Lines on the Water Read online

  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.

  Two

  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.

  “There were people who fly-fished of course, but none of the young lads I knew bothered. The rods were a lot heavier than they are now. We had old rods, one a them was my father’s twelve-foot rod, and he never used it but he won it on a raffle.”

  He showed me his diary—most of it written a decade or more before I was born.

  I took a fish today from Dr. Wilson’s, his diary read. Cool and cloudy, water just right, after dinner wind come up.

  His diary was old—so you were talking of old fish, generations ago. Winters that covered up those pools and turns on the river, in a deep bed of indolent white sleep, and springs that came and opened those rivers once more, with
the ferocious crack heard for miles. When thousands of tons of salmon moved through our tributaries, where small rocks and eddies were remembered as “the hot spot” in a pool for a few years before the pool changed. When the sounds of men’s voices changed with time, and the sound of different canoes coming around the bend changed, and the fly patterns changed too—they became more accommodating to the fish perhaps, or more utilitarian.

  And it was a generation ago when Mr. Simms showed me his diary. And an old cane rod that was splintered with years of use now forgotten about—the moment of ballet and battle on a cloudy day around a corner somewhere far away, when he was not much more than a boy. Yet, in some sadness, I relate a million fish have come and gone since then, and bears have crossed those rivers in silence, and moose have fed in the lily ponds, and salmon have jumped the sea lice off, in the splendid dusk coming into a pool, with no one in the world to see.

  When I was twelve or thirteen, and since my father didn’t fish salmon, and my uncles who did were all on the Matapedia some 250 miles away in the big woods of Quebec, I was at a loss over how to go about learning.

  I wanted to fish and hunt. Being able to use only one arm didn’t deter me. I just had to learn to compensate. I’ve been good at doing that.

  I didn’t start off fishing salmon. Not many do. Perhaps those lucky individuals who are born very close to the salmon pools can recount taking fish at six years of age. But I was not able to do that.

  So when I was young, we went down to Burnt Church, which was so named because General Wolfe on his way to Quebec fired a volley at the French Catholic church standing on Micmac ground and hit it. The wharf has the sea smell of salt and saltwater fish, and of course what I always associate with wharves near the sea—dried-out seaweed and tar.

  Sometimes on drowsy days, I would walk up to the Church River, alone, past the great cow pastures of downriver farmers, fishing for trout, in the little darkish pink pools, and looking for—and being somewhat wantonly cruel to—frogs.

  If it was August, I would get nothing but chub on a hook, and spend the day looking at the clouds moving haphazardly across the sky, already tinged with the feelings of fall. And now and again I would see some leaf seared by an early cold draught of air. On other days, for more excitement, I would walk to the wharf during the changing of the tide and fish for perch and eels, in the black tossing water of the Miramichi Bay.

  The perch were wonderful to fish with chopped-up pieces of discarded meat I got as bait from the general store.

  The eels were great fighters too, and since I never ate them (I had eel soup once, and once I had some eel in paella in Spain), I would take them off the spin hook and toss them back in. Some of them seemed as big as pythons to me then.

  Eels don’t die until sundown. That is when their body stops moving. It may be an old wives’ tale but I’ve witnessed it a number of times. If I happened to be fishing beside someone who kept his eels, I had to move my position because I couldn’t stand to watch them all day long, writhing and twisting and wanting to get back into the water, and not understanding why I couldn’t help them. I couldn’t tell the man to put his eels back because he was going to have them for dinner, so I would have to go down to the far end of the barnacle-strewn wharf to fish alone.

  At the far end of the wharf I seemed to be staring out towards a water-filled world alone. The waves here were darker and colder, the breeze sharper. Far away I could see the point of Portage Island.

  One hot day when I was fishing there, I decided to jump in off a tying pole and swim to the ladder about twenty feet away. I had seen my brother and his friends do it. And I felt it couldn’t be that much trouble.

  The swells were wonderful, the water was very green and deep, and because of the salt the sun dried you very quickly.

  Off the end of the wharf there had been mackerel moving all day—you could see their silver bodies about ten feet beneath the surface, charging along. They are wonderful fish, mackerel are, as wonderful (almost) to fight as a grilse. But I couldn’t catch one that day. I would try to touch them when I dove in, and I would come up to the surface, feeling exhilarated.

  But once I felt something swimming beside me as I came up. I turned towards the ladder, and this huge head popped up and stared at me. It was a seal. He calmly looked at me, blinked, barked, and lay back on his shoulders to eat a mackerel. He was about three feet away, and he must have thought that I was probably fishing like he was, and he wanted to brag to me about how it was done.

  Once or twice a summer I would get out with the drifters, jigging mackerel. These were small boats, twenty-eight to thirty-four feet long, that drifted at night for salmon. During the off-season or during the day, some fishermen would rent them out for tours or mackerel fishing.

  This was when I was between the ages of ten to thirteen. We would start off in the morning, but never seemed to make it anywhere until after lunch. The small open lobster boats were painted white, had small wheelhouses (sometimes not a wheelhouse—the wheel being open on the starboard side—but it had a tiny forward cutty, which always had the peculiar scent of soiled blankets, wine, and oil). It must have been a hard and at times lonely existence for some of the men who lived along the coastal shores.

  We would have two or three lines down off the side of the boat, fishing off the far side of Portage Island, which was about five miles offshore. I remember now that the man who owned the boat would always manage two things. He would manage to be drunk, without any of us seeing him take a drink, and swear to us that he hadn’t, and he would almost always manage to foul up the engine, and spend an hour tinkering with it, as we drifted towards the open sea.

  Still it was good fishing. We would use lures or bits of herring and perch for bait, and ride the swells most of the day, with the point of Portage Island visible.

  I loved fishing mackerel in the big boats in those early days, in shorts and bare feet—feet that had become so toughened I could run along the rocky Shore Road for a mile to get a loaf of bread. At night in our little cottage, when I was eight or nine, I would lie in bed and listen to the wind whistling off the dark and fearsome bay. I was going to become a fisherman and know the sea. And then perhaps my ancestry, or some other mysterious inclination, would draw me to the fir- and spruce-armoured woods, the sound of the river rushing around suicidal bends and cedar swamps. This, of course, was not so much a love of nature, I was to discover, but a response to the love of mankind. It might be sought in solitary ways, but in all ways that counted searching far-off places to fish seemed always to carry with it a love of humanity.

  The sea and the river are both laden with traditions—absolutely proud, fearless, and different. I have come to know men who had grown up on our river and could canoe, blindfolded through rapids, but never saw our bay; and I have met men who spent their lives fishing lobster in ten-foot swells, but became claustrophobic when they could see the other side of a stream because everything was closing in on them.

  This happened to a man I know who came down to my cottage, at the mouth of the bay, to collect the driftwood that had washed up on our beach. He was an older man, about 70, from Bellefond who worked most of the day with a chainsaw, cutting the huge logs and carrying them over to the one-ton truck. He looked out at the great water, shimmering in the July sunshine and leaving in its mist mirages of old ships and islands that weren’t really there.

  “So this is the bay,” he said. “By God, this is where the river runs to, and the salmon come from. I never knew it was like this.” What surprised me is what always surprises me about these meetings. In a real way, in an ultimate way, I who had by that time travelled the world had seen not much more, or had not too many more experiences, that could count for anything than he himself had, who had lived almost all his days in a four- or five-mile track of woods, with a trap line and a bucksaw.

  Three

  THERE ARE THOSE WHO live near the woods, within a hat’s throw of a stream or a fine salmon pool, and never discover
them. My father’s father died when my father was four years old. And in the truest sense my father was an orphan. He never knew about the woods. He didn’t own a camp. He had no knowledge of the great empire of the northern woods that spread in all compass readings on all sides of him.

  In the late spring, I watched as other kids got ready to go fishing or came home from fishing trips. In the night air they would bring the trout out of their fishing baskets and lay them on the cool grass. Sometimes hearing them come home I would run out in my pyjamas to see these trout laid out, signifying the mystical and haunted streams far off in the distance.

  I was a town boy. And my father owned a business downtown and went to work in a suit and tie.

  His world consisted of approximately eight blocks. As far as serious fishing was concerned, I may as well have been living in downtown Toronto.

  The boys who fished with their dads would look on me as someone who knew nothing, a neophyte. This angered me. It angered me because they were right.

  There was an idea of salmon fishing, of fly-fishing, that their judgemental scorn allowed me to see at a very early age. I was practised enough in detection of ridicule, but there was also the scent in the air of patronizing knowledge and just a little money. Not that these boys had any more money than I. But they had come in contact at a certain level with the idea of fish, and the fishing men, and understood this: the idea that fly-fishing was linked at some certain level, from some place, England or Scotland, to quite a privileged world. Not just a physical world; a monied world where in the search for game fish money was never spoken about, or perhaps only whispered about, at the end of the day. It took money to be rugged and get fish. Perhaps not for the people I grew up beside, but for certain people that they knew. Certain people who may have riparian rights to certain waters and pools. That did not diminish these people at all, but it only said what is always said: there is an affordability by a certain class (in a country where class is supposedly obsolete) where fishing takes on the splendour of gaming—not unlike the fox hunt. And that these laws and associations and riparian rights are jealously guarded. In the long run this may protect the fish that spawn in those privileged waters. But then again it may not. It may cause more resentment and resistence if it is perceived to be an elitist sport by those who feel they are not a part of it.