Chapter 15
But still, Billy’s murder, like Izzy’s disappearance, became an unsolved mystery—a mystery I blamed myself for. If I hadn’t made a deal with Billy and competed in the fly-casting tournament, he’d be alive in an army training camp.
How could my attempt to save his life lead to someone else taking it? What kind of world was I in where doing something so right ended up so wrong? Was right simply an upside-down reflection on a river? If so, was I again on the verge of causing wrong? Maybe I was a real-life Don Quixote. Or maybe I was just cursed the way the Beaverkill supposedly is.
As for fly casting, I thought of trying to win next year’s tournament in his memory; but for some reason, I just never felt like practicing, even though I often stared at Billy’s tournament rod and wondered what might have been if he had lived.
In August I registered for the draft. When asked about my health, I thought about the Zimmerman telegram, and how Germany’s scheme to encourage Mexico to invade America seemed terribly wrong. I told the draft board nothing about my ankle, then went home and prayed I wouldn’t be drafted.
In the next lottery I wasn’t, luckily.
March 1918: The German army began a spring offensive. Suddenly its soldiers found holes in the French and English lines, and soon they closed in on Paris—but then many attacking Germans were felled by a new enemy: a mysterious sickness (later called the flu). The German offensive bogged down. The Allies counterattacked and drove the Germans back to the Hindenberg line. The German High Command no longer saw the line as unbreakable. They asked, surprisingly, for an armistice. Their government collapsed like a bombed wall. The war ended, thankfully; but ten million dead soldiers told me to stop trying to believe in God.
Exactly five years after the assassination of Franz Ferdinarnd and his wife, the Versailles Treaty was signed, in spite of Germany’s vehement protest.
“This treaty,” my father said, “isn’t the foundation of a new world order. It’s a total humiliation of Germany. It’s a road to another war.”
December 1919: In the world of science there was an important discovery that intrigued me, maybe because the war’s carnage caused me and so many others to hope science uncovered more mysteries of the universe and proved that there was some sort of grand—I won’t say divine—working order, and that humanity was at the dawn of a second Enlightenment, a second era of hope and optimism.
What was that scientific discovery?
Because the war was over, scientists from different sides of the war were able to travel to Brazil and Africa and observe a total solar eclipse. Their findings confirmed Albert Einstein’s theories. Einstein became world-famous, almost overnight.
I read article after article about Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity. Though I certainly didn’t understand much of them, what I did understand was this: Isaac Newton, who discovered the fundamental laws of physics, believed time flows at a constant, absolute rate. Furthermore, he believed all objects not affected by outside forces move at constant speeds. Space, like time, is absolute. Newton therefore believed scientists, through observation and experimentation, could come to learn all of the physical world.
Einstein, however, believed observation is often misleading. To know more of the world, therefore, he looked inward, into his mind and intuition, and he visualized theories of time and space that could later be tested.
(I thought of how, in my mind, I had come up with fly-casting techniques I later tested. At the risk of being arrogant, I wondered if, without knowing it, I had followed in Einstein’s way. But how could I compare the way of fly-casting to the way of the world?)
Einstein theorized that nothing moves faster than light; and that the speed of light in a vacuum is always the same, whether you move toward or away from it. Time and space are therefore relative.
How would I explain this? Let’s say I sat on the banks of Ferdon’s Eddy. I look up and, hypothetically, see a band of sunlight. Below the band an airplane accelerates. As it almost reaches the speed of light, its front seems to contract.
Later, the plane lands. The pilot gets his fly rod and goes to Ferdon’s. I say to him that when he accelerated the plane, the light must have seemed to slow. He says, surprisingly, it didn’t.
How is his observation possible?
Because for the pilot, but not for me, time slowed.
Next, I ask the pilot if the front of his plane seemed to contract. No, he answers.
Einstein concluded, therefore, motion and distance can’t be measured by human observation. In short, the universe is more deceiving than a trout stream.
Einstein’s theory seemed gigantic compared to George M. L. La Branche’s; so how was I supposed to have faith in the world when what I saw of it was really an illusion, or some sort of rippled, broken reflection?
Einstein went even further. He theorized that gravity creates a fourth dimension called space-time, and that in the dimension, gravity curves all lines. (The universe is like a suspended mattress with a heavy ball in the middle.) Because all lines are curved, objects move on curved paths; and so gravity, according to Einstein, is not a force, as Newton believed, but a curved space-fabric that bends light. Furthermore, because the size and distance of a planet or star determines the strength of gravity, the speed of light, and therefore time on a faraway planet, might differ from time on earth.
I wondered: If time and space are relative, what about history? After all, if time had been faster, the Great War might have ended before the leaves fell, and fewer boys might have died. Or might their death rate simply have increased?
Not if the boys’ contracted size made them less vulnerable to bullets and bombs.
Was I stretching Einstein’s theories too far and hoping to rewrite history? After all, I was just a college student who couldn’t understand how Einstein came to believe theories he couldn’t see.
I tried to imagine his laboratory, but the only image I saw was Billy’s workshop. Did Einstein even own a fly rod? From his photograph, he looked like an angler, but so did just about everyone else. To me, Einstein seemed like an interesting guy to fish with, assuming he spoke English.
I read more about Einstein and surprisingly learned that he didn’t have a laboratory, that he tested much of his theories using long, Greek-to-me, mathematical equations.
How can numbers, I asked myself, reflect an invisible part of the universe? To me, it doesn’t make sense. Besides, even if there is a working order to the universe, where does that order come from? Maybe it often breaks, like a dam, and let war and disease spread. Maybe it needs a mechanic like Billy to fix it. Or are war and disease parts of an order that never breaks? Is there also be a fifth or even a sixth dimension? If so, can the universe be really measured? And because gravity, not God, creates time, are Christianity and Judaism fundamentally wrong?
What does Einstein think? Does he believe the Bible, like Don Quixote, is more metaphoric than literal?
Maybe, I realized, I was better off studying literature than science. You see, great literature, like Shakespeare’s plays and Cervantes’ novel, weren’t illusions and had beauty and answers on every level.
Again it’s time I speed the story up. I’ll leave out a lot of details and tell you that I broke my father’s heart and enrolled in graduate school. Two years later, I earned a graduate degree in education. With the help of the Antrim’s owner, I landed a job teaching English in Roscoe High School.
From day one, I loved seeing students look up to me as I preached that great literature was a reflection of the human spirit, a reflection of great characters overcoming obstacles and coming to terms with a world or a situation they couldn’t accept. Many students, I saw, didn’t believe me. But I knew one day they would probably suffer disappointments, like Hamlet, Oliver Twist and even me, and then maybe come to believe.
Before I go on, I should tell you I still dreamed of becoming a great wr
iter. I wrote two more stories. Both were rejected, again and again. Hurt, I wondered if I should give up writing. Though my thoughts didn’t answer the question, my feelings did. Often I sat for hours in front of a blank piece of paper, hoping, praying for words that didn’t come. In short, I found it impossible to write.
One more digression: In America, most fly-fishers, including me, filled their fly boxes with dry flies and, as Billy had, saw Theodore Gordon and George M. L. La Branche as prophets.
I often recalled their fishing contest and felt blessed to be the only witness to a growing segment of history.
I walked along the bank of the Forks. Fishing the tail was a pretty woman. She had blue eyes and black, wavy hair. I’ll admit it: she reminded me of my mother.
Was that why she looked familiar?
She looked at me. “You’re some caster.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Two weeks ago, when I walked across the bridge I watched you fish. You looked so beautiful casting, as if you were in perfect harmony with the Beaverkill.”
“Well, at least I was in harmony with something. My whole life I’ve felt out-of-step.”
“With what?”
Not wanting to say, I looked away from her.
“I’m sorry for asking.” she said. “I want to thank you for inspiring me to take up fishing again. When I was a girl I used to fish with my father. Now I feel close to him again.”
“Has he passed on?”
“Awhile ago. How’s your ankle?”
“You’re the nurse.”
“Yes. I’m Sarah. I just got back from Europe.”
I was reminded I wasn’t the only person who had lost a young parent. “What were you doing in Europe?”
“I was an army nurse.”
“You volunteered?”
“Yes.”
I wondered if I should I tell her why I didn’t, then asked, “How did you stand seeing so many soldiers die?”
“I also saw a lot recover and live. Besides, my job was to save lives. It’s what I wanted to do since my brother almost died of tuberculosis.”
“Was your brother in the war?”
“Ironically, the tuberculosis may have saved his life. The army wouldn’t take him.”
“I read a lot about the war. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I lost any faith I had in the world.”
“I feel sad for you, then. Faith, to me, means loving what isn’t perfect, loving what’s changing and growing.”
“Including God?”
“Yes. I see God in the change of seasons and in all that is good, like new, lifesaving medicines. Just think, Ian—see, I remember your name—billions of years ago this planet couldn’t nourish life. Now it nourishes thousands of species, including man. I believe in a God, in a world that’s evolving and getting stronger, like a person building up a resistance to a virus. I see a world where one day man resists war.”
“Does that mean history has a soul?”
“I never really thought about it. Who knows, maybe it does.”
Perhaps the world, I thought, like writing, has to be revised and revised until it becomes beautiful. But if gravity changes time, does it also change God and, therefore, make him reletive? Is God, therefore, relative? If so, is it his relativity that enables him to evolve?
Feeling trapped in a maze of ideas, I wanted out, but then I became thankful confusing ideas were not bullets and bombs. “Sarah, it might take thousands of years until man resists war.”
“I don’t think it will take that long. In the meantime, I’ll see a God that’s in beauty, in this river for example. I’ll feel a God that’s in the love people have for each other.”
“But how can God be in so many things?”
“Because to me, he’s in all that is good. And in spite of war and hate, good and love are endless.”
“Is it a Christian God?”
“Yes, to me.”
“You make things sound so easy.”
“Simple, you mean. Watching young boys die wasn’t easy, but being an army nurse was my way of putting love into the world.”
“My way is by teaching the beauty of literature.”
“So we’re not that different.”
“We are. To me, faith is a wish, nothing more.”
“Then don’t try to believe in God. Try to believe in the day and in spirituality, in being connected to all that’s good.”
Her ideas sounded like a cliché. But who was I to tell her so? After all, where did my doubt get me? Fear Alley? Didn’t I yearn to get off?
She false cast, jerking the rod back and forth, and stopping the rod too late. Her loops were wide.
“Tell me, Ian, do you think there’s a place for women anglers on this river?”
“As long as it’s near me.”
She smiled. “Tell me, Ian, what’s wrong with my casting?”
I waded into the river and gently suggested a few techniques. An hour later, her casts formed tight loops.
“Ian, thanks for helping me with my casting and for explaining things in a way that didn’t make me feel stupid.”
“You’re very welcome.” As I watched her fish, I wished I could reach out, pull her close to me and kiss her thick, beautiful lips; but I just stood there, watching, wishing. ...
She landed a sixteen-inch rainbow!
“I’m going to let it go,” she said. “I never kill fish.”
I wanted to see her again, but instead of asking her for a real date I asked if she was going fishing the next day.
“At about five o’clock. Can you make it?”
“Yes, I can make it! And, and Ian, I’m sorry if I made things, if I made believing sound so easy. I guess after seeing the horror of war I’m too scared not to believe in God and in love. Does that make me weak? Make me a coward? I don’t know, but on most days—the good days—I no longer care. See you tomorrow.”
During the next few two weeks we fished together four or five times. Finally, I got the nerve to kiss her. That night my father called. I told him about Sarah.
“What does her father do?”
“Her father was a mailman.”
“Ian, you’re Ivy League.”
“How can you say that? I’m in love with her and you’re just going to have to accept it.”
How would I describe being in love? I can’t. What I can say is love resembled my obsession to catch a fish. It consumed me. It became me. When I was away from Sarah, I really wasn’t away because, like Einstein, I looked inward, and in my mind I saw her beautiful face, heard her soft, soothing voice, held her hand and kissed her lips. The images became so vivid they almost always whitewashed the images of dead, twisted soldiers and garment workers. I felt blessed to be alive, to live near the Beaverkill and to be surrounded by the Catskills.
To describe my new visions, I wrote a poem comparing Sarah’s beauty to the beauty of the Beaverkill. Her voice and laughter were like gurgling water and singing birds. Her wavy hair was like long, gentle riffles. Her soft skin was like smooth, sun-tinted pools. Her eyes, the passageway to her soul, were like long seams and swirling eddies. Her mouth was like—I don’t remember, because soon I came to see the poem as what it was: juvenile junk. To make sure it never again saw the light of day, I ripped it into small pieces so, like Humpty Dumpty, it couldn’t be put back together. Feeling like a failure, I told myself that maybe love was to be lived instead of described.
So I lived it.
Sarah and I fished together almost every day. Always we stood close and talked. I remember one day we shared how our parents’ deaths left us devastated, confused and lonely. A few days later, as we fished the Forks, Sarah asked why I became an English teacher instead of a lawyer. I told her.
“I’m not much of a reader,” she said. “But I think it’s great you want to teach young people about the beauty of literature.”
“There’s another reason I became a teacher, a reas
on I’m ashamed of.” I cast and landed my fly just outside an eddy. I watched my fly drift downstream.
“Well, are you going to tell me the reason?”
“I want to be a writer.”
“So why be ashamed?”
“I don’t think I have the courage. Every time I get rejected it devastates me.”
“Every time I lost a soldier it devastated me, but I went on—I’m sorry, Ian. I didn’t mean to make you feel less than me. I’m sure writing is different. I mean, the soldiers who passed on didn’t reject me.”
How could my father not like her? I thought.
Sarah asked me to tell her about my favorite books. So every day as we fished, I summarized the plot of a great book or play, then its deeper meaning. Soon I thought she would tire of my summaries and interpretations, but she didn’t, and before long I ran out of books and plays to tell her about, so I started telling her about the lives of many writers. She was especially interested to learn that Shakespeare became the great Shakespeare we know only after his son died.
The next day, as Sarah and I fished the mouth of the Covered Bridge Pool, I said, “Today I’m going to tell you about Cervantes, the author of my favorite book, Don Quixote. The interesting thing about Cervantes was that he was a failure most of his life. Needing money, he took a job he probably hated, tax collecting, and therefore had to travel many roads of southern Spain and meet all sorts of people. Then, according to legend, Cervantes was short in his collections and thrown in debtor’s prison. In prison, he wrote a story of a knight, Don Quixote. But as Cervantes wrote, he decided to add another character, Sancho Panza; and then the story grew and grew and finally became the first part of his great novel. Luckily, a publisher took a chance on the novel, though he used the cheapest paper and didn’t correct many of the typographical errors. But to the publisher’s surprise, the book became a best seller. Cervantes became famous late in life.
“But you know what I wonder most about, Sarah? What did Cervantes think about as he collected taxes? Did he, a former war hero, feel life had been unfair to him? Did he feel bitter and like a failure? Or did he in some way see, that by traveling the dusty roads, he was living the life, or at least a part of it, that his great character, Don Quixote, would soon live? Had Cervantes not been a failure and a tax collector, he never would have gathered the visions he shaped into his great book.”
“Ian, you just told a great story.”
“I just wish I could write one.”
“You can. I feel it. Don’t ask me how, but I do.”
A week later, my father drove up and met Sarah. When he saw how pretty and intelligent she was, he seemed to forget her father had been a mailman. During dinner at the Antrim, he couldn’t stop talking to her. Feeling left out, I was a little angry, but then I told myself to let my father enjoy himself. Quietly, I finished my shepherd’s pie.
Later my father said to me, “Ian, she reminds me of your mother.”
“So you approve?”
“Yes, I approve.”
A few days later I nervously asked Sarah to marry me.
She looked down.
I thought, I’m a fool for asking her.
She looked at me. “Ian, there’s something I have to tell you. When I was in Europe I did something I was told not to do. I fell in love with a wounded soldier, a married soldier. I guess in war we live in different rules. We became—how should I say this—intimate. Then one day he went back to the front and I never saw him again.” Sarah cried.
“Do you still love him?”
“I love you, Ian, but I want you to know the truth about me before you decide.”
Later, I telephoned my father and told him what Sarah had told me. The next evening when I came home, my father sat on my porch.
Surprised, I asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I thought it would be better if I spoke to you in person. You see, Ian, when I met your mother neither of us was that young. Both of us had experienced love. What I’m saying is, neither of us was—you know what I mean. And in my eyes, I didn’t see your mother in less of a light. If I could do it all over again, I’d marry her in a minute. Now Sarah could have put a better face on her past, but she told the truth and, in my eyes, that means a lot.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“How come you never remarried?”
“Because I’m still in love with your mother, and I don’t think it would be fair to marry someone else and always compare her to Elizabeth.”
The next day, I forcefully asked Sarah to marry me. She said yes, then asked if she could encourage our children to believe in a loving God. I agreed.
We married in her church. For a wedding present, my father gave us a down payment for a house. We chose a small Victorian, about two hundred yards from the Beaverkill. After we painted it and moved in, Sarah encouraged me to write a memoir about my first day fishing the Beaverkill. I listened to her. Two magazines, however, rejected my memoir. Sarah insisted I send it out again. I did, and the third magazine offered me ten dollars. I accepted and bought Sarah an English fly box.
A week later we both received a much bigger present: She was pregnant. I was ecstatic. Nine months later, when I held my son Ross for the first time and counted his little fingers and toes, I felt what real ecstasy was. I remembered what Doc said about the magnificence of every living creature. It seemed amazing a single cell could evolve into a beautiful baby boy.
Maybe, I thought, there is a God. But what if Ross dies in some foolish war? No! Don’t worry about the future in a moment like this.
I kissed my son’s soft cheek and, wishing my mother was alive, I cried.
Almost every weekend my father drove up. “I think we have the making of an outfielder,” he said, holding Ross.
I said, “Or an angler.”
“Well, maybe both,” he answered.
“Maybe we should just let him become whatever he wants,” Sarah said.
Eighteen months later, my second son, Everett, was born a month premature. At first we didn’t know if he would survive. Hour after hour, as Sarah and I waited in the hospital, I prayed to a God I didn’t believe in. On the morning of the third day, Doctor Schwartz walked into the waiting room, smiled like a boy and told us Everett was all right. Looking back, that was the happiest moment of my life; though still I wonder if Everett’s premature birth was the cause of his small size.
Ross, on the other hand, was always one of the biggest boys in his class and, thanks to my father’s coaching, the best baseball player. Often I tried to take him fly fishing, but he said no usually. When he was thirteen he and his friends played little-league football. Because of his speed and size, Ross became a quarterback and a star, and so football became his favorite game. My father was disappointed, and to tell you the truth, so was I. You see, I couldn’t see any sense in the violence of football. Football resembled war.
Ross started high school. In his junior year he was his team’s starting quarterback.
Everett couldn’t compete athletically with Ross. Wanting attention, he begged me to take him fishing. I thought he was too young to fly fish, so I bought him a conventional rod and often took him to a lake. Sitting on milk boxes, we fished for blue gills. I loved spending time with Everett and seeing how catching a fish brought joy to his face.
Fly fishing, however, was still the blood in me. After school, I often fished the Beaverkill for an hour or so. One day Everett asked if I had fished without him. I told him the truth. He cried and said he wanted to fly fish with me.
“Soon, Everett. I promise. Right now, you’re a little too young to handle a fly rod.”
Later, Sarah said to me, “If Everett gets hooked on fishing now he’ll probably cut himself off from so many other things in life, like being part of a group or a team.”
“Sarah, I didn’t encourage Everett to become an angler, but we can’t force him to give up what he
loves. That will only make him resent us. When he gets older, he’ll learn that fishing is only a small part of life.”
“I’m going to see to it.”
Almost every day Sarah read stories to Everett. Her tactic worked. Everett became an avid reader and a good student. Sarah therefore didn’t object when I bought Everett a 7-foot fly rod and taught him how to cast. At first Everett couldn’t propel the line. His loops were wide and his fly didn’t turn over.
Afraid he would get discouraged, I put my arm around him, lied a little, and told him it took me a long time to learn to fly cast. “Everett, I think you practiced enough for today. Besides, dinner is ready.”
The next day Everett’s casts took shape. Though his loops were still wide, his fly turned over and landed over 30 feet away.
Surprised, I said, “Everett, you’re a natural.”
“Can I go fishing with you, Dad? Please.”
“We mustn’t rush things, Everett.”
A week later I came home and saw Everett casting on our front lawn. He accelerated the rod smoothly, gracefully, then stopped it abruptly. The line formed a tight loop.
Proud, I felt I was in heaven, or at least insulated from the rest of the world, especially the great economic depression, and the millions of unemployed, and the thousands of families living in shanty towns.
In Germany, the depression plunged even deeper. Though few thought it was possible, my father feared Adolf Hitler would come to power.
“I told you, Ian, that damn Versailles Treaty was no good.”
Maybe, I thought, Sarah is wrong about God and the world evolving for the better.
Before I go on with my story, I feel I again should tell you a little about the world of science. Walter Heisenberg, Neils Bohr and other scientists argued that subatomic particles acted randomly and unpredictably, defying the laws of gravity.
Einstein disagreed and insisted, “God doesn’t play dice with the world.”
But Einstein, I knew, didn’t believe in a God who created the world in seven days; so what kind of God did he mean?