Under No Power But My Own
A pond, rowboat, dead gull, black clouser, my grandfather.
Of everything I’ve written on Substack I remain most proud of this, about my grandfather. A big, greasy personal essay from July 31, 2021. I wanted to revisit and reshare. Makes me want to fish. I miss my grandfather, often imagine he’s watching what I’m doing, commenting on how I’m doing it. He was stubborn. When I recognize my own stubbornness, I think of Papa.
With a tropical storm warning in place, I rowed across a salt pond to move boundary markers and a wind sock. I wanted to beat the weather.
The pond means a lot to me. In all four seasons I have walked its shores. One winter a Peregrine Falcon rested on the beach, where Piping Plovers can be found in their season.
Least Terns have harangued me from above. My negligent footfalls have been met with pinching rebukes from blue crab—which you can wade by moonlight to catch in a chicken-wire net.
A Great Black-backed Gull and Bald Eagle flew next to each other above the water, where kingfishers pluck fish and otters swim. Crawling on my stomach on the shore, I locked eyes with a Sanderling. In a rowboat, I’ve sat noiseless atop the water.
I hefted that boat, my grandfather’s, onto my truck’s bed racks. A cherished possession, it’s been a constant. Many good moments of my life have been in that boat. I tossed oars in the bed, a canoe paddle, a shovel. After hemming and hawing about guilt and life being short, I also strapped a fly rod to my rod mounts.
From a few nights earlier, there was a black clouser minnow affixed to my leader via non-slip loop. One of many clousers I tied that winter. Between the black bucktail, red dumbbell eyes, green flash, and black thread head, the fly looked like a goofy, snub-nosed demon. The year before, I caught my biggest striper on a black clouser. This clouser was intended to duplicate that fly. I tested the hook—had a feeling.
On November 21, 2020, I walked around the pond looking for birds with a friend visiting from Brooklyn. Sunny and clear, but chilly, we saw Eastern Meadowlarks, a Savannah Sparrow, Northern Harrier, Horned Larks.
I also learned my grandfather was soon going to die. A text from my older sister: They’re taking Papa off his feeding tube and so things are happening. Obviously there is no timeline for these things but wanted to let you know in case you wanted to come home sooner.
I felt a bubbling sense of urgency, not yet realized. The news wasn’t unexpected. We’d predicted Papa wouldn’t last long after his wife, my grandmother, died the year prior. “She was my life,” he told me. “My whole life. I did it all for her.”
He was doing poorly, well, poorly again. Then a stroke. Before we knew it, “any day now.” It wasn’t until a phone call the next day—“come now”—that urgency would overwhelm me. I rushed into the night, straight to hospice.
That urgency had yet to arrive. Despite the news, my friend and I finished our walk. What else were we to do? There were meadowlarks.
As we made our way toward my truck, we came across a dead gull. It looked more asleep than dead. The sand upon which it lay looked undisturbed, except where its bill dug in. Its eye was still open and wet, reflecting the sky it had seemingly fallen out of—like its heart just stopped beating. Its feathers looked pure and clean. I nudged the bird with my boot. It moved easily. Jim Harrison wrote: We are surprised by how light a dead bird is.
And so things are happening.
The water was high at the boat launch. It was misting. A good day to drag signs all over the beach—I’d have it to myself. I backed my truck up to the water, got out, kicked off my boots. Climbed up the side of the bed, undid the cam straps, splashed down into the shallows. In a series of well-rehearsed but inelegant maneuvers I slid the boat down, nestled the bow in the sand, got underneath, walked it to one side, flipped it, lowered it gently, then guided it into the water.
The water was warm. Baitfish bumped against my ankles. They were about half the size of my fly. I’d brought smaller flies, but it was a black clouser day.
Not yet burdened by my weight, the weight of anything at all, my grandfather’s boat drifted freely. I pulled it onto a spit of sand, loaded the shovel, a sledgehammer, my fly rod. Parked my truck and shoved off.
I gave trolling a shot. Trolling with a fly is technically not fly fishing. It is trolling, with a fly. Just my opinion. All the enjoyable challenges of fly fishing are out the window. Casting, double hauling, retrieving—one hand slowly, or hand-over-hand quickly?—mending, drag-free drift, where to put your fly and when. This isn’t to say trolling can’t be challenging, but it is not fly fishing. Regardless, it felt like a missed opportunity not to have a fly in the water.
Most people who troll use a source of power besides their arms and back. Along with the boat, my grandfather left a trolling motor. It needs a new battery, I still haven’t gotten one. Plus I, stubborn, prefer moving across the water under my own power.
I rowed toward a deeper part of the pond. Nothing. When water was deep enough, I stood to strip line in and begin fly fishing, see if anything down there had an interest in a black clouser minnow. Right as I began stripping line in, a fish hit. Stripers often hit on the hang, when the fly stops moving. That might’ve been what happened. The fly had been moving with the boat; I stopped rowing and stood; the fly hung in the water; the fish struck as it twitched.
I brought the fish in—dancing around, playing it, rotating my rod around my head as the fish darted from one side of the boat to the other, bow to stern. Papa’s boat is the perfect size for this. I can swing my rod around 360 degrees, fighting fish.
You can guess at a fish’s size by its head-shakes or its tail when it breaks the surface. It wasn’t big, this one—but wasn’t small. Healthy striper. Bright belly, dark back, lines down its side. Listening to the gentle waves lap against the hull, I held the fish in the water until it kicked, splashing water on my face as it departed.
I rowed to where the fish hit. Stood, casted, stripped. Another—hungry fish all around.
When my friend and I were done watching meadowlarks, I FaceTimed my sister to see my grandfather. His eyes were closed. Tube in his nose, dried blood on his face and mouth. Hairless and pale, he did not look like my grandfather.
I did not know what to say to him. I had nothing to say.
“I took out the rowboat today.” I hadn’t, I lied. Something I hoped would make him feel good. My friend was in a different room, trying to give me privacy. Surely she could hear. Having been with me all day, she would’ve known I was lying.
“The other day I mean,” I added. Is a white lie permissible to tell a dying man? Does that make it worse?
“Took it out around one of the ponds. Still floats.” Attempt at levity. My voice was breaking. Papa opened his mouth. His bandaged tongue moved like a caterpillar. Despite it being expected, having lost my grandmother not long before, I felt unprepared, asked my sister to move the phone away and hung up.
Papa’s boat is an eleven and a half foot Great Canadian dory. A worthy vessel. Andrea Dory is written across its transom. It suits my needs.
When it became mine I did some quick research on the boat. Mostly I found them for sale. Often around $600, one was $750. It’s rated for a two horsepower outboard, weighs 86 pounds. One listing claimed “fishermen and guides have extolled the Andrea Dory's prowess as a New England ‘drift boat’” for large lakes and coastal harbors. Maybe hyperbolic—“extolled”—but that’s pretty much how I use it. One post on a striper forum mentioned the Andrea Dory was good for chasing backwater bass.
Its value is more sentimental than anything, but it works for me. Papa would be happy to see it in use. John McPhee used his father’s fly rod “to keep it active because it was his.” That’s how I feel when I pull on Papa’s oars.
I’d like to repaint the boat, make it look nice. I gave it a thorough cleaning when it came into my possession. It’d been sitting. I sanded and refinished the oars. They’re too far gone. I still use them, will until I can’t. A friend, when I took him out in the boat—if a person matters to me, I row them around—expressed concern the oars would snap. Rather than replacing them I mostly row by myself, don’t have to worry about anybody else getting stranded. I bring a canoe paddle just in case.
Papa’s boat is at its best when I’m the sole passenger. It moves well, is stable. I can stand and cast when I feel like it, let my fly line pile up where it may. A few strokes from land I can pause, think—how being on water lets you think—and remember. Moments, people, fish, birds.
I can also sing sea shanties—better to be alone for the vulgar ones.
When Papa bought the rowboat I was young. At the cottage in Maine, my cousin and I dragged it onto shore after fishing and filled it with lake water. We continued fishing from shore. Largemouth, sunfish, and perch. We put them in the boat, then we got in to sit with the fish. Papa bounded down to the lake, furious. “He had steam coming out of his ears,” my grandmother would retell it. The boat was so heavy with water we could hardly tip it to empty it.
I caught the biggest largemouth of my childhood out of that boat, next to lily pads in front of the neighbor’s dock. The fish was so big I drew a picture of it. My grandmother put it on the fridge. I named the fish Titanic. “We were getting nibbles right where I caught Titanic.”
Like most child anglers, I caught that fish on a worm—big Canadian nightcrawler— under a bobber, with a Zebco spincast. My grandfather left his rods to me. The kiddie ones we used, outdated saltwater gear he had for cod. A twelve-foot surfcasting rod I don’t think he ever caught a fish with, not for lack of trying. I have no use for any of it, but keep his gear mixed in with mine.
He used to tell people he taught me to fish. All the techniques I use to fish now, I learned myself. Many winter hours of ineptitude spent fly casting an empty leader over frozen water. Reading, Tom Rosenbauer, Pete Kutzer, The New Fly Fisher, picking up knowledge whenever and wherever. For my birthday one year, I went for a couple days alone to an Orvis fly fishing school in Vermont. Might’ve been youngest by a couple decades, but I learned a ton and left with flies an instructor gave me—chartreuse clousers I caught stripers on. I love my grandfather but he didn’t teach me how to fish.
Trial and error, university of the skunk. Now I’ve introduced others to fly fishing and helped them learn. It’s something I’m proud of, and I’m grateful one of those anglers is on my case about not having fished enough in 2024.
After my grandmother passed, I started emailing Papa pictures of fish, along with explanations of how I caught them.
Here are some pictures of the trout I got yesterday, and the fly I got them on. The fly is called a brassie. I was using a size #22 hook. The higher the number, the smaller the fly. . . I've been trying to fish as much as I can, since the weather is getting nice. . . I've put about 1,700 miles on my truck in the last few weeks, driving all over to find fish. I figured I'd send over some pictures and tell some fishing stories.
I’m sure a lot went right over his head. Papa had no reason to know the difference between 4x and 5x tippet.
The final time I fished with him, he used hot dogs as bait. He was unsteady on his feet; we fished a few minutes off a small dock in Florida—a spot he claimed to have caught a sheepshead years before. I baited his hook loosely so the hot dog chunks would fall off once they hit the water. He was convinced something was down there, taking his bait. Another white lie. We fished until the hot dogs were gone. It felt like our roles reversed. I’m sure there were plenty of times he pulled similar tricks on me.
Papa may not have known or cared about the granular details of fly fishing. He’d probably guffaw if I showed him a zebra midge and told him a trout would try to eat it. But I maintain Papa taught me to fish. He taught me to fish, not how to fish. The phrase has a different meaning when you omit that word. The how is not so important.
My friend left early so I could go see Papa. I sped north, thinking what I might say to him. He was asleep when I got to hospice. It was late, they’d just given him medicine. Morphine. He always used to talk about how, working as a pharmacist during his stint in the army, he had access to inordinate amounts of morphine—could’ve taken it, sold it, never did. Now they gave it to him.
He was on his side, a clean white blanket pulled up to his neck. Thin, pale, him but not himself, his nose more pronounced—beak-like as his face receded. The white blanket pulled tight against his bony shoulder looked like a wing. I could not help but think of the dead gull, could not help but seek some parallel, a link, a sense of meaning. I took a picture of him for the sake of comparison. Sometimes it’d startle me when scrolling through the pictures on my phone.
There is a line from a Robinson Jeffers poem: “He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse.” Papa used to flex his biceps, boast about pushups. “I used to do a hundred pushups to earn leave so I could go see my girl,” he always said, chuckling forlornly.
He had been wrestling with incapacity for some time. Looking down at him in his hospital bed, I thought of a moment not so long before. We’d been watching a movie together. He told me to watch him get up from the couch—unassisted. With the focus of an Olympian, he rocked back, forth, and up onto his feet. “It’s not much to you,” he said, shuffling past. “But that’s a big deal for me.” Incapacity is worse.
I rested my hand on what was left of his shoulder. I kept saying to him: It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay, Papa.
I was unsure what these words meant. It was very much not okay. He was starving to death. He’d had what the doctor termed a “life-altering” stroke, a euphemism for “life-ending.” He refused a feeding tube and chose death, lasted longer than they predicted. What was okay? It’s clear now I was telling him to give in. It was okay to die.
The boundary/wind sock portion of my trip across the pond took maybe an hour. Walking from one boundary to the other, dragging signs, digging holes, filling them in, tamping them down.
Walking back to the boat there was the unmistakable sound of fish breaking. Stripers chasing bait on the flat yards from shore. Silver bellies flashed, tails and bodies slapped the surface. Miniature explosions—as if a minefield of bass had been set off, each explosion giving rise to three more.
I sprinted to my rod and laid my clouser in the tumult. The line went tight. It shot through my fingers until the fish ran itself onto my reel. The drag’s scream rang in my ears. With water so shallow, the fish could go one direction: straight out and away. Tom McGuane wrote striped bass run “with the solid, irresistible motion of a Euclid bulldozer easing itself into a phosphate mine.” I palmed the reel to slow the fish. It was about to take me into my backing.
We went back and forth. I won line, the fish took it; I took it back, the fish took it again. It went on long enough a kayaker stopped to watch. Good fish, I kept saying to myself. To win more line back, I walked toward the fish: to my shins, knees, waist, bellybutton. Its tail broke the surface. I grabbed the leader and slid my thumb into the striper’s mouth to get a good grip on its lip. Breathing heavily, I calmed myself down now that I had the fish in hand. I measured the fish—keeper, smaller slot fish. I had no intention of keeping it, held it in the water as we each caught our breath. Ready to go, the fish clamped down on my thumb, let go, turned and kicked. It moved along the flat until it disappeared, I walked to the boat.
A couple of days after Thanksgiving, he died. I was scooping cold, congealed gravy into a cereal bowl of leftover mashed potatoes when my sister answered her phone. Papa was dead at the hospice center. We could go and see him if we wanted.
He was still warm, forehead and hair still greasy. His mouth was wide open. I could see his tongue—dry and brown, pimply looking, like some kind of grotesque nougat. The corners of his eyes were still wet. I thought of the dead gull, how its eyes had been wet enough to reflect the sky.
Per his request, we walked his casket out of the church to Sinatra’s “My Way.” If you knew him, a very “Papa” song.
I made batches of Manhattans in Sigg bottles, his drink of choice, so people could have one when he was interred if they wanted to pay homage that way. Manhattans are synonymous with Papa—even the priest had one.
Papa’s grave overlooks a lake. A Red-tailed Hawk watched us mourning as he was lowered into the ground. You process these things at odd times, at different rates. The emotions hit you when you don’t expect them. How a striper sometimes hits hardest on the hang.
Once he was buried, it came time to drive back south—toward the pond, my routines. My phone wouldn’t connect to my truck. A sign of how normal everything felt: I had just lost my grandfather, but my concern was the finicky bluetooth in my truck, hours without Spotify. I scanned the radio. Commercials, commercials, sports talk radio.
Then, clear as anything: horns, strings, Sinatra. “Yes, it was my way.” I pulled over and sobbed.
All the way back to the boat launch, I caught fish. Two guys were messing with an outboard. They kept swimming to their whaler. I rowed past, satisfied with the slow burn in my arms, back, and shoulders, having relied on nothing beyond myself.
After pulling the boat onto the sand, I backed my truck up to it, dropped my tailgate, rested the stern on top of it. Crawled under and shoulder pressed it onto my racks; grabbed the bow, lifted it over my head, shimmied the boat forward. Hopped up on the bedside to strap it in.
The kayaker from before paddled by and asked the guys with the whaler if they needed help. They declined; he joked: “the nature of outboards.” I looked at Papa’s oars. They haven’t failed me yet.
Papa joked with me to the very end. He would say, unprompted, “Hey, don’t forget what I told you.” He hadn’t told me anything. I’d reply, “What did you tell me?” He’d wave a hand and exclaim, “See? You already forgot!”
Only now do I realize he was telling me things the entire time. “A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.” Laughably simple, something he lived by. I hear him when I think of giving up. He spoke of the importance of family, hard work. His adoration and love for his wife. Remaining confident in the face of adversity, discouragement. Being steadfast, implacable. For lack of a better word: stubborn.
And of course the stories, dispatches from a life both rich and full. Seemingly endless retellings of stories—which now fall upon my family and me to tell.
“To think,” Sinatra sings. “I did all that.”
I went back to the pond a few days later. Rowing across, I got fish within minutes. A kayaker pulled up as I stopped to unhook one.
“What’ve you got there?” he asked. “Healthy schoolie.” The hook was deeper than I’d hoped. I held the fish in the water, reached for my pliers. “Very nice,” he said. “That’s a nice little rowboat.” “Thanks,” I told him. “It was my grandfather’s.”
I unhooked the fish, held it a second, let it go. It propelled itself away with three sweeps of its tail, then glided like a blimp to safety. I could hear terns, high pitched and insistent. The sun beat down on my neck. I wiped my hands on my shirt and took up Papa’s oars. They creaked as I leaned forward. I dipped them in the pond, leaned back—relishing the water’s weight—and rowed.
James, this is such a wonderful personal essay. Thank you for sharing this story with us all. It's clear you had a special relationship with your papa.
The gull with their beak in the sand, your phone not connecting with your truck and so listening to the radio and so hearing Sinatra…I really enjoy how you guide us as readers to follow the often-invisible threads between what seem like separate aspects of our lives. It was soul-warming to read about your grandfather. I really appreciate and resonate with the difference you make between him teaching you to fish, rather than how.