A Day in May

Without having flown over this particular stretch of water southwest of Key West, I can still envision it topographically: the infinite shadings of blue over the tidal flats—azure, indigo and the predominant light turquoise of the shallows with the paler striations of white sand. Then the brown turtle grass, the dark outlines of coral outcroppings or tidal cuts that game fish use to reach the feeding grounds, and the darker green random splotches of mangrove keys. Farther to the south is a sometimes garish penumbra of purple, that imaginary point where the Gulf and the Atlantic meet in a great ocean river, the Gulf Stream.

This vision is open to errant civilian pilots, gulls, frigate or man-o'-war birds at the edge of their northern cycle, and Navy pilots on practice bombing runs off the Marquesas. I saw it most poignantly last May, reflected off a motel wall in Hollywood after a month of butting my head into the movie industry with the kind of nondirectional energy that characterizes boobs from the Midwest.

One evening I drove back to the room in a borrowed car, going eighty miles per hour, in wet underpants from the sort of poolside party I will refuse to remember on my deathbed. In no time at all I was on the red-eye flight from L.A. to Miami, where a friend picked me up at dawn. Before noon we reached Key West and launched the boat. Just a clean, bare skiff with no equipment save a saltwater fly rod and a box of tarpon flies. Already the baggage of the clumsy Hollywood hustle was fading; we pulled out of Garrison Bight, ran at thirty knots past Christmas Island, then slowed for the heavy riptide of the ship channel. It was hot, but I was somehow shivering. Off Mule Key, not an hour into it, the first tarpon was hooked, a single stray lying along a dark bank of turtle grass in cloudy light. It was a sloppy cast, but the hookup was good, with perhaps eighty pounds of fish thrashing upward in three shattering jumps before breaking off. The break off was fine because it was the beauty of the jumps I was looking for, and we let all the tarpon free anyway.

Afterward I noticed my forearm was twitching from the electric strength of the fish. With the sun and heat and wave-lap against the boat, thinking became oddly cellular, not cranial. I'd learned again how badly the body wants to feel good.

On the way back to Key West we paused near the wreckage of a shrimp trawler. Here, a few years back, we saw an explosion up on the flat and checked it out. It was a hammerhead shark, nearly as long as the seventeen-foot skiff, chasing tarpon in the shallow water. He paused to investigate us and we teased him with the push pole. The shark circled the skiff with one goggle eye raised and tried to figure out if we were a meal. There was a stiff wind, and the sun focused him in brilliant flashes under the swiftly fleeting clouds. The water only intermittently covered him, and his long, thick, gray body glistened in a bulbous wake. Aside from a mostly imaginary threat, I could no more kill one of these creatures than I would a house pet. He belongs where he is and we are only visitors.

The next day was a long relaxing blank after the harsh, grisly nightlife that Key West specializes in—or that I seem to specialize in when I go to Key West. At dawn you always study the palm trees out the window. If they're merely rustling, the weather will be fine for fishing. If the palms are wild and bending in the wind, you check to see if anyone's in bed with you and, if not, you usually decide to make the run in bad weather. Once I fished thirty days in a row, celebrated God knows what most of every night, and took a whole month in Michigan to recover from the “vacation.”

But a blank day on the flats can be a wonderful thing. The long hot hours of nothing are alleviated symmetrically by long hours of talking about food and other pleasures. It is a natural sauna that soothes the muscles and makes you grasp neurotically for the memory of whatever it was that drove you batty. Sometimes we dive into a reef to gig lobsters for dinner. Or stalk Cottrell Key, a strange combine rookery of frigate birds and brown pelicans, hundreds of each filling the sky while the females stick glaring and restive to their nests. The air and still water of the lee are permeated by a hot low-tide smell of bird dung and the unearthly noise of the birds getting used to your presence. Later, you tie long gaudy flies to wire leaders and play with the barracuda off Cottrell, the tarpon having evidently fled to Tibet for the afternoon.

Now, there's a little panic associated with the slow fishing. After a month of it, I'm always stuck with an Andersonville or Russian Front sort of homesickness that swells in the throat and can only be handled by getting there. On a final trip, in contempt of our luck, we made the long, thirty-mile run to the Marquesas, and found a kind of tarpon epiphany. We saw nearly two hundred fish drifting in from the west, from the direction of the Dry Tortugas—a dozen schools, darkish torpedo shapes against white sand. On the flight home I still heard the gill plates rattling from the tarpon that jumped lithely over the bow of the boat, his six-foot silvery length seeming to hang freeze-framed a few feet away.

And at home, finally, in northern Michigan, the world was full of the cool green pastels of spring. On the first morning back, I went mushroom hunting with my four-year-old daughter and noted that the shades of green equaled the multifoliate blues of the tidal flats I'd just left. I looked for morel mushrooms among the first fiddleheads and wild leeks. Anna is as good at mushroom hunting as I am, perhaps because she's three feet closer to the earth and not daydreaming.

At the local bar, Dick's Tavern, I watch Anna at the weekly ritual of her pinball game. She disregards the flippers to lean on her elbows and watch the flashing lights. I would like to get that much out of a pinball game. I think of a recipe I have modestly devised that uses sweetbreads, leeks and morels, with a dash of white wine to deglaze the pan. I discuss the local fishing with Richard, the bartender. A few hours later we are standing close to shore in our waders in the cold serene waters of Lake Michigan, looking out at the Manitou Islands, their piney humps bathed in evening mist. Unlike tarpon, you don't let the lake trout go. You eat them. Sometimes your wife fillets and broils the trout and sometimes a neighbor farmer smokes them for you with apple wood. It is all part of an embarrassingly ardent cycle of fishing and hunting that keeps you alive the rest of the year during the enervating pursuits that are life in this century.

1976