Thomas McGuane: The Longest Silence

Many wonderful things happened during my endless summers with my grandmother, aunts, and uncles in Fall River, but for present purposes, I am thinking only of fishing. Those original images are still so burning that I struggle to find a proper syntax for them. In the first, my father arrived and took me up to see some shirttail cousins up in Townsend. A little brook passed through their backyard and, lying on my stomach, I could look into one of its pools and see tiny brook trout swimming. It was something close to the ecstasy I felt when I held my ear against the slots of the toaster and heard a supernal music from heaven ringing through the toaster springs. The brook trout were water angels and part of the first America, the one owned by the Indians, whose music I’d listened to in the toaster. I had seen the old Indian trails, their burial mounds and the graves of settlers killed in the French and Indian wars. For some reason, I understood the brook trout had belonged to the paradise the Indians had fought to keep. I knew King Phillip — or Metacomet, as the Indians called him — had eaten them.

All this seemed to be part of a lost world, like the world I was losing as my father became more absorbed in his work. We had good times together only when fish were present, and those brook trout are the first memories. It was casually easy for us to get along fishing; the rest was a bomb. I think of the fathers-and-sons day at his athletic club with particular loathing, as it was an annual ordeal. Silver dollars were hurled into the swimming pool for the boys to vie for. Each father stood by the pool, gazing at the writhing young divers and waiting for his silver-laden son to surface. Rarely coming up with a coin, I was conscious of appearing to be less than an altogether hale boy and hardly worth bringing to this generational fête, with its ventriloquists and Irish tenors or more usually, the maniacal Eddie Peabody on the banjo. All of this was an aspect of the big dust we were meant to make in our mid-American boom town where sport of the most refined sort quickly sank into alcoholic mayhem. Steaks in the backyard, pill-popping housewives, and golf were the order of the day, and many youngsters sought to get their fathers away somewhere in search of a fish. Most of our fathers were just off the farm or out of small towns and heading vertically upward into a new world. We didn’t want them to go and we didn’t want to go with them.

I thought that if I devised a way to free my father from his rigorous job, we could fish more. I saw an ad for a Hart, Shaffner and Marx suit that said it was for the man who wanted to look like he would make ten thousand a year before he was thirty. (Remember, this was many years ago.) I told my father that he ought to make ten thousand a year, then ten thousand a year in eleven months, then ten thousand a year in ten months and so on, and with this properly earned free time, he and I would go fishing together more often. “With an attitude like that,” my father boomed, “you’d never make ten thousand a year in the first place.”

None of this mattered in Massachusetts. Across Brownell Street from my grandmother, between Main and Almy, lived Jimmy McDermott, an elegant Irish bachelor and his spinster sister, Alice. They seemed very sophisticated and witty, especially compared to their immediate neighbors, the Sullivans, who were unreconstructed Irish, with a scowling mother in a black shawl and an impenetrable brogue. Jimmy McDermott took me fishing and bought me my first reel, a beautiful Penn Senator surf-casting reel whose black density seemed to weigh coolly in my hands. Jimmy McDermott detected that I needed someone to take me fishing.

He thought it was crazy for a boy who loved to fish to be hanging around Brownell Street in Fall River in August, so he packed a lunch and we went fishing for tautog along some small and lonely beach with its granite outcroppings and sunshot salty fog and tidal aromas. We caught several fish on the fierce green crabs we used for bait and I heard about several more, because Jimmy was the sort of person who made sure at such a sacramental moment as angling that the full timbre of the thing must be appreciated by the recounting of such holy incidents in time, of striped bass and flounders, the gloomy conger eel who filled three skillets with grease or the rich sports in the old days who baited their bass rigs with small lobsters. A Portuguese family picnicked on the nearby strand, and in my somewhat more global view today I think of us amusing ourselves on that mare nostrum , the Atlantic Ocean, casting our hopes on those ancestral waters toward Ireland, the Azores, toward the Old World. The sea heaved up around our rocks, pulling a white train of foam from mid-ocean along with its mysteries of distance and language, drownings, caravels, unwitnessed thousand-foot thunderheads, phosphorous and fish by the square mile.

IT IS A GREAT TRIUMPH over something — biology, maybe, or whatever part of modern history has prolonged adolescence to the threshold of senility — for a father to view his son without skepticism. I have not quite achieved this state but at least have identified the problem. Therefore, when I stood at the airport in Cancún and watched my frequently carefree son emerge with several disintegrating carry-on bags and his shirt hanging out of his pants, I did not take this altogether as a sign of complete disorganization.

When we hugged, because he’s so much stronger, he rather knocked the wind out of me. And when we made our way to the small aircraft that would take us to Ascension Bay, I asked if he had practiced his casting. “Once,” he said.

“These aren’t trout,” I said. “A thirty-foot cast doesn’t get it.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he smiled. “I don’t expect to have any problem with bonefish.”

“How can you say that?” I asked. “You’ve never seen one before, you don’t know how tough they can be.” He smiled again, knowing exactly how to drive me crazy.

We had a comfortable, really wonderful cottage with cool concrete walls and a roof of thatched monkey palm. Birds were everywhere and the blue Caribbean breakers rose high enough that you could look right through them, then fell. Just past the line of breakers, the coral garden seemed like a submerged quilt.

Thomas was slow in getting ready to fish. He was bent over the sink, doing something and taking too long about it. I said we ought to hurry up and head for the boat. I said it twice and he straightened up from the sink holding a pale green scorpion he had just extracted from the drain. “In case you were thinking of brushing your teeth,” he said, and grabbed his rod.

Our guide was a Maya Indian named Pedro, a solid fifty-year-old of easygoing authority. I thought of a Little Compton voice of yester-year—“We’ve been here for generations”—Pedro’s family had been on the shores of this bay since thousands of years before Christ. As Pedro was a mildly intolerant man, all business, one soon learned not to pester him with trifles. I did ask if he had ever visited the United States.

“I’ve never been to Mexico,” he said coolly.

Walking to the boat, I was excited to see a lineated woodpecker who loves to eat Aztec ants from their home in the hollow pumpwood tree. A brave soul, he defends his nest against toucans. Ruddy ground doves scattered along our trail and we saw the splendid chacalaca on the edge of the jungle, noisy as a chicken in flight. When we set out in the skiff, mangrove swallows scattered across the narrow channels. My son explained to me that some birds had taken to flying upside down over New York City because “there was nothing worth shitting on.” Birds have much to tell us.

Pedro ran the skiff through the shallow water wilderness with the air he seemed to bring to everything, an absence of ambiguity. There was no scanning the horizon or searching for signs. If a tremulous ridge of tidal movement betrayed a shoal in our path, Pedro adjusted his angle of travel without ever looking in the direction of the hazard.