announcing its location to the airy world.
Its tail shimmers, a loose-fitting bracelet affixed to the wrist of a beautiful woman seated at a bar, the likes of whom the man has seen only in movies, or through the dining room window of the fishing club where he works. Before the foraging fish, a puff of inhaled sand the fish’s gills expel, clouding its vision. The man gains a yard while the water clears and the fish finishes pulverizing the crab with the crunchers in the back of its throat. Then he stills again and waits until the hovering fish inverts its nose, now pink from the rooting, toward another meal.
Low on the horizon, a single crown-shaped cloud lifts toward the rising sun. The man’s sighting light is limited; when the cumulus obscures the sun, the water’s surface will turn opaque, gray as a blind eye. The tide is due to turn and the south wind, low now but sure to advance with the day, will harry the incoming water onto the flat, pushing the lone fish into an apse of mangroves, a maze of many-fingered roots. Small, eager snappers will emerge there, busying the water, quick to jump on his offering before his fish has a chance. Schools of loose-scaled green fry frequent the cove as well, behind which the big predatory Cubera are never far—once he saw a fifteen-pounder annihilate a whole school: when it finally settled, the water looked strewn with tiny emeralds.
“Get yourself another crab,” he whispers, and commences tugging twenty reams of yellow fly line from the Medalist reel seated at the base of the rod. The reel’s gears click slightly as he pulls—he looks to see if this has altered the fish’s posture, but the fish seems unbothered. Soon the loose fly line lies in coils in the water around his ankles, and he holds the fly in his hand, letting ten feet of clear monofilament leader dangle like a luffing sail at his side.
Fortune: the fish has tipped down again to feed, this time with its tail facing toward him. He takes two careful steps and begins his back-cast, extending his right forearm out and upward from his elbow, flexing the fiberglass rod deeply so that, springing, it propels the slack line behind him. The line straightens, bristling with water like a long, lit wick.
Here the fully extended back-cast, waiting for the forward cast to propel it to its destination, breathes: a pause, an emptiness at the root of which all good lies.
The forward cast: a tug against the tension the back-cast established, a punch through the humid air that cannons the poised line forward parallel to the water. Because the edgy fish navigates such a shallow element, the man knows his fly must land like a feather—it must alight, not land. He finishes his cast high, right hand reaching above his head so that the forward-traveling line extends upward and outward from his body, and the fly at the end of the tippet at the end of the leader at the end of the line lists toward the water before landing, a detectable but not irksome disturbance.
The fish turns, scurries a short yard to the south, and puts eyes on it: a stainless steel hook wrapped with brown thread, two upwardly pointing tips of hackle borrowed from a rooster’s cape, and a set of brass bead-chain eyes wrapped liberally with pink chenille yarn. A shrimp in flight, a crab wielding its pincers, a benthic worm protruding from a hole in the seafloor: the man couldn’t care less what forage the fish mistakes the fly for, so long as it’s taken. Now his rod hand and line hand come together as if in the briefest of prayers, and he gives the loop of line below the reel a tug, so that the lure dashes across the sand in irresistible faux flight.
Dithering, the fish stares squarely at the fly, but before the man can play puppeteer again, it pivots its body to inhale. The man feels the pulse-like thump that tells him fish jaw has ceded to hook point, and, tugging again, feels the sweet stretch of the monofilament leader travel through rod blank and cork handle to hand. The fish torques, readies its body to burst for the horizon; the man raises his now equally torqued fly rod, and the line connecting two creatures—across which the sun’s ancient and instant light stretches—comes taut.
If you find you no longer believe enlarge the temple.
—W. S. MERWIN
On still mornings like this one, from the McLean’s Town dock you can watch a single fold of water rolling in from a long way off and wonder where, how far out there, it began its approach. Like any story, this wave begins at an arbitrary point: before it was a wave closing in on the shore, it was an exhalation, and before it was a breath it was a drop of rain, a skein of clouds, a pothole lake, a snowfield at elevation. For all intents and purposes, it always was, never wasn’t. Look: already it’s a modest swash breaking over the blanched sand on my bare feet, receding seaward.
I first came to the East End of Grand Bahama Island to fish, a little less than a decade ago. Escapee from a soul-sapping Rocky Mountain winter, I arrived that April on the trade wind of a friend’s generosity—So-and-so can’t go, it’s all paid for—a gift that couldn’t have arrived in a timelier fashion. I was about to enter my thirteenth year as a fly-fishing guide in Montana, but would have to wait two months before my seasonal work began in earnest, and wait twice that many months before I could begin to row my way out of five-figure-deep debt, the product of some of my patented financial wizardry, which was itself largely a product of having indentured myself to the angling life at age sixteen, followed by sustained attempts to live like a sixteen-year-old for the ensuing seventeen years.
To complicate fiscal matters, February had seeped into my bloodstream, the snow spindrifting off the wind-hardened backyard mounds like elemental enactments of my unstable psychological state. And my young family needed not listlessness but some semblance of solidity from me: my wife Mary and I had a young son and were expecting a second child, which was worrisome not only because of my tenuous financial state, but also because Mary’s previous pregnancy had been fraught with health complications. The thought of her spending several months on bed rest again, on unpaid leave from her job—our only steady income—deadened me with fear. I think it’s fair to say now, with the perspective several years afford, that I was at best clinically depressed, fatigued with indecision that bordered on dread, and in need of professional help.
My psychologist father could have referred me to any number of well-qualified counselors. But out of some strange instinct or allegiance, I trusted only water’s treatments. Threadbare, more than a bit benumbed, I hoped I might be able to fish myself out of my fret-driven depression. I’d done it before, each cast a pathway out of what I assumed was myself. I remembered vaguely, or perhaps had invented, an apocryphal story in which doctors in ancient India tied mentally ill patients to trees beside the moving water. Sequestered near the sound of water running over rocks, the mad were often cured. I was hoping to fill such a prescription.
“NO EXPECTATIONS,” I PREACH TO CLIENTS ARRIVING TO fish Montana’s fabled rivers for the first time, but even on the night flight from Miami to Grand Bahama, somewhere above the black water between the hundred-mile torch of artificial light that is the Florida coast and the relative candle that is Freeport, I found my own credo impossible to follow. Somewhere below the plane swam actual schools of a silver fish that had navigated the waters of my imagination for decades; I’d spent entire winters reading books and lore about the bonefish, and heard enough firsthand accounts of its caginess and speed that my mind’s eye could effortlessly conjure images of that which I had neither hooked nor held, and that had not, to steal a phrase from Keats, been proved upon the pulses.
By the time the shuttle van neared McLean’s Town the following morning I was twitchy as a dowser near a spring. In the front seat sat my host and longtime client Miller, an annual visitor to East End flats, who prepped me on the nuances of his home-away-from-home water much the way I had for him on our drives to the Bitterroot or Blackfoot. To further distract myself from impatience,
