Beachcombing at Miramar Read online

  A tall, imperious man, he drew himself up to full height. “Surf fishing,” he replied. “What do you want to do that for? It’s the most unproductive kind of fishing there is!” I left and never went back.

  I found what I was looking for in a ramshackle bait and tackle shop located on the pier in the seaside town where I lived. The elderly proprietor picked a fiberglass blank off a wooden rack with his gnarled fingers and held it up for me to inspect.

  “This one is nine feet long,” he said. “That’s all you need. Some fishermen want a rod eleven, twelve, even thirteen feet long. They think they have to cast to England to catch a fish. But all you have to do is reach the breakers.That’s where the blues and stripers feed.”

  He attached cork grips, a seat for the reel, and wrapped the guides. I attached a reel, a leader, and lure, and made a practice cast from the edge of the dock. The rod had exactly the right flex to it—not too limber, not too stiff. It was meant for me.

  My career as a surf caster began on the long spit of sand that faces the Atlantic off the south shore of Long Island. Every Saturday morning from September through November, my good friend Bob Behn and I would cross the causeway to the ocean beach, scan the horizon for feeding gulls, and cast our lures into the white water in front of the breakers. Bob, who was my mentor, had a standing rule, and we seldom varied from it.

  “Cast three times from one spot,” he told me on our very first outing. “If you don’t get a strike, walk fifty paces up the beach and cast three more times. Cast and walk, cast and walk. It’s the only way.”

  And that’s what we did. Week after week, year after year, Bob and I made our fall pilgrimage to the south-shore fishing grounds. Week after week, year after year, we would cast and walk, cast and walk, from early morning to afternoon. And week after week, year after year, we would go home with no fish.

  Yet I cannot say that those long days under the autumn sun were unproductive. Between casts, there were frequent intervals of conversation and reflection that were fruitful beyond belief. Sometimes Bob and I would lean against the lee side of a dune, discussing the stories we had read, the stories we wanted to write. A teacher of English, a lover of literature, Bob had given me an anthology of short fiction, and he would press me for my thoughts.

  I must have read a dozen stories in that book, but one in particular remains firmly fixed in my memory. “Old Red,” by Caroline Gordon, is a haunting tale of Mister Maury, a freshwater fisherman who, in the eyes of his family, seems to be fly casting his life away. They urge him to do useful work, productive work in the way of the world, but he refuses to change his life, to let them wear him down. Day after day he ventures down to a pond and casts his feathery lures over the placid water with perfect fidelity, hauling in bass and bream.

  “What does it mean?” Bob asked. “What do you think it means?”

  Although I was moved by the story, I really didn’t know. I may have been fishing, but I had no idea why I fished, why Mister Maury fished, why men fished or what they were fishing for.

  “Maybe he’s just obsessed with fishing,” I said. “Maybe that’s all the author is trying to say.”

  “I think Mister Maury fishes,” Bob said, “because he has a desire to make his life whole. Fly casting is his art, his craft, his means, his ends, his work, his play. There are no artificial boundaries in his world. He is like the plovers feeding along the shore. They probe, rest, wade, fly; they don’t need a vacation to rejuvenate themselves. Their life is of a single piece, and so they are fully alive all the time.”

  We fished longer than usual that day. It was mid-November, the north wind gusted at our backs, and we knew we wouldn’t return to the surf again until the following fall. All through the noon hour, through the early afternoon, we cast our lures into the breakers three times, walked fifty paces up the beach, and cast three times more. With each cast, I thought of Mister Maury and all the fish he took from his tiny pond. And here I was with the wide Atlantic at my feet, and I couldn’t catch a thing.

  The sun was halfway down the sky when Bob turned to me. “What do you say we call it a day.” He removed his lure, put it in his canvas shoulder bag, and snapped the leader to one of the guides.

  “Just one more cast,” I said.

  He laughed. “That’s what you always say.”

  I removed my metal lure and attached a wooden plug. I don’t know why I did it; it wasn’t skill or intuition. I had no special knowledge that informed me a popping plug would be better at that moment than a shiny lure. I cast high above the churning water and the plug landed with a visible splash. Almost at once I saw a movement, a dark swirl below the plug, and I knew it wasn’t an ordinary fish. It struck the plug; I let out a mighty howl and jolted the rod to set the hook.

  What followed was sheer panic. Bob was jumping up and down, telling me to keep the rod tilted upward, to tighten the drag, to loosen the drag, to give him more line, to reel him in, to take it easy, to hurry up. Several times I thought I had lost him; then I would reel in furiously until I felt his powerful tug again. Finally, with the help of a wave, I rolled him toward the shore.

  “It’s a striper,” Bob cried. “My God, he’s huge!”

  When I got him on the beach, he somehow managed to throw the hook. He lay on the wet sand, a yardstick long, flapping furiously. Bob and I stood there staring at the mighty fish, unable to act. We had come all this way for all these days, for all these years, to catch a fish, and now that we had at long last caught one, we didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it. A wave washed up the shore, surrounded the striper, and it swam back into the sea.

  “He’s gone,” Bob said.

  “Yes,” I said, “he’s gone.”

  We trudged up the beach, our rods over our shoulders, and drove silently home.

  That spring Bob accepted a teaching job in the Midwest; by early summer he had moved away. But I went on fishing. I bought short surf rods for my sons, Jeff and Keith, who were of fishing age, and took them to the beach with me as soon as the blues and stripers started to run. I continued to cast lures and poppers, but I let the boys bottom-fish with bait, squid, or sand-worms. The luck was with them, for they pulled in fluke, blowfish, and sea robins right away. Long before the season ended, they proclaimed themselves better fishermen than I.

  They were then and they are today. But the sea calls to us in different ways.

  “The difference between Pop and me,” Keith says, “is that I like to catch fish.” He plies the Pacific off Southern California and Baja in his small, towable powerboat, an assortment of rods and reels at the ready, depending on what is biting that day. He leaves at dawn, stops at a bait barge, then heads for the oil rigs a dozen miles offshore. If he has no luck there, he tries his other favorite spots—and almost always by early afternoon he has his quota of bonito, sand bass, dorado, or yellowtail.

  His freezer is filled with fish. When I visit, he cooks me a magnificent meal over hot coals.

  But his assessment is right. His way of fishing is not my way; our reasons for venturing down to the sea are not the same. He is casting for fish, but I am casting for something else. I don’t know exactly what it is. It is hidden below the surface, maybe lying on the ocean bottom, an object that I lost a long time ago. It may have been a penknife or an agate shooter or a well-worn baseball mitt.

  I have told this story before, and I imagine I shall go on telling it over and over again. My parents died when I was a child, and with their death the avenues to all those who came before me disappeared. I was a man a long time before I found the courage to mourn their passing from my life, and ever since I have been trying to resurrect all the forfeited memories that link me to my past.

  My mother’s father, Henry Isidore Lewis, was an ardent fisherman. I have a photograph of him, of Izzy, in my family album. He is standing against a backdrop in a photographer’s studio, his rod in one hand and a huge striped bass in the other, having his picture taken for posterity. His hat is pulled back
jauntily on his head; a tuft of soft white hair slips out under the brim and falls across his forehead. His expression is serious, as if he is saying, This is how I want the world to remember me.

  Grandpa took me fishing once off a narrow footbridge at Sheepshead Bay; we didn’t catch anything. He taught me a fisherman’s proverb that day, and it sticks in my mind.

  When the wind is from the north,

  The fish bite naught.

  When the wind is from the east,

  The fish bite least.

  When the wind is from the south,

  The fish bite with the mouth.

  When the wind is from the west,

  The fish bite the best.

  I have never found absolute truth in the saying, but absolute truth is not what I am searching for.

  A few years ago, my mother’s younger sister, then in her eighties, gave me a copy of Grandpa’s death certificate. It showed that he was born in New York City in 1870. I browsed through The Oxford History of the American People, searching for a few benchmarks that would help me grasp the full extent of his days. I was astonished to discover that he was born while Ulysses S. Grant was President of the United States, before the first electric streetcar, before the battle at the Little Bighorn. I am saddened to think that all my grandfather’s memories died with him, that they have passed into oblivion and can never be recovered. There is something I did not do that I should have done. Had I thought to ask him about his life when he was alive, I could be the one to pass those memories on.

  Grandpa had gold coins; he kept them in a desk drawer, and every now and then he would take them out and show them to me. He said his father had been in the gold rush of 1849—that the coins dated back to that time. I don’t know what happened to them. They vanished ages ago. Maybe that’s what I am surf casting for. Maybe I’m trying to fetch up those old coins.

  A few years ago, while traveling through the Scottish Highlands, I took an excursion boat through the Caledonian Canal into Loch Ness. The sky was low and heavy mist blocked my view of the shore. I stood alone on the foredeck, looking across the darkening waters. I could sense the monster of that far northern lake lurking below the surface, exerting a spell that held me in place while the boat slowly circled the frigid body of water in which he dwelled. He did not appear.

  Hours later, when the boat pulled into its berth, I was still standing in the same spot. I walked back to town along the banks of the River Ness, resolved to return another day. The following morning I caught an early train to Aberdeen—but the need to see the monster of Loch Ness remained in me. And now I find that the mythical creature is with me still as I walk the sands of Miramar.

  The penknife, the agate shooter, the baseball mitt, the gold coins, all have merged in my memory and are now one. All those lost parts of my past life submerged, buried in the deep with the serpent of the lakes and seas. That is what draws me to the edge of the ocean with rod and reel. I cast not for fish but for the leviathan.

  Although I have never seen him, I know that the monster possesses no separate identity of his own. He is an aspect of me, a part of my hidden nature, and I want to pull him up to the surface so I can look at him squarely and make myself whole.

  A fine drizzle falls over Miramar, coating my hair. But there is a lightness to my step as I head for the shelter of my beach house a mile away. I will not hurry; I will move so fast and no faster, even if it starts to pour. I feel as if I have shed a burden that had been weighing me down for a long time.

  The wind is high and the tide is in. I glance into the breakers; the urge to fish comes over me once more. I want to cast my lure not for the mighty tug but for the nibble at the end of the line. If luck is with me, I might catch a perch or a cabezon.

  I remember the nine-foot rod that was made perfectly to suit my purpose so many years ago. If I had it now, I could rig it up and start to cast right away. Then I remember I left it on the other coast with my son Jeff.

  When I reach the beach house, I make a longdistance call. Jeff answers. I ask if he still has the rod. “Of course I have it, Pop,” he says. “I just used it the other day.” He tells me he took his five-year-old son, Trevor, to the same strip of beach Bob and I fished from years before. He hooked a sea robin and Trevor reeled it in. “Now,” Jeff says, “he wants me to take him back there every day.”

  I walk out on my deck and watch the surf, curling high and crashing against the shore. The rain is now coming down hard, soaking my skin, but I don’t care. I am aware only of how the past, present, and future are joined. From Grandpa Izzy to grandson Trevor there are five generations, and we are fishermen all.

  twelve

  written in the sand

  The wind comes up out of the southeast, damp and chill. By noon, an hour before the memorial service, the harbor is full. The crowd gathers around the stone monument dedicated to commercial fishermen who have been lost at sea. Now there are four more.They are strangers to me, but their names are indelibly imprinted on the tablet of my mind, as if they were members of my family or my closest friends:

  Kirk Pringle, 40

  Alex Kovack, 34

  Joe Fischer, 53

  Les Bronsema, 72

  Who are these men—Pringle, Kovack, Fischer, Bronsema—and why should their deaths affect me so? I know nothing about them except what I read in the newspaper or pick up in casual conversation on the pier. They were crab fishermen, I am told, good men, family men, involved in the community.

  They went out one morning in two vessels—Pringle and Kovack aboard the Lisa, Fischer and Bronsema aboard the Best Girl. The red flag was flying high over the harbor; most of the fishermen stayed in port. But these four went to sea. The wind was gusting from the south; the swells were rolling from the north. They got caught in a vortex. Their heavy crab traps shifted from side to side. The boats broke apart and sank.

  A bagpiper plays at the far end of the pier, a plaintive sound, like the cry of a killdeer. The families, who left the harbor earlier aboard a fleet of fishing boats, have been strewing flowers on the sea. Now, the private ceremony over, they are returning home. The boats pass through the breakwater, enter the harbor, dock at their berths. The mourners disembark and follow the bagpiper to the stone monument. They take their seats, surrounded by bouquets and floral wreaths. An anchor plaited with petals hangs in front of them, beyond the monument, on a pale blue wall.

  The crowd of a hundred or more stands behind them. I stand with them, looking for a familiar face. I don’t see anyone I know. A priest appears, uses the monument as a pedestal. He gives a brief eulogy, then intones the names of the lost men. After each name, a young girl strikes a ship’s bell, which resonates low and long across the pier.

  A local poet sings a fisherman’s ballad. A woman who lost a husband and a son to the sea in separate accidents makes a plea for faith in the Savior and everlasting life. Mothers and fathers, wives and daughters, sons and brothers, sisters and friends rise and try to say what words cannot say about their grief. The service ends with “Amazing Grace.”

  I stroll about the harbor, studying the ships. Somewhere along one of these floating piers there are two empty berths. Where are the Lisa and the Best Girl now? Where are the men who owned and sailed them, and where are their mates? I am struck by the disparity in their lives. One man dies at thirty-four; another lives to be more than twice his age.

  My thoughts go back a half century to my mother’s death. I remember the wan face of a woman in a casket, a woman who barely looked like my mother, and I remember how the room in the funeral parlor reeked of perfume. I took a rose from my mother’s bier; afterward I placed it between the pages of a Bible. Years later I came upon the pressed flower in the Book of Psalms. I held the stem between my fingers, twisting it slowly, remembering my mother, the kind of woman she was.

  When I was little, she taught me how to push saliva under my upper lip and give a Bronx cheer. She touched my toe, my knee, my chest, my head and called me “Toe-knee Chest-nut.�
� She put me on the back of a bike and pedaled up and down the streets of Manhattan Beach, where she grew up, waving and smiling at all the people she knew. Those are the signs of her days, the legacy she left me with.

  I threw away the withered rose; it could not bear the weight of all that memory. What I treasured was the image of my mother alive. Now I want to pass that image on, pass it on to my children, pass it on to my children’s children, for memory is what I have of the mother who bore me.

  But the tragedy of life is that in the inevitable course of history my mother will be forgotten, just as I will be forgotten, just as the four fishermen will be forgotten. For who will take the pains to remember all those who came before me after I am gone? The tragic part of death is not that I die, but that in dying I take with me the last vestige of those who survive in my remembrance of things past.

  When I am gone, what will my survivors say? Will they remember my minor deeds, the ones I cherish most? Will they remember that once I sailed a sloop, once I edited a small-town newspaper, once I taught my daughter to read? And what will happen when my survivors die? What will happen to their memory of me?

  I once lived in a hilltop house above a cemetery dating back to the 1800s. From time to time I would climb over a low stone wall and wander through the graveyard, examining the weathered and timeworn inscriptions on the headstones of the six people buried there. I would try to piece together the relationship among them, try to figure out what happened to them when they were alive, but the epitaphs were so eroded by the winds of a century that I could barely make out their names.

  Who were these strangers who had their final resting place in my front yard? Does anyone remember them now—remember their births, their marriages, the sounds of their voices, the way they walked? They dwelled for a while along the river of life, did their dance, sowed their seeds, and now all that remains of them are bare granite headstones at the bottom of a hill.

  They are but six among the untold millions since the dawn of humankind who have come and gone, leaving no trace, no fossil memory of their passage. Kings, emperors, czars, presidents—we have accounts of them in our history books. We know about the bard who wrote Hamlet, the musician who composed the Eroica, the mathematician who computed the gravitational pull of heavenly bodies. We know their names; we know their works. But, for all their fame, we know little about the sensate life they lived in the flesh day by day—about their hopes for themselves, their ambitions for their children, the daily deeds in which they took the most pride. And of the great mass of ordinary people, we know nothing at all.