Thomas McGuane: The Longest Silence

When we emerged completely from the congestion of cays, remarkably similar bands of pale blue, of sky and sea, stretched before us at a sublime scale, white tropical clouds reaching upward to heavenly elevations. A scattering of small islands lay in the distance.

I was still thinking of Pedro’s answer about never having been to Mexico. Quintana Roo was his country. In my minimal Spanish, I decided to pose a peculiar question. “Pedro, to us this is an extraordinary place, a beautiful place. But you have never been anywhere else. My question is this: Do you realize and appreciate that you live in one of the world’s great places?” He pulled his head back and, pursing his lips to state the obvious, said in an impassioned growl, “Sí, señor!”

Thomas was in the bow of the boat, line stripped out, and Pedro was poling along a muddy bank near the mangroves. A squadron of bonefish had come out of the light, our blind side, and flushed in a starburst of wakes. It wasn’t really a shot, so Thomas remained in the bow, ready. After a while, I felt Pedro kick the stem of the bow out to position him and declare, “macabi” —bonefish — in his quiet but insistent way that made it clear he expected no screw-ups. We stared hard, testing Pedro’s patience, then made out the bonefish about seventy feet away. He was feeding slowly, his back out of water at times and his tail glittering when he swirled deliberately in the shallows to feed. The fish came almost to a stop, faced right, then moved steadily but imperceptibly forward. The bonefish seemed to be staring at the skiff.

This seemed like a tough prospect: the water was much too thin, the fish insufficiently occupied; and since he was alone, his green-and-silver shape all too clear, I couldn’t imagine the bonefish would tolerate the slightest imperfection of technique.

Thomas was false-casting hard. Faced with such a good fish, his intensity was palpable throughout the boat. I told him he’d only get one shot at this fish, treading the parental thin line of reminding him of the present importance without exaggerating its difficulty. He released the cast. His loop reached out straight, turned over, and the fly fell about four inches in front of the bonefish.

The fish didn’t spook. The fly sank to the bottom. Thomas moved the fly very slightly. The bonefish moved forward over it. I looked up and the bend of the rod extended all the way into the cork handle. The fish burned off through the mangrove shoots which bowed and sprang up obediently. When the fish headed out across the flat, Thomas turned to look at me over his shoulder and give me what I took to be a slightly superior grin. A short time later he boated the fish.

We were actually fishing in the middle of the Sian Ka’an biosphere reserve, over a million acres of the coast of Quintana Roo, savannas, lagoons, and seasonally flooded forest. Our simple camp met the Mexican requirement of integrating human use while preserving the complex and delicate ecosystem whose uniqueness derives not only from the phenomenon of a tropic sea inundating a vast limestone shelf, but from long human history. Every walk that Thomas and I took brought us past earthen mounds that covered Maya structures. One superb small temple has been excavated and its inspired siting caused us, hunched under its low ceilings, gazing out on the blue sea with bones and pottery at our feet, to fall silent for a good while.

Since I have been unsuccessful in bringing any formality to the job of parenting, I wondered about the matter of generations, and whether or not this concept added much to the sense of cherished companionship I had with my son. And I thought of the vast timescape implied by our immediate situation and the words of the leader of the French Huguenots when the terrible Menendez led his band of followers into a hollow in the dunes to slaughter them. “In the eyes of God,” said the Huguenot, “what difference is twenty years, more or less?”

As we wandered through the barracks of an abandoned copra plantation, I saw a carved canoe paddle leaning against a wall — the kind of ancient design used to propel dugout canoes but probably the backup for an Evinrude. Inside, the walls were decorated with striking graffiti, ankle-grabbing stick ladies subjected to rear entry and the prodigious members of grinning stick hooligans, complete with rakish brimmed hats and cigarettes. There you have it.

MY ANXIETY about Thomas’s bonefishing disappeared. He did just fine. Less obsessive about fishing than I am, he had to be harassed into organizing his tackle, showing up at the skiff on time, and fishing instead of crawling around the mangroves to see what was living in there. We began to catch plenty of bonefish in a variety of situations: schooling fish in deep water, generally small, easy prey; small bunches lined up along the edge of a flat, waiting for the tide to come in and help them over; singles and small bunches, tailing and feeding, on the inside flats. Several times I looked up and saw Thomas at a distance, his rod deeply bowed and his fly line shearing an arc toward deeper water. We were happy workers on a big bonefish farm.

“Pedro, are there many permit, unas palomettas ?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Have you had many caught from your skiff?”

“No one catches many palomettas .”

“How many?”

“Maybe six this year.”

Pedro stared in the direction he was poling, getting remarkable progress from the short hardwood crook with which he pushed us along. Florida guides with their graphite eighteen-footers would refuse to leave the dock with an item like this. Pedro had a faint smirk on his face, as though reading my thoughts; more likely he was feeling that the hopelessness of predictably catching a permit was his own secret. The look challenged you to try, but declined to subdue skepticism.

I feel, when searching for permit, as a bird dog must when the unsearched country ahead turns into a binary universe of sign and absence of sign. Now, I certainly couldn’t expect my son to feel the same way; here in the Sian Ka’an his attention was trained on all the wonders around us, the sea creatures scooting out in front of the skiff in response to Pedro’s skillful poling, the spectacular flying squid that sailed across our bow, the cacophonous waterfowl that addressed our passage from the secrecy of the mangroves, the superb aerobatics of frigate birds trying to rob royal terns of their catch. Graciously, Thomas offered me the first cast.

The little bay had a bottom too soft for wading. We were at a relatively low tide and the hermit crabs could be seen clinging to the exposed mangrove roots. A reddish egret made its way along the verge of thin water, head forward, legs back, then legs forward, head back until the sudden release, invisible in its speed, and the little silver fish wriggling crossways in its bill.

“Palometta,” Pedro said, and we looked back to see which way his phenomenal eyes were directed. A school of permit was coming onto the sandbar that edged the flat. Once noticed, the dark shape of the school seemed busy and its underwater presence was frequently enlarged as the angular shapes of fins and tails pierced the surface. I checked to see if I was standing on my line, then tried to estimate again how much of it I had stripped out. I held the crab fly by the hook between my left thumb and forefinger and checked the loop of line. Now trailing alongside the boat, that would be my first false-cast. We were closing the distance fast and the permit were far clearer than they had been moments before. In fact, if they hadn’t been so busy scouring around the bottom and competing with one another, they could have seen us right now. The skiff ground to a halt in the sand. Pedro said that I was going to have to wade to these fish. Well, that was fine, but the few permit I have ever hooked wading had spooled me while I stood and watched them go. Furthermore, the freshwater reel I was using had lots of backing but no drag. That I’d picked it for the sporting enhancement it provided now seemed plain silly.