Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/554642
S P O R T I N G C L A S S I C S 1 7 0 golden fish that was still going up, having scooped my popper en route to the sky. A big fish can do funny things to a fisherman's heart. In that moment, when the smallmouth crashed down and cut a corner and headed for the snags, I had a moment to feel the weight of him, and the weight of the water, and the line in my fingers singing out, slick-wet and spastic. Jackie was gone then, alongside the Northern lights and the cavernous feeling, and there was instead a bile bitterness for this fish that had become a presence in my mourning. The burden of him, the superior secrecy, the lineage of a thousand Vermont autumns and catamount trails and beaver flows was all right there in a straight line to me, and the possibility of losing him was at once near, a presence beside me in the canoe, tangling the line that jumped from the coils around my feet. I hated that fish for the potential of him, and decided then to cling to him at any cost, to let him run me clear over Wolcott Pond for the day if he wished, forcing me to miss whatever there was to miss back home. I'd stay there and win and take that fish and keep him forever, keep him safely in my sight, a stuffed and painted effigy on the wall that would never elude me, that would hang me in this summer forever. The smallmouth came up fast and far out, and the line sliced the water, bowing as the fish outpaced it. He rose, and hovered against the morning in perfect profile, and I saw myself as an older man, watching the fish exactly like this, tacked up on a wall, in a world that had moved along, growing temporally as the weight in my heart anchored me in youth. I clung to that image and cling to it still, and remember it more perfectly than I ever could have in the presence of a plasticky skin mount—but then, I have no choice. The fish tumbled back into Wolcott Pond and the electric heaviness departed the line and the popper burbled to the surface to sit there still and nonsensical, among the deadheads and snags. I miss Wolcott Pond in the way I miss summer, even as I sit against fence posts, aware of its passing. But age and time and moments that disappear give back a peace with the things that slip wordlessly away. There is love there, among the Vermont hillsides, where Tobey now rests under the branches of an apple tree, turning back to rich black soil, and Wolcott Pond remains in the shadow of fir trees. And Jackie is there too, somewhere, sifting through the Northern lights when the winter is coldest and darkest and more honest than cruel. And it is perhaps the most beautiful thing I've known—a peace with what we love and lose, and love the more for losing. and grays. The rod in his hands was just a knife cut through layered paint, but it bent against the pull of a heavy fish. I went downstairs. The stove was cold, and I stirred the coals and put the kettle on to boil. Under the same moon, I drove over the North Wolcott Road in the dark, with the radio on and my windows rolled up. I reached for the tea in the cup holder and took a long burning swallow that stung from the whiskey in it. Behind me, the first ream of pink appeared over the White Mountains and the sky was crisp with stars. It always seemed that as the nights grew colder, the stars shone clearer, as if the thick summer air had muffled them. There were twists and turns over Town Hill that I can't see now any more than I could see them then, and a hollowness in my heart that I still remember clearly. Just as the individual branches on the firs became distinct, I pulled off the road beside Wolcott Pond. There were moose tracks in the mud. I undid the half-hitches and swung the canoe off the car, and put together the sections of my old Orvis cane. I tossed the remainder of the tea into the mud. I was not yet ready to think of myself as a morning drinker. I worked the edge of the pond slowly, throwing a green and yellow popper against the shore and chugging it back. It was a mindless sort of fishing that produced with enough regularity to make it reasonable, and I traced tangential lines around the margins of the pond as the sun rose. A sunrise is a wonderful thing at times, reminding all the world of the gently passing moments, and in the early part of the day, the possibility for nearly anything to make itself clear. A beaver waked against the bank warning me with his tail, and I dipped a paddle, pushing around to the cove that remained in shadow. There, the beaver chews stood stark and straight and skeletal, and somehow promising, but looking over at them, I felt ever more alone. In moments of sheer melancholy, there is a substrate of truth that justifies the indulgence. Alone in the presence of beauty and impending demise, I let the sadness wash over me. I breathed in the end of summer, and the necessity of a lost love, and the departure of the first grown-up year that I was intimate with. It was all so present to me, so essential and acutely sacrificial and I just kept casting that old 5-weight, working closer to the quietest, most still place. Against the rising sun, the reflection on the water was undistorted, and the world became huge for a moment, and bright, and I became infinitesimally small. And then the reflection opened up, bending the colors into a vacuum that became shattered negatives of sky and hills and a monstrous, I breathed in the end of summer, and the necessity of a lost love, and the departure of the first grown-up year that I was intimate with.