 |
| Illustration by Ralph Steadman, from Ian Frazier's "Snook" |
The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the next ten months, I’ll choose ten of my favorites (one per month) and try to express why I like them so much. Today’s pick is Ian Frazier’s “Snook” (October 30, 2006).
This delightful piece is about Frazier’s experience fishing snook. What’s a snook? Frazier tells us:
The snook is an elegantly constructed fish. It’s narrow, but not too – not snaky like a pike or a barracuda – nor does it grow to be chunky like its distant relative the bass. The snook’s shape is close to the platonic ideal for a fish, in my opinion. The slight concavity of its upper jaw gives it a racy, rakish profile. A narrow, ruler-straight line the color of tattoo ink runs along its side, which is an understated silvery-white.
The piece is composed of four untitled sections. Section one tells about one of Frazier’s earliest sightings of a snook. He was hitchhiking from Key West to New York City. He got a ride from a young guy from Kentucky who was in the Keys to look at a sailboat he wanted to buy. Frazier accompanied him on his search for the boat. They eventually found it. Frazier describes the scene:
A bright sun shone from almost straight overhead. The sailboat floated in the clear water; extending below it to the sandy bottom was its precise, hull-shaped shadow. I looked more closely. In the middle of the shadow, between the boat and the bottom, finning almost imperceptibly, was a snook. My idling, time-killing mood stopped as if I’d just tromped on the brakes. A snook! Twenty-five feet away! With a snookish sense of aesthetics, the fish made a symmetrical third among the images of sailboat and shadow. He had even positioned himself facing the same direction as the boat’s bow. The way he was holding there, you could have easily missed him, so boldly did he mimic boat and shadow, hiding motionless in plain sight.
Frazier describes watching as this particular snook is caught:
With a jerk the hook was set, and there followed the wildest close-quarter angling battle I’d ever seen. The snook dove this way and that around the boat’s keel, veered for the pilings, jumped, thwapped his tail against the boat, splashed, cartwheeled, all as if right before us in a bathtub. The angler had foreseen the street fight. His line was extra-stout, his hook strong. Soon he had the fish up on the dock and was pushing a stringer through his gills. Before he carted him off for supper, he let me marvel at the trophy lying there gasping on the planking. The older guy I am now wishes the snook had been left alone in his ingenious lie. But the young guy I was then had really wanted to see what would happen, and stare close-up, and touch the wonder with his hand.
Frazier describes this early snook encounter beautifully. He conveys the excitement he experienced when he saw the snook. “My idling, time-killing mood stopped as if I’d just tromped on the brakes. A snook! Twenty-five feet away!” I remember reading this passage when the piece first came out nineteen years ago. It’s stuck with me ever since, almost as if I’d spotted the snook in that boat shadow myself.
In section two of the piece, Frazier tells about a fishing trip he took with his friend Don to the Pigeon River, in northern Michigan. They’re fishing for trout, and having zero luck. Frazier writes, “We returned to camp in the dark – wet, fishless, and bummed.” I love that sentence. The next day, they decide to find a tackle shop and find out what they should be doing to catch trout on the Pigeon. They find one in Gaylord called the Alphorn Shop. Standing behind the counter is a man named Fred Snook. He takes them out on local waters – the Sturgeon, as well as the Pigeon – and shows them how he fishes in heavy brush. Frazier says of him,
Fred could put a dry fly in a saucer-size hole among a confusion of branches and twigs where even visualizing the cast seemed to call for trigonometry and string theory. When the only open airspace around him was directly overhead, Fred could make his back cast go straight up. You wondered how Fred himself ventured through some of the places he fished, like you wonder when a buck with big antlers comes out of a dense thicket. He had an otherworldly facility for not getting person or gear tangled, and he always found a quick out when, rarely, he did.
In section three, Frazier and his family are vacationing in the small Florida town of Everglades City. Frazier sets out to hire a fishing guide and catch some snook. But the guide turns out to be a tarpon angler. Everywhere they go, they find tarpon. Frazier catches two of them. He writes,
Tarpon have big scales and a lower jaw that’s overshot, like a bulldog’s. In that flat coastal landscape – tidal river, mangrove islands, horizon – the giant I hooked was a sudden stroke of verticality, leaping and splashing and spinning like a waterspout touched down. Tarpon are noble and bilingual fish that make long migratory journeys between the American coast and Mexico and back again. I liked watching them cruise by two or three abreast in the shallow bays and then continue into the far distance, the long front spines of their dorsal fins tracking above the surface like whip antennas.
In the fourth and concluding section of “Snook,” Frazier is back in Everglades City. This time he seeks a guide with credentials specifically for snook. He finds one in the person of Don McKinney. McKinney turns out to be one of Frazier’s great “characters,” right up there with Le War Lance (in On the Rez) and Sergei Lunev and Volodya Chumak (in Travels in Siberia). McKinney takes Frazier up tidal rivers through mangrove swamp. Frazier writes,
Once we had enough draft, he let down the engine and we roared across one reach and then another, heading inland, until we turned into the mouth of a tidal river and swooped up it like “Apocalypse Now.” As the river narrowed we slowed, the boat rocking on its own wake, and then coasted into a quiet intersection where this river met a smaller one. We eased next to the mangroves on our left, and Don McKinney shoved the pole among them into the muck and tied us to it. Mangroves enclosed us, their thicket of flying-buttress roots chuckling softly in the falling tide. He took out a cigar and lit it using a Zippo lighter emblazoned with a leaping fish in gold – a present from a high-ranking executive at Zippo for whom he sometimes guides. With that he seemed to complete himself, finally. Don McKinney has pale-blue eyes and a long, shrewd face that a cigar seamlessly becomes part of.
Frazier continues,
He began telling me just where in this particular intersection a snook might lie. Beneath that crotch of old tree trunk, veined like bridge cable; next to that stump; or right over there, against that far bank, where the water looks deep and likely. When the perturbation of our arrival quieted down, the surface became glass-still again. The spot he indicated, pointing to it now with the tip of his bait-casting rod, reflected the mangroves above it, their shiny green oval leaves with here and there a yellow one, and a few white, dead branches corkscrewing out, and on the branches several air plants, a lovely parasite that grows on dead wood and resembles the top of a pineapple. Don McKinney cast his topwater plug into the heart of the likely spot, inches from the bank. He let the plug sit a moment, then gave it a twitch. At that, a snook struck with a violent swirl that twisted the surface reflection around itself like a bedsheet.
That last sentence is inspired!
Frazier ends his piece brilliantly. McKinney takes him to a place on the Lopez River where it widens into a bay. “The yellow-green, slightly murky water in the cove lay flat calm.” Frazier scopes out the water before he casts. He notices a floating door in the middle of the cove: “The late afternoon sun hit the cove at an angle and caused the prism of the door’s shadow to descend into the water on a slant.” Frazier writes,
Of course I remembered the snook in the shadow of the sailboat thirty-odd years before. I cast my lure to the door three times, five times, twelve times. I put it just shy of the door, near the top, near the bottom, and beyond the door. I landed the plug with a rap right on the door itself, and then, carefully so as not to get hooked, pulled the plug off and swam it away. I really peppered that door. Nothing doing ... Oh, well.
I made a less careful cast past the door and to the left of it. I turned to say something to Don McKinney. Maybe pausing for that extra moment or two I let the plug sink longer than I’d been doing before. Still looking at him, I began to retrieve, and felt a jolt. He was looking at my plug. On his face I saw the joyful ignition of angling triumph. I turned back. A large and handsome snook with my plug in its mouth leaped head over tail in the air.
In summarizing this great piece, I’ve left out many wonderful details, e.g., Don McKinney getting stuck lures out of the mangroves (“His first address to the problem involved a no-hands repositioning of his cigar, shifting it by lip motion from one side of his mouth to the other and re-clenching hard with his teeth”), the sight of three manatees (“They swam by in a second about two feet down, as graceful as fat people who can really dance”), Don McKinney on his bicycle, “holding an unwieldy bouquet of fishing rods in one hand.”
“Snook” is a tour de force of evocative description. You don't have to be a fishing enthusiast to appreciate it. You can read it, as I do, for the sheer pleasure of its writing.
.gif.webp)
