The Longest Silence

Southern Salt

I THINK THE IMPULSE to wander between northern and southern fisheries for as long as decency would permit came as a result of my boyhood reading of what I still consider a masterpiece of world literature, the catalog of the Paul Young fly rod company, More Fishing and Less Fussing. This delicious, slim volume of prose treasures, besides describing the virtuous Paul Young rods, hinted at styles of living I could only dream about. But one rod in particular was prescribed for the angler who, at the end of trout season, “went south with the birds.” Even when I was explaining to the good monsignor who oversaw my little grade school, and who took a special interest in my graduating class of eight, that my dream was to be a Jesuit missionary — a ploy to defuse his annoyance at my disruptive behavior and drain a pint or two of blood from his weirdly livid face — my real dream was not the saving of souls but to go south with the birds, rod in hand, once winter had driven the trout into their winter holes. In the great Young book, luminaries such as Ted Williams found themselves “tickled pink” with rods that had “all the boys singing” down in the Keys. And in fact, getting away from baseball to fish, all he could say was, “Gee!” I had what Young described as “the finest all around daytime trout rod” and I thought the two of us just needed our walking papers for my life to be perfect. I would supplement my double-tapered fly line with the new “torpedo” line. From my remote angling venues, I would write testimonial letters to the Paul Young Company as to the quality of their products and sign them, as the others did, “Satisfied.”

In time I did get there, and the first magic — so many years ago now — of walking across the palm fronds to the sea, lizards rattling in the brush, fishable water to the horizon, birds on the bait, is with me still. In the small west-coast Florida town where my family moved in the fifties, there were empty or under-construction CBS houses on saltwater canals whose roofs we climbed to sight basking snook in the shade of mangroves. One day, my brother and I spotted an alligator shaded up there. I got him to take a Lazy Ike plug and fought him, thrashing and spinning in the muck, and then landed him, whereupon he rose up on his legs and chased me into the brush. Half a day passed before I had the nerve to go back for my bicycle.

We went every day to the pier where the public fished. This was one of the many rubble-rock jetties that jut from the coast of Florida, and they are great and successful places for producing happiness. In some ways, there is nothing like the society of a good jetty. The retirees, the down-and-out, the economizing housewife, the driven boys, the exposure to the whimsy of all weathers, the fickle divination of angling destiny falling where it would up and down the length of the jetty, all contributed to a soap opera wherein each hooked fish produced a mob of hopefuls casting across one another’s lines.

KEY WEST IN THE SIXTIES and seventies. Good heavens, a great and corrupt gardenia of an island in a wilderness of shoals and mangroves where we sometimes went from old wooden bars, shuddering with dance music and the heaving of like-minded characters. In the backyard of the Anchor Inn, an old Jaguar sedan that didn’t run was used to store guns confiscated from the dancing fools. Closing time left four hours for the sleepy quiet of backyards and old streets before the sun came up, and once the engine of the skiff went down and several waves of sickness were fought back, we again were up and running — lust and booze banked down — off looking for fish in the glare. Nice to be young, though it was awfully hard work. Even today, when I am sure to go to bed early the night before a long day of fishing, I remember the special horror of fighting wild tarpon with a bar-life muzziness on my face and my clothes revealing beer stains, cigarette burns, and head shop perfumes. Looking back upon those days when nothing was expected of us and you could wait all day for a tide, live like dogs, and look for fish with an unreasonable zealotry, I wonder at the wisdom of making fishing “part” of my life.

Each year, Jim Harrison came down for a long stay and lowered already abysmal standards of decency wherein the awful polarity of our nightlife and daytime striving on the sea placed us all within easy reach of professional custodians. Guy de la Valdene was almost always there to help us remember that the idea was fishing, though when finally struck with the general sleaze he, too, became part of the problem, in the end challenging the limits of our sporting motto, “Nothing is too disgusting.” This fishery lasted for many years, brought low only by a vague fear of being nabbed, though by whom and for what we were quite uncertain. Among the early signs was the presence of fellow anglers in regional prisons or in states of permanent exile under assumed names. It was a long way from Izaak Walton. Offshore lizards headquartered in the Chart Room Bar or the Full Moon Saloon, rootless and occasionally dangerous tourists and escapees, a complete collapse of the city’s management of public services in a spontaneous crime wave, had begun to give our waters a sinister tone. We pined for cold water, the colder the better now that the real ghouls of Key West were coming out of the bag. The day-trippers on the Conch Train, we began to fear, might turn on the citizens in general butchery. We sold our skiffs and cleared out.

When I went back to Key West ten years later, I was astonished. The disreputable and rundown Duval Street had become a glut of T-shirt shops and tourist traps. The end of the street was frequently blocked to the height of several stories by cruise ships, while the city itself smelled of spring break barf twenty-four hours a day. Half the writers of the East Coast had moved here to immerse themselves in the sort of cannibalism they’d learned up north. Among the towering hotels and condominiums, the marina where I used to keep my skiff was encrusted with petrochemical grime and operated by the sort of surly rednecks with catfish mustaches who seem to have proliferated in the charter-boat trade around the world. The man on the forklift sported a gaping tip jar on the front of his machine and if you didn’t take it seriously you were going to be a long time getting your boat. When I stopped in the bait shop to pick up a chart, uncertain if I could still find my way around these waters, waiting to be served by one of the several above-described idlers around the counter, a huge, drunken black man suddenly loomed in the doorway, gazed around the place and asked, “Which of y’all’s the Grand Wizard around here?”

I once had the only flats skiff in town. Now, if you didn’t have a skiff, you were viewed as some pathetic rebel without a cause. Idling out of Garrison Bight at No Wake speed, I found myself in a string of hostile skiffs that resembled a low rider parade on the border. I detected some wisdom in those skiff owners who used them exclusively for trailer rides on AIA. Once on the ocean or the Gulf backcountry, the problem was finding a place away from the competition. On the oceanfront keys south of Key West, the tranquillity I remembered was disrupted by joyriding biplanes at low altitude, Jet Skis and confused new boat operators. On weekends, a trawler yacht anchored inside Ballast Key and sold drugs to the kids in the “Save the Bales” and “Key Wasted” T-shirts who roared up in personal watercraft for what amounted to curb service.

Half the people I knew had taken a Coast Guard exam and become “captains.” Couples became captains together. I’d look in the phone book for old acquaintances and there they’d be: Smith, Captain Bill and Captain Sherri. I began to imagine a community where all were captains. Of course, many of these were realtors, though it was not out of the question for cosmetic surgeons or optometrists to be captains, too. It was very democratic, a homogenous world of captains.

Otherwise, my general impression was that Cayo Hueso had become part of New York, and not my favorite part. That would be the departure lounge at the airport. The same in-your-face style in the stores, the same goofy restaurant posturing so annoying to anyone who’s merely hungry. Furthermore, Key West was having a waste-management crisis with grimly amusing results, like the notorious Mount Trashmore, towering over the Key West Memorial Hospital and often cited in speculative considerations of the remarkably high rates of multiple sclerosis among its employees.

But Key West has always been changing. Patrick Hemingway, who grew up there before my time, told me that when he went back after a long absence he was stunned by the impact of the overseas water aqueduct. He remembered Key West as “a goony bird island,” a tropical, weather-blasted rock with humanity clinging to it in suitable humility. He marveled, too, that the black community in which he had so many childhood friends had missed the boom and was either disbursed or living in degraded vassalage to the tourism industry.

I certainly had seen enough. But it remains an odd pleasure to revisit these snapshots of the good times. There is nothing to compare to my years in the Keys as a reminder that Janis Joplin had it right: get it while you can. After that, it’s too late.