Another Fish Story
“Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll make it.”
I looked at my 11-year-old son, sitting beside me.
“And if we don’t?” I asked.
“We’ll make it, Dad.”
We had a 40-minute drive from the Auburn Colony in South Harpswell, Maine, to Popham Beach. The car radio clock read 3:58 p.m.
“Be back by the dinner bell,” my wife had said as we drove away.
The dinner bell at the “Colony“ would be rung, as it had summer evenings for the last century, at 7 p.m. His buddies would all be at dinner on time, dressed by their mothers as if to head out for a day at the office.
Some mothers tied their son’s bowties for them. Texan moms used string ties that their father’s had worn. Men bowed equally to Auburn Colony tradition, wearing blue blazers and white slacks; and conservative neckties. Ladies wore summer print dresses, and light cardigans for the walk back to their cottages in the Maine night air.
The Auburn Colony in South Harpswell, Maine, had remained an eddy of gentility since my great-grandfather bought one of the ten cottages about the turn of the century. I recall summer evenings as a young man when we’d build a fire in the ocean-stone fireplace in the white pillared dining-hall, then gather the octagonal oak tables in close to share its heat.
“You don’t understand, son. Popham’s a 40-minute drive each way. That leaves us an hour or so to fish. And your grandfather would like striped bass for lunch tomorrow.”
“We’ll make it, Dad,” he said.
“Did I ever tell you what makes me not care if I miss dinner, fishing at Popham?” I asked.
He grows quiet, perhaps thinking that I am going to tell him, whether he wants or not.
“I was your age, and your grandparents took me and my brothers for a picnic day at Popham. Back then it was a big adventure. The roads weren’t so good. And we had to pack everything from home. We would have had to dig our own sandworms down on the mud flats below cottage number nine, where we lived at the time.”
“Can you still find sandworms down there, Dad?”
“Bloodworms, crabs, eels too.”
“I’m going to dig bloodworms for our next time fishing.”
“I’ll help if you want.”
“Nah. I’ll get my friends to help.”
“There weren’t many people who visited the beach back then,” I continued. “We’d leave all the rods and tackle box and cooler and blanket — and even Grandpa’s wallet and the keys to the car — in one place on a big car blanket above the high-water line. And then we’d go off and play.”
“With all your brothers?” he asks.
“Yes,” I answer.
“How did Grandpa fall last time you were here?” he asked, unexpectedly.
I recalled my mother’s lament as we left, “You know your father would love to join you, but his Parkinson’s is too far advanced.”
Until now, Grandpa had been the storyteller.
“The tide forced us to walk back in the dunes,” I explained. ” I found a sand ramp back onto the beach near the path to the car. Grandpa wouldn’t wait for me to help him, and he came charging down the incline. His feet couldn’t keep up with his momentum and he fell. The sand broke his fall, but your grandmother doesn’t want him traipsing off across the wilderness.”
“Is Popham Beach a wilderness?”
“It is if you’ve made it as far upstream as Grandpa. But I don’t want to talk anymore about that. I want to tell you a fish story.”
“What if I don’t want to hear another fish story?”
“Then I suppose you don’t have to,” I said and then I shut my mouth.
*****
The fish story he wanted to tell happened many years before when he’d been at the same beach with his father, his mother, and his younger brothers who were still sand dollar collectors and hadn’t turned on for fishing yet.
Toward sunset the clouds rolled in, dark and ominous like ancestral crypts, lined up in the sky straight back to Stonehenge and beyond. The boy, the eldest son, thought the dark clouds meant that his father would have them pack to leave. Instead, his father picked up his surf casting rod and ran down to the surf. “Striped bass love bad weather,” he said. He watched his father running, strong calves flashing the soles of his feet, getting smaller as his father ran farther away.
*****
“We don’t have to stop for anything, do we dad?”
“Nope. We’ve got it all,” I smiled at my son.
I am a tackle shop junkie. But I’d prepared for this sunset ride to Popham earlier in the week when I purchased the two bags of blood worms at the tackle shop in Brunswick. They live for a good week in the refrigerator if your wife doesn’t find them and put them in your salad.
*****
The beach had become a serious place under the darkening sky. His brothers stood to watch their father run off, then went back to playing in the sand. His mother looked up briefly from her book. He took up the big old olive-green rod with the chipped cork handle, the frayed guide wrappings, and the bailess Abu Garcia reel, and followed. The cooling air jumped into his lungs, sprang his young legs over the tightening sand. His father, silhouetted out ahead, stood casting into the surf that rolled up onto the beach like bleached bones. He ran away from his father then for the first time. He ran to where the waters met. He waded in alone and cast.
*****
The five-gallon bucket I carried held the blood worms and the tackle bag, two chocolate bars and two bottles of cold water. My son, tall for his age and lean, with a mop of wavy brown hair, kicked his Crocs into the trunk and walked “ouching” and “ouching” beside me down the hot sand path through the sawgrass dunes to the beach.
From the peak of the dunes, we could see the Kennebec River meet the Atlantic. Directly in front of us lay the ever-changing beach. A mile or so offshore, two small pegmatite, rose hip, and herring gull, islands jutted out of the shimmering sand and sea. Southeast lay the meander of a brackish river cutting through the marsh and then on across the sand flats into the sea.
My son ran ahead, carrying the two light spin rigs over his shoulder. He stopped at the river’s edge. The outgoing river ran with the tide. Riffle water pitted the wide flats, turning into deeper surging burls of water where it cut into the sandbar along the far shore. Beyond the cut edge you could see hundreds of standing seabirds that rose up in twos and threes and turned in the hazy July air, soaring out over the surf where it uncurled onto the beach.
*****
Later in the evening the tide would push in and the acres of exposed sand would disappear. Where he stood, one single burl of pure sea defining the tide line, would progress toward shore until the river would be pushed still. And then it would surge further, shooting Atlantic waters deep into the marsh. Had it been the constant of these transitions that caused his father to pick up his rod, leave his family, and run into the sea? Or was it the falling barometer that made him sense the big fish feeding? The boy waded out where the water was up to his chest and cast again.
*****
Arm in arm I walked with my son across the river. The sand beneath our feet drew us in and was more uneven than the surface of the water above. It pulled at our legs and hips and sucked us down so that I had to rock back and forth to take another step.
“I don’t like it, Dad.”
“Do you want to turn around?”
“It’s too deep.”
“What if it gets shallower from here on?”
He took another step forward and sank down up to his chest into a hole. I watched him gasp and scrunch his face and stagger forward.
“C’mon. That was just a hole. See there.”
He found his footing and the bottom leveled out. We walked a few more steps before he dropped my hand and surged forward onto the sandbar. He ran out a few steps and stopped. It seemed every shorebird in the world left the sand at once. He turned and came back to me, holding up two shells, one conch and one broken sand dollar. I was still struggling a bit in the sand and current.
‘What do you want to do with those?”
“Put them in the bucket.”
“Don’t you think they’d be better left on the beach?”
“Aw!”
“Did we come all this way to hunt for shells or catch a striped bass for your grandfather’s lunch?”
My son dropped the shells and ran off to study a commercial lobster crate that had washed onto the bar with line and buoy attached.
*****
The boy, the eldest son, hooked something heavy on his second cast. He was using a bouncing retrieve, jigging once with every turn, pulling a slender pitted silver drail. Something big picked it up and turned and ran and shook its head hard and was gone. He looked for his father down the beach but could not see him over the waves. He cast again. He looked round for his father. He found his father walking back to his mother. The boy turned and cast again. The drail arched up black against the stone dark clouds and fell, glinting yellow, into the promising water.
*****
I walked to the far end of the sand spit where the tide had begun to turn. I tied a new circle hook onto a new section of fluorocarbon leader and put a loop in the end and clipped it onto the swivel above the fish-finder rig. The fish-finder rig was a plastic tube attached to another clip. The line went through the tube above the swivel, leader, and hook. Attached to the clip that extended from the sliding tube, swung a two-ounce pyramid sinker. The pyramid would lay flat on the sand bottom and the bait would flow out with the current. You could let your bait drift back in the current or bring it in tight and allow it to hold on the bottom behind the sinker.
I selected a large blood worm from the seaweed in the plastic bag. I prodded the head of the worm with the tip of the hook until the worm seemed to regurgitate its own jaws, two nasty black pincers that looked more like a tarantula’s jaws than jaws you’d find in a sea worm. Once the pincers were out, I put the bend of the hook between them and the worm bit down and drew the hook deep into its own gut. I ran the hook out the one side and turned it around and sent it through again to keep the worm from slipping off the hook.
“Hey Buddy, c’mon and help me fish,” I called.
“Dad, the trap had a plastic sock with fish bones hanging inside.”
“A bait bag. Anything else?”
“A toad fish. It was still alive.”
“Sure it wasn’t a sea robin?”
“Ah, yeah!”
I went to cast the baited spinning pole.
“I’ll do that, dad,” he said.
I handed him the pole. He ran out a way into the shallow water, flipped the bail, and cast the bait. He backed up letting off line until he stood at the water’s edge. I began rigging the second spinner as I had the first.
*****
The second fish came tight while he was looking back at his family preparing to leave. The boy did not know at that age that his own version of “You can never go home again,” would become, “Never look back.” Later in life he learned that his mother’s was, “Never should on yourself.”
His family seemed a long way off and the fish felt strong. The boy could not stop his fear of being called home from running down the line to the fish. The fish moved laterally down the beach and away, as if it didn’t know it was hooked. He stopped himself from calling out to his father. His father was too far away in the wind to hear. He set the hook again.
*****
“Got one!” called my son.
“You sure?” I asked, seeing very little bend in the light rod tip.
“Oh yeah!” he said as the pole bent almost double.
“Don’t horse him,” I urged.
While he fought the fish, I finished rigging the second spinning rig. The fish was in close, and I handed my son the second rod and went down to the water to leader the striper. I lipped the striped bass and carried him up onto the beach.
*****
A black and white photograph of his father, standing beside a much larger broadbill swinging from a gin pole, once hung on a wall somewhere. Then his father stood six foot tall, cut like a fullback. And there are pictures of him beside all his sons, save the one that died as a child, holding stream trout and stripers, fluke and blues.
*****
The tide began to push in and lapped at the base of the bucket. I dragged the bucket and the fish back onto dry sand. I put the reel in the bucket and unhooked the circle hook from the crease of his lip. I lay the fish down and took out a dollar bill and measured him off in six-inch segments, making sure he was within the limit.
*****
He’d read stories of fish that test the soul of the jerk on the other end of the line. He knew that strength and size don’t always go together. “Nothing harder hitting than a welterweight,” his father, watching Muhammad Ali fight, would say. He had this and more in mind sizing up the fish that he could not see.
And then the fish ran again, clearing all reason from his mind. Except that he’d begun to learn. Learn what? Things such as, when you cannot see what you are fighting, you are fighting something more imaginary than real — and also that his reel didn’t seem to hold much line. What he hadn’t learned yet was that it was the fish you don’t catch that makes you a fisherman.
*****
“Got another,” my son called out.
This time I didn’t question. I just stared in disbelief. He fought the fish for a while and then it was splashing in the shallows. I went in to leader the fish and when he saw me, he surged away several times until I was able to reach the leader. The second fish was longer than the first and I worried that it might not be within the guidelines. I laid him out beside the first and measured him with my wet dollar.
*****
The boy never turned the fish. After several hard head shaking runs it took one very long run. He still feels the intense strain of the line and hears the snap the monofilament made breaking. He can see the old rod gone straight and quiet like a young boy waiting for another fish story he doesn’t want to hear. His father called again from the beach that it was time to go.
“Did you see that?” he called back.
“Must have been some fish,” replied his father.
“Can I fish a little longer?”
“Time to go, son. Your mother’s waiting. You and me, we’ll have to come back another day.”
*****
“Two keepers. That’s a limit,” I announced.
A young couple and their children came walking up to us. He asked where to find out more about the fishing. I gave them the name of my favorite tackle shop. The man was kind enough to take our picture. I put the two fish, heads first, in the bucket, the rods and tackle bag over my shoulder this time and took my son’s hand for the walk back. He dropped it and went on ahead.
The stream had reversed in full with the incoming tide. The water was deeper but did not pull you out to sea. We waded back across a broad plain of flooding sea that came to our waists at the deepest part. In the shallows and walking up the beach, we were stopped several times to answer the questions of other beachgoers who noticed the fish tails protruding from our bucket.
“Took him 10 minutes to catch our limit,” I said, nodding at my son.
We drove straight home, speaking of baseball and cousins.
“Its too bad Grandpa couldn’t have been there,” he said.
“You tell him how he came to have striper for lunch,” I said.
The End
