This memorable piece has the compression and pent-up feeling of great poetry. It artfully blends two completely different scenes: (1) New Hampshire’s Lake Winnipesaukee, where, every October, McPhee and his friend, George Hackl, fish for pickerel; (2) a Baltimore County Hospital, where McPhee’s father lies dying from a stroke. It unfolds in four untitled segments.
Segment one begins with pickerel fishing:
You move your canoe through open water a fly cast away from a patch of lily pads. You cast just shy of the edge of the pads—inches off the edge of the pads. A chain pickerel is a lone ambush hunter. Its body resembles a barracuda’s and has evolved to similar purpose. Territorial, concealed in the vegetation, it hovers; and not much but its pectoral fins are in motion. Endlessly patient, it waits for prey to come by—frogs, crayfish, newts, turtles, and smaller fish, including its own young. Long, tubular, with its pelvic fins set far back like the wings of some jets, it can accelerate like a bullet.
You lay a kiwi muddler out there—best white or yellow. In the water, it appears to be a minnow. Strip in line, more line, more line. In a swirl as audible as it is visible, the lake seems to explode. You need at least a twelve-pound leader, because this fish has teeth like concertina wire. I tried a braided steel tippet once, of a type made for fish of this family, but casting it was clunky and I gave it up in favor of monofilament thick enough to win the contest between the scissoring teeth and the time it takes to net the fish. I’ve been doing this for more than thirty years, always in October in New Hampshire with my friend George Hackl, whose wife owns an undeveloped island in Lake Winnipesaukee. Chain pickerel are sluggish and indifferent in the warmer months. In the cold dawns and the cold dusks of October, they hit like hammers, some days on the surface, some days below it, a mass idiosyncrasy that is not well understood.
Paragraph four of segment one brings McPhee’s father into the narrative:
As far as I know, my father never fished for chain pickerel. When I was three years old, he was the medical doctor at a summer camp on the Baie de Chaleur, and he fished for salmon in the Restigouche with his bamboo rod. He fished with grasshoppers in a Vermont gorge, and angleworms in Buzzards Bay, taking me with him when I was six, seven, eight. And across the same years we went trout fishing in New Jersey streams. On Opening Day, in April, we would get up in the pitch dark in order to be standing beside a stream at the break of dawn. One time, as dawn broke, we discovered that the stream was frozen over. On the way home, he let me “drive.” I sat in his lap and steered—seat belts an innovation not yet innovated. These are my fondest memories of my father, his best way of being close, and I therefore regret all the more that my childhood love of fishing fell away in my teen-age years, and stayed away, in favor of organized sports and other preoccupations.
And then, at the end of segment one, McPhee joins pickerel fishing with news that his father has suffered a disabling stroke:
At the end of the seventh October, after Yolanda and I had driven home to New Jersey, we came up the driveway and the telephone inside the house was ringing as we approached the door. My brother was calling to tell me that my father was in a Baltimore County hospital, having suffered a debilitating stroke.
Segment two cuts to the hospital room, where McPhee, his mother, brother, sister, and a young doctor are gathered beside his father’s bed. McPhee writes,
I was startled by the candor of the doctor. He said the patient did not have many days to live, and he described cerebral events in language only the patient, among those present, was equipped to understand. But the patient did not understand: “He can’t comprehend anything, his eyes follow nothing, he is finished,” the doctor said, and we should prepare ourselves.
In the next paragraph, McPhee expresses an intense anger at the doctor:
Wordlessly, I said to him, “You fucking bastard.” My father may not have been comprehending, but my mother was right there before him, and his words, like everything else in those hours, were falling upon her and dripping away like rain. Nor did he stop. There was more of the same, until he finally excused himself to continue on his rounds.
The remainder of segment two describes an hour in the hospital room when McPhee is alone with his father. Spontaneously, he begins to talk to him. He talks about pickerel fishing:
In my unplanned, unprepared way, I wanted to fill the air around us with words, and keep on filling it, to no apparent purpose but, I suppose, a form of self-protection. I told him where I had been—up in New England on the lake in the canoe, casting—and that the fishing had gone well despite the cold. One day, there had been an inch of ice on the water bucket in the morning. My fingers were red as I paddled and cast. Water, coming off the fly line as I stripped it in, froze in the guides that hold the line close to the rod, and so jammed the line that it was uncastable; so I went up the rod from bottom to top punching out little disks of ice with my thumb until I could make another cast and watch a fresh torpedo come out of the vegetation.
That last sentence is inspired. What does McPhee mean when he calls his talk with his father “a form of self-protection”? Protection from what? Feeling? Sadness? Grief? Does McPhee somehow feel threatened by his father? Perhaps it’s the presence of death in the room that he’s trying to ward off by his talk. “A form of self-protection” – it’s a curious phrase to use in the circumstances. Maybe McPhee is using pickerel fishing as an oblique way of telling his father that he loves him.
Segment three is all about pickerel – “With those minutely oscillating fins, a pickerel treads water in much the way that a hummingbird treads air”; “If a pickerel swirls for your fly and misses, it goes back to the exact spot from which it struck”; “Pickerel that have been found in the stomachs of pickerel have in turn contained pickerel in their stomachs.” It brims with wonderful pickerel description, including this beauty:
A pickerel’s back is forest green, and its sides shade into a light gold that is overprinted with a black pattern of chain links as consistent and uniform as a fence.
The fourth and concluding segment ingeniously cuts back and forth. First, the hospital room:
Silent myself now, in the attending physician’s presence, I looked down at my father in his frozen state, eighty-nine, a three-season athlete who grew up in the central neighborhoods of Youngstown, Ohio, and played football at Oberlin in a game that was won by Ohio State 128–0, captained basketball, was trained at Western Reserve, went into sports medicine for five years at Iowa State and thirty-six at Princeton, and was the head physician of U.S. Olympic teams in Helsinki, Rome, Tokyo, Innsbruck, and elsewhere.
Then to a quarter-mile area of lily-pad-covered water on Lake Winnipesaukee that McPhee and Hackl call “the Patch”:
In a small open pool in the vegetation, about halfway down The Patch, there had been, this year and last, a chain pickerel that was either too smart or too inept to get itself around an assemblage of deer hair, rabbit fur, turkey quill, marabou silk, and sharp heavy wire. The swirls had been violent every time, the strike consistently missing or spurning the fly, and coming always from the same place on the same side of the same blue gap. In the repetitive geometries of The Patch, with its paisley patterns in six acres of closed and open space, how did I know it was the same gap? I just knew, that’s all. It’s like running a trapline. You don’t forget where the traps are; or you don’t run a trapline.
Then back to the hospital room – the two scenes now almost merging:
As I was getting back into the story, again speaking aloud in the renewed privacy of the hospital room, I mentioned that I had been fishing The Patch that last morning with my father’s bamboo rod, and it felt a bit heavy in the hand, but since the day he had turned it over to me I had taken it with my other rods on fishing trips, and had used it, on occasion, to keep it active because it was his. Now—just a couple of days ago—time was more than close to running out. Yolanda was calling from the island: “John, we must go! John, stop fishing! John!” It was time to load the canoe and paddle west around some islands to the car, time to depart for home, yes; but I meant to have one more drift through The Patch. From the northwest, a light breeze was coming down over the sedge fen. I called to Yolanda that I’d “be right there,” then swept the bow around and headed for the fen. Since I had failed and failed again while anchored near that fish, I would let the light breeze carry me this time, freelance, free-form, moving down The Patch like the slow shadow of a cloud. Which is just what happened—a quiet slide, the light rustle on the hull, Yolanda calling twice more before she gave up. Two touches with the paddle were all that was needed to perfect the aim. Standing now, closing in, I waved the bamboo rod like a semaphore—backcasting once, twice—and then threw the line. Dropping a little short, the muddler landed on the near side of the gap. The pickerel scored the surface in crossing it, swirled, made a solid hit, and took the tight line down, wrapping it around the stems of the plants.
“I pulled him out of there plants and all,” I said. “I caught him with your bamboo rod.”
I looked closely at my father. His eyes had welled over. His face was damp. Six weeks later, he was dead.
It’s a wonderful ending – not the death, but the possibility that McPhee’s pickerel story broke through his father’s frozen state. The bamboo rod is key, binding father and son. The description is exquisite. A brilliant piece – one of McPhee’s best.
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