Book Excerpt: “Calling After Water: Dispatches from a Fishing Life”
The last fish I would catch before becoming a father comes on the penultimate day of the trip. I am back with the crew for the morning. And not just the crew—a group of podcasters and videographers has arrived, and we are now nine strong, needing three boats to get around. We fish out the morning but by lunch one of the newcomers isn’t looking so good. Whether it’s food poisoning or heatstroke or the latest and greatest Covid variant is impossible to say. All we know is that one of the boats has to leave for the day, and whoever is on it won’t be coming back out. We draw straws.
“It’s his last day, so he’s staying,” Gil says, pointing at me. I don’t protest. Everyone else will be fine, I know. They’ll be here for another week. Maybe two. Maybe they’ll never leave the island. But today I’ll be making my last cast until—I sincerely don’t know when.
I set off with a small group, including a freshly arrived drone operator. We have not yet found the land of bonefish milk and honey, so we hopscotch around from flat to flat. It’s a lovely day with a steady, easy wind, and I can see very clearly the allure of this whole saltwater fishing thing. The drone operator looks like he’s been whipping around the Caribbean for a while now, his skin deeply tanned and his attitude… very islandy.
The drone follows me for a bit as I fish. It’s a familiar whirring sound—I have flown more than a few drones in my day. Over the last few years it had become increasingly necessary to collect diverse images for stories I was covering, so in addition to my Moleskine and Fischer Space Pen, I often toted two Pelican cases, one with standard camera gear and another, the drone. And while I always enjoyed taking photographs, I never did anything but despise the little flying robot. When it crash-landed in a river during my last shoot, taking a chunk of my thumb with it, I’d been thrilled. My client ran up and helped me fish it out of a logjam.
“Do you think it’s ok?” he had asked.
“I sure hope not,” I said.
After a time, the drone departs. It’s about time for a fresh battery, if the pilot can find a decent place to land. He carefully lowers it onto the bottom of the boat, one propeller thwacking aluminum on the descent. I feel very happy that the sun is setting on one particular chapter of my fishing life and think back to a children’s book we received as a baby shower gift, which I have been using to practice my goodnight stories.
“Goodnight, drone,” I say to the empty air.
“Goodnight, editor whispering rush.”
“Goodnight, deadlines everywhere.”
The light starts to get low, which means we have time for one last spot. I haven’t yet caught a fish today and am at peace with that. Still, one more would be nice.
I look up at the sky and repeat: One more would be nice.
We motor into a large wilderness of mangroves veined with channels running between little islands. Strong tidal currents here and there. A good place to hunt, for bonefish and bonefish angler alike.
I wander off as far as I can while still seeing the boat. I glimpse nothing, nothing, nothing for an hour. I open my last Kalik. The wind picks up, howls around me, pulls a little bit of music out of the bottle—almost but not quite the cooing Amber uses to talk to Summer.
And then I see something. Maybe. A slight aberration of light, far off and moving deeper into the flat, a wandering scrap of pale shadow. If it’s a fish it’s quartering steeply away, already at the limit of my casting and going farther out. I cast beyond myself, not a measured presentation but a half-blind heave. Somewhere in the indeterminate distance the fly lands. There’s a tap tap. And then my reel is spinning in a blur as my fly line breaks for the horizon.
I hold fast to the cork as the drag whines and the fish flees, and suddenly I am six years old, flying a kite with my father, caught in that moment when the wind rips and grabs and all you can do is just stand there, index fingers in the tubes of the spool, trying to keep all other digits clear. Sometimes you got the kite back and sometimes you lost it.
A few minutes later the fish is at my feet. It’s just me and him—it feels like a him—in the middle of this huge flat. The middle of the middle. Far from one shore, far from the other, in this strange space where lasts and firsts rub up against each other, ends and beginnings, goodbyes and hellos.
The bonefish, oblivious to all this hullabaloo, swims away, light and easy.
Our last full day Amber and I save for each other. We spend the morning making sure everything is as it needs to be—flight on schedule, horses and chickens still alive, ride home from the airport all lined up—then go to one last beach.
This one is at the southernmost tip of the island. There’s a shack where we have our last meal of conch. We walk the beach. We laze in the shade. Then we go for one last long dip in the surf.
In the water the three of us ebb and flow with the waves, weightless. I trace a finger on Amber’s belly, the small dome below which our fierce little girl waits for the world. Can she feel the sun? Hear the water? Smell the salt?
“I’ve been flying rickety planes since before I was born,” Amber says.
“I’ve been eating conch fritters since before I was born.”
“—Dodging goats since before I was born.”
“—Squashing scorpions since before I was born.”
We laugh and stretch back into the waves.
“We need to come back here someday,” Amber says. “The three of us.”
The statement catches me by surprise, but I like the sentiment. A lot.
“When she’s 16,” I reply. “When she can cast.”
“Are you kidding? She’ll be a great caster by the time she’s 12.”
“Twelve, it is. 2034. Book your ticket.”
We float back and put our feet up, letting the waves rock us back against the beach, a kind of levitation. It isn’t that far off, when you think about it. Only twelve years. Twelve years of firsts. The first time she’ll watch a bobber bounce. The first time she’ll feed her mamma and dadda a fish she caught. Her first rising trout.
The first horse she falls in love with. The first time it whips away at full gallop, snatching her breath.
And other firsts too. The ones she won’t see coming and can’t expect, wonders beyond what her mother and father could ever imagine, bright shapes in bright sun, swimming round and round, waiting for her reach.
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