Lines on the Water Read Free

their nets so their drifters wouldn’t sink, but being swept away, tying their sons to masts before losing their own lives. Handing lifelines to friends instead of keeping them for themselves. If this sounds heroic, it was. It was.
    That night I slept through the death of thirty-five men out in the bay.
    Just after this experience, I went with my brother to dig worms in an old garden. We were going downriver to fish on the Church River, which we did every summer, until I was about eleven, with our father. My brother took the pitchfork and started to dig, while I shook the sod and picked up the worms. I happened to drop a piece of nice plump sod over my left foot. I stood there counting up the three or four worms we had managed to capture.
    “This looks like a good place here,” my brother said, and he drove the pitchfork into the sod above my foot. I looked down at it, in a peculiar way, I suppose, and then he jumped on his pitchfork to get some depth.
    And then he lifted the fork, and me, and my foot up with it. One of the tines had gone right through the top of my foot, and I landed about four yards away.
    Mr. Simms, the man who came to our aid, and carriedme to the doctors, and who’d known about my near-death experience in the Mill Cove made the observation: “Fishing’s pretty darn hard on you, Davy, isn’t it.”
    I suppose those were the truest words about me he ever spoke.

Two
    FOR ALMOST A MONTH after this I was laid up, and moved about with the aid of crutches. Which made me think of myself as a Randolph Scott movie character, and had people being very nice to me.
    I see old pictures of me at that time now and realize how tiny I was for eight. I might have passed for five, with my left arm almost useless. Yet something in me must have been determined—for I was climbing cliffs, jumping ice floes and freight trains, getting into fights with boys my age. As a matterof fact, I never thought of myself in any way except willing to give most things a shot.
    In the year 1900, when my paternal grandmother was about seven years of age, there would be so many salmon moving up the main Miramichi in June that people wouldn’t be able to sleep at night because of the splashing these great fish made moving upriver. People who lived upriver, ancestors of people I know, would fish by night with lanterns in their hands.
    All that is changed now, but I have sat out and watched salmon break water all those clear white nights of July and August near my cottage and at different camps of friends along the river—especially if there was a holding pool near a brook. Newcastle was much different then. It graced its people with more of the natural world and less of the manufactured one. But it had the nefarious cauldron of political bigotry well ingrained in it.
    My grandmother, an Irish woman, came from Injun town—her father had come over as a young boy after the potato famine in Ireland. The Orangemen used to parade through the Irish settlement for a number of years, on July 1st. And my great-grandfather used to dress in his suit and lie in bed, certain he was about to be murdered, and preparing for his wake as best he could.
    The river was much cleaner, the salmon more plentiful, the long logs and pulp logs that would be boomed after the great river drives, where the timber cut on faraway river branches and streams would be floated out to the town mills.
    All of this is gone now, gone forever. Eighteen-wheelers carry the pulp and hardwood along arteries of roads, and those roads are travelled by fishermen and hunters who would have had little access to those faraway pools a generation or two ago.
    There were more salmon and trout then, and biologists and conservationists have been telling us since the commercial fishery of the sixties that things must change in order for the great fish to continue. When I see nets strung out across our river, or listen to the tales of certain poachers, I realize there are many hard lessons