Beachcombing at Miramar (10 page)

O, I am a cook and a captain bold,

And the mate of the Nancy brig,

And a bo’sun tight, and a midshipmite,

And the crew of the captain’s gig.

I am reciting loudly and gesticulating wildly, unaware that a woman and a small girl are approaching me from behind. When
I see them, I stop. The girl, no more than three, looks up into my face.

“Are you being silly?” she asks.

I have now reached a point in my life where I regard silliness as a virtue, perhaps the first sign of sanity.

“Yes, I am being silly,” I say.

She laughs the contagious laugh of a child. I have that laugh in me. It bubbles up and I laugh, too.

T
he wind has shifted to the south and a light mist is blowing in from the sea. There is a desolation to the beach, a sense
of desertion, as if the human population has fled to a higher ground in fear of a pending catastrophe. I feel it myself, feel
the foreboding, but I don’t know where it comes from or what it is.

Down the beach, through the drizzle, I see a solitary fisherman. He is wearing a sou’wester, a yellow slicker, and hip boots
pulled up over his jeans. The sight of him evokes a buried image from my past, for I was once a surf fisherman myself, and
I stop to chat with him.

He tells me he has already landed nine perch, and he is determined to catch one more before the tide turns. His rig is simple:
a slim bamboo rod and a light spinning reel. He casts his sandworm into the breakers, reels in slowly, and suddenly jolts
the rod up over his shoulder.

“Got one!” he says.

His rod bends almost to the breaking point; his reel is too light to cope with the fish—if, indeed, that is what is at the
other end. It isn’t struggling like a bat ray or a striped bass; it seems to be lying under the water, perhaps trapped behind
a rock, listless as a cod or a mass of kelp.

The surf caster sticks his rod in a sand spike and begins to pull in the monofilament line, hand over hand, a little at a
time. I stare intently at the point where the line enters the sea, hoping that what ultimately emerges is more exciting than
a clump of seaweed. Gradually it becomes clear that he has snagged a line, one lost by another angler, who has long since
disappeared. His own line comes out first; there is a perch on the hook and a red crab clinging to the wire leader. He switches
to the snagged line, dragging hook and sinker up the beach. What we see astounds us both. There is a second perch firmly on
the hook, and a mottled cabezon, with spiny fin and gaping mouth, looking for all the world like a prehistoric creature, has
seized the smaller prey above the tail and is trying to devour it.

The surf caster kneels on the sand and stares at his haul with disbelief. With a single cast he has caught three fish and
a crab. The crab lets go of the leader, and he lets it crawl back into the ocean. But the two perch and the cabezon he keeps.

“I’m sixty-five,” he says to me. “I’ve been fishing the surf for fifty years, and I’ve never seen anything like this. Last
year I had a heart attack.” He thumps his chest. “Too much corned beef and cabbage, steaks and eggs. Now I eat fish, which
I catch myself.”

Warmed by his exuberance, I continue down the beach. Offshore, a brown pelican plunges headfirst into the ocean. Closer in,
a Caspian tern zigzags above the swells. Still closer in, a scoter dives at the last second under the crest of a wave. They
are surf fishers all, taking what they need to survive from the sea.

Once, when I worked in Manhattan, I went into Abercrombie & Fitch, the exclusive outfitter to sportsmen, then located on Madison
Avenue. On an upper floor, I found the store’s fishing expert. “I’m interested in surf fishing,” I said. “What do you recommend?”

A tall, imperious man, he drew himself up to full height. “Surf fishing,” he replied. “What do you want to do that for? It’s
the most unproductive kind of fishing there is!” I left and never went back.

I found what I was looking for in a ramshackle bait and tackle shop located on the pier in the seaside town where I lived.
The elderly proprietor picked a fiberglass blank off a wooden rack with his gnarled fingers and held it up for me to inspect.

“This one is nine feet long,” he said. “That’s all you need. Some fishermen want a rod eleven, twelve, even thirteen feet
long. They think they have to cast to England to catch a fish. But all you have to do is reach the breakers.That’s where the
blues and stripers feed.”

He attached cork grips, a seat for the reel, and wrapped the guides. I attached a reel, a leader, and lure, and made a practice
cast from the edge of the dock. The rod had exactly the right flex to it—not too limber, not too stiff. It was meant for me.

My career as a surf caster began on the long spit of sand that faces the Atlantic off the south shore of Long Island. Every
Saturday morning from September through November, my good friend Bob Behn and I would cross the causeway to the ocean beach,
scan the horizon for feeding gulls, and cast our lures into the white water in front of the breakers. Bob, who was my mentor,
had a standing rule, and we seldom varied from it.

“Cast three times from one spot,” he told me on our very first outing. “If you don’t get a strike, walk fifty paces up the
beach and cast three more times. Cast and walk, cast and walk. It’s the only way.”

And that’s what we did. Week after week, year after year, Bob and I made our fall pilgrimage to the south-shore fishing grounds.
Week after week, year after year, we would cast and walk, cast and walk, from early morning to afternoon. And week after week,
year after year, we would go home with no fish.

Yet I cannot say that those long days under the autumn sun were unproductive. Between casts, there were frequent intervals
of conversation and reflection that were fruitful beyond belief. Sometimes Bob and I would lean against the lee side of a
dune, discussing the stories we had read, the stories we wanted to write. A teacher of English, a lover of literature, Bob
had given me an anthology of short fiction, and he would press me for my thoughts.

I must have read a dozen stories in that book, but one in particular remains firmly fixed in my memory. “Old Red,” by Caroline
Gordon, is a haunting tale of Mister Maury, a freshwater fisherman who, in the eyes of his family, seems to be fly casting
his life away. They urge him to do useful work, productive work in the way of the world, but he refuses to change his life,
to let them wear him down. Day after day he ventures down to a pond and casts his feathery lures over the placid water with
perfect fidelity, hauling in bass and bream.

“What does it mean?” Bob asked. “What do you think it means?”

Although I was moved by the story, I really didn’t know. I may have been fishing, but I had no idea why I fished, why Mister
Maury fished, why men fished or what they were fishing for.

“Maybe he’s just obsessed with fishing,” I said. “Maybe that’s all the author is trying to say.”

“I think Mister Maury fishes,” Bob said, “because he has a desire to make his life whole. Fly casting is his art, his craft,
his means, his ends, his work, his play. There are no artificial boundaries in his world. He is like the plovers feeding along
the shore. They probe, rest, wade, fly; they don’t need a vacation to rejuvenate themselves. Their life is of a single piece,
and so they are fully alive all the time.”

We fished longer than usual that day. It was mid-November, the north wind gusted at our backs, and we knew we wouldn’t return
to the surf again until the following fall. All through the noon hour, through the early afternoon, we cast our lures into
the breakers three times, walked fifty paces up the beach, and cast three times more. With each cast, I thought of Mister
Maury and all the fish he took from his tiny pond. And here I was with the wide Atlantic at my feet, and I couldn’t catch
a thing.

The sun was halfway down the sky when Bob turned to me. “What do you say we call it a day.” He removed his lure, put it in
his canvas shoulder bag, and snapped the leader to one of the guides.

“Just one more cast,” I said.

He laughed. “That’s what you always say.”

I removed my metal lure and attached a wooden plug. I don’t know why I did it; it wasn’t skill or intuition. I had no special
knowledge that informed me a popping plug would be better at that moment than a shiny lure. I cast high above the churning
water and the plug landed with a visible splash. Almost at once I saw a movement, a dark swirl below the plug, and I knew
it wasn’t an ordinary fish. It struck the plug; I let out a mighty howl and jolted the rod to set the hook.

What followed was sheer panic. Bob was jumping up and down, telling me to keep the rod tilted upward, to tighten the drag,
to loosen the drag, to give him more line, to reel him in, to take it easy, to hurry up. Several times I thought I had lost
him; then I would reel in furiously until I felt his powerful tug again. Finally, with the help of a wave, I rolled him toward
the shore.

“It’s a striper,” Bob cried. “My God, he’s huge!”

When I got him on the beach, he somehow managed to throw the hook. He lay on the wet sand, a yardstick long, flapping furiously.
Bob and I stood there staring at the mighty fish, unable to act. We had come all this way for all these days, for all these
years, to catch a fish, and now that we had at long last caught one, we didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it.
A wave washed up the shore, surrounded the striper, and it swam back into the sea.

“He’s gone,” Bob said.

“Yes,” I said, “he’s gone.”

We trudged up the beach, our rods over our shoulders, and drove silently home.

That spring Bob accepted a teaching job in the Midwest; by early summer he had moved away. But I went on fishing. I bought
short surf rods for my sons, Jeff and Keith, who were of fishing age, and took them to the beach with me as soon as the blues
and stripers started to run. I continued to cast lures and poppers, but I let the boys bottom-fish with bait, squid, or sand-worms.
The luck was with them, for they pulled in fluke, blowfish, and sea robins right away. Long before the season ended, they
proclaimed themselves better fishermen than I.

They were then and they are today. But the sea calls to us in different ways.

“The difference between Pop and me,” Keith says, “is that I like to catch fish.” He plies the Pacific off Southern California
and Baja in his small, towable powerboat, an assortment of rods and reels at the ready, depending on what is biting that day.
He leaves at dawn, stops at a bait barge, then heads for the oil rigs a dozen miles offshore. If he has no luck there, he
tries his other favorite spots—and almost always by early afternoon he has his quota of bonito, sand bass, dorado, or yellowtail.

His freezer is filled with fish. When I visit, he cooks me a magnificent meal over hot coals.

But his assessment is right. His way of fishing is not my way; our reasons for venturing down to the sea are not the same.
He is casting for fish, but I am casting for something else. I don’t know exactly what it is. It is hidden below the surface,
maybe lying on the ocean bottom, an object that I lost a long time ago. It may have been a penknife or an agate shooter or
a well-worn baseball mitt.

I have told this story before, and I imagine I shall go on telling it over and over again. My parents died when I was a child,
and with their death the avenues to all those who came before me disappeared. I was a man a long time before I found the courage
to mourn their passing from my life, and ever since I have been trying to resurrect all the forfeited memories that link me
to my past.

My mother’s father, Henry Isidore Lewis, was an ardent fisherman. I have a photograph of him, of Izzy, in my family album.
He is standing against a backdrop in a photographer’s studio, his rod in one hand and a huge striped bass in the other, having
his picture taken for posterity. His hat is pulled back jauntily on his head; a tuft of soft white hair slips out under the
brim and falls across his forehead. His expression is serious, as if he is saying,
This is how I want the world to remember me.

Grandpa took me fishing once off a narrow footbridge at Sheepshead Bay; we didn’t catch anything. He taught me a fisherman’s
proverb that day, and it sticks in my mind.

When the wind is from the north,

The fish bite naught.

When the wind is from the east,

The fish bite least.

When the wind is from the south,

The fish bite with the mouth.

When the wind is from the west,

The fish bite the best.

I have never found absolute truth in the saying, but absolute truth is not what I am searching for.

A few years ago, my mother’s younger sister, then in her eighties, gave me a copy of Grandpa’s death certificate. It showed
that he was born in New York City in 1870. I browsed through
The Oxford History of the American People
, searching for a few benchmarks that would help me grasp the full extent of his days. I was astonished to discover that he
was born while Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States, before the first electric streetcar, before the battle
at the Little Bighorn. I am saddened to think that all my grandfather’s memories died with him, that they have passed into
oblivion and can never be recovered. There is something I did not do that I should have done. Had I thought to ask him about
his life when he was alive, I could be the one to pass those memories on.

Grandpa had gold coins; he kept them in a desk drawer, and every now and then he would take them out and show them to me.
He said his father had been in the gold rush of 1849—that the coins dated back to that time. I don’t know what happened to
them. They vanished ages ago. Maybe that’s what I am surf casting for. Maybe I’m trying to fetch up those old coins.