Richard Chiappone - Liars Code: Growing Up Fishing

Copyright 2016 by Richard Chiappone

Poem in chapter 9 is Forgetfulness from Questions About Angels, by Billy Collins, 1999. Reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press.

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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Tom Lau

Cover photo credit Richard Chiappone

Print ISBN: 9781-51070494-7

Ebook ISBN: 9781-51070495-4

Printed in the United States of America

Go Fish

There is a boy painting a fence,
an endless white picket snake,
shedding its aging skin.

His mind drifts to the river at the end of the street,
wide and long, and thick with fishwaiting
for a boy with a rod and reel, a can of worms.

He doesnt see his mother at the clothesline,
the wooden clothespin clenched in her teeth,
cant see her aching hip, her elbow, back.

But she sees himher firstbornstaring over the fence,
already on the water, paintbrush drying in the sun.
And she saysRichard, go on. Go ahead, honey. Go fish.

To my folks, Chip and Clara.
Every child should be so lucky.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the editors of the following publications, where these essays appeared previously:

Anchorage Press : Oblivious (as Rich! Bear!), The Killing Season, It Takes a Thief, The Last Fish, The Man Who Mistook His Vacation for a Fishing Trip (as Southern Exposure).

The Drake : Perfect (as The Feather).

Fly Rod and Reel : Requiem for a River Bend.

Grays Sporting Journal : Anything But Mercy, The Blue Pike Blues, Egg-Sucking Everything, Liars Code, The Winter Face, Trevally Ripped Our Flesh.

MidCurrent : Adis, Seor Permit.

Sporting Classics : Slamming Cuba, This Boys Bait.

Made of Salmon: Alaska Stories from The Salmon Project , University of Alaska Press, 2016: The King and I.

Some were also included in Opening Days: A Fly Fisherman Writes , Barclay Creek Press, 2010.

And personal thanks to the friends who offered such good advice, help, and endless support for this and other projects: Jim Anker, Jim Babb, Scott Banks, Bob Bundy, Anne Coray, Pete Garay, Ann Keffer, Tom Kizzia, Mary Langham, Nancy Lord, Trish Manney, Jo-Ann Mapson, Linda Martin, Ed Murphy, Bill Rice, Zack Rogow, Judith Schnell, Teresa Sundmark, Miranda Weiss. With a special nod to Jay Cassell, whose idea this book was.

Finally, special thanks to Lin Hampsonalways my first reader, always most trusted.

Introduction

T HE PERSONAL ESSAYS COLLECTED HERE were written over a period of about fifteen years and published in a half dozen journals, both regional and national. Some appeared in a previous book. In compiling them for this collection it became clear that they basically comprised a memoir in linked storiesstories from my life. Although I have also been a father, a construction worker (for nearly forty years), a working musician, a watercolor artist, a writer, and a college professor, this is an account of my life as a fisherman in three vastly different parts of the world.

The pieces are therefore organized into three groups. The first section portrays my childhood along the Niagara River, learning to fish in conditions that were less than idyllic (to say the least), and dreaming about one day moving to the Great North Woods. The second group involves reaching that goal as well as moving to Alaska in my early thirties, a huge change in scene from the industrial environs where I spent the first half of my life. The last section reflects my late-in-life, ongoing infatuation with tropical saltwater fishing, another wildly disparate environment, and about as far from both Alaska and the Rust Belt as its possible to get.

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that there are no second acts in American lives. He just didnt live long enough to audition for his next role.

Rich Chiappone, August 2015

PART I

All You Need Is Love Canal

C HAPTER 1

Liars Code

B EING FISHERMEN, MY FRIENDS AND I were all great liars. We fibbed about the monster perch caught in the Niagara River at the end of our street when none of the other kids were around. We jacked up the number of bullheads or sunnies hauled in on family vacations, far from the neighborhood. Fish that got away ballooned with each telling, like the rivers algae blooms in August. All honest stretchers, as Huck would have it. And we never called each other on them. We never would.

Deceit is in my blood. My grandfather once told me about being a young man in Sicily, playing cards with his friends. Everybody knew everybody at the table was cheating, he said. Then he paused, as grandfathers will when dispensing wisdom. But nobody said anything! He smiled at the memory and added, nostalgically, Of course everybody had a knife.

In our neighborhood, the liars code worked the same way, except without the weapons. And, really, who was hurt by our endless fish tales?

Then came ninth grade, when Catholic boys were seined from every junior high in the city to attend Bishop Duffy High School, and all rules were off. There I met Kelleher, who was from a different world, and a different class of liars altogether.

Kelleher and I were the two smallest boys in a school known for its gigantic football goons of Irish, Italian, and Polish extraction. Those monsters bounced us off the walls like mice in a cattle car, used us for target practice in dodgeball, swung us on the gym-class ropes like pet monkeys. Too small to go out for any team, we nursed our wounds at the bus stop after school, while the varsity gorillas stayed late stomping school spirit into each other in the practice-field mud. When Kelleher and I discovered our shared love of fishing, the stories began.

Kelleher had the weary face of an old man, with eyes set darkly in deep sockets and further shadowed by a hint of pained experience a kid our age shouldnt have known; somehow this gave his every story credibility. He lived in the inner city, far from the river, and shouldnt have known a thing about fishing, but his father owned a cabin in the Allegheny Mountains, south of Buffalo, which, compared to my home waters, the fetid industrial Niagara, was like owning a boat on the River Spey or a floatplane in Alaska.

He told me about a huge brown trout lurking in the unnamed creek on their property, a fish so old and wise it wouldnt take a hooked live sculpin in the middle of the night, though it had once made a move on a Mepps Spinner hed offered.

I could see halfway down its throat, he said as we waited for his bus. Kelleher made a circle with both thumbs and forefingers to show me the size of the trouts mouth. That fishll go eight pounds, easy. The manic barks of the football coach and the pained grunts of clashing linemen hung in the damp September air. Kellehers bus pulled up.