The Longest Silence

Twenty-Fish Days

ON A WARM DAY in mid-October at Sakonnet Point, I was staying again at my uncle Bill’s old house, with its view over the low weathered roofs to the harbor and the cove where we swam as children. My feelings of excited anticpation were unchanged after half a century. Roses still bloomed along the stone fences and the air was full of swallows and gulls. When I was growing up, we often visited family along the Massachusetts and Rhode Island shore where great importance was placed on the benefits of “salt air.” As I recall, it was believed to contribute not only to good health but to salutary morals as well.

I sat on the wide, wooden porch with my morning coffee, waiting to go fishing once again with my cousin Fred, and vividly pictured, really saw before me, scenes from long ago: my aunts and uncles, brother and sister, cousins and parents, gathered on that damp and fragrant grass in sight of the sea and blue skies.

The harbor was an active commercial fishing place in those days, with a number of swordfish boats from whose pulpits swordfish and white marlin, called “skillygallee,” were harpooned. The swordfishermen were our heroes. We made model swordfish boats with needles and thread for harpoon and line, tied “choggy” minnows across their decks for a triumphant return to port. I remember my businessman father heading out in his long-billed cap for a day of swordfishing with the great Gus Benakes aboard the beautiful Nova Scotia boat, the Bessie B. Those people are almost all gone. But much else has stayed the same. Even the old harbor tender, the Nasaluga, is still there.

As if to bless my fishing, a gold-crowned kinglet (probably dazed) landed on my shoulder while I drank my coffee and contemplated the striped bass fishing ahead. When Fred came we set out across the lawn just as we’d done forty-five years ago, carrying handlines and fiddler crabs. Now we bore graphite fly rods and bar-stock aluminum fly reels. Still, it felt the same. More to the point, we had arranged to fish with Fred’s friend Dave Cornell, who guides these waters he knows so well.

I had come from across the country and we were making a late start. The wind was already blowing hard. Nevertheless, we quickly headed out through the harbor around the breakwater and were running between granite ledges past the ruins of the West Island Club, where sports of the Gilded Age cast baby lobsters for tackle-smashing striped bass. Club logs reveal their astounding catches followed by a rapid decline, paralleling the industrial pollution of their spawning rivers. Where once stood their fishing stations, grande-luxe living quarters and kitchen gardens, there remained only gull-whitened rocks and the nervous attendance of the green Atlantic.

The sea was rough. We made a few stabs at schooling albacore and worked our way east toward Westport, finally tying off to a mooring buoy and eating our lunch. Dave was thinking in defensive terms, based on uncooperative weather and the gentlemanly hours of his guests. He untied us from the buoy and we headed up a saltwater river, turning into a fairly busy marina. He positioned us just outside the pilings of some empty slips along a finger pier. In a very short time, I could hear bass popping along the seawall. We caught several small fish before facing that our options that day were sharply limited. We headed back to Sakonnet.

The next day, Fred and I were better behaved and we set out at daybreak, with Dave far more optimistic. We rounded Warren’s Point and looked east toward the Massachusetts shore. The wooded land looked remarkably unpopulated except for a church steeple sticking up above the trees. Among those trees once lived Awashonks, the female chief of the Sakonnet Indians during King Phillip’s War. Between the green landmass and the Atlantic was a pure white line of low surf, sparkling with sea birds.

The ocean looked as wide and level as a snooker table. At a number of places, birds were diving into schools of bait pushed by predatorial fish underneath. There would be a patch of rough water with a stream of birds trailing from it like drifting white smoke. This looked suspiciously like the good old days.

We skirmished with a couple of schools of false albacore without success, casting from the drifting boat into the bait, the albacore cutting through like fighter planes in the clear water, succeeding through speed rather than maneuverability. With little opportunity to tease them into taking, it was hit or miss. We missed.

Dave Cornell fishes like a prowler. Even when he’s in fish he’s looking for more fish. I, most often confined by riverbanks, was fascinated by this wide-angled view. I soon was made comfortable by our fishing along the rocks, the ocean gulping and foaming around their bases. It looked right when a big green-and-white Deceiver dropped into this turmoil and was drawn into the fishy darkness. No dice.

Dave spotted a school of stripers. By the time we reached them they had strung out in a line and one of Dave’s friends was already fishing the far end of it. This was suddenly not difficult fishing. To say that it was like taking candy from a baby would be to defame the baby. We had tied on Clouser Minnows, a pattern of nearly universal effectiveness, and striped bass see them as a tremendous opportunity.

Every once in a while, angling provides an episode one can keep for life. It is not necessarily about big fish, though it sometimes is, nor about great difficulty overcome. Rather, it’s a kind of poetic singularity. Sometimes you’re even aware of it as it’s happening.

This was such an event. We drifted along the school of feeding stripers, my cousin in one end of the boat, me in the other, Dave Cornell making such adjustments as were needed to keep us lined up to the drift.

The feeding of this big school of bass was creating what looked like a low breaker traveling steadily over the surface. A dark mass of bait like a shadow full of silver flashes moved ahead of the disturbance. Along the entire front of the wave, the length of it, were … mouths. Above and all down its length hovered the terns whose forked tails touched the water when they sighted bait, caught it and swept away.

We hooked and released bass continuously. Stripers were so hard to come by when Fred and I were kids that I looked at each of these handsome native fish as though I’d never seen one before.

Dave radioed to his colleague at the other end of the school and asked how he was doing. His friend said he thought they’d put the rods away and “just lip them from the boat.”

When the sun came up fully, a beautiful sea haze spread across the land to the north. We poked around for a while, had lunch off Goose Wing Beach at Little Compton, then headed for the Elizabeth Islands, walking along the beach and into the beautiful stands of hardwoods, just beginning to turn color.

Dave ran us through Quicks’ Hole between Pasque and Nashawena and pulled us into a beautiful, quiet bay on the north side of Nashawena. False albacore were finning around but they were ultraalert and we found no takers.

We headed back to Sakonnet Point and put the boat on the trailer. Fred and I changed clothes, then followed Dave to his house in South Dartmouth, where we loaded his canoe on top of his car. Through judicious use of sandy roads, car, and canoe, we found ourselves in a remarkable world illuminated by sea light. Through a long bank of dunes, the ocean had made a hidden inlet. Once inside, the tidal channel formed a salt marsh. On the high ground encircling the marsh, old houses looked on, their windows shining in the late sun.

The channel made its serpentine way through the cattails and was the size of a trout stream, which it resembled in other ways, except for the blue crabs that backed away from us and the stone-heavy quahogs revealed by our sinking feet.

We spread out along the stream, finding places where sandbars faced the deep flowing water on the outside of bends and their undercut banks: easy casting in an absorbing world. That from beneath those banks, oceangoing striped bass took our streamers and fought the good fight seems a matter for wonder. Looking across the cattails and spartina, I could see Dave, then Fred, with deep bows in their rods.

I slept well that night, with all the windows open so the fog could creep around my bedclothes and I could better hear the sonorities of the sea buoy. All night long I received cheerful visits from family ghosts and remembered how I once longed for a single striped bass. I wondered how my life would have gone had I known at age twelve that at fifty-five I’d have a twenty-fish day. Perhaps Fred can tell me.