Fishing - The Pale Rider

The boy is sick.

Not Sick, where you spend time telling strangers about his white blood
cell counts, but sick, where you develop an extended case of bags
under your eyes and a slightly glazed expression. He was having
difficulty sleeping, certainly no naps. His mother was getting testy,
what with the little boy in a constant state of unhappiness, Christmas
looming and a big pile of ungraded papers. I took him for a ride.

It isn't as easy as that, though. A spontaneous trip with an infant
requires preparation. It probably took half an hour to dress the boy,
get the car seat and stroller in the Jeep, make a bottle, find the
diaper bag, load the diapers, pacifiers, toys, rags, wipes, etc. The
process was compounded by crying - the boy and his mother both. While
packing, I walked past my fishing closet. My rod whispered something
from behind the closed door, but I couldn't understand it. I left it
there.

We headed for the river under full steam. Out on the thoroughfare, the
boy looked at me suspiciously, but a little bit of Sonny Boy
Williamson and the bouncing of the Jeep calmed him down. He was asleep
before we got to New Hope, hunched over in his car seat and snoring
gently.

The weather had put a damper on New Hope. The bikers looked cold, with
their collars pulled up tight against the chill. There weren't very
many of them, but a good few had vests indicating they were Vietnam
Vets. I suppose that after that experience, a thirty-five degree day
in New Hope is pretty easy going. Nobody was shopping, but I don't
think I've ever really seen anybody shop there. Certainly very few
people carried bags from one of the many boutiques. Maybe they were
all in Triumph, watching football and drinking down a fine dry Irish
stout.

It was not a bright winter day; quite the opposite. Though the sky was
cloudless, the world was forlornly hung with winter's drabbest old
coat. Direct sunlight, where it could peek over the rim of the valley,
didn't brighten anything, but instead added a slight chill. It was
warm enough in the Jeep, but I turned the heat up a notch anyway.
Passing on the right, the river was mostly calm. In the weak afternoon
light, it had a cold brownish color through the bare gray trees on the
shore.

I talked to the boy, asleep or no. I'm pretty sure that our
conversations in the car have little bearing, but I feel like I'm
stocking up time spent with the boy.

I talked about the floods on the river, in particular the 1841 and
1903 floods (the worst of their respective centuries) and the double-
hurricane flood of 1955. There are marks on the stone along the river
road showing the high water marks with the date 8-19-1955, some seven
or eight feet above the road. These floods bring up good points, I
told the boy as he drooled quietly next to me. For one thing, the
floods are going to get more frequent: as the agricultural and sylvan
land in the watershed (the surface that absorbs the water and
recharges the aquifers) is slowly replaced by suburban and urban (the
surface, whether a roof or a parking lot, that channels water away
without absorbing into the ground), the runoff from a heavy storm gets
to the river faster and in greater quantity, meaning that a damaging
flood is more likely from a smaller rain than it used to be. Hundred
year floods, I told him, are more likely due to land use, even though
hundred-year storms remain as frequent as always.

The boy heard about shad runs, and how if his grades were good, we
could cut a day of school and go out early one morning for them. He
heard about the stripers and the walleyes and the carp and the
smallies. I told him about drifting a big Clouser through the riffles,
and how it was a lottery of sorts: anything could happen.

North of the winery, we passed the Spiderman house, an odd modern
house the size of a three-story townhouse up on hefty steel piles
driven into the bedrock right at the river's edge. We call it that, I
told him, because the front door has a stained glass Spidey and the
back side of the house had a life-sized cutout of the webslinger
himself stuck to the wall. It has a hot tub on the roof, and I told
Henry how it wouldn't do either of us any good, as I couldn't afford
the house or the flood insurance.

We went through Erwinna, so I had to tell him the story of the
Schneiderwind farm. The house was an old stage coach stop on the
Philadelphia-New York line, and Grover Cleveland used to stay there
during the shad runs. I told him about the Giving Pond, the ex-quarry
and the owner's duplicity when the quarry's high-grade gravel was
depleted. He had, I heard, falsified FEMA data with help from a FEMA
subcontractor to show the flood plain ten feet below the actual so he
could get a permit to build. As an engineer, I told Henry we didn't
need to see the Firmette, the canyon walls were the edges of the flood
plain - after all, hadn't the river carved the canyon?

Sometimes, I imagine he's older but still taking a nap in the car.
We're probably on the way to fish, maybe midges on the Saucon on a
pale December day just like this one. I can see him, arms folded and
head tilted against the roll bar. He's got tight blond curls, a square
lean runner's frame and a few days stubble on his square lean runner's
jaw. I imagine him a fairer, better-looking and more athletic version
of me. In the weak afternoon sun, he's colorless, washed out both as
the twenty-two year old man in my mind's eye and the seven-month old
baby strapped in beside me, riding the pale light.

I fear that we'll be a little too far apart, that going fishing with
him will be too full of silence. Maybe that's why I talk to him when
we ride. Maybe that's why I memorize great writers, so I can tell him
the words and the stories behind them. We few, I say, we happy few, we
band of fathers and sons. Maybe that's why I struggle to know a good
story about everything, so I'll never be at a loss for words with him.
More than anything in the world, I don't want a distance between us
farther than to reach over and adjust his hat. Not to smother,
certainly, because I know that there are some things a boy must
discover on his own, but to make sure we never lose touch.

At a certain point, the road diverges from the river, where the flood
damage makes the road impassable, and we detour from the now-placid
Delaware into the interior of Bucks. The sun, on the far side of the
ridge, lays everything in shadow. We curved up and around the hill,
and as we turned onto the road home, the sun gained color, setting in
a brilliance of salmon colors. The boy, after his long nap, stretched,
yawned and smiled at me. I turned on the stereo: "I've had all that I
wanted of a lot of things I've had / and a lot more than I needed of
some things that turned out bad." He smiled again and we went home.