because they were not entirely clear to me, and because he loved the great assortment of flies he was showing me. But the flies in his fly box, with their wonderful deceptive dressings, did not seem to complement the great natural woods, the vast rivers that these men explored for fish. Salmon fishing was supposedly linking men once again with their natural self. It took me a while to realize that tying flies in order to salmon fish was not only, in the end, natural but an art.

  An art—far more than digging worms out in the garden. It is through this process of fly-tying that a person got to know the fish and themselves far better, and became more personally attached to the river. Through the fly they either trusted or had tied themselves, they faced a challenge that becomes quite philosophical, even if they themselves weren’t philosophical about it. The wonder of this is that no two flies tied true are ever the same. A Green Butt Butterfly on a number 8 hook tied by my friend at 7:45 on February 3, 1976 is never the same as the Green Butt Butterfly tied on a number 8 hook at 8:00 that same night.

  The fly becomes in all its ornate beauty of regulated simplicity an extension of the imagination, and knowledge of the fisherman in winter, for those fish he is seeking, in those months holed up in his basement or squirrelled away in his shed. He can see the fish in pools, and can guess how the fly will move in a forty-five degree arc towards them, how he will rest a fish that has just boiled, how he will shorten up his line to fish down to it once again. This fly-tying process becomes, with snow over the window ledges and the river blocked and soundless for miles, an act of faith and will.

  Mr. Simms had a good deal of will and knowledge and a thousand flies. He had been stranded for days in the snow one winter. He dug himself into the snow, and waited the blizzard out drinking pine-needle tea. He had worked his way through many fine difficulties, had been trapped by a forest fire when he was a young man and stayed the whole night in the water.

  He missed a finger and had rough calloused hands. He wore, like old woodsmen of the generation gone, Humphrey pants and a checkered woodshirt, which always smelled of kerosene, spruce, and tobacco. He had known no other life. That people now flew off to Toronto or New York or Paris on a daily basis to do business would be as foreign to him as space travel. Nor do I think, except for the finger, he missed much. He was, and always will be, the embodiment of a Miramichier; proud, conscious of others, fearless within the bounds of a physical environment, filled with humour, and yet somewhat shy. When he worked in the camps years before, the average day would start off at five o’clock. In the camps and with the working conditions of a generation or two ago it is amazing more men didn’t go mad. Certainly some did.

  He liked to tell me about Saint John, N.B., and how high the tides were there—the highest tides in the world—and that some day he would get on a bus and go to see them. I did not want to tell him that I myself had been to Saint John with my family, had seen these tides, where boats rested on the bottom of the bay after the tide went out. Like most true rural men, he was proud of small gifts from God.

  He called me, in his gruff old voice, “the little Christ child” because of the pitchfork going through my left foot a few years back. He had made the mistake—just as many others in my neighbourhood had—of believing that this is how I had become lame. He didn’t know the real reason—my mother falling on her stomach when she was pregnant, and causing a brain haemorrhage—and I did not volunteer the information.

  So I always tried to be as modest and as pleasant as I could when I sat there. But sometimes I would tell him my left foot ached, when it didn’t, and I would look sorrowfully about, and then I would look up at the birds flying, as if I could never be as free, yet my spirit soared (or something like that). So it must have been a very poignant moment.

  “Christ child, you’ve got to go fishing,” he would say, his lip
s trembling when he looked at me, and then bending over to spit out his plug.

  “I know,” I would say. “I will—but now I’m a little tired.”

  The truth is this: All my life men and women (except those individuals who actually hate me) have found in me some endearing quality that they wish to protect, and Mr. Simms was one of these people. He told me about his son, who went away and never came back, and he would get me ice cream and sit and look at me, and ask if my foot was still hurting.

  “Not so much now,” I would say. “Thank you, sir.”

  “God almighty, Christ child—don’t call me sir. I’m just ol’ Alvin Simms.”

  Then I would have to go to confession. I would tell the priest that I had lied about my foot aching.

  “Why would you ever do that?”

  “They all think I’m the little Christ child.”

  There would be a disturbed silence on the priest’s side of the box.

  “Did you ever get fishing yet?” Mr. Simms would ask.

  I would have to tell him that no I hadn’t, but that I would go in a few days time. That was always the story.

  One day when his twin brother came to visit, Mr. Simms said, “Why don’t you take the little Christ child fishing?”

  I looked up with a feeling of dread and expectation. I immediately thought that though I had bragged about wanting to learn to fly-fish I wouldn’t be able to do it. It would be the same as skating for hockey, or baseball, or volleyball, or anything else I had ever tried. I would try to do it and find out with my limitations that I could not do it. This was the curse of my childhood and took me a long while to overcome.

  I would be up in a tent somewhere in the middle of nowhere and I would be left behind, frightened of being eaten almost immediately by a bear.

  But his brother looked around, as if trying to see where the little Christ child was, and then saw this miserable skinny specimen sitting in front of him.

  “No, I can’t do that,” he said laconically. “I’m going in for the week. Why don’t he go become fishers of men?”

  This rather blasphemous statement aside, I liked Mr. Simms’s brother. They worked in the woods all their lives and had shared the same woman. This started at a dance when they were sixteen and they continued to try to fool her their whole lives. They both took her out, and they both decided that they were married to her.

  “She married you but she thought you was me!”

  “LIAR!”

  They made a mad dash for home when they left the woods, trying to get out before the other, jostling and bumping one another, and trying to force each other off the road.

  She wrote Ann Landers about this for advice, because she couldn’t decide. To her, they both seemed exactly the same.

  I remember Mr. Simms’s diary only vaguely—as you remember things from the past by a peculiar kind of association that is never straightforward. Mr. Simms’s diary will always remind me, in a circuitous way, of nuns. And of school. Of Sister Saint John Daniel and Mother Saint David because of how his diary was written in pencil. And the nuns had taught both of us to write.

  In this diary there were small sketches of a man—perhaps of Simms himself—standing along a bank of a river, with the line of his fishing rod taut. The water and the rocks were just a few discernible pencil strokes, but these pencil strokes showed man against nature, far up on some river bend alone, as well as any I’ve seen sketched.

  One day, many years later, when I told him I had poled the North Pole Branch from Lizard Brook down eight miles with my friend Peter, in search of trout (I was quite proud of this because it was such a hard go that day with the water low), he replied that I should have poled up from Lizard Brook nine miles to find the trout I was then seeking. That is, pole up against the current, because he had done that for years as a young man. The pride my friend and I had in navigating down seemed less splendid after that.

  Mr. Simms’s diary was written in pencil, and was faded. As long as I knew him he never used a pen. It was as if a pen was too grandiose. There was always an old yellow bitten pencil in his kitchen drawer, where the diary lay. The house is now gone. It has been gone perhaps for twenty years.

  The diary too might have disappeared by now. But the memories are still in that part of experience, as saddened by time as old black-and-white pictures of trout or salmon at a camp. And in the grain of those old pictures there always seems to me to be undisclosed knowledge about the men who fished those fish. Whether they took too many, were unthinking, were just, were patient, were professional. All this seems to be in the pictures though the pictures might show man and fish that have been both dead for forty years. Nothing one does, in this way or in any way, will go undiscovered. That is the secret truth about fishing or hunting.

  For a time I became Simms’s eyes and ears about who was getting fish, and he would tell me stories. He told me a story about his cousins who once stole a camp from him, and how he got back at them. It was a very interesting story and I was to relate it years later to my friend on the South Branch Sevogle one night in late July. I do not know if my friend believed this story nor am I certain that I do. Mr. Simms was a man replete with stories, about fishing and hunting and horses, and log drives, and winters, and ghosts in the woods.

  I would go back and relate these stories to kids as if it were me who had invented them. I had to do this, at that time, for I had nothing else to tell.

  But I did not get fishing salmon then or for a long while after.

  I would go over to the house and ask my father to take me fishing. He would be having his noon-hour nap, with a blanket pulled over his head, his left hand hanging down over the side of the bed. I would pick up his hand, feel the pulse, and drop it back where it was. Then I would go try to find something else to do.

  That year, in late October, just after my birthday, I had gone for a Saturday hunt with my father—while Gordon and his friend had gone with their fathers to their hunting camp on the Little Souwest. Gordon was a snob of all the right proportions and calibre. An egotist of manner even at twelve. A person who knew the right and the wrong way to do things. Even the way to talk about what one talked about in the woods, or about the river.

  A person then who knew the price of everything, and the value of nothing. A rather hard indictment to hold against a boy of twelve, but there you are. I’m not sure I knew that I held it then. But I suppose I did that day we as childhood neighbours went hunting in separate vehicles to separate places.

  We both arrived home at the same time—just about seven at night.

  They had a twelve-point buck in the back of their truck. The buck probably weighed 220 pounds. I went over and looked at it. It had been shot in the foreshoulder at dusk, as it made its way back to a rut above a little stream. Though the stream was opened there was an inch or so of snow down. The area in back of it was in gloom, with small spruce and maple cuts. It was October 24, 1961; that was the day that the buck was shot. There is always in my memory a smell of gunpowder in the fall that traces the wind and sky.

  Gordon had seen it shot by his father who now sported a three-day growth of beard.

  I saw through the dark the yellow leaves (there was as yet no snow in town, even though in the woods snow had fallen), the lights from their garage, the very palpable hint of excitement in the air that, along with the gunpowder, was always persistent in my memory of autumn.

  They lifted the buck from the truck, cut holes in its back leg tendons, and hung it from the rafters of the garage, and there they began the process of taking the hide off it.

  Gordon walked about touching the hide that was being pulled back from the buck’s layer of fat. He had an important and elemental role to fill at that moment, the son of a successful hunter. And as all children, when I looked at this deer, I never thought of the animal being dead; I always thought of it being alive—how splendid it must have been.

  It was the third deer Gordon’s father had shot in two years.

  I coul
d not stand this. I was filled with jealousy. So when Gordon and I went out into the night air I said—not loud enough to be heard by the men, but neither in a whisper—“We got a deer too.”

  “You did,” Gordon said, and he actually believed me. Which made me feel terrible.

  Then I said, “Ya, well, we’ll see you later.”

  “Let me come over and see it,” Gordon said, and he was excited and happy for me.

  “Oh no—look—it’s not like your deer. It’s more littler—and stuff like that there.”

  “What do you mean, ‘stuff like that there’?” Gordon said suspiciously. And over he followed me to my house. There was no way I could shake him. And so I went around to the back, looking down into the cellar window. I pointed to something in the corner—it was a carpet my mother had just beaten to death with a broom.

  “That’s the hide right there,” I said. “We’ll make a lot of deerflies with that ol’ hide.”

  He looked at me, Gordon did, with such a quizzical look of profound embarrassment at my own lying idiocy that I have never quite gotten over it.

  Of course Gordon was my nemesis. He was always better than I was at anything he did—that was a given. But his father was also better at what he did than my father.

  So I had to make up stories about things my father did. I told them my father was a war ace, and shot down eight planes—I wanted to say eighteen planes, but I settled for eight.

  They were imperturbable people, hard to impress.

  His father was a mechanical engineer with the mines, so I suppose he could do things that my father couldn’t even dream of doing—because of narcolepsy, he slept fifteen hours a day.