Memory Swims the Tuckahoe
by
Bill Peak

 

This morning I lost the last of Dad’s lures. I didn’t think of it that way at the time. When I cut the line, I said good-bye to a favorite plug, nothing more. It was only after the fish had slipped back into the water, turned pale and vanished into the green depths, that I realized the lure still attached to its jaw was the last of those I’d inherited from my father. It was a plug he must have cared for and used, taken off and put on, who knows how many times.
I’m not really much of a fisherman. Dad was. Dad was a great fisherman. The last photograph we have of him before Alzheimer’s robbed his looks of intelligence and personality shows him fishing – jaw set, eyes happy, the look of a man doing something he loves, something that requires all of his attention, all of his heart. Of course I looked up to him. He was, I suppose, for me, something of a minor god. I’ll never forget the thing our guide said about him that day, the way he said it, the way he looked not at me when he said it, but at my father.
He was a Native American, the guide, the first I had ever met – big, handsome, distant and taciturn – everything, in other words, that a little boy in that day and age could have wanted in his first real live Indian. It seemed perfectly fitting to me that he should be our guide. Naturally enough, he would know about secret places. Naturally enough, he would know about places hidden away in the forest that no white man could possibly know of. The only thing I found surprising (indeed remarkable) was that my father had managed to talk him into showing us one; somehow my father had convinced an Indian to lead us to a place only Indians knew of, a secret lake where he said we might catch German brown trout.
All these years later, I can still remember the wild drive we took that day, the last mile or so over open ground, no road, not even any track that I could see, the three of us bumping along in the Indian’s old Corvair, my father visibly concerned, wondering what he’d gotten us into. Our guide stared straight ahead, never saying a word, eyes locked on the meadow before us, avoiding every rock, every grassy swell. It was, I think, at the end of that drive, when the Indian brought his car to a sudden shuddering halt, that I began to experience a shift in my allegiance.
We stopped, as I remember it, beside a small stand of white birch – new growth, none of the trees more than ten feet high. Before us the ground fell away steeply to form the nearer slope of a small valley. At the upper end of this valley stood the first beaver dam I had ever seen, the lake it enclosed, and, on the slopes surrounding the lake, a mixed woods of birch and some darker species of tree.
I think Dad said something. It would have been like him – by then he would have been regretting any doubts he’d had about our guide, would have wanted to make amends, maybe say something about the beauty of the place he had led us to. But if he did speak, I don’t think the Indian answered him. In my memory he remains entirely silent. And it was then, I think, that a portion of the admiration I felt for my father was transferred to the man sitting beside him, the guide hunched forward over his steering wheel, looking down at the valley as if seeing it for the first time.
We didn’t catch any trout that day, didn’t catch anything as I remember it. We were completely skunked, but, still, it was a fine day. We fished from the top of the dam, the lake spreading out dark and mysterious before us, the air full of the sound and smell of water moving fast, escaping here and there through the carefully constructed latticework beneath our feet.
A family of red-headed woodpeckers must have lived among the drowned trees protruding from the lake’s surface, for I seem to remember the flash of a head, the blue-black of a body, as one of the adults moved in graceful parabola from tree to tree.
After a while I think I grew bored with fishing. I was only nine or ten at the time and, if there were any German brown in that lake, they were uninterested in what we had to offer. Still, characteristically, my father fished doggedly, contentedly on.
I don’t remember what games I played that day to entertain myself, though war would certainly have figured among them. We were all children of war then, it being not long after the conclusion of World War II. Doubtless that beaver dam became in turn a mine-strewn beach, some famous gun emplacement, the crest of Mount Suribachi – indeed it may well have been my cries of victory that kept the fish away, skunking us so completely.
Anyway, whatever game I played, after a while I remember noticing that our guide had stopped fishing. He wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at my father. Dad, in my memory, was drying out his fly, his line forming and unforming big lazy S’s in the air over his head. Suddenly, with a slight arch of his back, he signaled an end to this exercise, sending the fly unerringly into a gap between two of the drowned trees. He waited a moment and then, with a practiced movement of his hand, like a surgeon sewing one suture at a time, he began his retrieve – all attention focused on a tiny spot of movement sixty feet away. The Indian spoke. Without ever looking at me, without ever even turning to check that I am still there, the Indian’s voice floated solemnly out over the water. “Your father,” he said, “has used a flyrod before.”
They were the only words I remember him speaking that whole long quiet fishless day.
I’m not really much of a fisherman. I seldom get out on the water more than three or four times a year now. And, truth be told, even when I do go out it’s more for Dad’s sake than my own. He’s been dead nine years now, and, in a sense, he was taken from me long before that – the Alzheimer’s, the inevitable decline and loss. So now, when I do go fishing, it’s not so much to catch fish as to commune with the memory of fishing with my father. Sometimes it’s as if he’s beside me in the boat and I speak to him. I don’t say much – Dad taught me to be quiet when we fished – but I do tell him how much I miss him, how much I wish he were there.
All of which may go some way toward explaining why I bothered to read the pamphlet.
Nowadays, when you buy a Maryland fishing license, it comes with a little pamphlet, a three-fold brochure that, in addition to listing catch limits and consumption advisories, offers advice to the novice fisherman. Thinking myself more and more of a novice every year, I read the thing cover-to-cover. Among its pointers was a section on catch and release. “Wet your hands before handling a live fish.” “Carefully, but quickly, remove hooks.” “Never keep a fish out of water longer than fifteen seconds.” “Cut the line if you cannot carefully or quickly remove hooks.” I have always fished catch and release. It was something my father taught me.
Of course he was a veteran – it seemed all fathers were veterans in those days – but Dad had experienced a particularly hellish war in Okinawa. I remember well how, when other fathers were taking their sons hunting, my father gently declined my invitation to do likewise. He did give me a rifle (the same single-action .22 his father had given him at a similar age), but, after teaching me how to use it, for the first time in my life my father told me from there on I was on my own. Hunting was a sport he no longer enjoyed. He didn’t make a big deal of it, didn’t go into dramatics about how the battle for Wana Draw had changed him. “I just don’t like killing things anymore,” was all he said. For Dad, catch and release embodied all that he loved about fishing.
Anyway, I’m hoping this will give you some idea why it was that, before I caught that catfish this morning, I had read the pamphlet that came with my fishing license. The children of men like my father find something familiar in such pamphlets, their tone, the patient repetition of their maxims: we always read instructions, always follow directions.
You know, I’d love to claim it was a smallmouth. Dad loved smallmouth bass, thought them to be, pound-for-pound, one of the best game fish in North America. But he valued honesty even more than a good fish story, more than anything except love, so we’ll leave it a catfish. Which, truth be told, is good enough for an old spinbait fisherman like me.
I like catfish. Though I’ve never seen one jump, they do strike hard, fight deep; there’s never any doubt you’ve got something alive on the other end of your line. So, I was feeling pretty good about myself this morning when, having boated my fish, I went to work with a pair of needle-nosed pliers on the hook embedded in its jaw. I’d been at it only a short time when, suddenly, I remembered the pamphlet and the fifteen second clock. How long had the thing been out of water? I gave the pliers a quarter turn, watched the fish’s mouth twist cruelly, began a desperate count: one, two, three, four, five.... I cut the line.
I listen to authority, respect authority, it’s one of my father’s legacies – like that plug. And so I cut the line. Now, as I sit here and think about it, I hope and pray that that catfish is working his way up the Tuckahoe River, decorated with a bit of hand-carved, hand-painted balsa wood. I also hope and pray that Dad is watching over him, delighted in his vigor, the beat of his tail, the omniscience of his lateral line. Now that I think about it, that makes me a better fisherman than I thought. For such hopes and prayers are what fishing is all about: every cast, every turn of the reel, a sort of prayer, an exercise in faith.