Authors: John Langan
The same checkout girl told me I needed to see the Town Clerk for a fishing license, and suggested a spot off to the side of Springvale Road where she and her family had fished the Svartkil River on occasion. I thanked her for her good advice, and hurried out to take it. Springvale’s a narrow road that runs parallel to 32, the main north-south route in and out of town. For the first part of its length, the road hugs the west shore of the Svartkil, which is only about fifty yards across there, and fringed with maples and birch that hang out over the water. The checkout girl’s spot was a steep bank across the road from a horse farm and across the river from the town golf course. What a sight I must have made, a couple of hours later, sitting by the side of the river in my dirty slacks, wrinkled white shirt, and baseball cap, holding my new fishing rod like it was a strange tool I hadn’t the faintest idea how to use. I suppose it was. I’d broken open the tacklebox and taken hold of the first lure I laid my eyes on, a red and black number with a double set of triple hooks whose barbed points seemed as likely to snag a fish as anything. Cast after cast, I sent out that same lure, with nothing to show for it. It wasn’t until I’d been fishing for a good two weeks—and catching the handful of bluegill I’d pulled wriggling up from the water through as much dumb luck as anything—that an old man with a long gray ponytail who’d been fishing beside me passed me a plastic cup full of fat, muddy worms as he was leaving and suggested I might find one of these of more use.
Yes, I’d gone back. Even though that first day had been fruitless, not even a ghost of a nibble, just five hours of sitting on the riverbank watching the slow current carry my line past me, as well as of tangling my line in the trees overhanging the river a half dozen times; even though all I had for my efforts was a slightly stiff neck, I went back the next day. And the day after that. And the third day. And so on. Each day, I pulled into the spot on Springvale Road a little earlier, left it a little later, until my entire day was taken up with fishing. When I was done, which was to say when the last trace of daylight had seeped out of the sky, I packed up my gear and drove not home but into town, where I stopped at Pete’s Corner Pub for a burger and fries and a beer. I quickly became enough of a regular at Pete’s that the waitresses knew both me and my order, and, instead of wasting time bringing me a menu, brought me my beer—Heineken, in a tall glass—and checked that I was having the usual, which they’d already called into the kitchen. After I started back at work, I discovered I could still squeeze in a couple hours of fishing at the end of the day if I were organized and brought my rod and reel with me in the car. As I say, it was around that time that I switched from my lure to worms, and all of a sudden, my line was singing. The Svartkil, I learned, was full of fish: besides the bluegill, there were pumpkinseed sunfish, smallmouth bass, bullhead catfish, even a monster walleye that snapped my line before I could bring him all the way on shore. Since I didn’t know anything about cleaning and cooking fish, I threw back everything I caught, but that didn’t matter.
I realize all of this must sound like some kind of inspirational story, “How Fishing Saved My Life,” or the like, and I don’t mean it to. For a long time after that first day at the river, especially once fishing season was over that fall, there were more than enough nights I rode to sleep on a wave of Scotch. The house stayed a mess, and my meals at Pete’s, which remained a daily habit, were the best I ate. Sitting on the couch or lying in bed thinking of Marie, I felt as bad as I ever had, maybe worse, because each day that passed was another reminder of how far away I was from her. Fishing was no miracle cure.
When I was at the river, though, if I didn’t feel any better, at least I didn’t feel any worse. Perched on the bank, I was visited by feelings that had been keeping their distance since Marie breathed her last—since she first found the lump in her breast, really. There was satisfaction, which came with a good cast, with watching the hook arc out overhead, listening to the reel unspooling, finding the spot where the line plunked through the water. There was joy, which came but rarely and never stayed long, at pulling back on the rod and watching the green length of a smallmouth break the river’s skin, twisting as it hit the air. Mostly, there was calm—I might even call it peace—which came from sitting watching the brown water slide by, on its way from a lake down in the mountains of western New Jersey up to its destination in the Hudson. Those hours on the Svartkil were breathing room, if you see what I mean, and it’s hard for me to say what would have been my fate if I hadn’t had them. Maybe I’d have been all right, anyway. But when I was fishing, I usually didn’t drink as much at night, since, after having stopped at Pete’s, it was already pretty late and I was already pretty tired by the time I pulled in the driveway. And although, as I said, the house stayed a mess, I found that if I kept it a little less so, I could locate things like my shoes more easily, which let me get to fishing all the more quickly. My nightly burger and beer were the highlight of my day, culinarily speaking, but after the second day of fishing I started stopping at different delis in town for a sandwich, bag of chips, and a soda. The sandwiches were things like baloney and American cheese on white with extra mayo, or salami and provolone with mustard and onion; the chips left a shiny layer of grease on my fingers; and the soda coated my teeth with sugar; but it was a meal, and it was more regular eating than I’d been used to.
So fishing was no miracle cure but, on balance, I guess it did save my life. I’ll let you in on a secret: for the longest time, I thought I had been, well,
led
to fishing, if you know what I mean. It was the only explanation I could come up with for why this activity so far outside my everyday routine had caught me up. I didn’t think so at first. At first, I just thought it was dumb luck, chance, something I hadn’t remembered watching on TV that had snagged on my brain. The more time passed, however, the less that explanation convinced me. Fishing felt too right; the fit was too close, which I discovered the second year I fished, after a winter of trying to find something to fill that space fishing had occupied for me. I won’t say I tried every sport and hobby known to man and woman—I never made it as far as fencing—but I went through a good many of them, and none hit the mark. It wasn’t until I was back at my spot on the side of Springvale, Yankees cap on my head, rod in my hands, trying something new, a green and white jitterbug lure, that I felt myself unclench, like a fist you’ve been making so long your fingers have forgotten they ever knew how to stretch, and then, all at once, your hand opens. From talking to people at work, comparing notes, I’ve learned that not many men or women feel this way, this passion so strong you can completely relax in it, about much of anything. To say that I’d stumbled into it by accident seemed, the more I reflected on it, harder to believe than that something, or someone, had brought me to it, someone who knew me well enough to know that this would be perfect for me.
Of course I mean Marie. In the months after her death, I hadn’t had any of those experiences you hear people babble on about on the afternoon talk shows. I hadn’t felt her touch, hadn’t heard her voice, hadn’t seen her. She’d been in my dreams, every one I could remember, but I thought that was no more than what you’d expect. I hadn’t sensed her, so to speak, in any way; although when her sister stopped in to visit one afternoon, she told me she was positive she’d heard Marie’s voice singing a song they’d sung as children outside the kitchen window. When she ran outside to look, the yard was empty. I didn’t feel especially bad that I hadn’t seen or heard Marie. She’d suffered much, too much, and I didn’t begrudge her her rest. I’m not really much in terms of religion. I was baptized Catholic, and went to C.C.D. until my confirmation, but neither of my parents was all that religious. It was more something they felt they had to do to me until I was a certain age, when they could stop. They stopped, I stopped, and that was that. I never gave much thought to God, heaven, or any of that stuff. Marie and I were married in a church, but that was because it was important to her. For the same reason, I made sure she had a funeral mass, with her favorite priest on the altar. When she was dying, when she was gone, all sorts of folks, from close family to fellows I barely knew at work, talked to me about religion, about faith. They told me that I needed it, that a creed would be a help to me. I suppose it might’ve been. I just didn’t seem to have it in me, if you know what I mean.
This one night, my cousin, John, who’s a priest, a Jesuit, stopped by with the intent, it’s safe to say, of making a convert, or whatever it is they call it when you go back to the Church. At one point, I remember him talking about death, asking didn’t I find it terrible to think about ending, about just dying and that was that. Didn’t I think it was terrible that Marie had died and it was all over, that she’d gone and I’d never see her again? I told John it didn’t bother me, which was the truth. She’d been sick a long time, all our marriage, and she’d put up a good fight, and I was the last one was going to deny her a little peace. Tell the truth, I liked the idea of her at peace, at rest. It seemed a lot nicer, a lot more charitable, when you came right down to it, than any busy heaven where she’d be flitting here and there like an oversized hummingbird.
During that second year of fishing, though, I did start to wonder a bit. Maybe it was all the stuff my cousin had said. Those Jesuits are supposed to be clever, aren’t they? And he’d certainly given me the works. With each year that passed, I came to ask myself if Marie might not have gone out of this world so much as gone more deeply into it. From being wrapped up in earth, maybe she’d made her way out into it, into the soil, the water, until she was part of things. Maybe she’d found a way to lead me back to her.
As time flowed on, I refined my gear, moved from a spincast reel to a spinning reel (I never could master a baitcaster), learned how to use a lure to bring in my fish. I searched out other rivers, other streams, to fish. Although it was close, about twenty minutes’ car ride, I never was much for the Hudson. For one thing, for the longest time, you couldn’t eat most of what you caught, and that was a treat a fellow at work had introduced me to that I was reluctant to surrender: not so much bass, but catfish, walleye, and especially trout. For another thing, love the river though I do, and I do, the Hudson’s just too damn big. I prefer a smaller river, one that’s more intimate. I can’t do without moving water, either. I’ve fished lakes, and while I agree it is pleasant to while away a couple of hours floating around in a boat, I prefer being able to stand up and stretch my legs when I want to. So I tried out the Esopus, then the Rondout, and then I started driving up into the Catskills. I don’t know much—anything, really—about my part of the Hudson Valley. Pa had his roots in Springfield, Kentucky—his family was Kentucky Melungeon—although he’d moved around quite a bit as a boy; and Ma came from Scotland: from St. Andrew’s, where they have the golf courses. She stepped off the boat when she was eighteen, met and married Pa in Queens, and the two of them moved up to Poughkeepsie so Pa could take a job managing a bank there. Neither of them knew the area that well, and neither ever showed any inclination to make its acquaintance. Aside from that long-ago day Marie and I had spent at her friend’s brother’s, I’d never been to the mountains. This meant that, when I turned west onto Route 28 heading out of Wiltwyck that first Saturday morning, I was striking out into uncharted territory.
Right from the beginning, I loved it up there. I don’t know if you’ve spent time in the Catskills. From a distance, say, the parking lot of the old Caldor’s (which became an Ames that became a Stop ‘N’ Shop) in Huguenot, they’ve always made me think of a herd of giant animals, all standing grazing on the horizon. Up close, when you’re driving among them with the early morning light breaking over their round peaks, they seem incredibly present, more real than real, these huge solid heaps of rock that wear their trees like mile-long scarves. You glance at them, trying to keep your eyes on the road, which is already pretty busy with people driving up for a weekend getaway, and somehow you wouldn’t be surprised if the mountain closest to you were to cast off its trees in one titanic shrug and start to lumber away, a vast, unimaginable beast. When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think,
Here, there are secret places.
Well, that’s what I thought, anyway. I fished as far west as Oneonta, and as far north as Catskill, taking fish from most of the streams between these towns and Wiltwyck. And while I was standing streamside on a Saturday morning, sunlight bouncing on the water as it tumbled over a small waterfall into a broad pool I was sure held a trout or two, and so had cast the spinner with the tri-hook and was watching the lure descending into the water, waiting to reel it in as I tried to decide if that shadow beneath it was just a shadow or a fish come to see what was for breakfast—I say, moments like this a kind of silence seemed to fall over everything. I could still hear the water chuckling, and the birds having their morning conversation, and maybe a car, far away, but I could hear this other sound, too, this sound that wasn’t one, that was quiet. It was like another space had opened up around me, and it was in that quiet, so to speak, that I came to believe I could hear Marie. She didn’t say anything, didn’t make any sound at all, but I could hear her just the same. I couldn’t have said if she were happy or sad, because I had realized that the moving shadow wasn’t a shadow but a trout, and a big one at that, and I had started winding the handle quickly, making that spinner leap forward through the water, my arms already tensed, waiting for the fish to strike and the struggle to begin. Maybe in another situation, another setting, I would have felt differently, the hair on my arms and neck might have stood straight up and my mouth gone dry. Holding on for that trout, though, whose mouth was about to close on the lure, there wasn’t more I could do about that strange silence than know it was there. Later, after I had helped the fish and a few of his friends out onto the ground beside me and was treating myself to a chocolate bar, I would think about what had happened, about that deep, deep quiet.