Preface

In the photograph we will use for his obituary, my brother, Brad, smiles his big smile that always came without warning, exploding right from the deep center of human happiness. His eyes are dark black just like that big mustache and his long, thick hair. In another time, in a different culture maybe, he would have been a holy man—his simplicity, that all-sincere joy a thing to learn from and maybe even worship.  As I write that, I hear him guffaw in disapproval.  In the picture he stands near me, both of us having returned from a catastrophic fishing, camping and canoeing trip to the Rangeley region of Maine (I will tell about that in due time).  We are both young, sun-baked, unshaven, happy to be back in the land of toilets and hot showers.  Just out of the frame is my red Plymouth Duster with its beloved straight six engine.  

When Brad died, and I went searching for a picture for his obituary and found that one, I knew I would also have to write an essay as tribute, and I knew deep down it needed to center around recollections from our fishing adventures (and misadventures).  These stories would do the best job of beginning to say what he fundamentally meant to me.  I only wish I’d gotten around to this years earlier, so he could have read it and corrected all my mis-rememberings and laughed over it with me—and to have him tell a memory, then laugh, not needing to finish it, just giving enough to spark the image in both of our minds…. So many shared memories needed so little prodding for us both to reminisce about and then be instantly transported back to those simpler times.  Perhaps with his passing, the imperative to write it well will spark a still deeper connection and understanding.

The Bass Whisperer

My earliest fishing memories with Brad take me back to our father—a man who ultimately stepped out of our lives just as we stepped into our young adulthood.  For all his many deep flaws and all the sad and painful things he caused to pass in our lives, fishing with him as boys is at least one good thing he left us.   

For me, and I’m sure it was the same for Brad, those days revolve around memories of a red “speed boat” he must have gotten a deal on someplace—its red fiberglass dulled and washed out, a big, white Johnson outboard that roared and sent out puffs of white, single-stroke smoke and left rainbows of leaked fuel on the surface of the water of his favorite fishing spot—Fish Creek, the channel that feeds Saratoga Lake in upstate New York.  It had a flat bow where my mother would douse herself with baby oil mixed with iodine (ah, those pre-sunscreen days!) and lay still roasting herself there for hours.  My oldest brother, Randy, might feign interest and take a cast or two before returning to some beefy novel or scribbling notes on 3x5 cards, “just ideas for things,” he told us, keeping it mysterious…. My younger sister, Lisa, would be handed a small rod, a hook sporting the smallest possible segment of worm and a bobber to keep her happy (and in my dad’s mind hopefully not catch anything while he was working the weed line with his jointed Rapala for largemouth bass).  But for Brad and me and our father, we were here to fish.  And fishing with dad meant casting surface plugs up tight to the edge of the thick layer of lily pads which lined the entire shoreline of the channel.  

Brad and I would watch him in awe, the way he could drop his Rapala so it was right up against the edge of a lily pad, how he could even magically predict when a strike would come. He’d twitch the lure, then let it rest, then twitch, rest and say, “I feel one coming. That just looks too good, don’t you think boys?  Here fishy fishy, come on now.” And he’d twitch it again, so it jiggled ever so slightly, then let it rest until the surface around it was absolutely flat and calm again….and always, the bass would strike—that gulping smash and slurp that to this day fills me with the self-same sensation awakened then—with Brad at my side.  Brad and I would try, our casts not close enough, our jiggle/wait/jiggle pacing too rushed, not nuanced enough.  Or, to dad’s chagrin (and he was very good at chagrin), we’d cast too far, out into the pads, and our lures would get caught there, the treble hooks wedged in the thick, immovable shaft of a lily pad, and he’d have to pull up anchor, and get out the oar, and raise the Johnson outboard, and edge us into the thick of lily pads, and reach down, and fish out one of his expensive bass lures.

No matter how many “here fishy fishies” and perfect casts we executed, and even if we were catching fish, neither Brad nor I could ever replicate our father’s magical premonitions and bass whispering abilities.   Recently, alone in my canoe on a remote bass lake in the Adirondack mountains, I tossed a deer hair popper dad-inch-close and noticed in the depths of the pads an almost imperceptible movement of a lily pad, then another, coming closer, and I whispered to no one in particular, though I wish Brad had been there with me that time, “Here fishy fishy” just as the bass struck.  I had discovered a secret, finally; it was never really magic at all but only angler-intense observation.  

Equally important in these earliest of fishing-with-Brad memories was the equipment we were allowed to use.  Dad had his sleek, black Mitchell 300, an open-faced reel that whirred and clicked and pumped in and out an incantatory magic.  And our father was especially adept at un-clicking the stainless bail, pushing the line up against the cork handle of his rod with his index finger, knowing when to let go of the line at just the right moment as he flicked the rod forward….  Brad and I were relegated to small, simple Zebco push button “outfits.”  Push in the button with your thumb, release thumb just as you flick the rod forward.  While it took a little mastering, it was pretty bullet proof, and more importantly, it didn’t lead to disastrous tangles of monofilament if your timing were a little off, a common occurrence if Brad or I ever tried to cast dad’s Mitchell.  While I graduated to my own open face reels, and even a Mitchell or two, and ultimately to only fishing fly rods, Brad always stayed true to his push button roots (as he did with so many things in his too-short life).  He loved their simplicity, that they rarely tangled, and he developed an uncanny knack for casting far too hard but knowing just when to engage the handle and check the lure mid-flight so it would land with near-dad-precision at weed edge.

When he was healthier, Brad would rent row boats and go out alone and fish the same weed lines with the same lures—Hula Poppers, Jitterbugs, always a jointed floating Rapala—and the same style of reel we used with dad as children, all on Saratoga Lake, on Fish Creek, a body of water he rarely ventured more than a dozen miles from for his entire life.  

Constancy.  Simplicity.  A clear and predictable order.  I start to see that reflecting on Brad as a fisherman is to reflect on Brad as a human being, on what he was and what he meant to me, to so many of us. 

The Golden Era

This is the time where we struck out on our own, where our fishing camaraderie was truly forged.  With the departure of our mystical fishing guru father, who in other endeavors, it turned out, was just a bad, hurtful and neglectful person, and after a stint in Des Moines, Iowa of all places, we landed post-divorce in deeply rural, Galway, New York, living in my aunt’s wonderfully dilapidated farmhouse on the edge of a fantastic field, a dark, mysterious forest beyond...and lots of places to fish.   With our mother working hard to re-train herself and find her way back into the workforce after being a classic housewife for decades, our oldest brother away at college, our young sister not compelling company to boys 4 and 6 years her elder, Brad and I would gather up our rods and reels and tackle boxes and somehow manage to hold onto everything while holding onto the big grips of our Schwinn bicycles and ride off in search of water.   

While there was plenty of water, sometimes finding legal and easily accessible waters to fish proved a challenge for Brad and me.  We were quick to discover and seek ways to  take advantage of any and all opportunities.  We saw it as a kind of duty or obligation to fish fishable waters and implement our passion someplace within walking or biking distance of our aunt’s farmhouse, our too-temporary home.  Having left a middle to upper middle class, horrifically suburban life back in Iowa, we were thrilled to find ourselves in that magically dilapidated farmhouse—whose attic, even, was filled with all manner of treasures—old Civil War letters of a distant relative, a 48 star American flag, lovely old windup clocks and—our greatest found treasure—two beater guitars and Mel Bay’s Teach Yourself Guitar method (which we did, and which, as with fishing, is still a central part of who I am—another part of me forged in my youth with my brother, Brad).  

In Iowa we hadn’t done any fishing, not with dad when he was still on the scene, not with each other, venturing out as we did in Galway nearly every day all summer long.  The lack of water and fishing in Iowa, in that flat, foreign place we had moved to, it seemed, just to witness our parents split up and to catch a terrifying glimpse of middle American suburbia, was symbolic of all that went wrong there.  At other points in my life I see a similar correlation.  When I’m not fishing, not out in the world, when I’m sucked into the day to day grind (somehow akin to all those identical houses positioned in those square lots lined up along  endless grids of streets), things are going terribly wrong in other, deeper ways in my life.  

But we were back east now, back near where our fishing had started, living in the same farmhouse where we’d visit our Aunt Gerry and Uncle Jack (they had moved to New Jersey, the farmhouse empty and so a good place for us to land after the divorce). This was the same farmhouse we would drive out to from Schenectady, pre-Iowa, to spend the day. The adults gathered and talked about adult things, my Uncle Jack a lifelong Democrat, dad, of course, a Republican, our mom’s sweet, older sister, Gerry, trying to keep the peace, showering us with baked goods and love.  While the adults sat in the shade and drank gin and tonics, Brad and I would explore the big back field, the woods beyond.  At night the adults would gather around the dining room table to play viciously competitive games of pinochle, dad and Aunt Gerry vs. mom and Uncle Jack, while we lay feigning sleep on the screened front porch, listening.  And later we were swept up in my father’s strong arms and carried out to the old, tan Ford station wagon, Brad and I both noticing, as we drove home, that the moon seemed as if it were chasing us, moving along with us behind the trees as we returned to our small, simple house in the city.  That was our first taste of life in the country; Brad and I loved it, and now we were living in it, the ugly suburbs with their clean, too big, identical houses, or the city house of our childhood, so far from the fields, woods, streams, ponds within striking range.  We were here, and there were fish to be caught.

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