Green

The weather the past few days has been perfect. The air and the light at this time of year combined with the Indian Summer temperatures do something to me. It probably has to do with the change in seasons and my northern blood.

Driving over the bridge this morning and looking out across the glassy surface of the river, over The Spit and out into Cape Cod Bay brought to mind days past and running to the outside with the dogs in the bow to engage bluefish off of Third Cliff and Peggotty. The dogs have all passed and the boat is gone but I have the memories. The images of Jack and McGee pointing when they saw fish breaking, of Bekka not knowing what the hell was going on and the feel of that boat beneath me and at my hand...that was living. Those times were gold. Cash money. I parked at the office to start another day “making a living” and laughed at the irony of it all.  

Shortly after going through the morning’s emails my iPhone lit up. My buddy Capt. Hal Herrick and his crew from Sankaty Head Fishing Charters are down at Harker’s Island, NC this week chasing albies and he sent me some photos of the start of their day. Fifteen pounds of green. On my fly.

Photo by Sankaty Head Fishing Charters/Capt. Hal Herrick

 I tried to get back to work but my mind wandered back into the archives and I thought about the first albie I caught. It was also in NC, not far from where Hal had caught the monster this morning. I cracked another cup of coffee, found the photo of that first albie on the computer and let myself relive that day for a few minutes.

It was 2007. I had taken time off to spend a full week in Morehead City with Henry (previously written about here) and his friend Barry albie fishing. Being down there also gave me a chance to hook up with my good friend Capt. Bill Strakele, a Cape guide who had relocated there. I had met him a few years earlier when I bought his boat. It was an eighteen foot Lund Alaskan center console. Custom rigged with fore and aft casting decks and a poling platform. It was a fishing machine.

I knew of Billy through fly tying articles and word of mouth. He was part of a group of guides and fly tiers I looked up to. To be honest, I was nervous about meeting him. That nervousness disappeared three seconds after meeting him in his driveway. Through the process of taking the boat out for a splash and making the transaction we learned we had some common history as cops. We had both been detectives when we got out and had some similar stories. In law enforcement, at least back in my day, it was common for a veteran to take a rookie under their wing and be somewhat of a mentor. The veteran was referred to as your “uncle.” Bill Strakele became my “uncle” in Fly World.

Once H, Barry and I arrived in Morehead City, Billy came by the hotel and gave me a few of “the flies” that the albies were keyed in on. There were probably 40 other fishermen staying at the hotel, many also from Massachusetts, and we all met for breakfast each morning. I had packed my vice and materials and sat in my room each night drinking beer with Billy and twisting these flies to hand out to the guys at breakfast.

I think it was day two or three and I had yet to catch an albie. We had found some, cast to some but I was still on a learning curve. At breakfast it was decided that I would go out with Billy on his Pro-Kat and meet up with H and Barry on the water later in the day. The day was gray, windy and cold. There were no classic bait balls to be found. After a couple of hours of searching and waiting we found a few albies moving fast along Atlantic Beach. They were up and down and unpredictable as they tend to be. Billy set up a drift and told me to just keep blind-casting until we saw them break and then try to lead them with a long cast. It took some time but it allowed me to mellow out a little. Eventually a few fish broke in front of us and I got in a good cast and was hooked up. Drag screaming, line flying all over the place…now I knew what “albie fever” felt like.

Photo by Capt. Bill Strakele

 The fish was small but I felt like I had just slain a dragon.  Billy tailed the fish and handed it to me. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. Even as small a fish as this one was I could feel its seemingly infinite strength as I held it. As Billy dug out my camera for a photo I looked up behind him and noticed that the clouds were giving way to blue sky and sunshine. Moments like that change you. I was glad I was able to share that moment with my “uncle.”

I think of that first albie periodically but I think of that morning with Billy more often. Being on the water with him for a few hours and talking about life and having him there as I let that fish go…that’s cash money.

Capt. Bill Strakele 

Photo courtesy of Capt. Bill Strakele

North River, MA

4 November 2015

Intersections

I’m going off script a little on this one. But I did have a conversation while albie fishing with a couple of friends a while back about some of this which is where the first half came from.

“Not all those who wander are lost.”

I see and hear this quote from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring used all the time. I’ve never read the book or seen the movie(s) so I have no idea in what context it was originally intended but I have at times hijacked it to describe and/or explain parts of my own journey. I’ve always subscribed to the idea that “wander” refers to making (not finding) your own path and “lost” to mean not standing with the flock. In short, without engaging in socio-political discussion which seems to be all the rage right now, it's about  a balance between being yourself or being like everyone else. Defending that balance is something I once struggled with. It’s just too tedious and ultimately meaningless to maintain.

I just turned fifty. The idea of wandering a little more and finding new places and getting lost in the old ones is more important now. The sand in the hourglass is not as infinite as it once seemed. This thought came to me while looking at my daughter’s math homework. In her geometry book was a graph with values listed on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis. I looked at it and I saw material things on the vertical and experiences on the horizontal. Plotting my life on that imaginary graph and forecasting the rest of it I saw a vertical existence. Despite all the bullshit I write about here like, “In these backwaters life happens…,” I didn’t see as much volume on the horizontal axis as there should be.  

Ultimately we all live on the vertical axis. I get it. But I’m no longer convinced it’s the only way or the best way. Part of my daily routine is looking for new posts and material from people I admire for the way they live their lives. They are people who live a little more, or sometimes fully, on the horizontal axis as opposed to the vertical. I do this to seek inspiration and to remind myself there is another way. Ironically I wrote about them as a group in general two years ago as I completed another circle around the sun. I have added another to the list.

I recently started reading and following a blog written by my friend Holly’s daughter Samantha. She started sohoma to document her personal journey as she navigates changes in her life and makes her own path. Her story hits close to home for a couple of reasons.

The first is that while I don’t know Sam other than through a few messages, I have known her family for almost as long as I can remember. Sam’s grandparents were friends of my parents. Her mom and I were teammates on our high school ski team. Holly trained and raced with tenacity that I applied to my own skiing and carried her example of leadership with me as I became a leader of the team. One of her aunts, who happened to be on the US Nordic Team, spent ten minutes with me before the state meet qualification my freshman year working on my transition from the single-step double pole to single sticking out of the starting gate. Those ten minutes defined my skiing career and realistically may have been responsible for getting me to college. I spent two summers life guarding and teaching swimming lessons with another of her aunts and received the basis of my knowledge of American literature and the lyrics of Jackson Browne and the Eagles from her. Sam’s uncle was one of my swimming students and later in life a colleague in the construction industry. Her dad was also an industry colleague and we sat together on an education committee for a contractor’s group in Maine. I mention all of this because these people and the experiences with them are contained on the horizontal indices of my life’s graph. Because I know the character of Sam’s family and where she came from, I know she’s going to get to the other side just fine.

Secondly, and basically inside the wheelhouse is that I was exactly where she is at right now. I was the same age, living under the same circumstances and in the same city. I won’t try to paraphrase her story or interject my own here other than to say those were some of the hardest times of my life yet some of the best. A time I learned the most about myself, about life, about what is important and about what is not. It was a time that I truly lived on the horizontal axis.  Reading Sam's blog has been a good reminder. If only I had a fly rod back then...

So to Sam, I say be yourself, learn from this time, struggle with it but above all else embrace it. You are not lost.

And should our paths cross at some point, 

beers are on me.

And to my mom, sister and the 5 other people who read my blog, if you haven’t already followed the links to some of her posts, check out Sam’s blog at sohoma or https://sohoma.wordpress.com/. 

Start at the beginning and follow her story. It's a good one.

North River, MA

12 October 2015

Time

Ben Franklin said, "Lost time is never found again."

Driving home from work one night last week I was at a stop sign and noticed the leaves on a tree next to me were starting to change color. I sat there for a moment realizing that another season is about to pass and once again I have not spent the time on the water I planned to when the season started four months ago. There are several reasons, and they’re all justifiable, explained simply in the words my father once said to me, that “…being a man means doing what you have to do instead of what you want to do…” The time is coming, and it’s not that far off, when what I “have to do” and what I “want to do” are going to trade places. In the meantime I’ll keep pulling a little more at the leash as I plan for change and find a way to spend my days on the backwater flats.

Since I started Backwater Flats and have written a bit about were I’ve gone, what I’ve seen and people I’ve met, I’ve been asked a few times where exactly these backwater flats are, how many fish have I caught and what were they caught on. My best answer is they are wherever you want them to be and any fish caught are just a bonus. The idea is not about a specific location or the results of throwing feathers and fur at the water. It’s about getting to that place and the time spent there.

After the stop sign incident I’ve ventured out three times to spend a few hours in the backwater unplugged and unleashed from the world. Each outing was in a different place, a different tide and for different purposes. The first two were purely to escape the job, the phone and the vice for a couple of hours. Last night I headed to those flats on the edge of the marsh where this blogging idea was born two years ago. The purpose wasn’t about fishing, it was about getting there. With the sun dropping and the tide almost out I moved quickly and saved the few minutes of fishing for the other side.

Getting there is best done midway through the drop. The obstacles of finger creeks and mosquito ditches deeper than I am tall create a small window of opportunity. It takes several trips to get the timing and the route down. It’s a slog hop-scotching through the marsh and along the river bank through the mud. It’s not a straight walk in, there is a lot of climbing, sliding, jumping and stumbling involved. This is where my collection of $100 waders is invaluable and the performance clothing gets left behind in favor of work wear. River and marsh mud does not wash out of anything.

Along the way are deep pools in some of the finger creeks that on occasion will hold a trapped fish or two. It’s pretty cool to walk back into some of these places and find a fish trapped in a relatively small piece of water and spend some time trying to get them to hit a fly. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

Eventually the marsh opens up to the flats. It takes planning and timing to get there when there is still good water but every once in a while it works out. I have in the past totally committed in expedition style to spending a full tide out there. There are places to ride the tide out and they are fish-able but it gets real small, real quick.

The memory of the fish may be lost but the effort will not.

It all comes down to time.

Don't lose it.


North River, MA
31 August 2015

Wayfarer

The trail leads into the marsh from the edge of the parking lot transitioning first from pavement to hard packed gravel and then to well worn dirt. A short distance from the asphalt a tunnel of sorts is created around the path by stands of old growth trees, scrub brush and vines. As with any path, there are two certainties: something lies behind and something lies ahead. What happens in between is up to the wayfarer.

Light begins to change as day eases into night. The dim coolness of the tunnel is periodically broken by the last bits of the evening sun and its heat weaving through the breeze stirred canopy overhead. The sounds, smells and feel conjure memories of sunsets on dirt roads, the old International Harvester with half a tank of gas, the Shakespeare with a Zebco on it thrown in the back with a box of Mepps Spinners and half a dozen streams with brookies in them to stop at…and “Jack and Diane” on the radio. The summer of ’83, the last time that all things seemed possible.

Off the beaten path and through the grass is the edge of the creek. Along its length as it reaches out to the river proper are a random series of swallows and ditches. The water floods the sod banks and begins to fill the space between the stalks of cord grass and salt hay, transforming the marsh into a different place that exists for a short time every twelve hours and twenty four minutes.

In the distance is the hum of engines and tires on the pavement departed just minutes ago. The sounds of the daily journey between what is and what can be, between making a living and making a life. Looking down into the water a reflection stares back, eyes lock,  each face familiar to the other. Both mouth the words to an old Tom Petty song:

“Sometime later, getting the words wrong

Wasting the meaning, and losing the rhyme…”

Each silently asks the other, “Do you remember?”

The two part ways as life begins to flow with the water from the creek and its fingers over the bank and into the grass. A depression on the marsh floor next to a wide ditch is now filled with water, its glassy surface intermittently disturbed by dancing shrimp and baitfish. Casts are made from a somewhat raised area off to the side in the hopes a striped bass or a shad ventures out of the ditch into this temporary buffet line. In time a wake appears and on the second cast to it the fly is hit almost immediately.

During the release of the shad, in the light of the headlamp, the reflection reappears and asks again, “Do you remember?”

Both watch the fish swim away.

The water’s edge is the border, the difference between one who does and one who does not. Standing here right now, caught in the middle, each step deeper into the marsh another step away from one and closer to the other.


North River, MA
Summer of '15