by Thomas Lynch
Danny had known his father’s father. And had loved and admired the man who occupied his youth like a force of nature. He wondered if getting to heaven meant you got to ask these reasonable questions. Why? How? When? Why not?
He opened his father’s fly box.
He felt his face tighten around his eyes. He began to weep.
It was not the bone-wracking sob he’d been holding back for months now, ever since the morning he’d gotten word. It was not the shoulder-shaking, wind-robbing breakdown with his name on it he knew he’d have to have eventually. It was only the catch in his breath and the tightening behind his eyes and the improbable twitching of his eyebrows at the sight of his father’s little collection of caddis and stonefly patterns, some streamers, eggs in different colors. But it was not so much the flies as the knots, the bits of line like little hangman’s knots in the eye of each hook where his father had bitten them off after they hadn’t produced or after a day’s fishing or after they’d produced enough. His father had never learned more than two knots. The nail knot for leader and tippet and the cinch knot for flies. Danny had brought home wonderful variants from the Katmai Lodge in Alaska where the salmon ran to fifty pounds and from the cutthroat waters in Colorado and Montana. But his father never wanted to learn them. He trusted his tying and never lost a fish, he was fond of affirming, on account of knots. His held, he’d insisted, however old-fangled.
Danny wiped his eyes, glad that he was fishing the low water, glad for the little release, glad for the feel of his father’s knots as he bit one off a yellow egg and tied it freshly to his line.
The water had risen with last night’s rain and darkened some and the sun was not yet high enough to see into the hole but he knew this bend by heart and reckoned the fish would be suspended in it and tied one split shot on and cast it backhand slightly up stream toward the opposite bank. He could feel the split shot in the gravel at the top of the hole, and could feel it fall into the deeper run, and watched the loop in his line straighten in the current and held the rod out in front of him as the line moved through the water. At the bottom of the run he began to strip back line and looped it out upstream again, the familiar balance between fisherman and rod tip and terminal tackle establishing a cadence to the casting, the fly’s drift, and the retrieval so that he was covering the hole every thirty seconds. He avoided, in his cast, the bronze leaves of an overhanging oak tree, and in his drift, the submerged stump at the bottom of the run. He could hear Chinook deep in the forest rolling in something dead and rotting. Part wolf, part malamute, he could not help himself, Danny thought.
On his eighth or tenth cast, the fly stopped early in the run and Danny set the hook and a huge buck king salmon rose shaking its head to the surface. Yes! he could hear himself saying to himself as he felt the first surge of the fish against him. This was always new, always the first time, never routine, this wonder that two separate natures could intersect like this. The fish roiled on the surface, dove deep into the hole, and held there, the line pulsing, rod pulsing with the weight of it, then it ran upstream toward the logjam above the gravel, taking line off the reel as it worked its way. The look Danny got of it in the shallows made him guess, eighteen, twenty, maybe twenty-one pounds. And it was fresh—silver and blue—only out of the lake a couple of days, still weeks away from spawning and fatigue and death. Danny loved the ferocity of fish in the lower water. He could see the tiny egg in the bony upper jaw. Right in the snot-locker, he could hear himself saying, and turned to look, because he’d never in all these years gotten out of the habit of turning to look for his father’s amazement and excitement and approval. But there was no one grabbing for the camera or the video cam or the net or anything. There was only the boat snug to the riverbank and the thermos bottle on the front seat and Danny, momentarily disconnected from the fish’s struggle, failed to turn the fish back downstream, and in the lapse the salmon got under the logjam and, free of the reel’s drag and the rod’s wisdom, it snapped the eight-pound tippet easily. Danny felt the line go limp, he could see the fish jump behind the logjam, his father’s egg pattern still in its jaw. He turned and looked back to the boat. There was nothing. He was alone. For the first time since his father’s dying he felt his father’s death, the dull, undeniable force of it, and it dropped him to his knees in the river, the water nearly running over the top of his chest waders, its cold embrace a kind of comfort as his body shook in spasms. He held his father’s fishing rod aloft as the weight of the river beat against his chest. The fog was lifting now; the morning warming as the sun rose. He whistled for Chinook, stood, and walked back to the boat.
Standing beside the boat in the water, he reached the thermos on the front seat, unscrewed the stainless steel top that served as a coffee cup, set it on the bow. Then he loosened the cap in the mouth of the thing and poured a handful of his father’s ashes into his right hand. They were dull gray and sharp-edged and utterly dry. They had about them the feel of vermiculite or kitty litter or something freeze-dried that could, with the addition of water, be reconstituted. He grinned at the prospect that “just adding water” might bring his father back. He let his hand drop into the river, where he opened his fist and released the ashes into the current. The little white puff, like a cloud of milt when the buck salmon spawn, disappeared downstream.
Danny waited for something like an overwhelming feeling, and when none was forthcoming, he recapped the thermos, climbed back in the boat, weighed his anchor, and eased into the downstream current. He found himself sighing, breathing deeply, grinning inexplicably.
Chinook kept up through the woods, chasing along the riverbank, sometimes leaping in the river to swim beside the boat or behind it or crossing in front of it like a furry dolphin. He’d climb the bank on the other side and rummage among the overgrowth for muskrat and squirrels and possum. Long ago he’d learned to run with the twisted left leg, and when he needed the most speed, when he’d kick deer out of their bedding, to simply tuck it up and run on three legs. Danny reckoned it never slowed him down but kept him from going too far astray. Never out of earshot, a whistle from Danny would bring the dog to the riverbank to check in; then it would disappear again into the deep green of the forest. The dog stayed tuned to the sound of the boat and to its master’s noises. Danny was glad he hadn’t killed the thing.
He’d only just gotten the dog a few years before. He’d chosen it from a litter in Alaska, his first season there, and brought it home with him to Michigan. Unaccustomed to traffic that would not stop, the dog had run into a street in Mount Pleasant, where Danny had been partying with old college friends, and was hit by a car taking an old couple to the casino. They felt horrible. They offered to pay for any damages to the dog. Danny had taken the dog to the vet, who suggested the veterinary school at Michigan State University. The dog was sedated and Danny raced to East Lansing, where student vets set the leg, put it in a cast, and thanked Danny for his confidence in them. When the cast came off, Chinook’s leg was badly twisted. Another vet suggested a surgeon in Chicago. Danny drove the dog there and the surgeon, taking a look at the damages, told Danny he’d really be better off to put the dog down. The leg, he said, would never be right. The older Chinook got the more it would be in the way. He could, of course, remove the leg and the dog might even get on without it. Other dogs did. But a three-legged dog? The surgeon said he could euthanize Chinook.
He’d called his father. His father said that he trusted Danny’s instincts. He said he knew that Danny would know the right thing to do. He said he admired him for taking on the care of the dog and these difficult decisions. His father had told him to say his prayers, to listen to God, and the right thing would come to him, whatever it was. He told Danny to take a day or two to think it over. He told him he’d be willing to help, whatever the decision was.
Danny rowed past the first confluence. The sun was working up the sides of the trees. The day was going to be blue. He found himself talking to his father’s ashes.
&n
bsp; Let go, let God, he heard himself saying.
He was thinking of that first brown trout. He remembered wanting to take it home to show his mother. His father said they could either take it home and it would die and they would eat it or they could let it go. His father was working the lure out of its jaw. Danny was holding the handle of the net the fish was flopping in. He couldn’t believe the options. Kill it, eat it, show his mother. Let it go. Never see it again. It was so beautiful. How could he let it go. How could he kill it. He remembered how it made him feel cold, for the first time, having to make such an awful choice.
At the second confluence, the river turned westward and the topography flattened and the current slowed into an area all of the guides called “the Serengeti,” because it was a huge flat expanse of cat marsh a mile wide on either side of the main flow. Surrounded by a high ridge of ancient white pines, winter oaks and sugar maples, the area seemed like a huge bowl of natural wonders. Whenever his father fished this float with him, he’d always call it a National Geographic moment when they’d make their way into the Serengeti. Once they’d seen a pair of fully matured bald eagles and a young eagle with them in a tree. They’d seen osprey and owls and plenty of heron, and in one shallow backwater slough, outside the current, they’d seen salmon by the thousands milling about, as if resting from the furious pursuit of reproduction and mortality that had triggered their return to the river. The irony of this discovery was that these were literally fish in a barrel, but because there was no current, there was no way to present a fly to them in a way that would induce them to strike it. Danny and his father could only row in and out among the hordes of fish remarking on nature’s strange abundance.
After the Serengeti the boat bearing Danny and his dog and his father’s ashes drifted into the Braids. This was a maze of river and stream and rivulet that from overhead might look like a bunch of pretzels. It was rarely fished because guides could get lost in it, following the wrong shoot to its dead end, at which point the boat would have to be walked out against the current, or circling some loop outside of the mainstream. Local meat fishermen used to hike in with burlap bags and clear out a hole with weighted snagging hooks on thick line and stiff rods. But the DNR had impounded a pickup and a bunch of gear some years before, so even the snaggers left the swamp alone now. No fish was worth the loss of a truck.
Danny remembered, as a boy, fishing Gus’s Hole with his father, when a pair of snaggers appeared in the hole just above the one he and his dad were fishing. He could hear the boozy laughter and the splash of the treble hook and the line ripping through the water as they yanked and yanked until the hook lodged in the belly or the side or the tail of a salmon. He could hear the leap and splash of the foul-hooked fish and the shouting of the snaggers, how they’d hoot and howl and they’d crank the huge reels and how the short stiff rods seemed like baseball bats and how they’d take ten fish out of a hole, then move on through the swamp.
At the Sand Hole, a twenty-yard expanse between fallen cedars, Danny tied a single egg on. He stood above the hole, cast quarter down, sweeping the red, above the hen salmon he could see fanning the gravels with her tail, the males lined up like a squadron behind her. Behind the red, a pocket of dark water the width of a dining room table seemed to suck the egg into its deeper habitats. As the egg worked its way into the sweet spot where the current and seam and the foam line converged, he let out line so the fly would sink. Here is where he figured the steelhead held—where the O2 was highest, the food flow was fastest, and the deeper water gave them cover, downstream from the spawning salmon and browns. All the fanning of the gravel would send a constant buffet of hex nymph and stoneflies and caddis along with fresh spawn from the maturing salmon. He imagined the steelhead, mouth agape, holding in the current, gulping anything that looked like protein floating by. On his second cast, the fish slammed the egg with such ferocity Danny lurched forward, set his foot, then set the hook. The water broiled and he could see the pale white mouth of the huge rainbow which dove deep, then rocketed out of the water, then dove and ran downstream, jumping twice, then turning back so fast the line slackened and Danny reeled as fast as he could. From wherever he was in the woods, Chinook could hear the line peeling against the drag, the fat smacking of the fish on the water, Danny shouting “Yes! Yes!” and ran to witness the commotion. It was fifteen minutes before the huge silver fish, fifteen pounds of hunger and outrage, was backed into the shallows where Danny held his line tight, the rod aloft, and, genuflecting, grabbed the steelhead by its tail. The tiny hook was deeply embedded in its jaw and with a pair of forceps Danny worked the hook free, held the gasping, wriggling fish to his face, admiring its teeth, its steely eyes, then knelt in the water and worked it back and forth in the current, letting the water wash through its gills, restoring the spent thing’s equilibrium. After thirty or forty seconds of this, he could feel the fish’s muscles flexing, Danny loosened his hold of the huge tail just enough for the fish to sense freedom. In a flash it was gone.
It was his favorite thing—to hunt the stealthy, transparent, invisible fish, to know enough about its habits to isolate it in all that dark water, to present a fly or an egg of his own making, the right size and color, at the right angle at the right depth at the right speed to trigger the thing to animal desire, then to fight the thing in its own environs, counting on his knots, his timing, and the proper setting of his drag, then to catch the thing, to hold it, and then to let it go.
“Love ’em and leave ’em,” is what his father used to say, and it was true. No dinner of salmon or steelhead, and they’d had plenty, ever made him feel as full as the utter mastery involved with returning the captive to its freedom, the genuine pleasure of letting it go.
Among his clients it was well known now that Danny would put you on fish, teach you to catch fish, work hard to net them, and take your picture with them. And you could keep one male chinook or coho to take home to barbecue for the neighbors, with too much beer and blathermentia, but whatever plenty the season provided, whatever the limit the State of Michigan allowed, one salmon was the limit on Danny’s boat and none was better and no browns or steelhead were ever kept.
“But they’re all just going to die,” one of his clients once protested when Danny released a thirty-pound hen.
“We’re all just going to die,” Danny told him, “sooner or later, a hundred percent.”
Danny washed the fish slime off his hands, poured another handful of his father’s ashes out, kissed the fist he held them in, and let them go into the dark water.
He sat with his dog on the bank for a few minutes, waiting for no particular reason, watching the salmon working the reds. Everything around him seemed a metaphor for his father—the leaf-fall, the clear water, the fish in their futile quest. He tried to remember when he first became aware that his father approved of him, his life, and whether it was a gift outright or whether he had earned it.
Early on they’d argued over church and Sundays. He’d quit after his mother died. He was ten when she had died of “complications” involving “medications” and “depression.” And though he would stand in the first pew on the left side of the church with his stepmother and siblings—for his father had married Margaret within the year—with a hymnal in his hand for a few years after that, he was never really “there” and didn’t really sing the songs or believe or understand the light that came through stained glass or how it had happened—how or why his mother had been removed from their lives. At thirteen he simply refused to go and gave his father and Margaret to believe that if forced he’d make a scene that would embarrass them more than his absence. He took to fishing Sundays at the dam below the park in town for bluegill and crappie and sucker and carp. He’d learned to like the quiet and the privacy and the feel of fish on the other end of his line. And when he told his father years later that the river, the Pere Marquette, was his church and chapel and Bible and choir, that he felt closer to God there and closer to himself there and closer to
his mother there and closer to life, his father had nodded, if not approval, then at least acceptance. “The Lord,” the churchman told his son, “has a fondness for fishermen.” This was near enough to forgiveness.
And there’d been issues over education. Danny had been a lackluster student. After high school he’d managed to get accepted to Central Michigan University. It was the nearest school to Baldwin and the Pere Marquette. He enrolled in a course of General Studies, but between the draw of the Indian casino on the edge of town and the Pere Marquette less than two hours away, nothing in the curriculum could keep his interest long. Whenever he could he’d drive to the river and float a stretch researching the pocket water, the structure and the habits of resident and migrant fish. Home for Easter that first year, Danny’s father told him he could not succeed by doing things halfway.
“Do something you’re really passionate about. What’s the worst that can happen? You’re young. You can afford to fail but you can’t afford not to try.”
This was permission enough for Danny. He quit school. Worked on a landscape crew for three months, and with the cash bought a tent, three new Orvis rods and Billy Pate reels, and moved to Baldwin in early August, with his drift boat outfitted, pitching his tent on the river, where he slept and tied flies when he wasn’t fishing. He’d begun hanging out at the PM Lodge and the local bars and tackle shops, picking up guide trips where he could. It wasn’t long before word got around about his talents for putting clients on fish, for finding the right drift through difficult holes, for working the river in difficult conditions. Some fishing guides were taxi drivers. Rowing to some famous meat hole and sitting tight all day, then rowing out. Danny fished the slots and shoeboxes, the lesser-known pools where fish held on deep gravel or between difficult snags and stumps. He’d taught himself what shade did and rain did and the moon did to the habits of fish and the conduct of water.
