The Mindful Carnivore (19 page)

“Any luck with the stripers at the bridge?” I asked.

Willie shook his head. He hadn’t been out recently. Earlier in the summer, when he had, nothing had taken the bait.

We spoke of future outings. It had been two years since we fished from the bridge over Spruce Creek. In that time, we had talked about fishing together again, but never got around to breaking out rods and reels. He and I had both been busy with work and family. And weddings.

Twelve months after Cath and I tied the knot, Willie and Beth had done the same. I was delighted for them, and astonished, too. At nearly fifty-nine, Willie had never married and I hadn’t imagined he ever would.

The wedding itself had been a small church service in Manhattan, bringing together Beth’s family from Jersey and Willie’s from the Bronx. The serious party—and food—came a few weeks later, in Maine. With a front yard big enough to accommodate a large tent, they hired a local outfit to put on a full-fledged clambake with all the fixings: fresh-caught lobster, roasted corn, steamed mussels, and the best seafood chowder we had ever tasted. Willie relished his role as host, greeting friends and dispensing bear hugs. When he finally sat, he tucked a big lobster bib into the front of his shirt and settled down for a feed. Watching him dig in, I recalled a line from one of his favorite books,
The Problem of Pain
by C. S. Lewis: “I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else.” It was not an offense that Willie was at any risk of committing.

Later that evening, after most folks had left the reception, Willie and I sat down at a picnic table with another old friend of his to shuck the leftover lobsters. We sat in the dark, with only faint light from an outdoor bulb some yards away, cracking shells one by one, pulling out the tender flesh and setting it aside for future meals, our hands drenched with sweet, salty juice.

Now, a year later, Willie’s schedule and mine were both looking more spacious: friendlier to fishing. Soon he would be fully recovered from surgery and we would start making plans for spring or summer. We would go for stripers. Or we would head to a nearby river mouth where a friend of his said we might find big trout: sea-run browns.

Beth’s call came the next Sunday. That morning, Willie had suddenly felt uncomfortable. They rushed to the Portsmouth hospital, but it was too late. A blood clot had struck Willie in the lungs. The clot might have come from the surgery; more likely, it was caused by the cancer, which had been more advanced than anyone guessed. It hardly mattered now. He was gone.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. Yes, I told Beth, of course we would be there for the funeral. Yes, I would be honored to be one of the pallbearers.

Cath and I held each other, mourning our loss, and Beth’s, unimaginably greater.

Back in Maine a few days later, we stopped at the house. We gave Beth long hugs and met a few of her friends and Willie’s, along with members of both their families.

In the dining room, I admired the exquisite black cherry table. Willie had, I thought, been like the furniture he built. His life and character were not happy accidents of inborn personality, the way the grain of his being just happened to lie. They had been carefully crafted. “We are responsible,” he once told me, “for the refinement of our own souls.”

Atop one of the matching side cabinets, I noticed a big wooden bowl. Resting in it was the cherry cooking spoon I had carved as a wedding gift. On the back of the handle, using my woodburner’s finest tip, I had etched a tiny, leaping trout.

That night, in our motel room, Cath and I made an altar. In the center, a candle and a single red flower. In front, my fillet knife in a half circle of seashells. To one side, the little notebook I was using as a fishing log, three trout on the front. To the other side, an old copy of Henry van Dyke’s
Fisherman’s Luck
, and a photo from our wedding—Willie and me walking toward the altar, shoulder to shoulder, our heads inclined slightly toward one another, laughing.

At dawn we walked the beach. Gentle swells rolled in as the sun eased up out of the sea. Here and there we bent to pick up shells.

Later that morning, we gathered for the funeral at the local Catholic church. Willie had almost never joined Beth in attending Saturday evening Mass, but I didn’t think he would have objected to the venue. What had bothered him about the church was its double standards, not its basic teachings. He needed guidance as much as the next person. Though he didn’t normally seek that guidance within the four walls of a house of worship, he wasn’t picky about where it came from. On one of his rare visits to the building where his funeral was now being performed, he was standing just inside the door when a priest approached.

“Can I help you?” the priest asked.

“Father,” replied Willie, “I need all the help I can get.”

In a nearby cemetery, we carried the heavy, dark casket from hearse to fresh-dug grave. Two young navy sailors folded a flag and presented it to Willie’s mother.

Then we gave Willie back to the earth.

A low jumble of dark rocks pointed toward the open ocean. Uncle Mark, his son Adam, and I had paddled across to this spit in the dim light of an overcast dawn and anchored the old aluminum canoe in a few inches of water. Now the three of us stood among the rocks, rods in hand. To our right lay the deep channel we had just crossed. With the tide beginning to fall, Cape Cod’s East Bay was giving its waters back to the sea. With those waters came baitfish, streaming out through the channel. Drawn by the small fish came larger ones, the hunters we hunted.

I had only fished with Mark once or twice as a boy and never since. But a few days after Willie was buried, Mark had written. He had noticed that the tide charts indicated favorable conditions for striped bass and bluefish the following weekend. Knowing how important Willie had been to me and how central fishing had been to our friendship, Mark wondered if I wanted to come down to the Cape and wet a line. Did I ever.

Standing there, our feet wedged among the rocks, cold salt-water swirling around our ankles, Mark, Adam, and I heard an occasional splash as fish broke the surface nearby. If we happened to be looking in the right direction, we would see a silver flash or two before the turmoil subsided, leaving the flow of the tide unmarred. Minutes later, the surface might erupt again just a few yards away.

In that violent slapping and swirling of tails, I felt a hint of the wild, open ocean. I thought of a photograph Beth had told me about: Willie standing atop a great rock at the surf’s edge, his feet set, his fishing rod doubled over, the vast, raw power of the water making the big man look tiny. I thought, too, of the photograph in the back pocket of my jeans, the laminated card from the funeral home, bearing Willie’s broad smile.

This flinging of lures and bait into the salty, wind-driven swells was nothing like the fishing I had done with Willie when I was a boy: standing under the granite cliffs or sitting in my father’s battered old rowboat, watching our lines straighten on the breeze-riffled surface, praying for the gentle tug of a brookie. But it was, I thought, very much like the fishing we would have done if he had lived longer.

There, casting a line into the churning sea, I could begin to say goodbye.

Other goodbyes had been like this, too. After my father died, I went to a spot where he and I often swam together when I was a boy, the same spot where Willie had nabbed the huge brookie with a salmon egg. Back then, I would stand on that small granite shelf just a foot above the water, my back to the quarry wall. I would look high over my left shoulder and glimpse my father taking that last casual step toward the late-day summer sun, testicles cupped in one hand: He swam naked and the human body picks up momentum in twenty-three feet of free fall.

He would hurtle past and hit with a great splash, spraying me and the stone around me. When the froth settled, I would dive straight into the long column of air he had left, hundreds of tiny bubbles tickling skin as my small body shot through. Back on the surface, we would exchange a few playful splashes before hoisting ourselves out to towel off. Later, over a game of backgammon, we would hear the big yellow-throated bullfrogs begin their nightly chorus among the cattails.

Returning to that spot after his death, and diving in again, the simple fact struck me: I would never again feel that bubbly plume rise up around me. In that moment—and later, in walking that land with my sister, scattering his ashes on earth and water—my heart opened to loss.

Cath also turned to nature at such times. Years before we met, when her father called to tell her about the results of her mother’s first biopsy—
Yes, it’s cancer
—she went to the backyard and set hundreds of daffodil and tulip bulbs into the soil, tears running down her cheeks as she dug each hole and planted each tightly packed bundle of beauty-to-be. Nine months later, when her father was struck by his final heart attack, she dug a new rose bed, a circle, an opening in the ground where she could pour her grief.

In our first two years together, when her mother’s cancer returned to lay its final siege, Cath helped her at home and took her to chemotherapy appointments. Every time they walked into the chemo room, it took Cath’s breath away. The rows of big recliner chairs. The people, with or without hair, their faces ashen. Some sat up, alert, maybe reading. Others just lay there, often alone. Once, a mother sat with her sick teenage son.

After each session, Cath came home drained. We talked. She wrote in her journal. She sat by the brook, needing to hear the rhythm of the water. And she gardened, needing to feel soil against skin, to coax loveliness and sustenance from the earth.

My fishing, like Cath’s gardening, was not a simple matter of procuring food. Nor would my hunting be. As Canadian wildlife biologist Valerius Geist once phrased it, I would “no more hunt to kill deer than I garden to kill cabbages.”

A solid tug on the line spurred my hands into motion. The fish was close. In the swirling water, I caught the broadside flash of a silvery flank marked by dark lines: a little striper. I brought the bass to hand and eased the hook from the corner of its mouth. One powerful flick of the tail and the fish was gone. From the massive swirls we had seen and heard, we knew there were bigger fish nearby. But they would not strike. Mark and Adam, like me, caught only small bass, nowhere near the twenty-eight-inch legal minimum for stripers.

Bluefish came, though, in a toothy swarm, chattering at the ends of our lines. We landed three of them, each a foot or more long, and—there being no size restrictions—killed them.

By late morning, we were back at the house where Mark lived with his wife, daughter, and son. On the back deck, Mark filleted the blues deftly, using a knife that must have cleaned thousands of fish, its handle weathered, its blade narrowed by constant re-sharpening. By lunchtime, the rich, oily flesh was on our plates, broiled—the so-recently-living, so-recently-surging-through-the-sea feeding the so-far-still-living, so-far-still-wandering-the-earth.

That afternoon, Mark and I went to the woods across the street to walk his dog, Hunter, a burly Australian Cattle Dog he had trained to tree squirrels. As we walked, I watched Mark move. Several inches shorter than I, he had the strength of a much larger man, arms tightly muscled, shoulders sloping powerfully. Despite his physique, however, there was nothing aggressive or even assertive about how he carried himself. On the contrary, I was struck by the lengths to which he went not to take up too much room. As we approached each narrowing of the trail, Mark slowed, his pauses longer than politeness required, insisting that I pass through first. Later, running errands, he did the same at the grocery-store door. And, in his interaction with the checkout clerk, he seemed intensely self-conscious, almost apologetic, as though concerned that he might offend someone.

As we ate dinner that evening, I glanced around the small dining room. The shell of a horseshoe crab hung on one wall, photographs of sandpiper chicks and wood duck drakes on another. Two shed antlers—dropped by whitetail bucks in winter and later found by Mark and Adam—were suspended from a curtain rod.

Earlier in the day, I had taken a good look around the house. Wild things inhabited every space, indoors and out. At the street, the mailbox was painted as a striped bass, seven dark lateral lines running along its sides, with wooden head, tail, and dorsal fins attached. At the corner of an outdoor railing perched a carved wooden owl. Three fish swam below, two carved out of wood, one cleverly fashioned of metal odds and ends welded together.

In the bathroom hung a small painted relief carving of a blue whale Mark had made in his twenties, and two
gyotaku
fish prints he had made more recently: one showing four yellow perch, the other a pair of sea robins, their wedge-shaped bodies and broad, winglike pectoral fins realistically inked in brown and orange. In the living room, books on fishing, hunting, canoeing, and tree identification shared the shelves with painted duck decoys, rabbit sculptures, and stacks of scallop shells. Aldo Leopold’s
A Sand County Almanac
stood beside Gerald J. Grantz’s
Home Book of Taxidermy and Tanning
. Small sculptures of a loon and two sandpipers rested on the mantel above the wood-pellet stove, alongside another owl Mark had carved.

And there were the big buck heads, two of them now. The one I remembered from years ago, an eight pointer with slender, elegantly curved antlers, hung above the stairwell beside a longbow. In the living room was a larger nine pointer, its rack heavy and craggy.

As a vegetarian and antihunter, I had dismissed stuffed trophy heads as grotesque displays of prowess and machismo. Now, I considered these two more closely. The taxidermists’ craftsmanship was impressive. Technically speaking, these were not “stuffed heads” at all. Though it was impossible to tell by looking, the antlers were attached to quite small sections of skull, which were in turn attached to foam forms manufactured in the shape of a whitetail’s head and neck. What looked like a deer was, in fact, an expertly tanned hide with glass eyes.