Lines on the Water by David Adams Richards Read Free Book Online Page B

faraway branch, I would meet someone who I had not seen since the frost came the year before. There he or she was again, working their way through a pool, throwing a wonderful line unconscious of themselves. Or perhaps they would be offshore, in among the ferns, because they had spotted in the dew a patch of wild berries. You would become close to them by this aspect of humanity even though you may or may not have spoken to them very much.
    Way up on the Norwest, where I fished for the first few years, I would often meet a man from Chatham, who came the same time as we did every year. Then as the year went along, we switched rivers—he going to a river some place else, and I wouldn’t see him again, until he reappeared early the next season, as if he had come out of the earth. I would look up and he’d be there, wearing the same waders and hat, giving us the same rough smile.
    We would talk and have coffee, take turns moving through the pool. Once we boiled a fish on the side of the shore in an old bent aluminum pot on his Coleman stove, in the pouring rain. His wife had made him brown bread and molasses cookies, which we ate along with the freshly boiled grilse. He lazed on the beach staring at the hypnotic water and talked aboutbringing his son with him. That he was going to teach his son how to fish as soon as he got a little older.
    Then one year at that same time he did not come back. And we found out he had died of a heart attack sometime that winter at the age of thirty-eight. The shadows moved on the trees as we worked our way through the pool ourselves. I stared over my shoulder to the little rocky beach where we had boiled our grilse with such ceremonial laughter—I thought of his son.

Five
    THE MIRAMICHI IS A multiple of rivers and streams intertwined. There is no one place to go, there are literally hundreds of places. Although one place might remind you of another, all places are essentially different, have their own spirit attached to them. The Little Souwest is much different than the Norwest, and different kinds of fishermen travel these branches. But some people travel all rivers.
    Peter McGrath often viewed this world of his, the Miramichi, as a continual kaleidoscope of possibilities.
    Hunting or fishing, Peter is like this. For instance,hunting: I’d be sitting near a rut mark, and Peter would walk up.
    “Let’s go,” he’d say. “I’m compressed.”
(Compressed
rather than
depressed
because he believes it is a better adjective. And I have come to agree with him.)
    “Why—why are you compressed? What is there to be compressed about? There is nothing in the world to be compressed about. There’s a buck right here. Where the hell are you thinking of now?”
    Peter would point with his finger to some unknown space far away, around bends and denizens of the late-autumn forest, the sky like grey slate, and all about us the hushed whispers of tiny flakes of snow.
    “Are you slightly hyperactive, Peter?” I asked him one day, up on the south branch of the Sevogle, after we’d just walked five miles upriver from where we had parked the truck.
    “No, the fish are,” he said, pointing finally to four or five grilse in the bottom part of the pool we were just coming to. As I said, he answers always directly and with purpose.
    So that first day, without throwing a line at Wilson’s Pool, we turned and walked three miles back to the Lada truck, because Peter didn’t feel we’d have luck where we were. And who was I to disagree, not knowing one pool from the other.
    I had worn my waders for two hours and had yet to stand in the water. Suddenly it seemed as if I were not so much on a fishing expedition, but in the French Foreign Legion: March or die.
    As a matter of fact, there was a large puddle on the Stickney Road I felt like sucking dry.
    We headed upriver to the open pool on the stony brook stretch that early summer day, years ago, generations of fish ago, past the millions of leaves, on those