LOOKING at GHOSTS & EMPTIES

1. Boy in a Bubble

It was a slow day and the sun was beating through my car windshield when John called and said, “Maybe the worst day of my life can become the best day of yours.” After that the phone began breaking up. Staccato signals of constant information about a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires, an exclusive lodge, the dying of old men, non-refundable deposits. Once-in-alifetime trip, fit for a king. Bonefish, if I can just get down there. I’d been living like a boy in the bubble, hiding inside my house from floods, forest fires, and the sixth worst air in the United States. Maybe life itself. I had zero dollars in the bank, but that day found out the IRS was sending me exactly enough. My baboon heart screamed.

These are the days of miracles and wonder

This is the long distance call…

2. Graceland

I catch the redeye out of San Francisco at 11:15pm to catch the 2:30pm to Abaco the next day. In the morning my traveling companions are ghosts and empty sockets, a planeload of exhausted walking dead. And in 24 more hours I’d be looking at a different kind of ghosts and empties, the shadows of mirror-sided bonefish and the empty mud streaks where they’d just been. But for now there’d been a mixup. The lodge doesn’t know I’m coming. I’m a plus one’s plus one. Lost in the communique.

But I've reason to believe We all will be received…

3. I Know What I Know

Day one on the water, we’ve yet to see a bonefish when Kurt stops poling and says, “Three permit at 9 o’clock, 60 feet.” Between the clouds and waves I can’t see them. It’s my first time on a deck fly casting to saltwater. The wind is 17 knots in our face and I’m casting like it’s a trout stream, high and pointless, crumpling into the ocean like a dead paratrooper. Who am I to blow against the wind? Emasculated, I’ve already committed to a new cast thinking I’m short when Kurt tries to get out a “Let it sit.” It’s too late, the line rips slowly off the water, and lands as poorly as before. The permit I never see swim off. “He was on it. Always play it out, strip. Dem tree was lookin’.” The pole crunches again through sand.

4. Gumboots

I was having this discussion in a taxi heading downtown and the driver, Matthew says, “We got our own way of talking code around tourists. We don’t drive no square-tired cars round here, you know?” He’d seen me Rearranging my position in a notebook On this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown, wading through the mud and muck of everyday life and emotionally riding around on square tires. I said, "Hey, you know, breakdowns come and breakdowns go, so What are you going to do about it? That's what I'd like to know?"

“Catch a permit,” he’d said. “Hell, to even just see one would make the trip.”

5. Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes

And just like that there she was, flaring massive and silver on the black diamond of a stingray’s back. I hadn’t seen the three I missed, or the one John’s fly rod tip flung at, but I will never unsee this one. Looking just like the Vaughn Cochran paintings at the Lodge, just as I’d imagined from McGuane’s The Longest Silence. A bigger rogue wave pulls her off the ray pointing her straight at us as through an aquarium wall. We see the exact moment she spots us, and… gone. John folds into his knees, both disappointed and thrilled for the three casts she engaged him. Seneca said all disappointment comes from expectation. This is a stoic’s game.

He’s a poor boy

Empty as a pocket

Empty as a pocket with nothing to lose

6. You Can Call Me Al

I spent the second day calling our new guide Patrick. He didn’t correct me until I tipped him. “Patrick’s my brother, I’m Derrick.” All day he’d wanted to go in early, for us to just agree that the wind was too much, and that fishing in the rain was a pointless proposition. But we’d struck out through the windy, clouded morning. When the sun came out, Gecko broke the hook off our only heavy shrimp on a fat bone, then I played one too aggressively, no longer super-thrilled to catch a bone, having seen a permit, my eyes peeled for the shadow of a ray. “You gonna mash it up, playing him hard,” Derrick says through his cigarette, and I do. After two long runs, it slips off the rusty hook Derrick let us use. Gecko sees a large triggerfish and casts at him eight times. The boy can cast, but the triggerfish don’t care. “You ain’t gonna land that,” Derrick says, “He ain’t eatin.”

I need a photo opportunity I want a shot at redemption

Don’t want to end up a cartoon In a cartoon graveyard Bonedigger, bonedigger

7. Under African Skies

In the last lagoon before takeout, Derrick watches a private jet flying in. Once, a rich man lost a permit to some mangroves and yelled at Derrick, “You’ve got to go get him!”

To which, in his gangster way, he replied. “I ain’t no fuckin’ diver.” The sun’s finally out, but so is the wind. “I can’t fight this wind.” Derrick says. “It’s too much.” We ask for 60 more feet of poling. He relents. We didn’t know his shoulder was killing him, and hadn't really acknowledged his gray hair until now.

Gecko yells, “Triggerfish! Triggerfish!” Thirty feet at 3 o’clock. I offer him the rod. He waves me off. The trigger hits the first cast then spits. Goes back home. I cast again 10 feet off. It broadsides the fly, and when I set, I hook it from the outside of its lip. “You don’t know how cool this is,” Gecko says. Then we see seven bones with their backs out of the water. Gecko takes up the rod.

This is the story of how we begin to remember

This is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein

After the dream of falling and calling your name out

8. Homeless

Strong wind destroy our home, Many dead.

I hadn’t heard about hurricane Dorian, a category five with 185 mph winds that sat on Abaco for two days, trying to erase it from the earth. I was living in New Zealand, and during hurricane season I stay focused on wishing storms to go in any direction away from my family in Mississippi. Katrina was more than enough. Just like the Mississippi coast, you could read the storm’s power in absence of trees and crushed buildings, the human population shrunk from a once high of 80 thousand people, to 14 thousand today. Broken boats strewn from Marsh Harbor to Crossing of the Rocks, the jagged skyline of splintered pines. And the all-important mangroves, the incubators and nurseries of the Atlantic pulled from their clusters, sent to establish in new shallows, regeneration through violence.

“Can you tell an impact on the bonefish population?” I asked. Bones breed in the deep water, letting the currents disperse their larvae.

“Oh Yeah,” Kurt says. “Mainly up north. Population was down. It hurt ‘em. Everything, lobsters, crab, everything use it to live in. To bones, it’s the restaurant.”

9. Crazy Love Vol II

I go out with Clint to deep-line snapper for our evening meal. He’s a conchy with roots on the islands going back to the 1600s. He stays on the hustle. “How’d you get into this?” I ask.

“I took a hard left turn 15 years ago. Even my parents could tell I was miserable. So, I divorced my wife, who was a nice lady.” Never mistake comfort for happiness. Now the one-time preacher and cigar-importer-turnedguide runs the most exclusive lodge in Abaco. But the burden of other people’s happiness is relentless work, and there’s a tiredness in his eyes behind the shine. He’s training up a new manager to help transition to his next phase. He once said bonefish were from the Lord, and permit...the Devil. I'm tempted to believe him.

... the Archangel Files for divorce

He says, “Well this will eat up a year of my life And then there’s all that weight to be lost…

That Was Your Mother

At night the eight in our party eat together, get a little conversation, drink a little red wine. Tell stories of hooliganry unvarnished and unbecoming. Very little about fish is spoken that isn’t the crispy snapper on Hoppin John. Everything Chef Sam brings us is better than the last thing she brought us, every spoonful a benediction. I said, "Good gracious can this be my luck? / If that’s my prayer book / Lord, let us pray.”

They call it family here and her “Big Mama,” but she is Chef Sam and every night she throws down for the uber-wealthy, stars of stage and screen, a metric fuckton of pro golfers and occasional stray, broke assholes like ourselves. Gecko has four dollars, I, my last $300 on me for tips. John is the living embodiment of a Faulknerian generational freefall, Snopes-cycling the hell on out. But we’ve somehow been received at this table.

They‘ve flown Chef Sam around the world to shadow and dine with famous chefs. If she doesn’t like what they make, she lets them know. Originally a security guard, she started cooking when her husband began going blind, first the breakfast shift and then asking for a shot at dinners when the main chef moved on. Clint, a fine chef himself, hired her and worked with her on the kinds of four-course meals they expected. She more than met the challenge.

“You love Clint?” I ask.

“Like a father,” she says.

11. All Around the World Or the Myth Of Fingerprints

Well, the sun gets bloody And the sun goes down

I walk out to a gorgeous sunrise, feeling the broken heart of the last day of summer camp. Kurt is over in a field beside the lodge casting with power and grace as Matthew begins loading bags into the taxi. He’d like to leave five minutes earlier than scheduled, but the Long Wallets need an extra 30. He calls us the Short Wallets, and knows the short wallets would stay if we could. We’ll leave and a new crop of folks with high expectations will arrive. And though we’ll remember these folks and the experience they gave us for the rest of our lives, our names and faces are already ghosts in their minds.

“There’s no doubt about it It was the myth of fingerprints I’ve seen them all and, man, They’re all the same”

On the Clock

By Michael Steinberg

I’ve thought about time a lot in recent years, maybe even obsessed about it to unhealthy levels. Perhaps it’s a function of aging, or maybe every angler is in a similar, sorry state of time obsession. My SCOF colleagues remind me daily that I am the elder statesman of the group, so perhaps I’m getting paranoid. I think part of the root of my time obsession is that my actual time on the water, fly rod in hand, is limited. No matter what the job title, we only have so much time, actual real time, in pursuit of the fish we target. Much of my life is spent away from the water, my stored fly rods scattered in my guest room, fly boxes awaiting their promised re-organizing and de-salting. Like everyone else, I have other pressing matters to attend to: job, family, friends, exercise, bills, eating, drinking, special lady friend. All critically important endeavors on some level. My aged and aging high school friends on social media may think I’m always fishing (or so they claim) based on my photos, but sadly, my angling schedule, like most everyone else, must fit into specific blocks of time between other life events. As much as I want to be a trout or permit bum, my angling experiences are limited like 99.9% of us. I’m more of a permit vacationer, writer, and researcher than a permit bum.

I do have a career that provides more access to water than probably most of the public. For example, I take university students to Belize every May for a field course where our field sites adjoin a couple of bonefish flats. But even though I can literally see tailing fish, I have actual duties that limit opportunities to pay those fish proper attention. I throw some flies at dawn and feel quite happy if I can start my day with a single fish, but soon enough my teaching duties begin, and the fish are left to the conch chunking tourists from nearby lodges. Besides teaching, much of my research mapping mangroves and sea grass for the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust obviously puts me near water and fish. But I’m not necessarily fishing when I’m doing actual fieldwork and collecting data. When I can truly focus on fish, I am on the proverbial clock like everyone else.

At the beginning of an organized, booked fishing trip, it feels as though I have all the time in the world. Five or seven days on a bow, roughly eight hours a day seems like plenty of time to live out my angling dreams of glory. But as we all know, time passes far too quickly on the bow, and with that time, pressure builds.

On day one, I cut myself some slack if I make a shit cast and miss a fish. I tell myself that surely there will be other permit once my fish vision improves and I get my casting act together. Even day two feels carefree. I tell myself, “You’ve caught permit in the past, no worries! Enjoy the scenery.” But by day three, the pressure increases, and I can feel the clock ticking. It never helps if my flats are empty, but the guide regales me with stories of past, huge schools of permit that a previous client casted to for hours at a time without them spooking. I mumble to myself something about hatred for that lucky SOB.

The pressure is worse if the conditions degenerate. Cloud cover, gale winds, rain, all haunt me. Every shot, every possible fish, every shadow, tightens my chest. My chest is tightening just writing these words. And of course “tight fishing” usually doesn’t result in successful fishing. Rushed, sloppy loops in tropical winds rarely deliver a Bauer’s crab within striking distance of anything.

I often resort to prayer when the pressure builds. I’ve prayed more on the bow of a boat than any other time in my life combined. I’ll recite the Hail Mary, Buddhist chants, anything to any deity. Blasphemous perhaps, but I try to cover my bases with all the great faiths. The last day is the worst if it’s been a slow week. I can feel the guide looking at his watch. I want to shout out, “Give me one more flat, one more shot!” Again, the pressure is obviously much worse if it’s been a slow week. If I’ve caught a permit or tarpon, I’m satiated, I’ve lived my dream. I’m ready (sort of) to go home. If not, the guide’s final command of “reel it in” wrenches my heart.

...where will your Towee take you?