Hemingway's Boat (26 page)

The art of slacking, of holding back before you try to set the hook, is counterintuitive, counterreflexive, which is probably why Hemingway was so damn good at it—in both fishing and literature. This immense thing is coming at you, his back projecting out of the water like a submarine, a submarine with wings, and then he hits it, smashes at the bait, explodes and boils the sea around him, and all you can think to do—against every instruction and mental reminder—is to jerk back on the rod. The most natural impulse in the world. But if you do this, if you sock without first trying to slack, almost certainly you'll lose the fish—and maybe your line as well. You'll horse the bait right out of his mouth, or, worse, you'll snap your line like a matchstick
.

There's so much to remember, in split seconds of timing, and all of it's apt to go out the window at the instant of the thrill and the strike
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Once the fish has got it in his mouth, but realizes what's up, what's off, and has started his run, it's important to screw down lightly on the drag—but not too much. Too much tension drag on the reel and it's over. The line won't bear it
.

Sometimes the immense thing will only be rolling and lolling the bait around inside that cavernous gullet, gumming it, finning slowly away, as if trying to know whether there's something a little bit off here, as if trying to decide, even as the taste of the meat is quite satisfactory, whether there's another kind of taste mixed in here, something foreign, something hard and bitter, iron-like, although I realize that this will sound far-fetched to a nonfisherman. It presupposes that something as dumb as a fish could reason, could know what alloys of metal taste like. Yet it has often seemed that way to me, when I've got a rainbow trout tethered to the other end of my fly line, but not yet firmly hooked, and his intelligence is about to outshine mine once more
.

Sometimes a rainbow will just instantly spit out the fly, knowing it's a fake, an imitation, and then there's nothing you can do but reel in, and start your hopes over, start your loops over, arcing your line back and forth across the stream
.

“One Trip Across” could be read almost as much for its marlin instructions as for its taut drama: “If you don't give them line when they hook
up like that they break it. There isn't any line will hold them. When they want it you've got to give it to them.… What we have to do is use the boat to chase them so they don't take it all when they make their run. After they make their run they'll sound and you can tighten up the drag and get it back.” If you could remember that, you'd likely have your fish
.

At an earlier point in the tale, Harry Morgan is providing more instruction to his wealthy and ignorant and thieving client, whose name is Johnson, and who has booked Harry's charter boat for the day. Harry's at the wheel
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But Johnson doesn't keep the drag off—he screws it down too tight. And he takes the rod out of the chair socket. And he gets out of his leather harness and foolishly places the rod across his knees because he's grown tired of holding it steady in an upright position in the socket. A few minutes later, when the fish hits, Harry sees Johnson “rise up in the air off the chair as though he was being derricked.”

The finest fishing passage from the story may be this:

To try to land the thousand-pounder of your saltwater dreams, you sit in a ladder-back swivel chair with your feet braced against footrests and with somebody pouring ice water on your wrists and with your shoulders encased in a leather harness that almost looks like something from an electric chair. (The straps of the harness, which goes around your shoulders, are buckled to the sides of the giant reel. A lot of the weight is thus directed to your shoulders and back and legs. This takes the pressure off
your arms. The bolted-down chair is supporting the weight of the rod, which is in the socket, sometimes referred to by fishermen as the “gimble socket,” or just the “gimble.” You see that expression in Hemingway. The word is said to be a corruption of “gimbal,” which in nautical terms refers to a device that allows an object—such as a ship's compass, mounted in or on it—to remain suspended in a horizontal plane. A gimble socket on a fishing chair is just an iron cavity built into the middle of the seat.)

In almost forty years of wedging fast, pure water in many beautiful mountain places in obsessive search of rainbows and browns and brookies and cutthroats, I've probably landed and released (most of the time) several thousand trout in the ten-inch and half-pound range—and I've lost, in the same period, probably five times, ten times, twenty times that many fish. Why? Well, for many reasons, but not least because I came back too fast. Because I tried to implant the hook before I'd sufficiently slacked. All my experience and self-reminding as I stepped into the stream couldn't stop me at the instant of the hit and thrill from jerking backward. The fragile thing came darting out of the shadows of some gorgeous pool, striking the little blow-away wad of hackle and glue affixed to the end of my two-ounce Sage graphite rod and Orvis reel and tapered, lime-colored, weight-forward, high-floating line. And what did I do? I reflexively pumped, jerked, socked. I hauled the fly right out of his mouth
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When you've actually had him on the hook and have been fighting him for a minute or two or five; have been edging him, in between his various deep runs and spray-filmed leaps, ever closer to your net, and he then suddenly gets off, wriggles free, is gone, disappeared, vanished, well, the loss feels monumental. You want to go bawling and trembling in your waders to the closest boulder to sit down and try to get your life back—or I do. Damn, you lost him. Oh, you would have set him free anyway. But he beat you. Again. On bad winter days, when I'm up to my knees in the trout pools of memory, I usually wind up thinking—even laughing—about all the times I have failed at this wretched and exquisite sport, which, like writing, you could work at for the rest of your life and never come close to mastering
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“One Trip Across” is both a taut story and a marvelous instruction manual—and yet perhaps surpassed by Hemingway's account of David Hudson's six-hour losing battle with the giant broadbill swordfish in
Islands in the Stream.
David is transparently Ernest Hemingway's middle son, Patrick
.

Davy's broadbill battle goes on for pages. It's in the “Bimini” section
,
which opens that wobbly-connected, three-part, autobiographical, posthumous novel. The account of the battle is almost breathtaking for its tension and utter fishing authenticity, not the least of which is the prayer of a ten-year-old once he knows the living thing is on the other end of his line
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“Hit him now, Dave, and really hit him,” says Roger Davis, who, as I have already noted, is partly Hemingway, just as the novel's central character, Thomas Hudson—Davy's father—is even more unambiguously Hemingway
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“ ‘Do you think he's had it long enough?' David asked. ‘You don't think he's just carrying it in his mouth and swimming with it?' ”

“ ‘I think you better hit him before he spits it out.' ”

The boy's father, narrating the fight, says: “David braced his feet, tightened the drag well down with his right hand, and struck back hard against the great weight. He struck again and again bending the rod like a bow. The line moved out steadily. He had made no impression on the fish
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“ ‘Hit him again, Dave,' Roger said. ‘Really put it into him.' ”

Davy does. Then, “ ‘Oh God,' he said devoutly. ‘I think I've got it into him.' ”

And three paragraphs later: “ ‘I'm wonderful, papa,' Dave said. ‘Oh God, if I can catch this fish.' ”

At a café off the Prado, July 21, 1934, Ernest's birthday

SO THEY'RE IN CUBA
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The quarantine people have come and gone. The immigration officers, in their casually insolent way, have opened a few lockers and poked in a few drawers. Had they been more intent, they might have found the 12-gauge pump, and the 1903 Austrian Mannlicher Schoenauer hunting rifle, and the Colt Woodsman automatic revolver with its extra-long barrel, all of which, with their rounds, were hidden in sheepskin cases under the bunk mattresses, saturated with Fiend oil so the salt air wouldn't rust them. When the doctor left the boat and the yellow flag was hauled down, Carlos Gutiérrez, waiting in a dinghy with “Bumby” painted on the bow, clad in his spanking white sailor suit with “Pilar” stitched on the breast, oared up alongside. The owner went ashore to send a cable to his wife and to hunt with Carlos for a mechanic for the busted water pump, while the Mice kept watch over the boat and looked across in the middle distance at “the dark faces and white suits of Cubans riding past the gray apartment buildings in small street cars and open automobiles on the waterfront boulevard.”

A cook-cum-mate named Juan got hired. He was about thirty, “hungry-looking, with high cheekbones, hollow cheeks and shoes that
were cracked open” (again, Samuelson's description), and his one major flaw, apparently, was that he talked way too much. In the photographs, he looks lecherous and wears sleeveless undershirts and smokes little penny cigars only a little less skinny than he is. But it turned out that he could prepare marlin steaks five ways. Also, in the coming days Juan, who spoke a pure and old form of Spanish, would prove himself more adept at handling the wheel (when Hemingway was in his chair, fighting a fish) than the excitable Carlos. Carlos could gaff and scout and bait better than anyone around, but he had little experience at piloting a cabin cruiser. There are times when it seems as if everybody's running in circles in the small space of the boat, yelling at the top of his lungs.

The busted pump got attended to. The mechanic's Spanish nickname was Cojo, which means “cripple,” and he was a round little Cuban, who, like Juan and Carlos, would come in and out of photographs and log entries of the next several months. Cojo was missing his toes and so walked stiff-legged and pitched back on his heels. He told Hemingway he knew of Havana metalworkers who could replace the brass on the interior parts of the pump without having to send the pump to the factory in the States, and that he'd see to it that the motor was back in operation by the next midday. He kept his word, and to boot refused to take payment. For the rest of the summer, this chubby government employee, longing for a wife, was good for all the liquor he could down on the afterdeck when
Pilar
was in for the night and the owner hadn't yet headed to his hotel, with or without company.

That evening, while the boat was under repair, Pauline crossed over. Her husband met her at the ferry slip, and together they went off to room 511 at the Ambos Mundos. Early the next morning, the Hemingways came down to the wharf to see about progress on the engine. They retrieved Arnold, and the trio toured town, walking single file through the tight and still-cool streets of the old quarter, with Hemingway in the lead. “I don't care if I ever see the United States again,” the deckhand announced to the air. They left Habana Vieja and came toward Centro Habana, turning up the Prado, with its wide marble promenade in the middle, its overhanging trees, its lovers' benches, its lanes of darting traffic on either side. The Prado is Havana's Fifth Avenue, or maybe its Champs-Élysées. The tourists sat down at an outdoor café, near the Capitolio Nacional, across the Prado, while a nameless street photographer, nameless to history, came up and stopped time in a box. It's the photograph at the start of this chapter.

The instant survives in its original form on the front of a small postcard
in a white folder in an acid-free box at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston. It survives in soft brown hues, a surprisingly clear printed image on what had to have been ready-made photographic stock, handy for mailing by
turistas
. Dian Darby has a copy of this photograph on her living room wall, and the photograph is also on the dust jacket of her father's memoir. (Pauline is cropped out—it's just Hemingway and his protégé—but you can see part of her arm hanging at the edge of the frame.) What's revelatory is how much there is to see and muse on when you're holding the cheap-cum-glorious original in your hand.