The Longest Silence (21 page)

We were in a remote part of the Bahamas, a long way from even the smallest village. There were so many small cays and deep green cuts that if things abated at all, we could get in a lee somewhere and go on looking for fish. Meanwhile, we hung on our anchor, transom directed at the low, broken coast, covered in spindly pines well spaced in their sandy footing by incessant sea winds.

At the last village we’d bought bread from the local bakery. The people were cheerful and smiled quickly. Most had little to do. Their modest gardens were ruled by stingy rainfall; commercial fishing seemed reduced to supplying a hotel or two. The people were scattered
along the roads that left the village, strolling or carrying sacks. Coconut palms bowed over the roadway, and as one of my companions said to me, a coconut did not reach a great age here. These pedestrians weren’t the first poor natives to roam the luxury home sites of the future.

The boat was owned by a friend of mine, and in his foresight and wisdom she was equipped with good electronics, shipboard refrigeration, and comfortable places to eat and sleep. And she carried two bonefish skiffs in davits. Phil, her captain, also acquitted himself as a cook, and the night we ate all the fresh mangrove snappers or the night we had all the crawfish and black beans illustrated the compensations of life on that part of the South Atlantic, which seems at once a global dropoff and shelf of copious marine life, a buzzing cross-section of the food chain with fishermen briefly at the very top. One could raise the poetry as a nonconsuming naturalist, but who besides the angler crawls to the brook at daybreak or pushes his fragile craft to the head of the tide to come out on the flood with the creatures that breathe the water?

The weather broke and we began to fish, poling the skiffs among the myriad small cays in the fragrance of mangrove blossoms, the ceremony of angling holding our minds on all the proper things. Bananaquits, the active little Bahamian honey creepers, flitted along the sandy shore. At one small cay we disturbed a frigate bird rookery, iridescent black birds, the males adorned with red inflated throats. They pushed off the branches of mature mangroves and soared with the amazing low-altitude slowness that their immense wingspans allowed, practically at a walk. For a moment the skiff seemed surrounded by magnified soot, then they climbed steeply and soared away.

We spotted two nice fish well back in the mangroves in inches of water, their backs out of the water as they scoured around the bases of the bushes for crustaceans. Their silvery brilliance was startling. We stopped the skiff and watched. They didn’t seem to want to come out, so I decided to give it a try. I cast the fly into a narrow space between the mangroves and watched the two fish circle toward it. I moved the fly slightly and the first fish darted forward and took. I set the hook
and the bonefish roared out of there so fast that for a brief moment the small mangroves swept low by the pressure of my fly line and the fish was off.

At the edge of a turtlegrass flat I hooked a bigger fish that forced a sheet of water up my leader with the speed of the line shearing the water. At about a hundred yards into his run, the hook broke. Now, that’s very rare. I chatted less with my companion and more to myself and tried to stare through the water to the bottom or concentrate on the surface for the “nervous water” of approaching schools. We found one right at the edge of the mangroves. I hoped if I could hook one here, it would head for open water. I made a rather long cast that fell just the way it was supposed to. One strip and I was solid tight to a good fish. He ran straight at the boat and I had fly line everywhere as he passed us and stole line, causing it to jump up off the deck in wild coils that were suddenly draped around my head and shoulders. The fish was about to come to the end of this mess. When he did, I felt the strange sensation of my shorts rising rapidly toward my shoulder blades. At the point they came tight in my crotch, the leader broke with a sharp report: The line had hooked the button of my back pocket. My companion was hunched over the push pole in a paroxysm of laughter. I looked at him, I looked at the open sea, I tied on another fly.

I was in that state of mind perhaps not peculiar to angling when things seem to be in a steep curve of deterioration, and I had a fatal sense that I was not at the end of it. Bonefish are ready takers of a well-presented fly but once hooked, they are so explosive that getting rid of slack line and getting the fish on the reel can produce humiliating results. Their speed and power are so far out of proportion to their size that a bonefish, finally landed, seems to have gone through a magical reduction from the brute that burned line off against the shrieking drag to the demure little fellow one holds in one’s hand while gently removing the fly. With his big round eyes and friendly face the bonefish scarcely looks guilty of the searing runs he just performed. And the fastest individuals are the ones that look fat, bright little pigs that root around the shallows. They’re almost always moving, and if they rest, they prefer to get in among the mangrove shoots where barracuda
can’t get a straight run at them. Their reactions to anything overhead are instantaneous, so one good way of locating fish is to watch a low-flying cormorant cross the flats; every bonefish touched by the bird’s shadow will explode to a new position, then resume feeding. You slip up to where you have seen them move and perhaps you make a connection, the slow-stripped fly line jumping rigid in a bright circle of spray.

After a wonderful meal of roasted razorback hog, garden vegetables, and big in-season Florida tomatoes, I sat up listening to my host’s wonderful stories of life in the thirties: training fighting cocks in Bali while recovering from malaria, roading birds from his bicycle, tossing roosters from the balcony of his hotel to the bellhop down below to build up their stamina. Once, when he was waiting to catch the flying boat to the Orient, his plane was so late that he went to Idaho to learn to ski in the meantime. And I enjoyed his cultural views: “The Italians are my favorite! They adore their little pope! Then they put on their condoms and fuck everything in sight!”

Afterward, I went up on the foredeck and sat next to the windlass to watch the full moon rise. We were in a small tropical sea trapped between the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The Gulf Stream, that great violet river, poured northward just beyond my view, regulating the temperature of the world. Once the moon was up, it appeared as a fixed portion of the universe while the clouds and weather of planet Earth poured over its face. I thought of all the places and times in my amusing life I had looked to a full moon for even one suggestion I could do something with. I thought about John Cheever stating that man made a better traveler than a farmer and how the motion of clouds against the face of the moon always made me crave motion or pine for the sound of waves breaking on an empty shore. Or how Roger Taylor said a boat was meant to improve your position for watching the weather, or how Hemingway said, “Always put in the weather.” Weather on the Gulf Stream included the northern gale when we were headed to Cuba on my sloop
Hawksbill
: winds that built the seas up so high that the spreader lights thirty feet above the deck lit the waves from the side, and the big graybeards with their tops blowing off chased us high over the stern until they caught us and knocked us
down at three o’clock in the morning. Weather is one of the things that goes on without you, and after a certain amount of living it is bracing to contemplate the many items not dependent upon you for their existence. But tonight the moon shone broadly on the tropical sea. I could make out the radio faintly from the wheelhouse; Reba McIntyre, Roseanne Cash, Tammy Wynette, the big girls were out on world airways. I was supremely happy.

I had a good night’s sleep. By the time we arose and went hunting fish, I had a healthier view of loose fly line, the messages from the moon, and my place in the universe. It was as if the bonefish were in one room and I was in another: it was just a matter of opening the door in between. And indeed, one nice, round fish, swimming along where a snapper-filled creek poured onto the flat, came to my fly at the end of the long cast. And I landed him.

“M
UTTON SNAPPER
” is hardly a prepossessing title. The sheep, from which the name derives, is not much of an animal. No civilized person deals with him except in chops and stews. To bleat is not to sing out in a commanding baritone; to be sheepish is scarcely to possess a virtue for which civilization rolls out its more impressive carpets.

And it is true that the fish is not at all handsome, with its large and vacant-looking head, its crazy red eye and the haphazard black spot just shy of its tail. Yet its brick-orange flanks and red tail are rather tropical and fine, and for a number of reasons it deserves consideration as major light-tackle game. After you’ve been incessantly outwitted by the mutton snapper, you cease to emphasize his vaguely doltish exterior.

To begin with, mutton snappers share with the most pursued shallow-water game fish a combination of hair-trigger perceptions. They are wild and spooky, difficult to deceive and very powerful. Taken under optimum conditions, they are as enthralling as any species that haunts the flats.

Like most flats fish, the mutton snapper is primarily a creature of deep water, another individual thread in the ocean system that, following its own particular necessity, crisscrosses the lives and functions of the animals that share its habitat. Which is to say that in looking for one fish you find another—and maybe, in the end, you find it all.

After a long winter’s flats fishing, I had naturally acquired a ready facility for recognizing most anything that came along. A flat is a circumscribed habitat so far as larger fish are concerned. The first time I found mutton snappers was while poling for permit on flood tides close to the keys. They were wild fish, hustling around in their curious way and pushing abrupt knuckles of wake in the thin water. Their red tails made them unmistakable.

They seemed so conscious of the skiff that it was hard to see how they might be taken on a fly rod. Besides, they were somewhat harder to find than permit, for example, and they were every bit as alert and quick to flush.

One long-ago day in May, Guy de la Valdene and I began to fish for them in earnest, spurred on from time to time by the sight of brilliant red forks in the air. The fish often seemed hurried, and after we had poled to the spot where we had seen a tail, there would be nothing. Most of the first fish we found were in a grassy basin south of Key West, a shallow place usually good for a few shots at permit. The basin was little more than a declivity in the long-running ocean bank that reaches from just below Key West to the Boca Grande Channel across from the Marquesas.

A long convection buildup of clouds lay along the spine of the keys, like a mirror image of the islands themselves, all the way to Boca Grande, and then scattered in cottony streamers to the west. So we fished in a shadow most of the day, straining to find fish in the turtlegrass. With the leisurely, wan hope that comes of being on a flat at no particular tide, I was poling the skiff. We passed a small depression and suddenly spotted two mutton snappers floating close to the bottom with the antsy, fidgeting look they so often have. Guy made an excellent cast and a fish responded immediately. My hopes sank as it overtook and began to follow the fly with the kind of examining pursuit we had come to associate with one of the permit’s more refined refusals. But, with considerable élan, Guy stopped the fly and let it sink to the bottom. The snapper paused behind it at a slight forward tilt and then, in what is to the flats fisherman a thrilling gesture, he tipped over onto his head and tailed, the great, actually wondrous, fork in the air, precisely marking the position of Guy’s fly.

I looked toward the stern. Guy was poised, line still slack, rod tip down. He gave the fish three full seconds and I watched him lift the rod, feeling foredoomed that the line would glide back slack. But the rod bowed in a clean gesture toward the fly line, which was inscribed from rod tip to still-tailing fish. Abruptly, the fish was again level in the water, surging away in a globe of wake it pushed before itself. A thin sheet of water stood behind the leader as it sheared the surface.

The first long run ended with the fly pulling free. As Guy reeled in his line and backing, I let the boat drift on the tide toward the little community of stilt houses standing mysteriously in spiderlike shadows off Boca Grande Key. Nearby, an old sail-powered commercial boat rusted on the bank that had claimed it, a long row of black cormorants on its crumbling iron rail.

“Well,” said Guy, “I guess they’ll take the fly.”

By late afternoon Guy was poling. I stood in the “gun seat,” as we called the casting deck, trailing my loop of fly line. We zigzagged around in our grassy basin, fishing out the last of the incoming tide and getting shots from time to time at permit. From directly out of the light, a large stingray swam, and in front of it were two large fish, indistinguishably backlit. Because they were with the ray, these were necessarily feeding fish. I had time to roll my trailing loop into the air, make a quick false cast, then throw. The left-hand fish, facing me, veered off and struck. I had him briefly, yet long enough to feel an almost implacable power, enough to burn a finger freeing loose fly line. Since mutton snappers frequently accompanied rays into this basin from deep water, we presumed that is what had taken my fly.