Fishing with Brad, Continued
From the final chapters
Looking through my posts, organizing, tidying, finding silly typos always (argh), I realized I never included any excerpts from the last part of my “Fishing With Brad Essay.” Here they are. You can find the first two excerpts here and here or if you click on Archives.
Maine and Beyond
It doesn’t surprise me that I’m writing the first draft of this essay in Maine, a place that since before I lived here for a year during my first full-time teaching job at the University of Maine in Presque Isle even, has held a mythical angling place in my imagination—its rivers and endless lakes and ponds…. In a small AirBnB near the ocean I came in my grief and found myself returning to an old writing technique of first writing long hand on yellow legal pads with an Ultra Fine Sharpie pen. Something about the tactile feel of it, the resistance of the felt tip, that scratching sound all I could hear but for the ocean breeze, the electronic hum of the lighthouse not far away that came on whenever the fog rolled in, seemed simple and true enough and necessary to write about Brad.
I am nearly back now to where I started, to that photograph of Brad, that smile, that day when we returned from the trip to the Rangley lakes region of northwest Maine.
I worked hard to craft a plan where we wouldn’t have to hike (much), finding a place to rent a canoe and fish a lake for spring-run landlocked salmon…All reports were good; there was even a “lovely” island campsite available where we could canoe out just ½ mile and be isolated and not as buggy and in the “heart of good fishing”...or so I thought.
From this trip I have found several other photographs. In one Brad holds a landlocked salmon out in front of him with two hands, one hand below the eyes, the other above the tail. It looks as if he is holding on for dear life—landlocks are feisty things (and surely this is not exactly humane catch and release procedure). He is wearing a hoodie to keep the black flies at bay, his big mustache dark, dark black, like his eyes, that tangle of bushy hair, and his big smile, of course, bursting through it all.
In another photo he is slump-shouldered, hands in his pockets, no smile, certainly no laughter. Behind him is my old backpacking tent I still use set up beneath a rustic shelter with its tar paper roof—on that island campsite. The last shot is of a ¾ used roll of toilet paper—emblem of the story I am about to tell. That’s it—just those photos, and the one where we returned from the trip, the one where this all began. Part of me wishes we had digital devices ready at hand to snap shots of each and every moment back then, but the better part of me is glad we didn’t, that we only brought along one of those waterproof disposable 35mm cameras you used to be able to buy in any drugstore. So much of that trip now resides in a hidden, deep place in me, and as with all the fish we tossed lures and flies at together to try to coax them up into view, I am doing the same here….
…We rented the canoe, as planned, and set out with packs filled with food and camping gear to the rustic island campsite in the “heart of good fishing.” The lake was nearly flat calm as we made the relatively short paddle to the island—our very own island! Huck Finn couldn’t have asked for more.
We set up the tent beneath the shelter, unpacked our gear and set out in the canoe to cast to the rock piles along the island, hoping for some early June landlocked salmon. The bugs were bad, but out here on the lake with the breeze kicking up a little, they came in waves and were bearable. I smoked a cheap cigar to keep them at bay. Brad declined. Soon the wind came up, tossing the canoe always the wrong way around from where we wanted it, and we finally had to retreat back onto the island.
The wind increased in intensity all that afternoon. Brad tried fishing from the shore of the island, but the few spots which allowed him to get off a good cast quickly became uninteresting. The once clear, dark water was turbulent now, filled with weeds and small things that had blown up from the south to this, the north end of the lake. “It will be calm in the morning,” I said, “and if the fishing sucks, we'll just row back in and head to Middle Dam. I know the salmon will be running hard there, the guy at the fly shop said so.” Brad groaned.
In the morning…The sky was a wall of gray coming right down to the tops of black-black waves rolling along beneath frothy whitecaps…All we could do was wait, and wait some more, on through that day and another night, down now to just a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese, a can of brown bread, some apples and that dwindling roll of toilet paper enshrined now as a photograph.
I tried to keep his spirits up. In a strange sort of way, it seems now as if I were practicing for my phone calls and visits with him in the hospital. On that last day together with him in the hospital he laughed most heartily as we recalled our predicament on my tiny island campsite in Maine (though with a hint of what is seen in that photo, hands in his pockets, eyes glaring back at me). We were utterly helpless then, stuck on an island on a lake in Maine being pummeled by enormous, dangerous waves, that never ceasing, stupid, howling of the wind, nowhere to go, nothing to do.
My guess is Brad must have felt something like that during his last illness, stuck in his hospital bed, stranded, his lungs suddenly unable to do the thing they needed to do, so he couldn’t move, sometimes could barely speak. On the island, at least, he could still walk out and sit on the big Maine rocky shore and feel all that wind bearing down on him. I’m sure he would have taken our days on that island over what he felt coming—where we talked a lot, about everything, played our own version of bocce with rocks we gathered from the shore, watched the clouds roar past, retreating to our shelter when bursts of heavy rain fell….
Finally…We strapped packs and gear in tight, certain we’d capsize at some point. We even pulled on the cheap, ill-fitting PFDs that came with the rented canoe and cinched them down extra tight. And we set off together, brothers with our long fishing history, in what we worried might well be our final journey.
Miraculously, only a few waves came over the gunwales. I paddled from the stern and worked as hard as my then mid-20-year-old self could muster. We got into a kind of crazy rhythm where we’d feel the surge of a wave grab onto us from behind, and we’d paddle harder and harder to ride with it up and over the crest and down into the next trough—all until the next one came, and we were again working in a mad rush to catch up with it and stay on top.
The good news was we made safe harbor in record time, our hearts pumping, adrenaline, fear, surging through us….Somehow, we survived the island. In the photograph which now is part of his obituary, he is smiling and laughing as we step from my Plymouth Duster, home from Maine, in the driveway of my house in Williamsburg, MA after the last extended fishing trip we would take together.
…I finished graduate school, came to the far north of Maine to teach for a year, ended up in Kalamazoo, teaching, writing, my wife pursuing her career as a scientist. We started a family, eventually ended up back east, in Connecticut. Our three kids grew, put endless, wonderful demands on us, soccer, tennis, horse riding, music lessons…. I was always piecing together writing and teaching gigs. But none of this is excuse enough for growing apart from Brad, for not seeing him as much as I should have. It was during these years that a virus attacked Brad’s heart, a freak thing, a flu virus that, as we learned they sometimes do, turned toward his heart, so that the man with the biggest and purest heart I have ever known was left with an actual heart that only worked half as well as it should. For the rest of his life, he would be vulnerable to illness, finally succumb.
As I write this here in Maine, I have taken breaks to fish, of course. This very morning I drove miles down a dirt logging road to one of my favorite lakes and caught numerous fish, large and smallmouth bass, pickerel, though nothing particularly large. I caught them all on surface flies, many of them laid tight along the edge of a lily pad. Each time I did that, I thought of Brad. It is late August and has been hot. I’ve barely even seen a mosquito a black fly or a deer fly. On the lake this morning it was calm, and for stretches of time a fine mist fell, which kept me perfectly cool and comfortable and kept the fish hungry. And all I could think was how I would love to have had him there beside me, casting out, healthy again, catching fish with me on such a fine day with so little that could go wrong. For all my angling life, I’ve come to realize while working on this tribute—fishing, writing, grappling with my sadness—it seems as if he must still be there, in the bow of a canoe, around the next bend in the river. “Arn, Arn,” he’ll call out, holding a fish aloft for me to see.
Brad and I trod so many pathways, often creating our own, together, in search of good fishing, our brotherly love deepening, and now he has taken another path down which we will all one day follow, far out where no cast can reach.
If you’ve been enjoying my writing, please consider doing any/all of the following:
Help me grow my audience by Sharing this post or my main site with a few people you think might enjoy it as well.
Upgrade your subscription to paid. For only $.14/day, you can help me continue to devote the many hours I do each week to writing, editing and promoting this page.
You can also help a lot by making a one-time contribution to the page at any time by “buying me a coffee” (or two). And certainly a good amount of real coffee has gone into the making of JourneyCasts.
As always, I encourage you to leave a comment. Thank you.
I can hear his voice shouting to you and see his big smile, then maybe an under the breath chuckle of his through your story.