Chapter 16
The next day I bought Everett waders, fishing boots and a fly-fishing hat. His eyes opened wide. He hugged me around the waist.
“Can we go fishing now, Dad?”
“Sure.”
We walked to the Forks. Ray and Bill Sullivan fished the tail. Ray, I saw, had lost a few more teeth. Knowing he was hurting financially from the Depression, I wished I had carpentry work for him.
“Ian, you’re certainly starting him young,” Ray said.
Afraid Everett would be nervous casting in front of two experienced anglers, I asked if he wanted to fish upstream. He said no. We waded into the river. Everett pulled line off his reel and fed it into the current. He cast back. A tight loop unrolled. Keeping his elbow in place, he cast forward. Another tight loop. Doc’s streamer turned over and floated onto the water. Ray and Bill stared in disbelief.
“I’ve never seen a little kid cast like that,” Ray said.
“My father taught me,” Everett said. He mended the line and then retrieved.
“Your father is the greatest caster I ever saw,” Ray said.
A few minutes later, Ray and Bill waded downstream.
Everett looked at me. “Did I show them Dad? Did I?”
“You certainly did.”
Everett’s line tightened. He lifted the rod up and back, smoothly. The rod bent. A rainbow jumped up, shook his head, dived and bolted toward the near bank. Everett pointed the rod to the side and tried to lift the rainbow’s head out of the water but couldn’t. The rainbow bulleted straight downstream. Everett let him. His reel clicked faster and faster, and sounded like a spinning roulette wheel. Would Everett land the trout?
“Everett, keep him out of the fast water!”
“I know, Dad.”
The fish slowed, finally. Everett lifted his head and turned him.
I quickly waded downstream, closed in on the rainbow.
“Dad, I want to bring him in myself.”
The rainbow jumped again. Everett dropped the rod tip and reeled slack out of the line. The rainbow bolted right at him. Everett reeled, quickly.
My heart beat harder and faster, as if I were in the fight. “His head is down.”
“I know, Dad.” Everett stopped reeling. The rainbow streaked past him, then slowed. Everett lifted his head out of the water and calmly, as if he had fought hundreds of trout, turned and pulled the rainbow into slower water, then reeled him in, slowly, steadily. “Okay, Dad. Get him.”
I put my hand under the rainbow and grabbed him. “You did it, Everett. You did it!”
Everett smiled. “Can I mount him?”
“Look how beautiful he is. Don’t you think we should let him live?”
“But he’s mine.”
“He’s the river’s.”
“Please?”
“Everett, if we let him live he’ll father more fish.”
“Okay, Dad,” Everett muttered.
I let the rainbow go. “It’s getting late. We should start heading back.”
As we walked home, I thought about how Everett fought the trout masterfully. The fight seemed unreal, like a fairy tale, like the way Izzy came down the mountain and won the fly-casting tournament.
I put my arm around Everett’s shoulder. “Everett, how did you know how to play the fish?”
“From watching you last week, Dad.”
“Playing a fish is something most people can’t learn by just watching.”
“I did.”
“I guess so. I guess so.”
And so Everett became a real angler almost overnight, and I became a proud father whose son followed in his way, even though a few days later Everett caught a trout and insisted on keeping it for dinner.
I let him.
January 1933: My father telephoned and said, “I told you the unthinkable might happen. Hindenburg just appointed Hitler Chancellor.”
“The other Chancellors didn’t last long. Germany produced Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven. Once they see Hitler for what he is, they’ll reject him. He only got a third of the vote.”
“And what if Hindenburg dies? Ian, this can’t be good.”
“But what can we do?”
“I joined a group of lawyers and businessmen who are raising money to donate to some of the moderate, German political parties.”
A week later, Everett and I fished a long pool that I’ll only say is downstream of Cook’s Falls. Not getting a strike, we waded farther downstream, through a long stretch of shallow, flat water and into a fast tail. We were about twenty feet upstream of the mouth of a short pool I had never fished. A feeder creek, blocked from my view by an overhanging branch, poured foamy water into the pool. We tied on Doc’s backward streamers and let them dead drift straight downstream.
About ten minutes later, I got a take. A big brown veered for the creek, but before he reached it, I turned him and soon landed him. I looked at Everett. “I wonder if there’s trout in that creek. Let’s take a look.”
We ducked under the overhanging branch. About thirty feet in front of us was a low, man-made waterfall. The falling water looked like a see-through, rotating cylinder that crashed and splattered into white suds and sounded like a smooth-running engine. Upstream of the waterfall was a gently flowing pool, scattered with several boulders. The trees lining the banks tilted inward and reminded me of the trees lining the Saw Mill River, especially because signs prohibiting fishing weren’t posted. I felt I had stumbled back in time.
Is the pool a symbol of my past? I wondered. It’s been so many years since I fished the Saw Mill. And yet that first day I fished the river seems like yesterday. Maybe time really has sped up or contracted.
“Everett, I think we may have just discovered our own small fishing oasis. Let’s start by fishing the base of the waterfall.”
Standing next to each other, we cast our streamers into the base of the waterfall.
When is the last time, I asked myself, I heard my mother’s spirit, my mother’s music, in the sounds of a river or stream? Have I grown out of hearing things that, in reality, aren’t there? Oh how I wish I could again hear her play and, along with Everett and Ross, be soothed by her music and her love.
I closed my eyes, listened to the crashing water, the singing birds, the wind-rustling leaves, and wished I could somehow drift into the eternal music of the creek and lose myself.
But where would I end up? Back in my childhood? Or maybe even before that—before I even had a self, a memory, a hope, a fear, a grief, a sorrow. Again I see my father teaching me how to throw a baseball, my mother teaching me how to write better sentences. I see Doc telling his story. I see myself marrying Sarah, then holding Ross and Everett for the first time.
If I didn’t have these memories would I have a self? If not, would anyone remember or grieve for me? Yes, I want them to. And so I clutch my memories like a Leonard fly rod. Should I let go of them and merge with and become one with this stream? But streams can’t have children, or get love from rocks or waterfalls. No, I don’t want to give up my self. At least not all the time. After all, there are meeting places for my self and this stream, the way the Saw Mill was, for me, a meeting place for Manhattan and the Beaverkill.
“Dad! Aren’t you going to fish?”
I opened my eyes. “I guess I got lost in my daydreams.”
No takes. We waded to the bank, walked upstream and waded into the pool. The water was up to Everett’s waist. A flock of small singing birds flew down and circled the pool in a figure-eight, roller-coaster pattern. One by one, birds flew in and out of the pattern.
“What are they doing?” Everett asked.
“I don’t know. It looks like they’re playing a game.”
“Like baseball?”
I laughed. “I guess so.”
Everett’s line tightened. He hooked and landed a fourteen-inch rainbow.
“Is it big enough to keep, Dad?”
“Are you sure y
ou don’t want to let him go?”
“Please? You eat fish.”
“Okay. As long as you promise you’ll let the next ones go.”
We fished for another hour. Everett landed another rainbow. I landed two.
“Everett, I think we should keep this pool secret.”
During the next few months, Everett and I often fished the pool, but I never thought our secret pool, like the fly-casting tournament of 1909, or like Brett Wilson, would change my life.
1934: I published two articles about fishing the Beaverkill and a short story about a fly-casting tournament. Finally, I felt like a real writer, though I was light-years away from being a great one.
In the world of fly casting, a man named Marvin Hedge discovered a new technique called the Double Haul. According to an article in a fishing magazine, the technique enabled casters to increase line tension on the rod tip and therefore load the rod even more. To execute the technique, a caster accelerated the rod, and with his other hand, simultaneously hauled line downward. As the false cast unrolled, the caster moved his line hand upward and “gave back” line.
Curious if the Double Haul really worked, I took my fly rod to a football field and tried to execute the technique. But every time I did, the unrolling line sagged and the loop widened. Discouraged, I went home, telling myself I’d continue experimenting with the new technique.
But I didn’t. Somewhere down the road of my life, I had lost the interest, the drive to become the greatest long-distance fly caster on the planet. You see, I was more interested in being a great father, a great husband and a great teacher.
Looking back as I write this long story of my life, I again see an incident I must tell you about. It happened near Cook’s Falls, upstream of the covered bridge.
I pointed to the far bank. “Everett, there used to be a secret fishing hole there.”
“Dad, the water is too fast and rocky to cross.”
I don’t want him to be a coward like me. I thought. “Everett, an old friend of mine named Billy Reynolds showed me that if I took my time and anchored the wading stick, then stepped one foot at a time but not ahead of the stick, there wasn’t anything to be scared of. Let’s try. You go first and I’ll stay right behind you. If you fall I’ll catch you.”
“But—all right.”
Slowly, one step at a time, we waded across the river. Everett looked at me and smiled. “I did it, Dad! I did it!”
“I’m so proud. Now let’s see if that hole is still there.”
We didn’t catch a single fish. The sun slid behind the covered bridge. I said, “Everett, I guess an ice jam covered up the hole.”
“Why’d it do that?”
I laughed. “Nature doesn’t always have reasons.”
March 1936: Hitler ordered German troops to march into the Rhineland and to violate, for all the world to see, the Versailles Treaty.
My father telephoned me. He was worried.
“But Dad, you said the treaty was unfair.”
“Yes, but now we have to deal with the present. The French, by not stopping Hitler, made him a hero in the eyes of his people.”
“But the Rhineland is part of Germany. Maybe taking it back will satisfy Hitler.”
“A bully is never satisfied until someone stands up to him,” my father insisted.
“Now that their economy is finally improving, I’m sure the German people only want peace.”
“It’s what Hitler, not his people, want.”
I didn’t want to argue or even to think my sons might have to go off to war, so I said, “Next month I promised to take Everett to watch the fly-casting tournament at the Sportsman’s Show. Why don’t you join us?”
“Everett told me he begged you to compete.”
“I haven’t practiced for a long time.”
“Why don’t you? You can make him proud.”
“Or ashamed. Weren’t you always against my casting?”
“Ian, I don’t remember it that way.”
A month later, still clinging to the hope of seeing Izzy, I, along with Everett and my father, walked into Madison Square Garden. I saw the green casting platform, and for a few moments I was back in time, standing on the platform, trying to get my body to listen to my mind. Sad, I went further back in time and again saw Izzy climb down the stone hill, then look into my eyes and take my money.
Yes, through my childhood eyes, so much seemed right with the world that hot, summer day.
I looked at Everett and told myself I was blessed to have a loving wife and two beautiful sons. No, I don’t want to go back to the past.
I searched the crowd for Izzy.
I didn’t see him.
Because I’ve already described, though in different ways, two casting tournaments, I’m not going to describe the one of 1936. The winner, Jake Bender, a young man built like an offensive lineman, used the Double Haul and cast 128 feet.
If I had practiced, could I have beaten him? I wondered.
Yes, I think so.
Jake held up his trophy and yelled, “If anyone out there knows a caster who thinks he can beat me, tell them I’m willing to put up good money to meet their challenge.”
“Challenge him, Dad,” Everett demanded. “You used to cast over one hundred twenty feet.”
“Used to.”
“Don’t be scared of him.”
“I’m not scared.” I looked at my father. “Did you plant seeds in his head?”
“Ian, I swear I didn’t.”
Everett ran away from us. I tried to catch up to him.
He ran up to Jake Bender. “My father can beat you.”
“Kid, like hell he can. Get away from me.”
I caught up to Everett and glared at Jake.
He grinned. “If you could beat me, you would have.” He turned away.
The next evening as Sarah and I diced carrots and onions, I told her what happened. “Sarah, I wonder why Everett did that. I feel as if he wanted me to prove myself, as if I’m not good enough in his eyes. Haven’t I been a good father?”
Sarah put down the knife and looked into my eyes. “Ian, maybe, ah, maybe just showing Everett how to fish, isn’t showing him that, that you love him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ian, this is hard for me, but when you talk about literature and fishing I feel your passion, but I don’t feel passion when you talk about me. Sometimes Ian, I feel you have had so many losses in your life that you’re afraid to, to show love, or maybe even to feel love.”
“But I do love you. You know that.”
“Knowing it and feeling it are different. To me, the biggest danger of all is being afraid that love will be taken from me and therefore not feeling or showing it.”
“Sarah, when I was a boy I never thought my mother would die like that. And soon afterwards Izzy, the great fly caster I told you about, gave me a gift I never told you about, maybe because I’m still so ashamed about what happened.” I told Sarah how I fell in love with Izzy’s beautiful fly rod, and how my father broke it. “I guess the funny thing is I still remember looking at the rod and not feeling anything. Maybe you’re right. I probably don’t even show or feel love toward myself. Because of my mother’s drinking and death, maybe I just don’t feel I’m worth being loved?”
“Ian, I too have a secret. Remember I told you when my brother contracted tuberculosis my mother took him to Arizona and stayed with him for about five months—well what I didn’t tell you is that there were times I almost wished my brother passed on so that my mother would come back to me and love me. I knew my feelings were wrong, but I couldn’t always stop them. Then when my father, not my brother, died, a part of me blamed myself, as if his death was retribution for my bad thoughts. Maybe that’s why I eventually became a nurse, so I could wash my dark stain away.”
“And now, do you still blame yourself?”
&n
bsp; “Sometimes I still don’t know.” Sarah hugged me. “Ian, we’re both worth loving. To me you’re a wonderful man. Look at all the good you do: teach, write, raise sons. If your mother was alive she’d be so proud of you. We can’t let things we didn’t cause define us.”
“Like the crazy world and all its wars? Maybe you’re right. Maybe I can’t make peace with the world because I can’t make peace with myself.” I looked into Sarah’s blue eyes. “Sarah, I’m sorry for not being everything you, Ross, Everett and even I want me to be, but I am going to try to turn over a new leaf. In the meantime, I want you to know how much I love you and how I always will.”
The next day I bought Ross an expensive baseball glove. I gave it to him and said, “I want you to know, even though I haven’t always showed it, I love you and feel blessed you are my son.”
Ross put on the glove, pounded the pocket and said, “Has something got into you, Dad?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Thanks. Just because you bought Everett a fly rod you didn’t have to—Dad, I’m the one who chose not to be an angler. It must be so hard for Everett, always hearing about his older brother, always being expected to be as good an athlete.”
“Maybe he is as good as you, just in different things. He can really cast and fish.”
I walked into Everett’s room. He was doing his homework. “Everett, I’m so impressed by how quickly you’ve become an angler. Sometimes, though, I worry.”
“About what, Dad?”
“That you’re doing it for me.”
“For you?”
“Yes. You see, me and your mother had a talk, and, and maybe I haven’t always shown it, but I want you to know how much I love you, and that I wouldn’t love you any less if you didn’t fish.”
“But I love to fish, and I love you too.”
“Even if I don’t compete against Jake?”
“Yes, but I still think you can beat him.”
“Everett, there’s so much more to life than casting a fly farther than one hundred twenty feet.”
“I want to show you something, Dad.” Everett opened his desk drawer and took out a blue-covered notebook. The notebook, he showed me, was his fly-fishing diary. Every time he had caught a trout, he kept a record of the fly, the time of day, the length and width of the leader, and the temperature, clarity, depth and structure of the water. Everett, in my eyes, had turned into a junior George M. L. La Branche; and frankly, Sarah and I were concerned. Besides fishing and reading, Everett didn’t have interests. Just as troubling, he didn’t have real friends.
I hope he doesn’t end up a loner, like Theodore Gordon, I thought. It would be better if he played baseball and joined teams.
I bought him a baseball glove and offered to teach him some of the techniques my father had taught me. Everett, however, put the glove down without even trying it on. He told me he wasn’t interested in baseball.
Later, I told Sarah, “Maybe we shouldn’t worry so much. Maybe Everett just wants, in his own way, to be a star, like Ross. Maybe he’ll grow out of it. Remember I told you I once wanted to be a fly-casting star? For now I think we have no choice but to let Everett be who he wants to be.”
“I hope you’re right.”
To me, what was also troubling about Everett was his new business: catching and selling trout, often to anglers drinking in the Antrim Lodge.
One day I suggested, “Everett, if you need money for a new rod, why don’t you just ask me?”
“I want my own money.”
“But a lot of these anglers you’re selling fish to just want to pretend they caught them. Don’t you think those trout want to live?”
“What about all the baby fish and the insects the trout eat? Don’t they too want to live? Fish are here for us to eat.”
Did I have a choice other than to accept that Everett sold fish?
I didn’t think so.
With his profits, Everett bought an F. E. Thomas fly rod and a fly-tying vise.
April 1938: Snow covered the banks of the Beaverkill. Everett, however, insisted on fishing. We put on heavy long johns and wool jackets. Twenty minutes later we waded into our secret pool.
“You’re on my land!” someone yelled.
The Hermit stood on the bank.
I asked, “Since when?”
“Two weeks ago.”
“You haven’t posted signs.”
“I will.”
“Until you do, the law says we can fish. Besides, do you own both sides of the river?”
“I don’t have to.”
“The law says you do.”
He stepped toward me and then rested his foot on a big rock. His eyes beamed hate. “Are you a lawyer?”
“Maybe.” Afraid the Hermit would pick up and throw the rock, I stepped in front of Everett.
“I’m going to get something to eat. When I come back, don’t be here.” The Hermit marched away.
“My father’s right!” Everett yelled. “You don’t scare us.”
“Everett, be quiet.”
“He has no right telling us not to fish here.”
“We’d better leave.”
“No!”
“Everett, we may be right, but it isn’t worth fighting a crazy person over a fishing spot.”
“It is!”
“Sometimes it’s better to avoid fights. I can’t risk you getting hurt. We have miles of other water to fish.”
Everett folded his arms. I grabbed his hand and pulled him to the bank.
“I don’t want to fish anymore!” Everett yelled, wiping tears away from his cheek.
“Okay.”
As I drove home Everett didn’t say a word.
Have I again acted like a coward by leaving the creek so quickly? I wondered. But as a father, I had to protect Everett. Yes, I shouldn’t feel ashamed, even though I was a little scared.
I drove into our driveway and said. “One day you’ll understand why I decided to leave the creek.”
Without looking at me, he jumped out of the car and ran up to his room.
From then on I sensed Everett saw me in a different light. Often I wondered if I could have handled the confrontation differently with the Hermit. Though I didn’t see how, I continued to blame myself and to hope Everett would forget the confrontation. You see, I yearned for Everett to see me differently. So I came up with a plan: Secretly, I practiced the Double Haul, hoping to master it and to then compete against Jake Bender. But every time I moved my line hand up and gave back line, the line sagged and the loops widened.
Finally, a week before the fly-casting tournament, I made a discovery: If I moved my line hand up as I shot line on my forward cast, the line didn’t sag. My loops didn’t widen. Then I got an idea: what if I shot line after my back cast?
I tried, but I couldn’t move my line hand and simultaneously lower my forearm to 1 o’clock and break my wrist back. Executing three techniques at once was just too much for me.
I decided not to compete against Jake Bender, and I turned from trying to master the Double Haul to worrying about Adolf Hitler and the fate of the world.