Friday, October 28, 2011

As He Lay Dying-1

The distillation of a man's life into printed words poses a formidable challenge, considering the array of experiences and the necessity to weed out the less interesting moments, but one way in which my friend Dave characterized himself to me as he and my son and I were about to embark on one of our numerous fishing excursions summed him up: "You got two kids to take care of today, Tom."
The scene playing out in my kitchen rang familiar, with he and Brian greedily grabbing at one bag of snacks or another, a not-quite-noon beer accompanying Dave's portion, and the two of them leaving the kitchen floor resembling the crumb tray at the bottom of the toaster.
Their indulgences extended to our actual fishing time, wading the Delaware River, and grew even more acute once we had a boat. It was during one of those wading trips, riding in the car from one fishing spot to another, when he said, "Tom, you gotta get a boat." So I did, a 16-foot aluminum boat whose carpeted floor was left much the worse for wear after Dave and Brian got done with it. From chicken-liver gunk to crumbled-up Doritos, that poor floor took a beating.
One of our earliest boat trips up a Delaware tributary serves as an enduring memory for Brian and me: I steered from the tiller position in the back while Dave guided me. He after all, knew where the sand bars were in this creek. At high tide, we made it up the creek without incident, but on our return, we hugged that right bank and, of course, rode up on a sand bar. Not especially interesting until Dave got out of the boat to free us, because once out, he had to haul his considerable girth back on board without benefit of a ladder. The gunwale acted as a sort of fulcrum, stuck as it was into the fleshy area between the navel and hip bones, as he attempted to haul his nearly 300 pounds back into the boat. I don't remember where he stood with respect to the cancer at that point, but he had undergone at least one surgery and round of chemotherapy already.
He owed me for freeing us from that predicament, for about 20 years earlier, I was the one who jumped out of our canoe to dislodge an anchor stuck on who knows what in a lake's murky depths. A turtle, he feared, could spoil the day if you entered those waters. I got back into the canoe without incident, a not inconsiderable feat, though I always carried fewer pounds, and we were 20 years younger. I marveled at that scene that day on the Delaware as he attempted to climb back into the boat, among many others we shared, for at no time in our often-wayward youth did I consider that my own child and my longtime friend and I would be doing what Dave and I had done so many times over the preceding years.
Like the time he and I went to Erie, Pa., to fish for steelhead on our spring break one year in college. We showed up less than well-prepared for what turned out to be the source of  memories of that endured throughout our friendship. We had made no preparations for accommodations, just a tent in the back of my VW Rabbit, but eventually found a cheap, and practically deserted, campground. When we awoke to an inch of snow on the tent the next morning, the reason for the deserted campground appeared obvious. We had no firewood, and we shivered that night after an unproductive day of fishing, watching with envy as the one other party at the campground huddled by an oil-barrel fire. Soon enough, though, in what one can charitably term a mixed blessing, one of our neighbors sauntered over, inquiring as to whether we would want to hang around their fire. Naturally. That cast of characters read like something out of a John Irving novel, or a David Lynch movie. Art was the patriarch, and Art. Jr. the seemingly misguided youth. He had the weed, though, and that turned out to be an upside. Dave and Art Jr. woke me up around midnight one night, as I reclined outside on an aluminum chaise lounge in the 30-degree weather, by slapping a stringer full of steelhead on the ground at my side. They already had been into the aforementioned weed.
Art Sr. could best be described as, well, somewhat uncouth, and dentally challenged. Another member of the party, Loren, used to drive a truck, but he had retired on disability. That didn't stop him from maneuvering a chainsaw in the middle of the river on which we camped, in an attempt to remove some deadfall that obstructed the flow. Eventually he hooked those trees with a chain to his pickup and hauled at least some of them out. That truck took a beating, though.
Poppy had but one eye, and gray stubble stuck out from his sallow face like truncated porcupine quills. He bore the responsibility for netting some of the steelhead that the rest of us spooked up because, well, why wouldn't you pick the guy with one eye for that? He greatly irritated Art Sr. when he failed to net one of the silvery trout. But then Art would acknowledge that "goddamned Poppy" had only one eye.
Art Sr. had told us that he, upon hearing that we were college boys, feared that perhaps we were studying to be game wardens. That would have been unfortunate for those gentlemen, considering that their preferred fishing technique involved a "silver spider" dragged through the water. A silver spider consisted of a three-pronged hook with a lead weigh melted around its core. Not the most sporting approach, and illegal, but those goddamned steelhead ain't much for eatin' when moving up into the tributaries to spawn. So, snag them we did. Or, as I indicated, we would spook them and Poppy, standing downstream and wielding a net big enough to snare a dolphin, would try to scoop them up. I have to admit that their methods proved more productive than the conventional approach we were taking before they befriended us.     
 HBO was a relatively new phenomenon back then, and it aired a show called "Not Necessarily the News." The opening to that program showed a camping trailer floating down a flooded river. Art's claim to fame, if he was to be believed, was that he owned that trailer. We were suitably impressed with that.
So went our four or five or however many days we spent there. I think we ate at a Wendy's every night, and we drank LaBatt Blue, and we didn't have access to a shower. We were lucky to have potable water, those days being before you could get water in plastic bottles everywhere. By the time we wound that trip up, we had pretty much had enough. I mean, we stayed in a tent and didn't have shower access. So we decided to leave and drive through the night to get home, us and the deer and the tractor-trailers on lonely I-80. I drove and nearly drifted to sleep about 20 times but caught myself as I started to veer off the road. Dave swore up and down the night we left that he would stay awake. I knew he wouldn't, but I guess I wanted to believe it, sort of like what happens in my relationships with women. I think he would have said anything to get me to leave, since Art and his crew had invited us to stay in their trailer for the night. We had packed up our tent and gear, and they lobbied pretty hard for us to stay. Pictures do exist of this excursion, though we seem to have misplaced them. But for those who have seen the movie "Deliverance," it has been what most readily comes to mind for those who have seen the photographs. My concerns did grow the more they tried to persuade us to stay, and Dave always maintained that they wanted to show us some love. Neither he nor I found the prospect of getting fucked in the ass appealing. I guess we were fortunate they didn't break out the guns. Dave, naturally, fell asleep 20 minutes after we hit the road.