Town Dock Fishing

All my guests grew up in places far away from Maine. All my guests had advanced degrees and were almost successful or famous or leaning forward toward success or fame at some point in their future. The noted guest was a well-known novelist and outdoor writer.  I’d become friends with him at graduate school where we’d met on the tennis court long before he became one of my writing instructors. Their successes had led my guests to know the finer things in life, though they all had a fascination with the primitive.  Fishing from the town dock may have been disdained by others; for my guests it would be an adventure, like traveling in a third world country.

My guests had arrived two days before Clambake.  At the time we stayed in a cottage at one of the Colonies on the Maine Coast. This colony had been established by Maine’s wealthy families during the 1800’s as a place to go in the summertime to avoid the great polio epidemic.  My great-grandfather, a well-known Unitarian Universalist minister from New York had purchased a cottage there around the turn of the century.  His family grew and continues enjoying the Maine coast today.

My family has been summering in Maine long enough to have become either directly or indirectly related to every other family at the Colony and some others up and down the neck and on into the mainland as well. Our family tradition goes beyond Maine and into the business, legal, and arts communities of this country.  Recently, it seems to have stalled at the lack of real honest promise.  Keeping up with the Joneses doesn’t offer much adventure.  If you can’t discover some new thing or place then scrapping for more is a path that I’ve seen lead to ambivalence, litigation, and financial obesity.

At the time of his visit to the neck the great author was in his 60s and recently remarried. Since Hemingway had both blessed and hexed him by writing of him as the best writer of the New Generation, he had supplemented his writing income by teaching at writers’ workshops around the country.  My experience with him was that he was a great outdoorsman, fascinated by politics as it affected the human condition and a natural writer, raised in the Midwest of American parents of Irish and Middle Eastern decent.

By the end of my graduate experience I was glad that I’d met him on the tennis court, which had seemed accidental at the time.  Looking back, I wonder if it had been planned?  Much of the reason he was so loved was because his students trusted him.  And they trusted him because he could intuitively guide them through their creative cycles not only from what he gleaned from their writing but because he found ways to know them.  In short, he gave a damn.

His new younger wife accompanied him.  She hailed from Bombay, India, originally but had been a U.S. citizen for some time.  She’d been born a Moslem then educated in Catholic private schools.  She, like other Catholic school parolees, had her share of nun stories but by in large spoke highly of that part of her life.

At the time I was dating the daughter of a man very high up in the State Department who was all the time in the news, commenting on the situation in the Middle East about which he was an expert.  His daughter, my date, was editorial assistant to one of the powerhouse editors in the publishing world of the day.

The famous author was mostly famous in literary circles and had never had one of his books become a large financial success.  He had not only come down to the neck for Clambake but also to receive an award from his Alma Matter that was up the road on the mainland.

My only claim to fame, besides my backhand, was that I was a right-brained male with a passion for outdoor activities and that my father owned a house on the coast of Maine where various good people occasionally came to visit.

On the day of their arrival an occluded front slogged down over our peninsula and Casco Bay as far out as you could see and beyond.  “It’s raining on the Bush’s as well,” I remarked to my date. Her father had, at one time or another, reported to George Herbert Bush.

My date smiled diplomatically at that thought. My date was a wonder.  She’d been to all the best schools, literally knew every one who was anyone, yet rarely spoke about herself or those she knew.  She had classic good looks, blond hair, blue eyes, fair skin, and very long legs, but she dressed  conservatively so that you wouldn’t know how good-looking she was unless you’d seen her in a bathing suit.

With her smile, there instantly seemed enough light formed behind the clouds to make me feel that by going out into the day we could encourage a change in the weather.  Light rain like this would have been called heavy fog by the locals.  To this bright, diplomatic girl, it wasn’t even mist.  So we were going fishing in the rain at the town dock.  “How daring?”

I went into the musty utility closet and emerged with an assortment of foul weather gear, two small boat rods and a couple of hand lines, some sinkers and some flounder hooks.  I convinced my guests to walk the half mile or so down to the town dock where, with luck, we might catch some flounder.  The last time I’d caught flounder off the town dock was the last time I’d fished there some twenty years ago, when I was twelve.

The walk to the end of the peninsula, on clear days, is breathtaking.  The Maine air, if you haven’t experienced it, is like air nowhere else on earth.  I’ve always felt that the crisp clarity of the Maine air makes for the famous “Down East” thinking that I experienced first hand as a boy when Marshall Dodge would entertain us with his “Bert & I” stories at the local Congregational Church.

The clarity of the air also seems to embellish all those who live or visit here with a renewed sureness of identity that for some reason the “natives” take pride in muting.  Perhaps this muting is a result of the humility that comes with knowing that you are as sharp as you are because of where you live and not because of where you went to college or how much money you have?

On the walk down the windy two lane road we spoke of the award the novelist would receive from his Alma Matter.  “What was it for?” “The body of my work, David.”  “What are you working on now?” “A collection of short stories,” and so on.

At this point in his writing career many of the books that he’d written that I’d identified with were already out of print.  So receiving a reward for the “body of his work” seemed to have epitaphic overtones that made the clouded day funereally somber.

We walked past the local doctor’s famous gardens, where he hybridized day lilies and iris so coveted by the Japanese.  I explained that it could not be seen from the road.  But it could be seen from the deck of your sail or motor boat as you navigated the waters between our neck and the peninsula north of us.

And then, walking down the hill before the S turn in the road, we passed beside the honeysuckle trees that gave off their bemusing scent despite the heavy drizzle.  At the top of the S before the road bent down and around,   I pointed out the ancient crooked tombstones on “Graveyard Head” where another local author, Edith Dorian, had taken inspiration for her book of Children’s ghost stories, “No Moon on Graveyard head.”

“That’s where I like to walk to after dinner when there’s good moon,” I said.

“I would like to have wild sex with you in the graveyard, moon or not, Daves.” My girlfriend, the diplomat’s daughter said in a mock naughty girl voice that she made real enough to patent.

She was a woman of many voices.  And also of many surprises.  When she wasn’t expected to be diplomatic she sometimes said shockingly truthful things.  More than once I’d seen her fracture her father’s austere visage with one statement or another.

“David, where did you find this fabulous woman?” My friend’s new wife spoke perfect English, none of that Puri bread prose you heard at Indian restaurants in the city.  Her English went to her education, which in India was synonymous with good breeding I suppose.  She too liked to say shocking but true things that were mostly of a political nature.  She was taller than her husband and stood very straight.  She looked through you with black eyes when she spoke to you, stared through you with the same stoical fashion of Native Americans I’d met out west until she became familiar with you and then the Vishnu in her came out and she would mock you constantly with a haunting sensual tone in her otherwise consciously a-lyrical voice.

“I must say that you’ve managed to shock me,” the famous author said.

“Honored I am to have shocked the author to be honored, who’s eaten long pork at feast in Biafra,” she piped.

“I’m surprised you remembered that story,” he said.

“That story would be difficult for anyone to forget.”  I said.

We had come to the town dock, a freshly painted, wooden ramp that had been built many years before I could recall with stacked granite slabs that the tide could rush through supporting the gray and white boarded walk way that led to the sliding aluminum ramp that angled down to the floating dock, anchored by heavy chains and concrete to the sea floor.

I sent my troop out onto the dock and ran down to the tide edge mud and turned over a few flat stones and pulled a few sea worms and some mussels for bait.

I baited hooks and handed poles to everyone but the author’s Indian wife. She wasn’t fishing. Where she came from in India, women didn’t fish.

And there we stood in the rain in Maine, fishing for flounder.

If you go to the State of Maine Marine Fisheries website and put the word “flounder” in the search bar you will have the opportunity to review bar graphs that will prove that at the time of this trip in 1994 there wasn’t much chance of catching a winter flounder off a town dock in Casco Bay in August.  The expression “a snowball’s chance in hell” is a kind of parallel consideration.

But we did catch a few cunners and two or three silvery pollock that we  wondered over like 7-year-olds and released.  One of them had been gut hooked and didn’t make it.  We watched it float off on the current.  Several big Maine herring gulls appeared instantly but the pollock was two large for them to eat, though they did lift it partly off the water, dropping it, over and over again as it carried away on the tide.

A man got out of a wood-paneled station wagon – you could hear the door of his car slam with great clarity through the heavy air.  He pulled a canvas sail bag out of the back and then two oars and then he came walking down the ramp way and onto the dock.  He wore a yellow rain coat with a hood.  His hair was blonde under the yellow hood.  His gray-blue eyes stared out coldly from under the shadow of the hood.

“What ch’all fishin’ fore?”  He asked in a crisp voice.  In all my years I had never before met this man.

“Whatever bites first?  Flounder, hopefully.”

“No flounda been heah for years,” he said.

He went to one of the sailboat dories and pulled it up onto the dock, turned it over so that the rainwater fell out.  He righted it and fitted the oar-locked oars along the gunwales and slid the small boat back into the water.  He put his sail bag in the bow and stepped confidently into the oarsman’s seat. Through all his actions the flat bottomed boat didn’t rock much.  He rowed out and around us with a compressed efficiency and made his way to one of the many perfect sailboats anchored in reach of the town dock.  He made fast to the larger boat and stepped aboard.

Soon we saw what looked like a small elephant’s trunk extend over the shore-side gunwale and water began spouting out of the manual bilge pump hose.

The bite had stopped.  So had the rain.  So did the water pumping out of the pump. Classical music, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, came to us from the boat.  For what seemed a long time I observed the man in the yellow foul weather gear simply sitting in his sailboat, staring off into space. He had pulled back his yellow hood.

I grew tired of baiting hooks without first holding and releasing small fish.  But my friends seemed to have hooked into my feeling that they, by defying bad weather, were beating it into good.  They began to bait their own hooks.

The medium-sized, precise man, rowed back from his Pierson 35.  He pulled himself onto the town dock float with the deliberate fluidity of a man confined to a wheel chair transitioning to his bed, pulled his sail bag from the punt and stood quiet, observing us.

“Ya’ll from around these parts?” He asked.

The author, being senior, spoke first.

“I graduated from college in Maine on the GI bill, sir. Do whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”

The man stared back at us as if he hadn’t heard the author’s requests.

The two ladies said nothing.

“My families been staying summers at the Colony for generations,” I said.

“Good thing you didn’t call yourself a ‘native’,” he said.

I agreed but said nothing.

“My sister moved to Maine 13 years ago when her twin girls were three months old,” the man said.  “She’s trying to call them natives.”

Again we stood quiet.

“If my cat had kittens in the oven, I wouldn’t call them biscuits,” the man said and turned abruptly away from us as if we were less human because we were from other places.  He walked up the ramp to his car, got in without looking back, and drove away.

I half expected my date to ask in her coy voice, ‘Daves, if we made babies in the graveyard would we call them ‘gravies’?’  But she didn’t. She appeared even more diplomatic than usual though some of the light had fallen off her still beautiful face.

I stood with my friends, feeling awkward at best. I stood speechless; feeling clouded in, except the cloud cover began to break up.  And then the author cleared his throat.

“Clear mean thinking, like a well-timed right hook will knock you senseless  until you can gather it’s momentum into your own and use it to move on, David.”

I gathered up our tackle and we clambered up the ramp, now steep at low tide, and walked back along the brightening road toward our summer cottage.

“Really, David,” growled the author’s Indian wife, “must all you Americans always say exactly what you’re thinking?”

The End