into the docks.
“Shit!” Miller said with a start, slamming his hands on the van’s dashboard. I figured he’d forgotten his wallet or passport, or worse yet his fishing rod, back at the hotel. “Excuse my language, Freddi,” he said, “but I should stop at David Senior’s and pay my regards. Just for a minute. Do you mind?”
“Of course not, Miller. I’ll just put the old Odyssey in reverse. Tell me if I’m gonna hit a dog.”
“Hey,” Miller said, turning to lift his sunglasses and look me in the eyes, “you ought to come meet David. He’s the guy that started all of this.”
It was half past eight in the morning and I was desperate to set foot on my first Bahamian bonefish flat. I had traveled two thousand miles the previous day, crossed two time zones, cleared customs after midnight, and awoken at five a.m. in a hotel bed made frigid by extremely industrious air-conditioning fearing that I would miss my alarm and thus the shuttle—I knew the guide boats would be waiting for us across the channel, ready to leave the docks as soon as we dumped our luggage and donned some fishing pants. I excused my impatience with Miller’s errand and remained in the van to organize my fly box.
Miller got out and walked through a yard strewn with bric-a-brac, car parts, and boat motor guts to the door of a bright-blue house. I watched in the rearview as he knocked and waited. A tall Bahamian man opened the door and squinted at the light, tucked in the tails of his plaid shirt, and extended his hand. He smiled—his close-cropped gray hair glowing like a newborn’s—and with his free hand clasped Miller’s shoulder, as Miller did the same to him. In the windshield view, a long fly cast from the van, a cormorant fell into flight from its mangrove perch. The bird thrashed the water’s calm surface with its wingtips before angling up the bight. Sunlight pierced a distant wall of cumulus and fanned out across the water. Miller walked toward us in the rearview, and I saw the door of the blue house close.
AS OUR SKIFF CROSSED AN UNDERWATER TERRACE, I FELT a kind of spoiled guilt at my remove from whatever I had previously considered the world—the water beneath us resembled glacial ice, and the ocean floor’s relief was an inverse of the elevation, the contours of my country. Our guide Meko Glinton—only thirty, but already a legend in the angling world and favored guide at the storied Deep Water Cay Club—cut the motor and let the boat coast shoreward toward a latticework of tiny channels running through the mangroves. Stalling the skiff finally with a long push-pole made of shaved pine, Meko asked me to slip off the bow and station myself ten yards downlight from the boat, on a small alcove of sand the skiff couldn’t reach.
I had been briefed to think that Bahamian bonefish would be nearly impossible to see, but the tail of my first shone like a knife rinsed at a sunlit tap: a gimme from the fish gods for the rookie. In a mild chaos of shadow and waking water, more bones shot up the runnels into a tidal pool, their fleeting locations made known by Meko, who now stood well above the water, his thin frame hunched heron-like on his skiff’s poling platform. He hollered and aimed the push-pole: four more fish had banked toward me.
I began to false-cast, casually measuring line to what seemed a proper distance, easing into the rhythm of the presentation, but Meko yelled, “This time!” jarring me from my trance. Released, my top-heavy cast seemed destined to spook the torsional fish. A headwind, though, sudden and warm, erected an invisible wall that the weighted fly banked off and slid down, so that the shallow water barely registered its entry. Shimmering, a bonefish levitated and inverted to take the fly, its tail severing the water’s surface. I struck and the hook knocked in; after a wild fight, I beached the fish alongside some weathered coral rubble. The color of its scales recalled the face of a man deprived of oxygen.
While hooked, my fish had spooked its schoolmates and so we left the flat for another. Motoring through the maze of cays, we passed a small encampment of homes on Sweetings Cay, its church and bar; a dozen rusted buoys and one human-assembled cairn of conch shells; an engine prop’s signature on the seafloor—but no further evidence of society’s handprints on the landscape. As the boat halved a flock of banking curlews, Miller and I turned our heads to watch the flock reunite.
“Not much has changed in thirty-five years,” he yelled into my ear over the engine noise. He waved his hand at the cay-dotted horizon. “Or two hundred for that matter.”
He told me he had invited Meko and Meko’s wife, Samantha, to dinner that night, across the channel from the lodge, to a place called Alma’s. A diner, he allowed, but Alma’s lobster was better than the club’s. “The club gets a little miffed when we head across to eat, but it’s tradition.
“I’m hoping David Senior will come, too,” he said, adding that David was Meko’s grandfather, and “the guy whose house we stopped at this morning. Literally the first bonefish guide in the Bahamas. The reason we’re all here. I fished with him every year before he retired. Remind me, when were you born?”
I told him.
“Hell, I fished with David Senior before you were born. Over three decades ago, when my old man first brought me down. His eyesight’s awful now. Cataracts. But he has wonderful stories. If he comes, you’ll sit next to him. Guide meets guide.”
THE SUN SANK, DIMINISHED, AND EVENING’S COOL FELL IN. Water-tired, the rock of the wave-cresting skiff in my bones, I sat at the dinner table, which overflowed with loud conversation and the promised lobster, as well as poached red snapper, its fins the color of my neck after initial exposure to Bahamian sun, the skin under my shirt collar radiating with warmth. We ate under an awning in plastic chairs around a picnic table covered in a plastic gingham tablecloth. Dressed in khakis and a white pearl-button snap shirt, David didn’t say much but leaned in to listen to our talk, and each time he cleared his throat, or said so much as “Pass the salt and pepper, please,” Meko and several other local guides at the table went reverently silent, their glory stories put on hold. After a while I felt obliged to include the elder statesman in the conversation, so I asked David to tell me one of the wildest things he’d witnessed in his four decades of guiding: a trivial question, but I couldn’t think of another way to lure him out.
Fully functional or not, David’s cataract-lidded eyes bored straight into mine, as if my pupils were something of great interest to him, as if they were a pair of tailing bonefish he did not want to lose sight of.
“One time, we were up north near Water Cay and a guest caught a very big bonefish, eleven pounds, if I remember. Fat fish. Looked like it was about to burst. Back then, club rules, guides could keep one fish. Usually we didn’t clean it till we got to the dock, but its belly was squirming, this way and that. I had gaffed the fish and thought the wiggling was nerves, but the guest said no, he’d never seen nerves like that. So I gutted it. And you know what was in the belly of this eleven-pounder? One-pound bonefish. Still breathing! Yessir. I put the little guy back in the water, but he wasn’t really swimming, just kind of floating there, working his gills.
“Who knows,” David said, without a wink, with a guileless grin that lifted the thin moustache he wore and revealed his front teeth, yellow as antique piano keys, and the vast gap between them. “Maybe he made it.”
He passed a platter of conch.
“My daughter and I brought that up today. Ceviche,” he said, his eyes flashing vibrantly for a brief instant—the flash the sun makes as it sets behind the sea.
I put a forkful in my mouth and chewed.
THAT NIGHT AFTER DINING WITH DAVID, ASLEEP IN A modest white cottage on Deep Water Cay, I dreamed I was walking atop the ridge of a dune. Gulls were everywhere, loud and swooping low. Someone else walked along the shoreline below me. My dream camera panned closer, and I could see a teenage girl, talking on a phone, smiling. The wind
