Hostages to Fortune (5 page)

The season that Tony did it, the club's determination to catch the fish ceased to be sporadic and halfhearted and became a mania, a fixation. Even the sacrosanct and inviolable rule, their First Commandment,
THOU SHALT FISH WITH ARTIFICIAL FLY AND WITH ARTIFICIAL FLY ONLY
, carved upon their brains as though in stone, was waived.

“Spinning rods and lures are permissible,” a heresy theretofore unspeakable within those walls, one punishable by expulsion without even a hearing, was now openly urged by one and all. “Minnows! Mice! Frogs! Night crawlers!” they clamored, shuddering, and their voices rising in shock at themselves. “Anything to get him out of there!”

In reality the fish was doing no more depredation than they had winked at for years and they knew it. The flurry to catch him came about because he was getting old, this season might be his last, and being sportsmen, they wanted not to see him go to waste by dying a natural death and thereby furnishing sport to nobody.

One Sunday afternoon in August—the least likely month of the season as the hour was the least likely of the day—as members were packing their cars for the drive home, Tony, himself ready to go and only waiting for their wives, using an unsuitably light rod and a leader with the finest of tippets, both revelatory of how unprepared he was for what happened, made an idle cast and watched the fish float up from the depths of the pool, growing bigger by the moment, to inspect his offering as he had done countless times before only to spurn it and sink from sight again. The water that windless day was low, clear, and still, enabling the fish to detect even more easily the deception being practiced upon him, and the fly was one with which he was so wearily familiar that to present it to him again was nothing less than an insult. Known after its inventor as the Wulff, it had been a great killer, adopted by anglers everywhere, cast upon the world's every accessible inch of trout water, and there was scarcely a fish living that had not fallen for it, once. A close imitation of nothing in nature, it looked more like a moth than anything else. Unlike mayflies, moths make motions on the water, and it was this that prompted Tony that day to try giving his fly the tiny twitch, as though it were about to take flight, which provoked the fish into taking it before it should get away.

Instead of raising his rod and rousing the fish's resistance, Tony promptly lowered it. To do that took a denial of the angler's every instinct, but by doing it the pressure and the panic were taken off the fish. But for a prick lingering somewhere inside his mouth he could hardly have known that he was still hooked. So as to be less visible and thus less alarming to the fish, Tony sank slowly to his knees, come what might to his white flannel trousers. On this signal, as though they were his congregation and he their priest, every member of the audience already beginning to gather promptly knelt. In this prayerful posture was the contest fought and witnessed to its finish.

And they were as hushed and reverent as though silently at prayer. None had the presumption to offer advice. They were there to observe a master, or rather, a match between two masters: the fish, the idol of their common cult, and the man performing, the celebrant of the rite that bound them together.

But although Tony's was the textbook treatment of a fish that size, and although it sometimes worked by sapping the strength of the fish so insidiously he never knew it until too late, he was tied now to one that seemed to have read the book, one not to be finessed and finagled that way. This fish suspected that a sneaky attempt was being made to abridge his freedom, sensed that he had something foreign embedded in his palate, and was determined to rid himself of it instanter. Maybe he even knew he had drawn a gallery and felt called upon to show his mettle.

He was a brown trout, one of that breed that takes to the air to fight its battles, unlike the brookie which burrows when hooked. Now with first a bulge then with a burst of spray he broke the surface and rose out of water to his full length like a performing porpoise leaping for a reward. Luck was with Tony that day. Four times the fish showed himself in all his spotted splendor, in his multicolored coat of mail, threshing on air, and still the hook held. Again and again he dove to the depths and there stubbornly sulked, and still the leader withstood the strain. He gained the sanctuary of a sunken log only to find when he confidently quit it a quarter of an hour later that he was still in tow. For one who had had so little practice in them he knew all the tricks and he tried them every one. And he never surrendered. When he was netted at last and laid on the grass he needed no coup de grâce. He was dying. He could not have been revived and released even if that had been the common will, as well it might have been, of those who now rose stiffly from their knees and gathered around and in respectful silence looked down at him with bowed heads.

What they had witnessed was a demonstration of angling virtuosity, yet none of them but had tried for the fish themselves, many with the very same fly, and as Tony was the first to admit, his taking it that day had been pure luck. Forgetting what they above all should have kept always uppermost in mind, that without luck no fish is ever landed, they agreed. They were used to saying that about Tony. He was born lucky and he had had the best life had to offer. Perhaps that was why, when his luck changed, he had been unprepared for it, or been unwilling to settle for anything less than life's best.

Fishing was in Tony Thayer's blood. His town, the old town of Hudson, New York, had been home port for his great-grandfather's fleet of whaling ships. That Thayer, Jason, had been among the last of the Nantucket whalers to leave the island for Hudson. The first and second detachments had come after the Revolution and the War of 1812 in search of a port sufficiently far inland to be safe from the marauding of the British. The later ones followed those because the need for ever-longer voyages in search of whales had made the ships of that day too big for Nantucket's little harbor.

When kerosene for illumination sent whaling into decline Jason Thayer converted his whaling fleet into refrigerator ships. What they carried was ice itself. During that era, the latter part of the nineteenth century, the cutting of ice was a major industry on the Hudson River. Jason Thayer insulated his ships' hulls with sawdust, a by-product of the Catskill Mountains logging industry, and such a thorough good job he did of it that months after being packed, after rounding the Cape and coming through the heat of the South Pacific and the Indian Ocean, they arrived in Calcutta or Bombay with better than half their cargo still in solid state. There where ice was a wonder, a miracle, hot thirsty maharajahs paid for it with rubies, emeralds, gold, silks. Riverside, the country house Jason Thayer built for himself on a promontory where, from the captain's walk on the roof, he could tally his outgoing and incoming ships, contained the finest private collection in the country of East Indian arts and artifacts. In the portrait of him that hung over the dining room mantelpiece, one of the few ever done by his friend and neighbor, the celebrated landscape painter Frederick Church, Jason Thayer looked genteelly piratical.

Lucky the man who had a spot of earth dear to him, that sustained and supported him as it did the primeval oaks rooted in the soil of Tony Thayer's ancestral acres. Tony himself was a product of the river as surely as was one of its shad.

The river dominated life along it, and helped somewhat to democratize that life. Without it the gulf between the haves and the have-nots there would have been as deep as the river was wide. Water seeks its own level and there all men, rich and poor alike, must seek it. Hudson river rats found one another out across the barriers of caste and class, and the boy from beside the tracks who poled the sports in their punts through the windings of Tivoli's South Bay in quest of ducks, who knew which of the railway trestles to fish from for striped bass, who knew how to pickle and to smoke the ale-wives that, on their spring spawning run, paved from bank to bank the river's tributaries, grew up to hobnob with the heirs of Astors, Livingstons, Van Rensellaers, and Thayers.

You can never ascend the same river twice, we are told; the Hudson, being tidal (“the river that flows both ways,” the Indian name for it meant) was even more changeable than most. For those who lived along its banks its tides were an additional clock, regulating their activities from early childhood on. Riverbank children found their way down to the water with an instinct like ducklings. Christy Thayer was given a boat of her own almost as soon as she was trusted out of sight. She taught herself to sail in the bay, to run and when necessary to repair an outboard motor; only when the river was iced over was she to be seen out of a flotation vest, and all summer long she was as brown as toast. The river's seasons dictated its people's pastimes. In spring, when the ice broke up and floes of it drifted down and out to sea and left it open once more and the flights of wildfowl used it as their flyway, you went fishing. In summer there was boating and picnicking along its banks and on its islands. As the days began to shorten you built a duckblind to replace the one that had been broken up and swept away in the spring thaw. Then when, in the morning before the sun had touched it, there was rime at the water's edge and thistledown from pollinating cattails like a hatch of insects on the surface, you punted in the shallows for snipe. When the season opened in late October you shot the ducks that had summered there, then wintry weather up north sent them south sometimes as thick as bees in swarm and long undulant ribbons of geese sounded like a pack of slow-footed hunting hounds high overhead. Then the river congealed and looked and sounded underfoot like steel and there were iceboat races on the bays and at night skating parties around big bonfires on the ice.

The river instilled in its people not only a second clock and a calendar but also a compass. It compelled the eye. It was the river you looked out on the first thing in the morning, and finding it there was your reassurance that you were too. It was toward the river that on a summer evening with drink in hand you strolled out on the lawn to watch the sun sink in fire behind the cobalt and cerulean Catskills.

To Tony his river and its bounty was the greatest gift within his giving. He was generous with it, expecting in return only that it be appreciated and respected. He responded to people in a measure by their response to it. For you to become an intimate part of his life the river had to become a part of yours. Of his best friend's it had long since.

It was in May when the herring made their run upstream to spawn in their native tributaries that the Hudson reawoke. In this annual rite honorary river rat Ben Curtis was an eager, an impatient participant. The sign to watch for was the blossoming of the shadblow. On a day soon after this event would come a call from Tony announcing that the herring were in. He would drop whatever he was doing and point himself northward. Cathy and Anthony came along, for so prodigious was the catch, and such the quantity of work it entailed, that all hands were needed. Besides, it was fun for all; they would not have missed out on it. It was spawning time for the Hudson's shad too, and knowing that the river was pulsating with fish in their headlong millions bound for their orgiastic rendezvous, he could feel mount in him as he drove alongside it an anticipation akin to theirs.

Like subway riders headed home at the evening rush hour the herring sped upriver and surfaced at their separate stations, their spawning grounds, creeks with old Dutch names like the Kinderhook, the Claverack, and the Roeliff-Jansenkill. To get over the rapids in which the creek, whichever it was, ended, they needed a full tide in the river. Tony knew the river's tides to the hour every day. It would be rising when their party seated themselves among the plastic pails and scap nets and rubber boots in the bed of the old pickup truck and rattled off, and it would be at the full when they arrived.

The blossoms of the valley's many orchards were hardly more numerous than the herring. From near and far people came not to catch them but merely to marvel at the sight. Even after years of experience of it you were still awed by this example of nature's prodigality. For the first few minutes after getting down the bank with all their gear they too stood and watched. No fear that the families already there, the father hauling up a full net with every dip of it, would leave an insufficiency for you and yours.

All across the creek's broad mouth, from their party's vantage point all the way down to the river and for a hundred yards upstream to the first impassable falls, the surface bristled with fishes' fins. Beneath these were more layers like stacks of coins. They packed themselves in so closely they rubbed scales off one another. The fins were aquiver as the fish struggled in the current and were thrust onward by those behind them and as the spawning urge wrought them to a frenzy. The water was shallow and clear and the throngs of fish were a silvery and scintillant stream like the stars of the Milky Way. Here, there, and everywhere, around some female running ripe, a swirl of bucks made the water boil. Then, before the one found the other and the two sank together to the bottom, the mingling milt and roe turned the water milky.

Excitement succeeded wonder and while Tony and he were still rigging the nets Anthony and Christy were already in hip boots and in the water catching fish with their bare hands and tossing them onto the bank.

Unchanged since antiquity, a scap net was simply a stout pole some ten feet long with four staves hanging from it to which was attached a square net of fine mesh six feet long to the side. On days when the fishing was slow the fisherman threaded a line through the nose of a herring and with it decoyed others over his sunken net. That fish was his “stoolie.” No need of a stoolie on good days. Tony and he waded into the water, dipped their nets, waited a couple of minutes, and it was all they could do to hoist and swing them ashore to be emptied. A hundred herring bellied the net, strained its staves. Others were making similar catches and the bank glittered with threshing mounds of silver.