Thomas McGuane: The Longest Silence

Pomp and his wife lived near Kaleva, Michigan, which is one of the numerous Finnish communities in the state. They had a cabin overlooking Bear Creek on a small piece of ground next to a gradually approaching gravel pit, and they lived a through-the-looking-glass life, to which we all tried to annex ourselves.

My wife had a better line on the situation than I. She had summered in a jungle hammock with her grandparents, helped bake pies for the raccoons, been accidentally locked in the sauna of the neighbor’s farm, now abandoned, with nothing inside but a moth-eaten Korean War infantry uniform. Moreover, she could report to me the kind of trout fishing Pomp was capable of — upstream bait-fishing, the deadliest in the right hands. He had great hands. Not only that, he belonged to the category of sportsmen who will stop at nothing.

Bear Creek ran through a large corrugated culvert under a country road. Pomp had located a very large trout living there, a spotted brute that finned forward in the evening to feed in the pool at the upstream end of the culvert. How he knew about that trout I can’t say, but for sure he knew it by indirection. He had great instincts about trout, much envied by the locals. Pomp was from farther south in Michigan, and among the old-timers there was a competition over who was from farther north than who. Now it has become a perfect frenzy as the footloose Michigander wages the war of roots with fellow cottage builders.

Anyway, he crept up and hooked the thing and quickly discovered it was bigger than he expected. The trout fought its way down the culvert. At the far end it would be a lost cause, the line cut through by the culvert itself. I was a fly fisherman, new to Pomp’s world, when I first heard this story, and I confess that I reached this point in the narrative without beginning to see how I would have landed the fish. But Pomp had a solution.

He had his wife lie across the far end of the culvert. He fought the fish to a standstill inside the pipe and landed it. As I say, this was early in our experience together, and the reader will remember that it was his opinion that I fished with flies in order to keep from touching worms.

Heretofore, I had hoped to outfish him in our already burgeoning, if covert, competition. But his emplacement of his wife at the far end of the culvert in order to beat that trout showed me what I was up against.

And in fact, as a bit of pleasant foreshortening, I ought to say that he consistently outfished me all along, right through the year of his death, the news of which came by telephone, as usual, in some pointless city.

I had accumulated some ways of taking trout above and below the surface. We would start at dawn with shots of bourbon from the refrigerator, cold to take away its edge in the morning. Next, trout, potatoes and eggs for breakfast, during which Pomp would describe to me and to my fly-fishing brother-in-law, Dan Crockett, the hopelessness of our plight and the cleanliness of worms. It has been several decades since Dan and I contemplated those words. This morning, after thousands of trout have fallen to his rod, Dan died of cancer.

Then on into the day, fishing, principally, the Betsey, the Bear, and the Little Manistee rivers. Usually, we ended on the Bear, below the cabin, and it was then, during the evening hatch, that I hoped to even my morbidly reduced score.

The day I’m thinking of was in August, when the trout were down deep where only Pomp could reason with them. I dutifully cast my flies up into the brilliant light hour after hour and had, for my pains, a few small fish. Pomp had a lot more. And his were bigger, having sent their smaller, more gullible friends to the surface for my flies.

But by late afternoon, summer rain clouds had begun to build higher and blacker, and finally startling cracks of thunder commenced. We were scattered along the banks of the Bear, and as the storm built, I knew Pomp would head for the cabin. I started that way, too, but as I passed the lower bridge pool, trout were rising everywhere. I stopped to make a cast and promptly caught one. By the time I’d landed it, the trees were bowing and surging, and casting was simply a question of rolling the line downwind onto the pool. The lightning was literally blasting into the forest, and I was suddenly cold from the wind-driven rain. But the trout were rising with still more intensity.

When I was a child, I heard that a man was killed by lightning that ran down the drainspout of a bus station. Ever since then, lightning has had a primordial power to scare me. I kept casting, struck, misstruck, and landed trout, while the electric demon raced around those Michigan woods.

I knew Pomp was up in the cabin. Probably had a cigar and was watching the water stream from the corner of the roof. Something was likely baking in the kitchen. But I meant to hang in there until I limited out. Well, I didn’t. The storm stopped abruptly and the universe was full of ozone and new light and I was ready for the cabin.

Outside the cabin, there was a wooden table next to a continuously flowing well where we cleaned our trout. The overflow of the well ran down the hill to the Bear, and when we cleaned the trout, we chucked the insides down the hill for the raccoons. I laid my trout out on the table and went in to get Pomp.

Pomp came out and said, “What do you know about that!”

I’M FISHING THROUGH thirty years of unreliable memory, to a meandering trip through southern Ireland in a Morris Minor of ancient vintage. I have a few changes of clothes, a rubberized Irish raincoat; and the rest is my fishing gear. I have accepted driving on the other side of the road and shifting with my left hand, the delicate hum of the little motor, the alarming Third World driving habits of the locals.

I remember standing on the pilings at the mouth of the Galway river casting Blue Zulus for “white trout,” the extremely strong little sea trout which are part of Ireland’s fame. I also remember hanging over the old bridge in Galway City to watch the big, bright Atlantic salmon resting in the middle of town. I remember meeting and being taken in by a well-to-do American family who had purchased a beautiful Georgian home on the Blackwater river. An Irish girl built me a peat fire in the morning and told me that it was never necessary to eat anything but potatoes. I was comfortable and happy until I saw that my role would be to entertain the family’s teenage son, a whining nitwit. I drove him around the countryside in the Morris and gave him casting lessons. Almost old enough to join the army, he sniveled on about “Mummy” until the arrangement lost all value. The Blackwater River itself was hedged in by endless rules and the Americans imitating the Anglo-Irish gentry were avid to obey what they took to be an ancient order. These were the Kennedy years and when JFK passed over a garden party in the compound where I stayed, ruffling aristocratic hairs with his helicopter, no one looked up.

Walking to the Blackwater one day, I met a local man home on furlough from his duties with a NATO peacekeeping force in the Middle East. He had a young pointer bitch with him, a lithe, speckled ballerina of a bird dog. While we talked, she soothed her impatience by leaping back and forth across a little brook, glancing anxiously at her owner, who had ruined her jaunt by talking to this American. Something about the sight of that beautiful and energetic dog made me anxious to leave my comforts, my peat fire, and my unspoken duties to the nitwit. Discomfort set in and I was once again on my way in the little Morris, clothes and the tools of my passion in back. I remember spotting the young puke cuddling Mummy in the doorway. Neither of them waved and I was aware of having made a bad impression. It was opportunism gone sour.