Remembering Noah: A Fisherman’s Story

I had known Noah since we were kids — part of a ragged band of boys who spearfished in the lighthouse cove where Fred kept his lobster skiff. Fred kept the boat on a ramp that sloped down to the sea. To launch it, he would pour a few buckets of water over the planks, and we would throw our shoulders and backs against the skiff’s rough hull and shove it down into the drink. The whole ritual smelled of salt, tar and the cold Atlantic morning, and it made us feel, briefly, like we belonged to something older than ourselves.

Noah became a sort of older brother and mentor to me. He drifted in and out of my life over the years. One summer he turned up at our door needing a place to stay after splitting from his wife. He’d been sleeping on friends’ couches for a few months and his small skiff sat neglected in his soon-to-be-ex’s driveway, wilted like a tern with a broken wing. To make matters worse, a family of crows had taken up residence in a tree at his last stop, and their noisy cries woke him each morning at dawn. He looked worn and frayed when he arrived, but he laughed about it — he had the easy, private humor of a man who lives too much of his life outdoors.

By fall he was himself again. I often fished a stretch called the Bishop’s, and one evening I watched his truck roll up the beach. He had barely opened the tailgate and grabbed his heavy Lamiglas surf rod when a school of bass exploded in the swash a couple of hundred yards to the east. He took off running after them the way we had run as boys, reckless and free, and when I saw him move like that I knew he was going to be all right.

We went fishing together from time to time, but more often I found him alone in the surf after dark, especially in the fall on the mussel bars. There was a solitude about him then — a focus on the tides and the light and the feel of the rod in his hands. In those hours he seemed to have left the world of chores and obligations ashore, trading it for a place where only the fish and the immediate moment mattered.

I liked listening to Noah because he knew the old stories, the colorful characters who used to fish these shores. He’d tell me names like Ichabod, Peleg and Hezekiah — names you rarely hear anymore — and when he told those stories his face would change, softening with affection and the particular amusement of someone who has seen a long stretch of living. He also knew about a rougher fellow named Oscar, who used to fish the very point where we often stood. Oscar, a former railroad man, would arrive with his tackle, a watermelon, a block of cheese and a shotgun. If a boat drifted too near the shore — likely commercial netters in those days — he would wave the gun and chase them off. “Try doing that today,” Noah would say, shaking his head.

Once Noah asked me if I knew any Latin. “My old man was the Latin scholar,” I told him. “I never took it in school. I wish I had.” He was searching for a phrase he remembered an island fisherman muttering when he lifted his wooden priest to deliver the coup de grâce to a fish’s head. Noah was convinced the words were part of a lost childhood prayer, something that had stuck in the corners of his memory. He thought it might be useful someday, though I never quite figured out for what. It wasn’t so much the words themselves as the way he held onto small fragments of a vanished shore life.

After he remarried, I would stop by his house in the early evening and watch him on the back porch, saying goodnight to his family. Little had changed about his gestures — the rush to the water, the easy promise of a day gone well. “If we’re lucky,” he would say more than once, “we’ll have it all to ourselves tonight.” There was a yearning in that line, a hope for wide spaces that weren’t crowded with other people’s schedules.

I watched him kiss the tops of his children’s heads, speak softly to them and try to be both father and fisherman. “Daddy will catch you a big one,” he told his son. “Big as me?” the boy asked, eyes wide with the literal logic of children. “Taller,” Noah said, swinging him up, “and bigger.” He did not always see the worry that crossed his wife’s face when he said that, the strain between midnight trips to the surf and making it to morning chores. He would cut her off gently with a quick, “Running late,” and already he was slipping away toward the water, racing the light, the wind, the tide, and something else only he could feel tugging at him.

Noah meant well and he worked hard, but he was always short of time — not just hours in a day, but time for everyone and everything he cared about. I think the pull of the tides had more hold on him than it did on most of us. When the call of the sea took him, he hardened and flattened anything that stood between him and the shore. He moved between lives with restless energy, slipping out before dawn like someone who belonged to another, lonelier world. On the fish he often preferred solitude; sometimes he only tolerated a partner. I know that firsthand.

He carried contradictions that old fishermen carry — loyalty and restlessness, joy and a certain selfishness born of devotion to an idea of freedom. He loved his family and he loved the water, and the tension between those loves made the man he was. The stories he told, the silent early mornings, the hurried goodbyes and the small domestic scenes on his doorstep are the pieces I keep when I think of him. In the end, his life belonged as much to the sea as to the people on shore, and his memory is stitched to both.

Abridged from Anglers Journal

This article originally appeared in the October 2017 issue.