Fishing for Beauty

As my parents, my sister ,and I left Long Island’s Peconic Bay at the end of the three-week summer vacation, we followed the curving road around the edge of North Sea Harbor and crossed the inlet at the Fish Cove Inn. Between the concrete ribs of the bridge, I could see the shells on the sand at the bottom of the channel, wobbled by the waves. The stretch of green marsh grass spread back to our house in the dis­tance, and other kids, laughing with freedom in the sun, raced across the bay in their boats. The mouse-gray uphol­stery of our ‘38 Chevy scratched at my back, and my feet felt swollen in unaccustomed shoes. It was hot and stuffy.

I waited for the break in the trees where the water was visible again behind Tupper’s Boatyard. We passed the VFW ballpark and the firehouse, and the feeling start­ed. First a pulling in the stomach and then the tightness in the chest, like a little heart attack. A fire in the eyes, and then the water came flashing in the sun, the last salt water for a year, flowing from my eyes, and don’t make a noise in the back seat because I can’t let them know how sad it makes me to go home.

Thirty years later the same feeling comes every Septem­ber. Now I live all year by the sea, in Stonington, Connecticut, but the feeling comes anyway. I go down to the fish dock and sit in the car after work, looking out to Montauk with the first cold wind rocking the car, and wonder if I will ever grow up. I can still taste the adventure and success of July, the boundless calm of forty miles off shore, and the hugs and screeches after a big fish is brought into the boat, and the hope that this time the feeling will last forever. The tears still come.

I have tried to escape this feeling. Like so many others, I have tried to live in Florida to escape the sadness of winter, but there is no summer in Florida. We lived inside to escape the summer oppression. In winter, the Florida wind blew hard enough to make boating difficult.

In the Caribbean the wind blows harder, and the feeling of decay does not duplicate that of the north’s fresh clean summer with its winter-scrubbed water. Mex­ico’s Baja was productive and beautiful in a haunting way. Kona, on the Big Island was ominous and filled with people who want to pry open your car trunk. My fishing friend, Arne, went to Panama and Costa Rica, Alaska, upper Quebec and Iceland, and says that nothing can beat the forty-fathom curve off Block Island in late July. I didn’t go to Australia, but I hear that the hot wind off Cairnes is the stuff of nightmares. Maybe I will go again to other sunny places full of fish in the winter, but I think I’ll still be here at Labor Day wondering what I’ve lost, again.

Each year is a little life, and each September is a midlife crisis. Without each winter’s death, there can be no summer growth. That’s vintage New England Cal­vinism. I have tried to adopt the Houston-Los Angeles ethic and to say that we don’t have to earn our pleasure, but I think that I have become too mired in New England feeling to enjoy summer joy without winter pain. Everyone in southern California looks bored to me. We tiptoe around in the twentieth century, hoping that no one will seriously bring up the idea of death because we have lost faith and have no comforting answer to the question of what will happen when we die.  In New England

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