The Old Man and Me

Just before dawn and the breeze comes drifting in across the bay, the sun not far behind it, casting the first pink rays of morning across the water. The clean, honest air is ripe with possibility. The possibility draws all sportsman to the big water and to the wild places. Our boat captain is a broad, genial man, tanned deep brown by the Florida sun. He has an affinity for calling each one of us “Big Daddy,” among other nicknames. I like him immediately. Our crew is rounded out by my father and grandfather, both anxious for a successful trip after the harsh weather that postponed our first outing.

The captain greets us with firm handshakes and ‘how are ya’s’ as we load the boat. It is a twenty-two-foot center console, well-adjusted to the gulf coast and its tides. We idle out of the marina, passing all manner of vessels from catamarans to humble skiffs, each with names as colorful as the people who pilot them. Once in the bay, the captain throttles down and the boat jettisons up onto plane.  We skim smoothly across the water’s surface, like a flat stone skipped across a pond. The wind, cool and salty, puts me instantly at ease and it occurs to me I am smiling.

The old man sits near the rear of the boat, his hands folded contently in his lap. These days he doesn’t get out as much as he’d like. There was a time when he was always willing and able to hit the deep water or hike the mountain trails. Age and time have slowed his body down. His spirit remains as undaunted as ever, approaching eighty, he refuses to be boxed in by the constant worrying and hand wringing of his children and grandchildren. I was reluctant to invite him on this trip. Since he’d lost feeling in his feet, his balance isn’t what it used to be, I feared the result if a swell hit us broad-side and sent him overboard. Not that he worries in the slightest. He has faith solid as an oak. Like an old oak, the storms of this life have tested him. 

It’s not long before we start hauling in fish. Tripletail is a perennial classic in the Gulf, considered by many to be a delicacy. We cast 1/0 J-style hooks baited with live shrimp, reeling them slowly by buoys and artificial mats under which the fish congregate. I catch several before handing off the rod to my father who steps up on the casting deck to take his turn. The sun, barely above the treeline, is already scorching. My neck is warm, and I know it will be burned pink before the day is over. I look over at my grandfather, nodding off as the boat rolls with the outgoing tide. I shake my head and smile. I think about how much this man has taught me over the years, the wisdom imparted through a lifetime of waterside conversations.

We’d come down to the Gulf a few weeks before. The weather dealt us a tough hand; forty mile an hour winds and great flat sheets of rain spelled the end of our fishing trip before it even began. With nothing else to do, and a six-hour drive home staring us in the face, we did the only reasonable thing a man could do in such a situation: we bellied up to an old-timey soda fountain and drowned our troubles in ice cream sodas. Just like a bunch of good Baptists ought to.

“What a waste of a trip,” I said from behind my drink. I ran a hand through my hair and slapped my cap against my leg.

The old man, ever the annoying optimist, placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. 

“My boy, disappointment is a choice, so choose to make the most of this situation.”

“Wow,” I said, rolling my eyes, “that was profound. I never knew you were a philosopher.”

“Might as well make lemonade out of this lemon we’ve got,” he said as he scooped ice cream into his mouth. 

“Yeah,” I grunted and sipped my coke float half-heartedly.

We spent the morning and early afternoon loafing; window shopping, checking out bait shops and sporting goods stores. None of it scratched my itch for wetting a line. Despite turning into a sunny day, the wind persisted, and sand peppered us like birdshot. We drove back home that afternoon, crawling down back roads until we hit the Georgia line then shooting up Interstate-75 for home. We passed great stands of live oaks and panhandle ranches, their rolling hills dotted with cattle. My grandfather rotated between talking and sleeping. My father and I kept the vigil up front. 

While sometimes annoying, the old man’s optimism is something of a miracle. Born a week before the bombing of Nagasaki, he grew up impoverished in the country’s supposed golden age. After his own father abandoned the family in Texas, my great-grandmother packed up the kids and drove to Florida, where they persisted on commodity food and church charity programs. She couldn’t support all her children. When my grandfather was ten years old, his mother dropped him at the door of a Baptist children’s home in Jacksonville.

Not an orphanage, a children’s home.

This is a point my grandfather has never failed to emphasize when retelling the stories I’ve heard a hundred times over. The emphasis is telling. 

The draft came calling when he was twenty-two, a month after his college graduation. It was a bus to Fort Benning and a shaved head and spit-polish boots, then a plane to Vietnam. Twelve months in the steaming jungles of southeast Asia, a bronze star, a purple heart, shrapnel scars. Unseen wounds resting behind kind old eyes. Forty years later he was driving home from work, a two-hour commute since his company had downsized and he took what he could find, and a reckless driver crossed into his lane. Head-on at fifty miles an hour. Twisted, molten heaps of burned-out metal. And he crawled out of the wreck, battered, and swollen, and perched himself on the ditch, holding onto consciousness, and prayed for the driver of the other car. Fifty years later and Vietnam still had its hooks in him and when he was seventy, he was diagnosed with cancer, a parting gift from Agent Orange and the Swinging Sixties. Lymphoma took him to task. 

But he beat it, like all that had come before. He beat it with a smile.

After lunch, we move on from the Tripletail mats and start casting for Reds, my personal favorite. They fight like nothing else in-shore. We run the boat parallel with the beach, maybe fifty yards out and drop anchor. The fishing is good. Whiting and Reds can’t seem to stay off our lines. I bring in my personal best, weighing in close to twenty pounds. My grandfather catches a few, but contents himself with watching. He’s reached an age where observing the victories of loved ones is enjoyable enough. He smiles from under his broad-brim cap. The moment is not lost on me. 

I think about my catch, and I realize the old man’s smile would have been enough. All the drive-time, all the hassle and little sleep. All the sun. All the biting, stinging, swollen Florida sand gnats. It would have been worth it. Even if the bottom dropped out again and the rain and wind kept us beaten back to the shore as it had before. Even if the only trophy was a Coke float at an old soda fountain and one more conversation. I measure this moment, this snapshot in time to be filed away forever in happier parts of my mind, and it all seemed clear. It really was never about the fish. Maybe not even about the pursuit. I smiled at this revelation. The old man has dozed off again.

He likes to tell a story. It will usually come after supper, if he’s in the story-telling mood, when he’s eaten his fill of creamed corn or cured ham or any of the recipes my grandmother might whip up (though never lima beans, he’ll tell you that he ate enough of those in the Army to never want another). He’ll push back from the table and stretch way back, setting his hands behind his head. Those old graying eyes will go far off for a minute, and I’ll wonder what lies unseen behind them as they race across the decades of memory. He’ll take a long, deep breath and begin. It was Tampa Bay. 1966. Before the Army got him. His long absent father had died, leaving him an old station wagon. With a college buddy, they piloted the relic to the coast to chase tarpon. 

“The biggest one I caught was a hundred pounds, my boy,” he’ll say with a grin and goose my leg. “We must’ve caught close to two hundred that day. Two hundred Tarpon. You believe that? Course we threw them all back. Can’t eat Tarpon anyway.”

This story really has little to do with fishing. When I was young, he would sit me on a rock down by the pond behind his house and we’d catch bluegill and catfish all day long. And I suppose I’ll remember that as long as I live. As I sit here writing this, it occurs to me I’ve been blessed as mightily as any man might be, for I spent my boyhood alongside the banks of the cool water with my grandfather. And if the love of an old man and the pull of a line doesn’t count as a blessing, I surely don’t know what does. Thoreau said, “Some men fish all their lives without knowing it is not really the fish they are after.

My grandfather knows this.

I’ve seen the cool waters cast in the red glow of a dying sun and the flashing of a thousand fluttering fireflies. The fog rolling off a sunrise duck hole is a revelation to witness and the mountains over north Georgia are profound in their age and solace. It occurs to me perhaps I’ve known all along what it is I’m truly after, what truly matters. I’d like to think it would make the old man proud. I’d like to think it would make him smile.