Lines on the Water (2 page)

When we lived in the centre of town, we might have been described as city dwellers. But here we had different friends, far more ambitious and competent woods travellers. We were closer to the main Miramichi River. We would jump ice floes
in the spring, with kitchen forks tied to sticks, spearing the tommie cod under the ice, as the sun melted these floes beneath our feet. Or we would wait along the side of the bank and throw hooks baited with carpet lint at the smelts that ran close to shore.

I grew up with poor boys who knew when the smelt run was on, and when the tommie cod came, because much more than me, they needed these things for their families to eat. We were wasteful—they were not. To them, fishing, and their fathers’ hunting, had a whole different perspective. Some I grew up with ate more deer meat than beef, and relied upon it. And when they went fishing, it was less a sport than part of their diets. I remember a child who fell off an ice floe and started crying, not because he fell in, but because he’d lost the tommie cod he had promised his mom he would bring home.

As we started off to fish in June, the year I was eight, I did not know that out in that great river was the next generation of salmon moving up. They travelled in waves and waves of fish—perhaps seven to ten feet under the water and no more then fifty or sixty yards from the shore—absolutely unconcerned with me, or the fact that I would be fishing their descendants in the years to come; that they were the ancestors of fish I would some day see rise for my fly on the Renous or Little Souwest; that they were the progeny of fish that had moved up
these rivers in the time of Caesar and Hannibal—the glacier fish (as David Carroll calls them), the salmon.

By late May to late June we would be fishing in the cool brooks and streams beyond town. We would sometimes jump a freight train leaving the Newcastle station, and ride it about a mile, as far as the Mill Cove turn.

I was with my brother and two of our friends, one who had the nomenclature Killer, and that morning we had walked down to the Mill Cove brook past the ancient crooked bridge, past the turn where the headless nun (a seventeenth-century French nun) would sometimes appear to unsuspecting lovers (almost always nearing the moment of climax) to ask them if they would be so kind as to help her find her head, which was chopped off by the Micmac, so that she could go back to France and rest in peace.

We passed the Cove, splendid in the early sunshine, where a small boy we knew had drowned the year before, in a neat little shirt and tie he had worn for a Sunday outing—when they found him, there were still sinkers and hooks in his shirt pocket. Then crossing the bridge, we turned to our left and went up the rocky brook.

The brooks we fished always had the same make-up. They were two to three feet deep, maybe four in the hidden pools,
and sometimes no more than five to eight feet wide. They meandered and babbled through a green windy valley towards the great Miramichi, overgrown with alders and tangled with blow downs, which crossed them haphazardly, and for the most part the paths to and from them were paths made by children.

All during our youth we invented ourselves as cavemen, as Neanderthals. We had our own spots, caves along the side of the embankment, places on the streams that allowed us the luxury of this. This part of the spirit can never die if you are going to be self-reliant. If you think it can, try to excise it away from children, from one generation to the next.

Each year of our early youth we revisited spots on this Mill Cove stream that were rich with the memories of the year before. The dreams of children are poignant because they are so easily dashed.

That day, long ago now, we had gone to the left bank. It was hard going all the way. Many times we’d have to crawl through alders and thickets to get to a spot. Or cross the windfalls from one side to the other. And the spot where we were going was not much more than a small rip in the texture of the stream, about four feet long, just beneath the bank that we were walking on. Yet out of these small tiny pockets in this most unassuming remote northern stream came wonderful
trout—ten inches long and more—which to boys of eight and nine years old were God-given.

There were four trout taken that day. It was a warm day and we were walking back and forth on the windfalls that crossed the brook, wearing sneakers and short-sleeved shirts. It was almost time to go when we decided to cross, once more, a windfall to the right because there was a pocket further down the brook that Jimmy remembered, which we hadn’t been to yet.

“It’s right over there. I caught a trout there last year this same time,” he yelled.

We put our rods in one hand and started to cross the windfall that was angled higher on the right bank than the left. Jimmy went across first and then my brother, then Terry, and then me. I am fairly clumsy and have fallen in many times. When I hear of old river guides on the Miramichi who’ve done handstands going down through the rapids in a canoe, I can only say I’ve unintentionally done that as well.

I started inching along the windfall and glanced up to see the rest of the boys already on the other side and moving along the bank. The water babbled swiftly beneath me. I took one more step, and then another, and suddenly found myself under the windfall I had been crossing, and underwater as well.

The log was directly above me and I couldn’t stand up. There was a rock in front of me so I couldn’t go ahead, and one of the tree limbs from the windfall was preventing me from going backwards. Even when I lifted my head I couldn’t clear the water.

I just had to hold my breath and watch the boys walk away. I was literally between a rock and a hard place and I must have looked something like a trout. I can tell you there was no panic. But I sure thought I was in a bad spot. With the sound the brook made, the boys had no idea I had fallen in.

But then Terry said something to me, and when I didn’t answer he turned. I wasn’t on the log, but he could see something under it.

They ran back and hauled me out. They were all quite pleased they had saved my life. So was I.

The pool Jimmy wanted to fish was half full of sand and silt. The year had changed it, and aged it forever. That’s why he hadn’t initially found it.

We went home. It was June 1959.

This was the day of the Escuminac disaster, when men drifting nets for salmon got caught in a storm as fierce as any seen at sea. Their boats were twenty-five feet long, the waves they faced were eighty feet tall. But so many of them would not leave other boats in trouble, and continued to circle back
for friends being swallowed up, cutting their nets so their drifters wouldn’t sink, but being swept away, tying their sons to masts before losing their own lives. Handing lifelines to friends instead of keeping them for themselves. If this sounds heroic, it was. It was.

That night I slept through the death of thirty-five men out in the bay.

Just after this experience, I went with my brother to dig worms in an old garden. We were going downriver to fish on the Church River, which we did every summer, until I was about eleven, with our father. My brother took the pitchfork and started to dig, while I shook the sod and picked up the worms. I happened to drop a piece of nice plump sod over my left foot. I stood there counting up the three or four worms we had managed to capture.

“This looks like a good place here,” my brother said, and he drove the pitchfork into the sod above my foot. I looked down at it, in a peculiar way, I suppose, and then he jumped on his pitchfork to get some depth.

And then he lifted the fork, and me, and my foot up with it. One of the tines had gone right through the top of my foot, and I landed about four yards away.

Mr. Simms, the man who came to our aid, and carried
me to the doctors, and who’d known about my near-death experience in the Mill Cove made the observation: “Fishing’s pretty darn hard on you, Davy, isn’t it.”

I suppose those were the truest words about me he ever spoke.

FOR ALMOST A MONTH
after this I was laid up, and moved about with the aid of crutches. Which made me think of myself as a Randolph Scott movie character, and had people being very nice to me.

I see old pictures of me at that time now and realize how tiny I was for eight. I might have passed for five, with my left arm almost useless. Yet something in me must have been determined—for I was climbing cliffs, jumping ice floes and freight trains, getting into fights with boys my age. As a matter
of fact, I never thought of myself in any way except willing to give most things a shot.

In the year 1900, when my paternal grandmother was about seven years of age, there would be so many salmon moving up the main Miramichi in June that people wouldn’t be able to sleep at night because of the splashing these great fish made moving upriver. People who lived upriver, ancestors of people I know, would fish by night with lanterns in their hands.

All that is changed now, but I have sat out and watched salmon break water all those clear white nights of July and August near my cottage and at different camps of friends along the river—especially if there was a holding pool near a brook. Newcastle was much different then. It graced its people with more of the natural world and less of the manufactured one. But it had the nefarious cauldron of political bigotry well ingrained in it.

My grandmother, an Irish woman, came from Injun town—her father had come over as a young boy after the potato famine in Ireland. The Orangemen used to parade through the Irish settlement for a number of years, on July 1st. And my great-grandfather used to dress in his suit and lie in bed, certain he was about to be murdered, and preparing for his wake as best he could.

The river was much cleaner, the salmon more plentiful, the long logs and pulp logs that would be boomed after the great river drives, where the timber cut on faraway river branches and streams would be floated out to the town mills.

All of this is gone now, gone forever. Eighteen-wheelers carry the pulp and hardwood along arteries of roads, and those roads are travelled by fishermen and hunters who would have had little access to those faraway pools a generation or two ago.

There were more salmon and trout then, and biologists and conservationists have been telling us since the commercial fishery of the sixties that things must change in order for the great fish to continue. When I see nets strung out across our river, or listen to the tales of certain poachers, I realize there are many hard lessons ahead of us, and that our children or our grandchildren will some day pay the price we were unwilling to pay.

The manufactured world has done more for us, and less for the salmon, than anything I know. The politics are more polite, but like all politics, vulgarity rests just under the surface. And it is this political environment and this manufactured urban world that has set out to distribute salmon as if you would wealth or property. It will not be, and can’t be done.

On my mother’s side of the family they were all woodsmen, and went to work when they were children. They were and are
strong-willed and independent people, with a mixture of self-reliance and old-time Presbyterian ethics. When I was a very little boy, about 1954, my uncle Richard Adams (my mother’s brother), who already had a reputation as a great fishing guide for the rich Canadian and American sportsmen, brought a salmon home to my grandmother on the old homestead above the Matapedia.

I remember that fish—lying on an old newspaper in the kitchen, with a bit of blood along its gills. I imagine the fish weighed almost as much, or perhaps more, than I did. And I remember also how deftly my grandmother took a knife and opened it up, and the scales that looked like bits of silver in my hand.

My uncle picked me up and carried me down the hill towards the deep-green Matapedia River where he had moored his canoe, and set me in it. It was a long Restigouche canoe, much bigger than the Norwest Miramichi canoes. He wore work boots and green work pants, though the day was very warm, and he turned and walked away from me, towards the bow.

I was hoping to go fishing. This, however, was not the case. We were not going to go fishing at that moment. Someone wanted a picture, and I was the object for this picture. Far over our heads the CN train trestle glimmered in the sun. The
picture was taken—it was laid away somewhere to be forgotten. And my duty fulfilled, I was picked up and carried back up the hill to the porch. Off in the cool kitchen the salmon lay. It had come out of a pool that morning. My grandmother had cleaned it, and had taken the gills from it, and scraped most of its scales off.

The salmon was taken by my uncle on a Black Dose, which is the fly he loves. He had started to guide when he was twelve years old, and was far more comfortable in the woods than out of them.

“I will catch a fish some day,” I said, looking up at my grandmother and then looking at the huge bright Atlantic salmon, with its glassy dark eyes and just the start of a bill, that had known worlds that are secret to us all.

“Oh, those Miramichi salmon—they aren’t like our Matapedia salmon,” my grandmother said, teasing.

I grew up in an area of fishing rivers and fishing life without getting to go very often. Sometimes I would pass over a bridge over that dark rum-coloured water, or notice it in the distance as we went on our way somewhere. Sometimes, city bred (or town bred) as I was, I would have to listen to the trials of the adventurers who had gone out into that mysterious physical world. And sometimes I would seek these adventurers out.

So when I was twelve, I visited at times with Mr. Simms, who lived next door. As I sat on his porch in the August shade, with the soft smell of the mill far away, he often told me of the fishing summers he and his brother had when they were boys.

“We fished all summer from an old patched-up canoe that never handled well. We ran the Norwest Miramichi every other day—the loop from the Miner’s Bridge down to Wayerton, and every time we went we caught fish. We hit the sea trout run, and the salmon run, and the grilse run, and all summer long, poling downriver around every bend, we never saw another soul fishing. The river was deserted back then, can you imagine? Imagine that great salmon river being deserted? No one was much interested in the flies I tied back then—the Royal Coachman, the beautiful Dusty Miller, the Cosseboom.