by David Joy
I eased the truck onto the shoulder, grabbed my vest and rod from the bed of the pickup, and walked down a gravel path to the riverside. My waders were layered over sweat pants and a thermal shirt, and my Hodgeman boots were laced tight. Choosing comfort over the harsh reality of winter, I’d heated myself in the thermostat-controlled warmth of my apartment, and, as wind hissed across the water, I was glad that I had.
I rummaged through my vest and found my midge box, loaded with flies ranging from size 18 to 26. Eying the rows of flies, I plucked a Zebra Midge and Brassie from the white foam. My shivering fingers, stinging red, made it hard to run line through the tiny hook eyes. I must have lost two or three flies along the bank as I struggled to hold onto them. Twenty-twenty vision was barely enough to see the thin-wire hooks, but I managed and eventually got the miniscule patterns on the line.
I knew that the flies, weightless in my palm, would not be able to get down to the bottom in the raging current. So I grabbed some tin shot and pinched them into place, sixteen inches up the tippet. I hoped the weight would help get the flies bouncing on the bottom where midges belonged.
I stepped into the water. The chill didn’t immediately make it through my leather Hodgemans, neoprene booties, and layered socks, but I knew that it wouldn’t take long. Standing on grass covered by rising water, I stripped some line off of the reel and made a short cast into the middle of the river. The line, leader, and flies were swiftly yanked downstream without having even a chance of sinking. Water seethed too quickly to allow the midges to get deep, so I added a little more shot.
Venturing a little farther out, I cast toward an eddy formed by a fallen tree on the far bank. The midges and shot plopped in, but again the line was pulled downriver and the flies rose to the surface like skiers being towed by a jet boat. No amount of mends, or even a tuck cast for that matter, could get the midges deep. Back on the bank, I rethought the situation, bit the tippet above the flies, opened my fly cases, and settled on an olive Woolly Bugger with lead wire wrapped heavy beneath the chenille. I didn’t know if the large streamer would catch a wintertime trout but surely it would sink.
The heavy fly tugged at the backcast, the rhythm slowed by the weight of the Bugger. The fly struck the surface and then sank into the dark water. Ripping line from the reel and wiggling it through the tip-top, I dead-drifted the streamer to keep the path along the far side of the seam. As fast as I could get line off the reel, the current took the floating line. I could barely keep up but, with the drag loosened, managed to get a fairly straight drift. The fly began to sweep back as it moved downstream, eventually swinging directly below me. I stripped in the Bugger, the yellow glitter in the olive-colored chenille sparkling beneath the sheen, and watched as it came over the sunken grass in short hops. The fly was heavy enough to bounce the bottom now where the trout would lay, but after a few more casts and no bites, I moved further up the river.
Making my way through tangled underbrush—the twigs, vines, and briars harder and more brittle in winter—I found a small patch of ground still edging over the high-water mark. Carefully, I stepped down a short embankment, my knees beginning to tighten from the cold, until I stood on the tiny island of mud, rocks, and dead leaves. My boots sank, bubbles gurgling up from beneath my felts, and I scoped out the river.
Where a line of stones created a nice run in low water, a rapid now rolled over on itself, surely spinning stones along the bottom. The water pushed against a sandy peninsula across the stream, and a large pool eddied out on the backside. If I could catch that line bending around the strip of sand, I was certain that a trout, conserving energy in calmer water, would be sitting there. The cast would be tough, but good placement and dead-drifting fast might catch the right current.
I began a side-armed cast, the Bugger shooting parallel to the naked limbs along the bank. At the very last moment, with just enough line to cover the distance, I changed direction; the hook sank into a limb, the tippet popped, and the line fell lifeless into the current. I breathed deeply, tried to hold in my disgust, bit my tongue, and grabbed the Bugger box from the back of my vest. This time I chose yellow chenille with brown hackle and tied the fresh fly onto the tippet.
I tried a roll cast, but the weight of the streamer kept me from building any distance, and the fly came nowhere close to the seam. The Bugger was sucked into the small hydraulic, spun beneath the rapid, and then slung downstream.
With no way to get a decent cast, I decided to risk the current to get a better chance at the drift I wanted. Stepping off the small patch of earth, I immediately felt the rush of water, only calf-high, pushing against my legs. Still too close to the shoreline for any type of backcast, I attempted another roll cast. This time it landed a bit farther out but still a good ten feet from where I needed.
I inched a few feet further into the current, careful to keep my feet solid on the freestone bottom, and the water quickly rose above my knees, thigh-high. I had just enough room to try a standard backcast, but as the Bugger tipped trees, I could shoot no more line, and my cast still fell short. I was determined to get one good drift along the far side and hopefully catch a seam that would curve the streamer back into the slack water, so I pushed a bit deeper.
My feet were unstable now, and I bent my knees a tad to steady my stance. The current pushed around my waist; I made the cast, still short, and the felts began to lose their grip. I shifted for sturdiness, decided that a cast wasn’t worth being sucked downriver, and reeled in the wet Bugger. I felt stable now but thought it better to give up on the fish than to be dunked into a February snowmelt.
Facing downstream, I started to sidestep toward shore, but as I did, my planted foot began to rise from the stone it was holding to. My other foot was already off the bottom. I was a goner. As my right foot continued to come up in the current, I went down, my loose-fitting waders ballooning up like parachute pants while icy water wrapped around my legs. I gasped, panicked, and tried to scream; but no sound came out. I was breathless, and who would hear me anyway? My legs rose in the current as I floated downstream, my head barely above water, the fly rod thrashing in my right hand. I bumped against rocks and clawed at their slick sides, but I could not get a grip. I was moving too quickly to grab onto anything. My head continually went under—frigid water running into my nose each time I was dunked, the overcast sky hazier each time I broke the surface with water stinging my eyes, my ears ringing. I thought I was surely drowning.
I was pulled fifty yards downriver before I managed to get a breath. At that moment, I could either fight the river or let the current take me away. Somehow, through panicking thoughts, I realized struggling would do nothing, so I surrendered myself to the river and floated toward humility. Only when I surrendered did I find an escape. As the felt soles of my wading boots caught rock, I stood up with the freezing water waist-high in my waders, and trembled toward the shoreline. Finally safe, I laughed through shivers and gasps. The truck was in sight, but it was hard to move. My body was frozen. I walked hunched over like an old woman shaking from age and got to the truck. Water sloshed around my legs as I started the engine, cranked up the heat, and revved the motor. Soaked, I stripped the drenched clothes from my body, threw them in the back, and climbed in the cab barefoot and with nothing but dripping boxers on my body. I had nothing dry.
That day nothing went right: the current was too fast, the water was too high, my casts were too short, and the flies were too light. Through the onset of hypothermia, I drove toward home. My flesh was on fire and it felt like needles were piercing my contracted muscles, but surprisingly, I never stopped smiling. The truck didn’t warm for five miles, and the entire time my body shook, my hands turning white as they clenched the steering wheel. The river had shown me who was boss. The water couldn’t be tamed. I was the intruder and I was human. I was helpless against the force of the wild. It didn’t matter what I’d come for; it didn’t matter how much I respected its power. I left cold and wet, and the river continued to ris
e.
Tailout
The river was low as I walked down a gravel driveway to the hole below Webster Bridge. Overcast skies kept the summer sun from baking me, but there was still enough light to see clearly through the glassy water. The driveway hugged the bend of the Tuckasegee, but off the left side of the dirt, a steep embankment booby-trapped with groundhog holes dropped down to the still water of the pool. A mist seemed to be hovering over the current, but the cloud didn’t sit like fog. The mist moved in a single horde, a silvery smoke of wings—a caddis hatch.
I stopped along the edge of the embankment and sat down on a cedar stump, the red wood smooth and weathered. From the tailout, through the pool, up the head, and disappearing behind trees in full foliage, the swarm of caddisflies hovered just above the moving water. The hatches usually didn’t get this thick until evening, but the cool air of a dreary day had sprung the bugs into flight.
A groundhog wobbled through the tangled hillside, stopped, looked up at me, then began chewing kudzu from a vine, the leaves vanishing behind the furry rodent’s yellowed teeth. I looked back to the river and watched as ripples began to appear chaotically across the flat surface. It had to be rain, but a drop had yet to touch my suntanned arms, and I heard no sound among the leaves. The movement was trout, steadily sipping flies from the surface, as the egg-laying caddisflies dropped and held a bit too long.
I began to see the silhouettes come up from the freestone bottom. The trout rose smoothly, tipped their noses through the water’s edge, opened their mouths just enough to suck in wings and body, then vanished into the scattered stones. The fish were merely shadows, indistinguishable until they fed and disappeared. Mesmerized, I couldn’t move.
My rod lay on the green grass beside me, dew still dotting the blades, the sweet smell inhaled on every breath I took. I’d come to fish, but marveling at the sight, I was paralyzed. A breeze hissed through the leaves, the sound softened by the freshness of new growth, and still the flies continued to come. The swarm was a river above the stream, the currents moving in opposite directions. The wings never ventured farther than the water’s edge, as the caddisflies followed every bend, nook, and run of the water. I stared into a rhythm beyond any I’d ever seen; everything in tune—wings, fins, wind, water—all keeping time. The rhythm was the music of the world.
A large trout flew through the surface at the tailout of the hole. It had been keeping a line along the sandy inside of the bend. The trout’s eyes were fixated on the movement above and had spotted a meal. The monster had exploded instinctively and had broken the stillness, fed, and belly-flopped against the stream. As the ripples faded away, the water stilled again. The swallowed caddis was nothing to the swarm. The fly was unnoticed by anything but the fish and would not be remembered. The feeding continued, and I watched the whole scene, not focusing on any particular spot or on any single movement but on the larger picture.
The pool was meditative chaos. Things were happening all around, too quickly to take in, the feeling like the rush of stars when one is hit hard in the head and all goes black. I fell into a dreamlike state, my eyes still watching the movement, but my mind wandering somewhere else. Staring into the sheen, I was looking into a reflection of myself. My life was flowing in front of my eyes, and for one of the first times, I kept still enough to watch it.
My home is on the water. This is the place where I belong, the place where things make sense, the place where I learn what it is to live. I was born into a family of fishermen, a group of souls whose hands were imprinted into the cork of their rods. They took me to the shoreline when I was a child. I stood at the river’s edge at the high-water mark of my life and walked away a man. Nothing has taught me more and, as I daydreamed above the Tuckasegee that day, I continued to learn what the water had to teach.
*****
On the water I met my father: not literally, but in the sense that I first met the real Billy Joy—not an accountant, not a choir member at the Methodist Church—but my dad. Trolling through the same river, in the Piedmont of North Carolina, where he’d learned who he was, we anchored parallel to the mud bank. Before long, Dad set the hook into a channel catfish that had swum into the shallows for a taste of bream. His flimsy spinning rod doubled over to the water as the cat tried to tug under the boat. I grabbed the net, wrapped the nylon seine around the thrashing fish, and hefted the catch up onto the carpeted bottom.
On hands and knees, Dad untangled the fish’s boney pectoral fins from the net and lifted the catfish into the air. He stared over the long bluish body, the fat belly sinking down like a sack of potatoes, and then looked up at me. At that moment, I saw him. I watched the anxiety of taxes, bills, and work melt away in his eyes. All that was left was the man, a fifty-year-old man who grinned like a child as he held the six-pound channel cat.
The Catawba River, with its muddy water the color of chocolate milk, was our family river. We were students of the wild, and each one in our family had come and each had learned. The deeper the water, the deeper the stories, our ancestors beneath the current, beneath the vanishing light, beneath the clay bottom, buried in our blood.
Before us, there was Granny, and before her, her father, and before him another fisherman, his rod fitted to his hand just like ours. Granny used to sit me on her lap and tell me stories of the river before my time, when the river was still untapped. She’d share tales of jon boats, fish fries, trophy catches, family trips, and heritage. Through those stories, I learned my ancestry and the importance of continuing the line; because our family, much like rivers, had to keep moving.
A week into the summer after I graduated college, Granny lay struggling in a hospital bed. She asked me not to leave her, so I stayed. My sister, Deana, and I stood beside the bed that night, the smell of sterilization enveloping the room. Needles stuck into Granny’s hands and lines ran from her body into the machines she was hooked to. She kept asking about the music and who the other people in the room were, but it was just us three. During a brief moment of clarity, Alzheimer’s having left little of the woman I loved, Granny took me by the hand, pulled me close, and whispered, “I’ll leave you stories.”
Staring down at her hand, the large blue veins running beneath her fragile skin like the rivers we fished, I knew exactly what she meant. The things I remember most (besides being wrapped in her arms or casting next to her along the shore of the Outer Banks) are the stories, stories that echoed days on the water, stories that changed my life.
One of my favorite photographs shows her standing with me on the beach at the water’s edge. She’s wearing a pastel yellow shirt and matching shorts, with a straw hat tied tight under her chin with a piece of white ribbon. I’m only knee-high to a coon dog, but she’s handing me the rod. She’s looking down and telling me something I can’t remember, probably some syllables filled with wisdom that I’m too young to fully grasp. I have no idea what the words were, but I know that they are embedded in the man I’ve become.
*****
Eventually, I drifted away from the trails my family had cut to the river. I chose my own path, my own water, my own fish, but I continue what they started. When my first friend committed suicide, I grieved on the banks of the Catawba. When another friend did the same a year later, I stared into the open casket and remembered a time we shared on the water. I’d taken him to Johnston Pond, and we’d caught a feisty catfish under the light of a full moon. He’d been happy. I left the funeral parlor alone, just as I’d come. I drove to the river and fished for channel cats all night while my tears turned the fresh water brackish. At every milestone, there is a story of water, of fish, and, most importantly, of life.
In my favorite section of Walden, Thoreau writes that, “[he] went to the woods…to front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when [he] came to die, discover that [he] had not lived.” My family has done the same, and we have all grown to adulthood surrounded by water. What I’ve come to understand at th
is juncture of my journey is that the greatest courage is simply to live. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.”
It’s as if I were born into the head of a giant pool, rushed into the hole by current, and beaten against rocks as the rapids rolled over themselves. When I’d come to learn what was there, I was spit through the tailout, and forced downriver, only to repeat it all again. At times, the water choked me and held me beneath the current too long, but as I came up, gasping for breath, I found life.
I imagine the words Granny told me when the photograph was taken, and what I hear are words from a Flannery O’Connor story: “Everything that rises must converge.” Our rivers are transcendental, eventually merging in one place, unknown and unseen until we get there. Once we are there, we find that the prize wasn’t the destination; all that mattered was the journey. In the currents, I find a place where I belong, a flow that is swift, but sweet. And through the tail-out, there are stories worth telling, fading memories, and glimpses of lives well-wasted.
*****
When I emerged from my trance below Webster Bridge, the trout were still rising. The caddisfly hatch had not slowed very much, but the clouds were beginning to break. The August sun shot beams across the shimmering river, and the ghostlike fish became more visible through the glints. I could see the trout repositioning themselves along the rocks. They took lines for food and jolted back and forth to steady themselves in the current.
I stood up from the cedar stump, my knees tight from the long meditation, and grabbed my rod from the grass. The clouds separated quickly, and humidity came on heavy as the sun evaporated the trapped moisture. I walked farther down the gravel driveway to a place where the embankment lowered onto a small piece of flat land. Mockernut hickories shaded the ground, and large granite boulders stuck up from the passing river.
