Long Time Leaving (52 page)

The wake of a deep-sea-fishing boat, one of us mentioned, looks a lot like the delta of Venus. A whole lot, the more you look at it. And here we were, beating on against the Gulf, as if borne ceaselessly away from that image.

Then we all went home.

D
oc is our guide but not our daddy. In fact, though we would rather not dwell on this, we are old enough to be his. So we try not to be too respectful when we ask:

“How come, when you cast, you just flick your wrist and your line shoots out so straight and far?”

“It's got no memory,” he says.

A line that doesn't remember! “What a notion! Imagine if bloodlines had no memory; if heartstrings; if the bottom line!

“We're out from Shell Island fish camp, in the marshes off Ochlocko-nee Bay, off the Gulf of Mexico, in a scow, fishing live shrimp or artificial shrimp or cut bait (people say, “You got to fish or cut bait,” but you can fish cut bait) for redfish.

Doc, when he isn't maneuvering us into the right places to drop the anchor (“Reckon we could take a boat back up in here ourselves?” “Without running aground? Naw”) is catching them, redfish. “We aren't. But we're picking up the occasional keeper sea trout, or, regrettably, a ladyfish or skipjack or catfish (which we can wrest off the hook ourselves without getting finned), and I have brought in a nice little black sea bass (best eating of all, even Doc agrees), so we know what it's like to
have something live on the line, the jittery provisional tug of it—and before that, the expectational drag of the bait, and sometimes the slackness of a line whose bait is gone, taken away, like all the years we've left behind.

We have come down here, six of us (used to be seven but Bobby died,
^*
) once a year for the last twenty-six. We have caught great messes of delicate-lipped trout, and—when we go out into the deep sea in a bigger boat—grouper, grunt, cobia, and shark. Our lines do have memories. They are monofilament; they hold old kinks and bends and traces of backlash, coil, and convolution. Doc is using state-of-the-art braided line, which never loses true linearity.

Except for Doc, we have all, at Vanderbilt University, either taught or studied English. So we are bad to get metaphorical. Citational, even. We value lines of writing.

Ben Jonson: “Who casts to write a living line, must sweat.”

Jimmie Rodgers:

Every year, on The Chart, which lays out the waters, coastland, and islands of our shared experiences, we jot memorial notes:

Among us we have published, I don't know, maybe thirty books, thirty-one counting the lamented Bobby's definitive
Roofing.
And have
fathered fourteen children and weathered ten divorces. Dan, the youngest of us, and the only one with just one marriage, is a nonauthor, but Vereen, the eldest, once said (with scant regard to my feelings) that Dan was the most interesting student he ever had, and back during the go-go eighties Dan wrote a prophetic cautionary letter to the editor that
The Atlantic Monthly
published. Maybe Dan would have gone into the writing game himself, rather than money management, had it not been for something that happened to him in high school English, back in Bells, Tennessee.

Write a descriptive paragraph, his teacher said, using the phrase “trolling lazily for bass.” Dan worked up a good one, felt right proud of it. Teacher commended it, bade him read it aloud in class, which he did.

And other boys in the class hooted and snorted: “You don't
troll for bass
! Anybody knows that!”

“I was totally humiliated,” Dan says. “Obviously I didn't know anything about what I was writing about.”

In fact, he probably knew you don't troll for bass. He just got carried away temporarily by school. Following a line of thought. Which is what I am doing in the marshes, thinking:

Line. Wonder what culture first used it to fish with. It connects us to unseen depths and separates us from the gulls and the bears.

Once, for a documentary film, with two old men showing me how, I went down into river water up to my neck and reached into a hollow log (well, a culvert pipe) and felt blindly for a flathead catfish, and it bit down on my hand, and I pulled it out and strung it through the mouth and gill and held it up! A nice one! Even grabbling, you've got to have a bit of line, a fish is so slippery.

Telephones all used to be line-linked. Maybe the sadness of the Internet lies in its linelessness.

Then, too, Emerson: “Line in nature is not found; / Unit and universe are round.”

The backlashes I used to get when I was a lad, with the old cloth line, and Daddy patiently unsnarling them for me. Jimmie Rodgers again: “In my memory lingers / All you once were to me. ”

Maybe lines aren't so much memory, as karma…

And suddenly I've got something big on. A chunky old drum, maybe— no, we catch those next to bridges—anyway, look at the bend in my rod-it's something that “will really stretch your string,” as Doc has put it, in a
different connection. Whatever it is, I'm not going to lose it. I will fight it out on this line if it takes all summer!

“Don't think you're gon’ be able to turn that one,” says Doc. “Got the bottom.”

I knew that! Just a split second before he said it, I knew it. But there's no way to prove it.

Well, I know how to get off the bottom. Take my line in hand, beyond the rod tip, and tug it from different angles till it comes loose, and now it's slack, and when I reel it in—what goes around, comes around—my whole rig is gone, broke off, hook, split-shot, and leader.

“I'll make you a new leader,” says Doc.

“Leaders are not made but born,” I say. A poor rejoinder, but mine own. With a nod to whoever, in some other context, said it first. I don't remember who that was, offhand, but maybe I could dredge it up. Writing, wrote Eudora Welty, entails “a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost.”

E
verything, in the world,” wrote Stéphane Mallarmé, “exists to wind up in a book.” I am not that literary. I like to think an alligator ate my notes. Ate the small pocket notebook, that is, in which I recorded the impressions that came to me as my friends Vereen, Slick, and Hal and I canoed through the Okefenokee, whose name derives from the Creek for “Land of the Trembling Earth.” I always feel that there is something I'm not quite getting at in my books. I had reason to believe I might get at it way back up in that particular swamp, which was Pogo the possum's home and which is way down upon the Suwannee River.

Pogo
meant a lot to me as a boy—the animals had much more oomph than the stuffed British ones in
Winnie the Pooh,
the writing was highly phonetic, allusive and free-wheeling, and unlike the Brer Rabbit stories,
Pogo
was free from plantation stigma. Pogo himself was a liberal Southerner, which couldn't be said for Li'l Abner, or Snuffy Smith, or,
for that matter, Pogo's friend Albert, the alligator, who was forever swallowing smaller characters more or less by accident. As for “Old Folks at Home,” the sentiments that stick with you are the ones that you're deeply ambivalent about. But the feature of the Okefenokee that gave me dreams was the quicksand that swallowed Jack Elam in
Lure of the Wilderness,
the 1952 remake of Jean Renoir's first American movie,
Swamp Water,
which came out in 1941, the year I was born.

Elam was a bad guy, but still. One moment you're on supportive ground, the next you're in glop that you sink into beyond all hope. Quicksand gave you two options: thrash and struggle and go down faster, or remain calm, try to think, and die inch by inch. Elam thrashed, until the last few inches when all he had to thrash with was his face.

My notebook was not without food value. The last time I remember writing something in it was after I had scaled and gutted a string of bluegills, stumpknockers, and catfish we had caught on red wigglers and an artificial bug called a Yellow Sally, and you know how your hands get when you clean fish. (Slick fried the fish in a fancy copper pan he brought, and that was some eating.) Wherever I had touched the paper, it wouldn't take ink well. I wasn't about to wash my hands in the black unripply water alongside our shelter, because we knew that down there lurked an alligator, as big as any one of us, named George or Georgette.

There are seven different two- to five-day Okefenokee canoe routes. Unless you love sweaty, buggy nights, summer and early fall are not the time to take any of them. November, when the cypress needles turn golden and the sweet-gum leaves red, is one of the two best months of the year. April, when we went, is the other; March is nearly as popular. To make a trip at any time of the year, you have to apply for a permit.

You call the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, near Folkston, Georgia, and tell the cordial person who answers (Karen, when I did it) that you want to canoe the Okefenokee. She will tell you that you're welcome if your party is no larger than twenty people and ten canoes. (Ten dollars per person per night. You can rent canoes and equipment there.) But if you want to embark on, say, November 1, you must phone for a reservation first thing in the morning exactly sixty days ahead of that date. First thing in the morning means 7:00 a.m. And a lot of other people will be calling then, too. It doesn't matter who you are, a writer, say, or a congressman: first come, first served.

So you and all the other members of your party who can speak intelligibly at that time of day will have to start dialing at 6:59 a.m. EST, with fingers crossed. (If you think this is awkward, wait till you have to make
a pit stop in terrain where the only place to stand is either your canoe or a patch of mush and roots.) You will get a great many busy signals, and when you finally get through, you will most likely be told that all the trails are taken for that day. So you'll have to try again the next day, for November
2,.
On the third day of calling, we were lucky to get the trail we wanted—“the red trail,” Kingfisher Landing to Maul Hammock, Big “Water, and Stephen C. Foster State Park.

You could, of course, avoid all this uncertainty by renting a motorboat and taking it ten or twelve miles up into the swamp—and make a lot of noise, and incur the disdain of us deep-swamp canoeists returning from way back up in there where we could entertain the notion that we might conceivably never get back out again.

The shelters along the canoe trails, at intervals so explorers will have a place to spend each night, are roofed wooden platforms set on piles. They may be the only surfaces in the swamp that don't quiver or give. The Okefenokee, which occupies almost seven hundred largely unspoiled square miles in southeast Georgia and north Florida, is generally referred to as a swamp but strictly speaking is not one, because it is too far above sea level and because a swamp is stagnant. “Water flows constantly, though very slowly and circuitously, through various channels in the Okefenokee

I say the Okefenokee water is black. From canoeside it is, but a sample in a clear bottle is tea-colored. The fish you catch from it are sepia. It tastes slightly like Scotch whiskey; the Okefenokee is a peat bog. The unstable clumps of soil from which huge cypress trees grow (also the hooded pitcher plant, the golden trumpet, the bonnet lily, the neverwet, the sweet pepper bush, and the lather leaf or poor man's soap) are, in fact, islands of peat that float above the sandy bottom.

So where is the quicksand? You'd think I would have asked Vereen about this, because his father, Vereen Bell, Sr., wrote the novel,
Swamp Water,
that both of those Okefenokee movies were based on. The elder Vereen was a great outdoorsman who died in World War II, when Vereen was ten. The road into the Okefenokee National “Wildlife Refuge is the Vereen Bell Memorial Highway. I said to Vereen the other day, it's funny we didn't talk about his father much, when we were in the swamp. He said yes, it was. In an introduction to the University of Georgia Press edition of the novel, Vereen writes about his father:

After big Vereen went off to war, he came back home only once, Vereen remembers:

“How did your father react to the mystery biscuit?” I asked Vereen. “Seems like he might even have swallowed the nickel.”

“I don't know,” said Vereen. “I just remember conspiring with Leila,” the biscuit baker.