The Longest Silence

Sakonnet

BECAUSE THIS WAS a visit and a return, I might have had the nerve, right at the beginning, to call it “Sakonnet Point Revisited” and take my lumps on the Victorianism and sentimentality counts, though half a page of murder and sex at the end would bail that out. If you are to cultivate a universal irony, as Edmund Wilson told Scott Fitzgerald to do, you must never visit anything in your works, much less revisit, ever.

But when you go back to a place where you spent many hours of childhood, you find that some of it has become important, if not actually numinous, and that universal irony might just have to eat hot lead for the moment, because there is no way of suppressing that importance. Also, there is the fact of its being no secret anyway. A Midwestern childhood is going to show, for instance, even after you have retired from the ad agency and are a simple crab fisherman by the sea, grave with Winslow Homer marineland wisdom. Sooner or later someone looks into your eyes and sees a flash of corn and automobiles, possibly even the chemical plant at Wyandotte, Michigan. You can’t hide it.

Still, there was one thing certainly to be avoided: to wit, the notion when you go back to the summer place everything seems so small. You protest: “But when I got there, everything did seem small.…”

Don’t say it! The smallness of that which is revisited is one of the touchstones of an underground literature in which the heart is constantly wrung by the artifacts of childhood. Undermining it would be like shooting Barbie.

I had neared Sakonnet Point thinking, This place is loaded with pitfalls, and I had visualized a perfect beach of distant memory now glittering with mercury, oiled ducks, aluminum, and maybe one defunct-but-glowing nuclear submarine. And I met my expectations at my first meal in the area: “the Down East Clam Special.” The cook’s budget had evidently been diverted into the tourist effluvium inspired by the American Revolution that I’d seen in the lobby. The clams in my chowder and fritters and fried clams were mere shadows of their former selves, calling into question whether they had ever been clams at all.

On my plate was universal irony in parable form, come to haunt me. I knew at that moment that I had my imaginative rights. As a result, I actually returned to Sakonnet Point half thinking to see the whalers of the Pequod striding up from their dories to welcome me. And, truly, when I saw the old houses on the rocky peninsula, they fitted the spangled Atlantic around them at exactly the equipoise that seems one of the harmonics of childhood.

I had my bass rod in the car and drove straight to Warren’s Point. There was a nice shore-break surf and plenty of boiling whitewater that I could reach with a plug. Nevertheless, I didn’t rush it. I needed a little breakthrough to make the pursuit plausible. When fishing on foot, you have none of the reassurances that the big accoutrements of the sport offer. No one riding a fighting chair on a John Rybovich sportfisherman thinks about not getting one in quite the same terms as the man on foot.

Before I began, I could see on the horizon the spectator boats from the last day of the America’s Cup heading home. The Goodyear blimp seemed as stately in the pale sky as the striped bass I had visualized as my evening’s reward.

I began to cast, dropping the big surface plug, an Atom Popper, into the whitewater around boulders and into the tumbling backwash of waves. I watched the boats heading home and wondered if Gretel had managed a comeback. During the day I had learned that an old friend of the family was in Fall River recovering from a heart attack and that his lobster pots still lay inside the course of the cup race. I wondered about that and cast until I began to have those first insidious notions that I had miscalculated the situation.

But suddenly, right in front of me, bait was in the air and the striped green-and-black backs of bass coursed through it. It is hard to convey this surprise: bait breaking like a small rainstorm and, bolting through the frantic minnows, perhaps a dozen striped bass. They went down at the moment I made my cast and reappeared thirty feet away. I picked up and cast again, and the same thing happened. Then the fish vanished.

I had missed the chance by not contriving an interception. I stood on my rock and rather forlornly hoped the surprise would happen again. To my immediate right, baitfish were splashing out of the water, throwing themselves up against the side of a sea-washed boulder. It occurred to me, slowly, that they were not doing this out of their own personal sense of sport. So I lobbed my plug over, made one turn on the handle, hooked a striper, and was tight to the fish in a magical burst of spray. The bass raced around among the rocks and seaweed, made one dogged run toward open water, then came my way. When he was within twenty feet, I let him hang in the trough until another wave formed, then glided the fish in on it and beached him.

The ocean swells and flattens, stripes itself abstractly with foam and changes color under the clouds. Sometimes a dense flock of gulls hangs overhead and their snowy shadows sink into the green, translucent sea.

Standing on a boulder amid breaking surf that is forming offshore, accelerating and rolling toward you is, after awhile, like looking into a fire. It is mesmeric.

All the time I was here I thought of my uncle Bill, who had died the previous year and in whose Sakonnet house I was staying, as I had in the past. He was a man of local fame as a gentleman and a wit. And he had a confidence and a sense of moral precision that amounted to a mild form of tyranny. But for me his probity was based almost more on his comic sense than on his morality, though the latter was considerable.

He was a judge in Massachusetts. I have heard that in his court one day two college students were convicted of having performed a panty raid on a girls’ dormitory. My uncle sentenced them to take his charge card to Filene’s department store in Boston and there “exhaust their interest in ladies’ underwear,” before reporting back to the court.

He exacted terrific cautions of my cousin Fred, my brother John, and me, and would never, when I fished here as a boy, have allowed me to get out on the exposed rocks I fished from now. His son Fred and I were not allowed to swim unguarded, carry pocketknives, or go to any potentially dangerous promontory to fish, a restriction that eliminated all the good places.

And he had small blindnesses that may have been infuriating to his family, for all I know. To me they simply made him more singular. By today’s standards or even those of the time, he was rather unreconstructed, yet this renders him an infinitely more palpable individual in my memory than the adaptable nullities who have replaced men like him.

His discomfiture will be perceived in the following: One day he invited Fred and me to his court in Fall River. To his horrified surprise, the first case before him was that of a three-hundred-pound lady, the star of an all-night episode of le sexe multiple, and included a parade of abashed sailors who passed before Fred’s and my astounded eyes at the behest of the prosecution. Unrepentant, the lady greeted the sailors with a heartiness they could not return.

After the session for the day, my uncle spirited us to Sakonnet to reflect upon the verities of nature. For us, at the time, nature was largely striped bass and how to get them. But the verity of a fat lady and eleven sailors trapped in the bell jar of my uncle Bill’s court fought for our attention on equal footing.

I hooked another bass at the end of a long cast. Handsome to see them blast a plug out at the end of your best throw. I landed the fish as the sun fell, reaching through foam to seize the vigorous creature.

I was here during the 1954 hurricane that made the surf break in the horse pasture across the road from the house. Shingles lifted slowly from the garage roof and exploded into the sky. The house became an airplane; unimaginable plants and objects shot past its windows. The surf took out farm fences and drove pirouettes of foam into the sky. My cousins and I treated it as an adventure. Uncle Bill was our guarantee against the utter feasibility of the house going underwater. And if it flooded, we knew he would bring a suitable boat to an upstairs window.

Late that day the hurricane was over, having produced delirium and chaos: lobster pots in the streets, commercial fishing boats splintered all over the rocks, yards denuded of trees and bushes, vegetation burned and killed by wind-driven salt water.

Fred and I stole out and headed for the shore, titillated by rumors of looting. The rocky beach was better than we dreamed: burst tackle chests with more bass plugs than we could use, swordfish harpoons, ship-to-shore radios, marine engines, the works.

Picking through this lovely rubble like a pair of crows, we were approached by the special kind of histrionic New England lady (not Irish Catholic like us, we knew) who has a lot of change tied up in antiques and heirlooms that point to her great familial depth in this part of the world. At a glance, she called us “vile little ghouls,” which rather queered it for us, neither of us knowing what ghouls were.

I kept fishing after dark, standing on a single rock and feeling disoriented by the foam swirling around me. I was getting sore from casting and jigging the plug. Moreover, casting in the dark is like smoking in the dark; something is missing. You see neither the trajectory nor the splash, nor the surface plug spouting and spoiling for trouble. But shortly I hooked a fish. It moved very little. I began to think it was possibly a deadhead rolling in the wash. I waited, just trying to keep everything together. The steady, unexcited quality of whatever this was prompted me to think it was not a fish. I lifted the rod sharply in hopes of eliciting some characteristic movement. And I got it. The fish burned off fifty or sixty yards, sulked, let me get half of it back, then began to run again, not fast or hysterical, but with the solid, irresistible motion of a Euclid bulldozer easing itself into a phosphate mine. It mixed up its plays, bulling, running, stopping, shaking. And then it was gone.

When I reeled up, I was surprised that I still had the plug, though its hooks were mangled beyond use. I’d been cleaned out. Nevertheless, with two good bass for the night, I felt resigned to my loss.

No I didn’t.

I took two more fish the next day. There was a powerful sense of activity on the shore. Pollock were chasing minnows right up against the beach. And at one sublime moment at sundown, tuna were assailing the bait, dozens of the powerful fish in the air at once, trying to nail the smaller fish from above.

Then it was over and quiet. I looked out to sea in the last light, the white rollers coming in around me. The clearest item of civilization from my perspective was a small tanker heading north. Offshore, a few rocky shoals boiled whitely. The air was chilly. The beach where I had sunned myself as a child looked lonely and cold.

But from behind me came intimate noises: the door of a house closing, voices, a lawn mower. And, to a great extent, this is the character of bass fishing from the shore. In very civilized times it is reassuring to know that wild fish will run so close that a man on foot and within earshot of lawn mowers can touch their wildness with a fishing rod.

I hooked a bass after dark, blind-casting in the surf, a good fish that presented some landing difficulties; there were numerous rocks in front of me, hard to see in the dark. I held the flashlight in my mouth, shining it first along the curve of the rod out to the line and along it to the spot among the rocks where the line met the water, foaming very brightly in the beam. The surf was heavier now, booming into the boulders around me.

In a few moments I could see the thrashing bass, the plug in its mouth, a good fish. In the backwash, it looked radically striped and impressive.

I guided the tired striper through the rocks, beached him, removed the plug, and put him gently into a protected pool. He righted himself and I watched him breathe and fin, more vivid in my light than in any aquarium. Then abruptly he shot back into the foam and out to sea. I walked into the surf again, looking for the position, the exact placement of feet and tension of rod while casting, that had produced the strike.

One of my earliest trips to Sakonnet included a tour of The Breakers, the Vanderbilt summer palazzo. My grandmother was with us. Before raising her large family she had been among the child labor force in the Fall River mills, the kind of person who had helped make really fun things like palazzos at Newport possible.

Safe on first by two generations, I darted around the lugubrious mound, determined to live like that one day. Over the fireplace was an agate only slightly smaller than a fire hydrant. Here I would evaluate the preparation of the bass I had taken under the cliffs by the severest methods: eleven-foot Calcutta casting rod and handmade block-tin squid. The bass was to be brought in by the fireplace, garni, don’t you know; and there would be days when the noble fish was to be consumed in bed. Many, many comic books would be spread about on the counterpane.

We went on to Sakonnet. As we drove I viewed every empty corn or potato field as a possible site for the mansion. The Rolls Silver Cloud would be parked to one side, its leather backseat slimy from hauling stripers. There was no end to my foppish longings.

The sun came up on a crystalline fall day; blue sky and delicate glaze. I hiked down the point beach, along the red ridge of rock, the dense beach scrub with its underledge of absolute shadow. As I walked I drove speeding clusters of sanderlings before me. If I didn’t watch out, there might be the problem of sentiment.

When I got to the end and could see the islands with their ruins, I could observe the narrow, glittering tidal rip like an oceanic continuation of the rocky ridge of the point itself.

A few days before, the water had been cloudy and full of kelp and weed, especially the puffs of iodine-colored stuff that clung tenaciously to my plug. Today, though, the water was clear and green, with waves rising translucent before whitening onto the hard beach. I stuck the butt of my rod into the sand and sat down. From here, beautiful houses could be seen along the headlands. A small farm ran down the knolls, with black-and-white cattle grazing along its tilts. More than two hundred years ago, an American spy was killed by the British in the farm’s driveway.

Fred came that evening from Fall River and we fished. The surf was heavier and I hooked and lost a bass very early on. Other fishermen were out, bad ones mostly. They trudged up and down the shore with their new rods, not casting but waiting for an irresistible sign to begin.

When it was dark, Fred, who had waded out to a far rock and periodically vanished from my view in the spray, hooked a fine bass. After some time, he landed it and made his way through the breakers with the fish in one hand, the rod in the other.

At the end of a fishing trip you’re inclined to summarize things in your mind. A tally is needed for the quick description you will be asked for: so many fish at such-and-such weights and the method employed. Inevitably, what actually happened is indescribable.

It is assumed that the salient events of childhood are inordinate. During one of my first trips to Sakonnet, a trap boat caught an enormous oceanic sunfish, many hundred pounds in weight. A waterfront entrepreneur who usually sold crabs and tarred handlines bought the sunfish and towed it to the beach in an enclosed wooden wagon, where he charged ten cents admission for a view of it. I was an early sucker — and a repeater. In some way the sight seems to have taken like a vaccination. I remember very clearly ascending the wooden steps into the wagon, whose windows let water-reflected light play over the ceiling.

One by one we children goggled past the enormous animal laid out on a field of ice. The huge lolling discus of the temperate and tropical seas met our stares with a cold eye that was no less soulful for being the size of a hubcap.

Many years later I went back to Sakonnet on a December afternoon as a specific against the torpor of university. I was walking along the cove beach when I saw the wagon, not in significantly worse repair than when I had paid to enter it. Though to be honest, I didn’t realize it was the wagon of my childhood until I stepped inside.

There, on a dry, iceless wooden table, lay the skeleton of the ocean sunfish.

It seemed safe to conclude in the face of this utterly astounding occasion that I was to be haunted. Accommodating myself to the fish’s reappearance, I adjusted to the unforeseeable in a final way. If ever I opened an elevator door and found that skeleton on its floor, I would step in without comment, finding room for my feet between its ribs, and press the button of my destination.