One by one we children goggled past the enormous animal laid out on a field of ice. The huge lolling discus of the temperate and tropical seas met our stares with a cold eye that was no less soulful for being the size of a hubcap.
Many years later I went back to Sakonnet on a December afternoon as a specific against the torpor of university. I was walking along the cove beach when I saw the wagon, not in significantly worse repair than when I had paid to enter it. Though to be honest, I didn’t realize it was the wagon of my childhood until I stepped inside.
There, on a dry, iceless wooden table, lay the skeleton of the ocean sunfish.
It seemed safe to conclude in the face of this utterly astounding occasion that I was to be haunted. Accommodating myself to the fish’s reappearance, I adjusted to the unforeseeable in a final way. If ever I opened an elevator door and found that skeleton on its floor, I would step in without comment, finding room for my feet between its ribs, and press the button of my destination.
Twilight on the Buffalo Paddock
DAWN: A CURIOUS MIXTURE of noises. Birds, ocean, trees soughing in a breeze off the Pacific; then, in the foreground, the steady cropping of buffaloes.
They are massing peacefully, feeding and nuzzling and ignoring the traffic. They are fat, happy, numerous beasts, and all around them are the gentle, primordial hills of Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, U.S.A. It is dawn on the buffalo paddock. It is 1966, the Summer of Love, and though I may well have spent the night listening to the Charlatans at one of the psychedelic ballrooms, I am doggedly trying to remember that I am an angler.
By midmorning in buffalo country things get a little more active at street level. Out of the passing string of health nuts, ordinary pedestrians, policemen, and twenty-first-century transcendental visionaries with electro-frizz hairdos that look more like spiral nebulae than anything out here in Vitalis Central — from this passing string, then, a citizen occasionally detaches himself, avoids the buffalo paddock by a few yards, and enters the grounds of the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club. The club is the successor of an earlier organization, the San Francisco Fly Casting Club, which was founded in 1894. It has been located in Golden Gate Park only since the 1930s, when its facilities were constructed by the City of San Francisco.
The grounds of the club are not so prepossessing as its seventy-six-year history would lead one to expect. The clubhouse and casting pools are on an elevation that is shaped like a small mesa. It is a single story, dark and plain, and faces pools surrounded and overhung by immense, fragrant eucalyptus trees. The clubhouse is thoroughly grown in with laurel and rhododendron, and — after street-level Golden Gate — the effect is distinctly otherworldly.
Today, as a man rehearses the ancient motions of casting a fly on the elegant green surfaces of the practice pools, he may even hear one of the stern invocations of our century: “Stick ’em up!” and be relieved, perhaps even decorously, of his belongings. It wouldn’t be the first time. But that could only happen in midweek. On a weekend many of his fellow members will be there. Stickup artists will go to the beach and it will be feasible to watch your backcast instead of the underbrush.
This particular Sunday has been especially well attended. The men are wandering out of the clubhouse, where you can smell bacon, eggs, and pancakes, just as you might in the cook tent of one of the imperial steelhead camps these same anglers frequent in the Northwest. They pick up fly rods and make their way out along the casting pools, false-casting as they walk and trying occasional preliminary throws before really getting down to business. At the middle pool a man is casting with a tournament rod, a real magnum smokepole, and two or three people watch as he casts a 500-grain shooting head 180 feet.
Between him and the clubhouse, casting for accuracy with a conventional dry-fly rod, is a boy of thirteen. Later, this boy, Steve Rajeff, will be the world’s champion caster. At this point he is a lifelong habitué and he tournament-casts as another city boy might fly remote-control airplanes, and he casts with uncommon elegance — a high, slow backcast, perfect timing, and a forecast that straightens with precision. He seems to overpower very slightly so that the line turns over and hangs an instant in the air to let the leader touch first. He regulates the width of the loop in his line to the inch and at will. When a headwind comes up, he tightens the loop into a perfectly formed, almost beveled, little wind cheater. It is quite beautiful.
Standing beside him, an older man supports his chin with one hand, hangs his fist in one discolored pocket of a cardigan, and looks concerned. From time to time he makes a suggestion; the boy listens, nods, and does differently. Like most who offer advice here, the older man has been a world casting champion. When he takes the rod, you see why. The slowness of the backcast approaches mannerism but the bluff is never called; the man’s straightening, perfect cast never betrays gravity with shock waves or a sag.
So the two of them take turns, more or less. The boy does most of the casting, and while one casts facing the pool, the other is turned at right angles to him, watching his style, the angles, loft, timing, and speed of his cast.
At this point the boy is already more accurate than his elder and from time to time he lets his backcast drop a little so he can fire a tight bow in, and score — the technical proof of his bravura. But the older man has a way of letting the backcast carry and hang that has moment, or something akin to it. Anyway, the boy sees what it is and when the older man goes inside for breakfast the boy will try that, too, even though it crosses him up and brings the cast down around his ears. Embarrassed, he looks around, clears the line, fires it out with an impetuous roll cast and goes back to what he knows.
By this time a good many people are scattered along the sides of the pools. The group is not quite heterogeneous, and though its members seem less inclined to dressing up than many of San Francisco’s populace, they are not the Silent Majority’s wall of flannel, either. To be exact, sartorially, there is no shortage of really thick white socks here, sleeveless V-neck sweaters, or brown oxfords. The impression, you suppose, is vaguely up-country. My companion is widely known as a superb angler. He is not a member of the club and is inclined to bridle around tournament casters. They remind him of something more housebroken than fishing, and he doesn’t like it. He thinks their equipment is too good, and of course it is, largely. When they talk about fly lines and shooting heads, getting fussy over fractions of grains of weight, he instinctively feels the tail’s wagging the dog. Nevertheless, the fisherman has something to be grateful for. Shooting-head lines, now standard steelhead gear, modern techniques of power-casting, and, in fact, much contemporary thinking about rod design — actions and tapers — have arisen at this small, circumscribed anglers’ enclave. Still, it is difficult to imagine a tournament caster who would confess to having no interest at all in fishing, though that is exactly the case with some of them. Ritualistically, they continue to refer their activities to practical streamcraft.
My companion typifies something, too, something anti-imperial in style. Frayed lines and throwaway tackle, a reel with a crude painting on the side of it, brutalized from being dropped on riverside rocks. His rod is missing guides and has been reinforced at butt and ferrule with electricians’ tape that, in turn, has achieved a greenish corruption of its own. He is a powerful caster whose special effects are all toward fishing in bad wind and weather. He admits few fishermen into his angling pantheon and, without mercy, divides the duffers into “bait soakers,” “yucks,” and other categories of opprobrium. Good anglers are “red-hots.” His solutions to the problems of deteriorating fishing habitat incline toward the clean gestures of the assassin.