The Reciprocity of Haight Street

[Note: This was a submission made to Longshot Magazine, a publication that gives writers 24 hours to write on one theme; in this case it was "debt". It was quite the mad rush of interviewing and writing. Here is a PDF version if you'd prefer to read it that way.]

“It’s all in the approach.” That’s what I think to myself as I walk up Haight Street. You can ask anybody just about any question if you approach it the right way. I’ve been blessed (or damned) with a dry, baritone voice so my questions always come across as slightly more direct than intended. That, and the almost inescapably poignant nature of the question, will be working against me. I have the habit of getting into friendly but boisterous debates with random people, like cab drivers, but have learned to smother the poignancy of a debate, like questioning their union’s motives, without drawing anger.

So why shouldn’t I be able to have a conversation on a tense subject with a homeless person? My curiosity is honest. I really want to know the answer.

I do my best to remember this as I pass throngs of tourists. They’ve come to the famed ground zero of San Francisco’s Summer of Love, the hippie movement and Haight-Ashbury; a woman walks out of a store with a $30 tie-die shirt folded over her arm. Soon, through the crowd, I see a man with a clipboard moving from passerby to passerby. He approaches each person with a limp and his head low.

I slow my gait.

“ ‘Scuse me young man, can you spare some change for the homeless?”

“Sure. You mind if I ask a few questions too?” I ask.

“Of course,” he says, almost stately.

His name is Mark. I notice that Mark’s left eye doesn’t open. There are other scars across his face, but no swelling or open wounds. Just divots from a tough life. I ask him about the program outlined on his clipboard; he gives me the breakdown of how my five dollars just funded a week’s worth of meals for someone; not to mention, it netted him $1.20. I ask him how long he’s been homeless and he proudly tells me that he’s been “on the street” for three years now.

“Do you drink?” I ask.

“Sure I like a drink now and then; I won’t lie. What, you don’t?” Mark doesn’t get angry, but he’s certainly heard the question before.

We talk about his shelter and donations, and finally I wind around to my question. “So, in your own words, Mark”—I’d decided on this preamble to soften the directness— “Why should people give you their money?”

A moment passes.

Through one eye, Mark sizes me up and decides I’ve asked a simple question. He taps his clipboard. “You helping someone, man. Why you think?” He nods across the street. Three rosy-cheeked teenagers sit on the sidewalk; one smokes a joint as another asks a passerby for spare change. “Them boys, like that, they ruin it for the rest of us. Ruin it. I’m trying to make something happen. I wear a tie every day. I don’t know what they doin’.”

We talk a moment longer and soon I say goodbye; almost before we’re done shaking hands Mark shows a Japanese couple his clipboard and asks if they can spare change for the homeless. They decline. I realize that I didn’t think to ask how many five-dollar donations he gets in a day; and in turn, how many $1.20 commissions he pockets.

~

When I’d left for Haight Street that evening, my girlfriend had told me to “be careful.” Though, I wasn’t worried. Haight Street is crawling with policemen and most of the homeless, unless they are too far out, keep the peace. They occasionally yell something obscene but usually just ask passerbys for money. That’s really it.

But the fact that the question of “why should I”—without “Get a job!” underneath—should induce a tense moment, perturbs me. Most anyone I know would look at me tentatively if I told them what I was doing. A trap seems to ensnare us into believing discussing homelessness is inherently haughty. If you live a reasonably comfortable life, how you can you ask questions of, in any way, someone sleeping in an ally without coming off as judgmental—even if you are truly curios? We’ve instituted a standard where you’re supposed to fork over the money, if you so choose, and keep moving. But someone is asking for money; why shouldn’t I request honest reasoning? Asking “why” is the one question we should always be allowed to pose; it’s the root of getting a handle on what’s around us.

I go less than a block before coming upon a girl sitting against a stoop. A big bull terrier, reminiscent of Spud McKenzie, lays next to here.

“Spare change,” she asks me.

She takes my dollar with a hand inked in letters of a strange alphabet; I can see the end of a tattoo sleeve on her right arm. With the deftness of a magician, she makes the bill disappear within the folds of her jacket.

“Mind if I ask you something?” I say.

She shrugs and asks, “spare change?” of someone behind me.

Her name is Maggie and her dog is Chance; Maggie took ownership of her about a year ago. I wonder, to myself, if the United States is the only country so wealthy that homeless people can often care for dogs.

“How long you been here?”

“Where?”

“On the—”

“Spare change?” she asks a passerby over my shoulder. “On the streets? Three years.”

A passing suspicion warns me that this is a standard reply, but I chalk it up to coincidence. “What were you doing before you—”

“Hi Paul,” Maggie says sweetly; girlie echoes drift through the weeds of her smoky voice.

Paul cannot weigh more than a hundred pounds. His denim jacket and pants are covered in buttons with ironic slogans. “H-hi, hi M-Maggie,” he says and they discuss an upcoming festival nearby and the free food. Paul shifts as he talks, as if he had bad blisters on both feet. His jaw is soft, if not deteriorating. He takes no interest in me.

“He local as well?” I ask after he moves on.

“Yeah, he usually stays just— Spare change?” The passerby gestures helplessly at his pockets and keeps walking and Maggie asks someone else.

“How many people pass by in a day?” I ask, nodding with a little friendly contempt at the guy who’d claimed empty pockets.

“I dunno. Lots.”

“Let me ask you, in your own words, why should people—”

“Hi Seven Trees! Long time no see, man!” The girlie echoes are back in her voice. Seven Trees has the shakes in both hands and struggles to steady a backpack. I decide I’ve worn out my welcome and say goodbye to Maggie. She doesn’t look at me as I leave. Part of me wonders if Mark would claim Maggie is ruining it for him too.

~

I try to talk to a few more people: Eye contact hinges on the financial request; I donate a dollar; then my timer counts down from ten seconds before I’m being ignored. Money is my icebreaker, but it doesn’t get me anything after. My hopes of an honest, non-contemptuous approach to gain mileage and a few moments of honest discourse begin to seem hollow.

Appropriately, ironically, at the next block I meet Be Serious. (He got tired of “the name the government gave” him.) His just arrived in San Francisco from Seattle and tells me further questions cost a dollar. I donate enough that I’m given leniency to ask a few extras. He is older and with the leather face of man that’s slept on a lot of sidewalks.

“So let me ask you, Be Serious,” I say when I think I’m on my last question before having to pay again. “Why should people give you money?”

He doesn’t flinch; Be Serious is raising money to buy a bag of pot for a dying friend. “Man’s never had a good joint in his life!” The reason he made his way down to the Bay Area is for the San Francisco Homeward Bound Program. Provided they have some proof of friends or family at the destination, the program provides the homeless with a bus ticket out of town. Be Serious plans to visit his childhood friend in Philadelphia and deliver the green goods. Then he plans to “put two crystals on my parent’s graves.” Why crystals? “Just because. One on each.”

I give him a couple extra dollars, shake his hand and decide I don’t care if he’s lying. I’m unsure what Mark would think about Be Serious’s story.

~

A kid in broken jeans and a black hoodie whispers, “Nuggets, shrooms, LSD,” as he passes me. I don’t acknowledge. The crowds, as I reach the west end of Haight Street near Golden Gate Park are starting to thicken and such clandestine narcotic offers are coming more frequently.

I duck into one of my favorite bookstores for a quick break, browsing blurbs and scanning chapters. I eventually notice Andrew Moore’s coffee table book in the corner, Detroit Disassembled.

Rich photographs of broken warehouses, abandoned gymnasiums, collapsing factories and displaced residents of Highland Park and Detroit’s East Side in front of their boarded homes fill the pages. I turn the book over: $50 even.

~

I need to break a ten if I’m going to keep talking to people. I walk a block, past a man laying on the sidewalk listening to the Giants game on a handheld radio, and into an empty convenience store. Wheel of Fortune is on an old 14-inch television overhead as I approach the register. “Can’t access the cash unless you buy something,” the counterman says. I know this isn’t true, but grab a Cadbury egg and pay. As I’m putting my change away, the man with the Giants game on the handheld, who’d been laying on the sidewalk, sets a drink on the counter.

“I’ll get his too,” I say, hoping for an opportunity to strike up a conversation. He glances at me, then he turns away.

The counterman looks at him with disdain. “This nice man bought your drink. And you will not say anything—Jamie?” As the counterman bags the can, what I thought was just an energy drink displays “12 ABV” near the rim.

“Last week…we had a bag and it had nine thousand in it…and nine thousand,” Jamie says, his hand shaking as he grabs the drink. He limps past me with his radio and continues muttering “nine thousand.” Sounds like the Giants are going into extra innings.

I exit behind Jamie and start wondering what frustrates me more; that I just purchased alcohol for a derelict; that I won’t get a coherent moment to talk to him; or that, all in all, my question of “Why should someone give you money?” is starting to seem stupidly “N/A.” The thought of no tangible answer to “why” begins to gnaw at me; there must be something, a general feeling. Even people like Mark, who are working to make their money, and those like Maggie who are simply asking for it, must have some cohesive thread to their reasoning. Their day consists of extracting a perceived societal debt; what ties it together?

In my head, I see two parallel planes. They slide past one another with a single contact point; the coefficient of friction is “sure, here you go” or a helpless shrug towards the pockets. That’s it. The interaction is binary and the reasoning, on either side of the plane is irrelevant; “why” is irrelevant, both for receiving—and giving. The transaction just happens or it doesn’t—and as often happens when something is boiled to the bones, it takes on the aura, not of hippies and homeless, but something far more brutally survivalist.

~

The end of Haight Street, perhaps perfectly, is capped with a Whole Foods and a McDonalds on either side. A woman with a cashmere sweater and knee-high leather boots, walks her German Sheppard into the Whole Foods parking lot. She ties him up near a sign that advertises Coho salmon at $8.99 per pound and heads inside. I debate getting something myself, but instead cross over to McDonalds’ side of the street.

The questions from those sitting on the ground has changed now, noticeably. What had been a low rumbling of drug offers is now a full symphony. They make it abundantly clear exactly why people should give them their money.

“Buds, Nuggets, Shrooms, LSD, Medication?”

Everyone is making eye contact. Everyone is up front, in your face, not shy. Young girls, who look they’re breaking daddy’s heart, stand nearby watching the exchanges. I overhear one aggravated dealer say to another, “Come to San Francisco and see it all. If they don’t like it, they can go back where they fucking came from!”

I’ve strayed from where I want to be, the areas not crowded with drug dealers, and begin back down Haight Street.

“Find what you’re looking for, man?”

I realize that the aggravated dealer, with his nuanced anti-tourist stance, was talking about me; now he’s talking to me.

“Yeah, thank you,” I say.

“Okay, have a nice evening.” His tone says fuck you.

I wish him a nice evening as well.

~

I see Maggie again; she’s moved, likely having been told to vacate the stoop she was in front of. A second dog has come over to play with Chance and Maggie is feeding it. “Hey Maggie,” I say.

She stares back at me without a hint of recognition. I smile, and still nothing from Maggie.

I soon see Jamie, still with Giants on the radio and my drink in hand. He paces back and forth, aimlessly, in front of a store that sells t-shirts advertising “Darth Vader for President” and other such ironic slogans.

I send my eyes downward and begin walking swiftly, avoiding any and all interactions.

“Excuse me, do you have a moment for Planned Parenthood?” a girl with a clipboard asks sweetly.

I look up, startled, “Sure” and ask reactively, “Why should people give you money?”

She flinches at my directness. “We’re out to raise money, because the Congress is passing new laws that will shut down clinics. So we want to stop it. Minnesota has had twenty-seven of twenty-eight…”

I listen to her blankly until she finishes. “So how do I donate?” I ask.

She folds over the pamphlets on her clipboard and reveals a gigantic payment form with home address, email and credit card information. “You’d start by filling—”

“Can I just give you some money?”

“Sorry, we can’t accept cash.”

“Really?”

“No. We need to capture your information with this form.”

“I’ll do it online when I get home.”

“Okay, have a nice day.”

An Excerpt From The St George’s Angling Club

[The following is an excerpt from Chapter 3 of The St George's Angling Club. Copies of the book can be purchased at www.calebgarling.com.]

THERE IS VERY REAL HISTORY to the idea of strength in numbers. A while ago living creatures figured out that the game of life was shaping around one basic idea: the strong feeding on the weak. After years of trial and error, many species decided that the key to surviving the contest was in playing the odds. If the end goal was to get a set of genes across the finish line to the next generation, the best solution was to have as many players on the field as possible. Some animals decreased their gestation time so they could have offspring faster and populate the world more often. Others increased the size of their litters from a couple to many. Deer, elk and other grazing animals decided to migrate and feed in herds, rather than as individuals. Predators in the shadows may kill prey, but they won’t kill lineage.

The phenomenon is not restricted to the forest and the grasslands either. Aquatic insects make use of numbers to survive the hungry mouths of fish. Since these bugs live submerged adult lives but must mate in the air above, at some point along the evolutionary highway, nymphs—the pre-mayfly form of the insect—agreed that The Collective was better off making a break for the surface than The Individual. Trout are the stream’s ultimate hunter—quick, aware and unforgiving. You can’t out-power or out- maneuver them, so everyone has to out-work them.

It is in these instances that fishermen take notice. These are hatches. But like most of life’s beautiful and important events, as much as we hold them to the sun in gratitude, those that study these things don’t totally understand them. To start, the actual signal for “charge!” that governs the surface exodus is not well understood. Environmental factors like air pressure, temperature, acidity, water volume, cloud cover and time of day, along with a host of more debatable notions, play a part in firing the starter’s gun. But they aren’t the whole story. Most fishermen will agree that your odds of experiencing a hatch are best in the early morning or late evening, with water in the low fifties and a mostly cloudy sky; yet they can also give you countless cases where any of those rules are broken—badly. So it is in this respect that a hatch of insects resonates with innate curiosity: recognition of organization, ignorance of structure.

The events before and after the hatch are not simple either. After a short time fertilized eggs turn to nymphs. It is in this form, not as a flying insect, that the bug spends most of its life—scuttling about the rocks underwater, over pebbles and in the sand of the riverbed or lake, feeding on algae and a host of imperceptible prey. While they are good swimmers and clingers of riverbeds, it is in the nymph’s best interest to stay out of sight. There is a lot of safety under rocks. At some point, after spending life peeking at that murky blue world above, they get the silent “charge!” signal and whether they are ready or not, they crawl or swim to the surface in great numbers. They avoid the trout they’d seen cruise overhead from time to time; they brave the swirling currents and powerful whirlpools that suck them back to the depths; they dodge a litany of destructive debris. And if that wasn’t bad enough, when they hit the surface, the moment for emergence is worse. Now the frantic nymph must shuck its heavy husk (its body armor and wet suit), spread unused wings (and keep them dry) and escape the surface tension into the open air. Depending on your perspective, water is an incredibly cumbersome and sticky liquid. We may rub it between our fingers, but to an almost-weightless insect, emerging from a body of water, while shucking husks and learning how to fly, is like trying to get out of a bubbling tar pit while changing your pants. And all of that stress compounds when they watch a friend pop to the surface, wave hello and disappear into the mouth of an opportunistic trout.

But those that emerge successfully take flight and fill the air like confetti. This is the most palpable stage of the hatch and now they enjoy that one ultimate act that every creature secretly lives for, whether they know, acknowledge or care to admit: sex. The air fills with fornication. Docking with every partner showing vacancy, they are living the dream. Over the river, on the ground, near rocks, on branches and even in the bushes, mayflies are dancing in a synchronized orgy. A happy and free buzz throbs in the air during a good hatch. If you look closely, you might even see little smiles. This can go for a while, but as with most matters concerning procreation, the fun is fleeting.

Together and in rat-tat-tat fashion the moms swoop to the water and deposit their newly fertilized eggs into the current. They are wary of the waiting mouths below, but pushed by the silent, unyielding drive to propagate. The successful mother gets her eggs into the water and watches her children fall and disappear into the darkness below. She doesn’t know it, but her offspring will settle safely and start the process anew.

Finished with their only true quest, the adult mayflies find their way onto the water in a sleepy daze and if a fish hadn’t caught them as a nymph, emerger, mayfly dun, or even while mating, it gets them now. But they don’t care. They are exhausted. Life is over. Complete. They lay their big, fragile wings on the surface, close their eyes and die; their bodies rotating in the river. They are a spinner, the final stage of life. The spinner may ride the current for miles, but at some point, that big mouth comes from the depths and takes them away.

__

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Follow Caleb at www.twitter.com/calebgarling

Caleb Garling lives in San Francisco and wrote The St George’s Angling Club, available at

www.calebgarling.com

A second excerpt from The St George’s Angling Club

[This is a second excerpt from my book The St George's Angling Club.  Copies are available at www.calebgarling.com.]

Click here for the PDF

(An excerpt)

~ Year III, Chapter V ~

A few days of fishing and exploring the valley passed in a panorama of cool water, crisp air and sunshine.  Their campsite turned into a sort of incipient alpine agora with everyone milling in and out and about with their days.  One afternoon Paul returned to their meadow early to write in his notebook before the evening commenced.  He past the now-missing sign for the club and remembered David saying he was going to hang around camp that day; like Pavlov’s dog, he involuntarily started counting how many fish he’d taken.  But before he reached an answer, he stopped, and stared out at their meadow.

David sat sipping a beer with a peculiar smile across his face.  Around him were piles of glistening dirt, the smooth casts of a shovel still clear in the mounds, interspersed with rocks and overturned sections of grass and mud.  But what stopped Paul was around them: four long trenches cut the earth at right angles.  Just in looking at the corners and perpendicular lines, an innate sense of symmetry came alive in Paul.  It was a perfect rectangle.

“You’re going to do this,” Paul said quietly.

David raised his beer.  “The foundation.”

“You dug this all today?  You…you must be exhausted.”

He shrugged lightly.  “Easy work when you care.”

“Why didn’t you ask for help?”

David didn’t say anything for a moment.  “I didn’t want it for this part—wanted to do it on my own.”  He kicked a rock and it sailed over the sharp ledge and disappeared.  Occasionally, we are blessed with being able to see people, as if we are seeing them for the first time.  The newness gives us pause.

Paul blinked at the trenches and surrounding meadow.  “The St George’s Angling Club, huh?”

“The St George’s Angling Club,” David echoed.

Before he was done speaking, a cabin appeared before Paul.  He could see it.  The vision was simple.  The walls were crimson, white and orange of fresh pine.  A few stairs ran to a thin porch.  The roof was slanted.  One wall was divided by the spine of a fireplace.  He bent his head back, gazing at the top of the chimney and imagined smoke.  The grays and whites and blacks wove and rose into the evening sky.  Paul etched more detail in the flat walls; they started to fold and dimple and separate and ruffle into rows of stacked timber with surfaces of stripped bark.  The windows reflected a little sunlight.  The breeze shifted the smoke.  His mind raced and the little porch now had shade under it.  The flat grey chimney rippled, and individual stones appeared.  He spoke, still in his dream, “I mean, we could live here for a few months.”  Suddenly, the summer light dampened and turned grey and the cabin, still smoking from the chimney, was surrounded by snow.  “We could stay here through the winter.”

David jumped up, spilling a little of his beer.  He stood next to his brother and looked back at the trenches.  The setting sun cast long shadows of grass and put a twinkling in the dust and seeds swirling around them.  He looked up at his brother.  “We could do it—survive a winter in a cabin we’ve built.”  He laughed to himself.  “I’m single; you’re single,” then under his breath, “until Gretchen calls you again.”

Paul nodded and a thin crack in his reverie appeared. “We can’t build it on our own though.”

“No,” David said, snapping back to business.  “Of course not.  I’m going to talk to the club tonight.  We’ll call a ‘real’ meeting and talk about what needs to be done, and how we’re going to do it.”

Paul’s image of the cabin vanished.  He had almost chewed his cheek raw; he rubbed his tongue against the inside of his mouth.  “A meeting?”

“Yeah, when everyone gets back, and let them know what needs to happen.  I’ve drawn up plans, and teams, and tasks so we can get this done in the next two weeks.”

“Build the whole cabin in two weeks?”

“Just cut trees.  We’ll build the cabin next year—” David froze.  A loud crash burst from the woods.

A fawn rushed into the clearing. Wasting no effort with noise, terror shrieked from its wide brown eyes.  Its head was tossed back; its neck fought to maintain the role of supporting conduit, but the hips are always stronger.  The fawn veered left, kicking dirt and dust into the air.

The mountain lion burst into the clearing behind, cutting down the angle.  David didn’t have time to move.  He just stared at the charging cat, back legs exploding and extending away from the amber hips; its head was low and straight; its spine was a sleeve on an infinite wire.  Grass spat into the air as prey and predator adjusted in the meadow.  The fawn slipped and the mountain lion closed.  Then, they disappeared into the trees and were gone.

There was some light patter and the woods were silent.

David stood in the long grasses, staring into every corner of the meadow; his glance fired into every shadow like rifle shots, searching and absorbing; his breathing was labored and harsh; he didn’t notice the tweets of a couple birds.  He didn’t notice the breeze in the tree tops or a couple warblers swoop into the meadow and alight on a branch and fidget around one another carelessly.  He did notice something rest on his shoulder; he whirled around, throwing one arm about his neck, with the other snapping a fist like a bullwhip.

Paul batted David’s assault away with a recalled experience, letting the blow pass harmlessly beside him, yelling, “It’s me—it’s just me,” sharply, then less so. 

David glanced with quick embarrassment at his errant fist, but turned away.  “Just give me a minute,” he said, still breathing heavily, and dove into the confines of thought.  His face searched, replaying the chase again.  And again.  Adrenaline ranged about his body.  Finally, a moment of recognition passed over his face and he turned to his brother.  He released a large exhale and faked a confident grin.  “That was intense.”

A bat fluttered overhead and headed for the river.  Paul let David walk past him and trailed a step behind as he hurried to the firering.  “The eyes,” Paul said slowly after a second.  David wheeled around.  “Pretty different,” Paul continued.

David’s neck gave way in a slow nod.  “I can’t believe it,” he said carefully.

When he and Paul had encountered the mountain lion on the ridgeline, there had been a fierce defense laid in their edges, as if they had disturbed a ghost that spat venom in protection of its realm; its eyes were the central, outward flowing conduit of rage.  But as the mountain lion chased the fawn, the eyes were soft and calculating.  They steered a predator that adjusted and reevaluated every step, turn, rock and blade of grass in pursuit of a prey whose capture existed as a foregone conclusion.  There was no malice. The conduit flowed inward, absorbing, processing and reacting to every, single, infinitesimal detail.

David’s pace of breath was still rapid; gallantry came to his face.  “I’m going to tell the others.”

Paul nodded.

David continued, “It was selfish not to have before.  I don’t know what was the matter with me.”

“Scared it would deter people from coming,” Paul said slowly, and his tone was neither question nor statement, “Yeah, I’m not sure what was wrong with us.  There was no reason to keep that secret.”

David looked back to the two trees that the fawn and mountain lion had run between.  “You think it made it?”

Paul followed his gaze.  “I don’t know. Doubtful—though I didn’t hear anything.”

“Me neither.”

“Doesn’t mean anything though.”

“They cry out when they kill something don’t they?” David asked.  He sat down at the table and took up a few stacks of notes and shuffled them without intention.

Paul continued peering at the dark gate between the two trees.  “We would have heard the fawn, not the lion,” he said finally.  “They don’t hoot and holler when they do something to be proud of.  That would attract attention.  She has no interest in sharing meat with anyone—except cubs, if she has them.”  He broke his trance on the woods and turned back to David, “Anyway, I’m trying to think what to say—”

“I said I’d tell everyone,” David cut in.  His hands fidgeted with two diagrams that indicated which nearby trees should be felled, he continued quickly.  “I’m just going to tell them that we saw one close to camp, but up on the mountainside.  No reason to say it ran through.  ‘Close’ is good enough.”  He absently rubbed the plans between his thumb and forefinger.  Some of the ink marking the edge of their meadow smeared.

Paul watched his brother fidget for a beat then walked towards the woods.

“Where are you going?” David asked quickly.

“Collecting more firewood,” Paul said over his shoulder.  He peered into the shadows for a moment, took a deep breath and stepped under the gateway of branches.

The sun soon blinked out from behind the trees; the gold grasses dimmed.  The breeze picked up in the coolness; the meadow waved and bounced like a ghost pond.  Nervous chatter began to simmer and pop from the shadows and low branches.  Paul returned with a handful of kindling and stack of wood in the other arm.  He knelt by the firering, built his log cabin among the dead coals and set the new structure ablaze.

“Where do you think everyone is?” David asked after a while.

Excerpt from my book, The St George’s Angling Club

[Barring any setbacks with Lightning Source, the company printing my book, (and I don't rule out the possibility) copies of The St George's Angling Club should be available for purchase at www.CalebGarling.com next week.  Below is Chapter 1(though I'd recommend downloading the PDF); a second excerpt will be available next week.  Please enjoy and thanks for reading.]

Click here for PDF Download (a way better way to read than post-style):Excerpt I of the St George’s Angling Club

~~

Chapter I

I’m a fisherman, so you’ll find this story easiest to digest if you don’t question the details.  Now, the pencil outlines are true, it’s just that a fisherman’s mind has a funny way of taking license with the bits and pieces that paint the colors.  Sure, Paul and David Ambrose came to St George’s valley, started an angling club and got into a mess of adventure, laughter and tears, but I wasn’t there for every conversation; I didn’t hear the wind whistle through the trees every afternoon; I won’t remember the weather every day and I’m not going to try to either.  I’ll take that license and have fun instead.  I guess that’s why I’m telling this story in the first place.  And I suppose that’s the plight of fishermen anyway: We’re never fishing for fish; we’re fishing for a story.  And good weather.

Though brothers, the fickle nature of genetics had adorned Paul and David with vastly different frames. David had been bestowed a short and wiry build and fire from their father, passed down from the roving and warring British Isle clans that abandoned dialogue for the fists.  And maybe in a subconscious homage, he let his hair grow long when he got older, hanging it low on his freckled neck.  Paul, however, had taken on his mother’s eastern European heft and broad and tan features through the waist and shoulders, all crowned with a strong jaw and cheekbones.  Though he always kept his hair short, draped from his great height was a pair of thick hands, bestowed from ancestors that evolved them into the sockets of creation.  The only hint that the two brothers were related was in their eyes—the way they focused.  Though Paul’s were green and David’s a light blue, you could see they were examining, always, even if guided by different motivation.  If both Paul and David were given a quick glance into a crowded gathering of people and asked for the first thoughts to their head, David would tell you whether or not it seemed fun, Paul would theorize the reason it was being held.

I’ll tell one quick story from well before their time in the sprawling lengths of St George’s Valley.  When Paul was ten and David was eight, two of their aunts came by their home near Boston to take them to the beach.  They pulled into the short winter-cracked driveway that fed a garage that didn’t work anymore.  The grey paint curled and fell into the patches of grass that indicated what was once a lawn.  The windows were spotted and off-kilter from their sill; and if you looked closely at the front door, you’d notice that the screen had been torn from the hinges.

Paul would later remember how their cousins had stayed in the car because his father was home.  He heard his aunt’s cautious voices from the driveway.  “No,” Aunt Dee had said firmly to her children, “stay here.  Uncle Richard is here and I don’t want you—well—”

“He’s sick,” Aunt Aubrey had cut in quickly.  “That’s why we’re going to the beach with Paul and David.”

“Yes,” Dee said just as quickly.  “We’ll be right back.”

From his room, Paul had heard the car doors slam shut with extra force, like a warning shot and then a tentative knock at the front door.  It had opened quietly and a moment after, Aunt Dee was knocking at his room and cooing him from his covers.  He could hear Aubrey doing the same with David across the hall.

“Paul, sweetie,” Dee had said softly, settling at his bedside.  “You want to come to the beach today…and maybe sleep over later with your cousins?”

Paul pulled down the covers and tears welled in his eyes, but he sucked them back.  He nodded his head as resolutely as he could.  “Yes,” he said quietly.

“Good, sweetie.  David’s going to come too.  I’ll talk with your mom and maybe you can spend the whole weekend with us until your dad leaves or, well—would you like that, hon?”

“Yes.”

He had wandered down the hallway steps, a shaft of sunlight bursting into the stale air of their tattered home and sharpening in the standing cloud of cigarette smoke like cream swirling in cheap coffee.  As he approached the door, he tiptoed through the stale smell of sticky bourbon and shards of a broken glass; David walked behind him, matching the placement of his feet between the sharp pieces.  They didn’t see their parents, but Paul could feel them; he knew they were in the house, smoldering like two volcanoes around the kitchen table.

He stepped into the summer sun and tipped his head back into the heat, letting it warm his face as his aunts sealed the door behind him.

When they’d all arrived at the shore, Aunt Dee procured an old green fishing rod from her trunk.  Cobwebs strung like dead bridge cables from one guide to the next and the reel hung lamely in its rusting seat at the base.  She’d sheepishly handed it to Paul, knowing that it was useful, but trapped because she didn’t know how—counting on her tall, smart nephew to figure it out.  Paul had looked it over and chewed the inside of his cheek in thought.

They walked from the parking lot to the beach and as the cousins built castles made of sand and hit wiffle balls into the wind, their aunts’ attention diluted, focusing on their own children and magazines filled with pictures.  Paul wandered away, over to a couple black rocks around a tidal pool, drawn by some void he didn’t understand and bent over the salty waters.  David crept up behind him, trying to follow quietly.

“I hear you,” Paul said.

David ran forward, released from hiding, and looked around the pool with him. “What’s that?” he asked quickly, then stepped backwards, his face fragmented in fear.  Gulls had dropped clams on a rock to shatter their shells and the destruction and sparse remains of the exposed meat lay scattered in the hot sun.

Paul picked through the pieces and found a chunk of clam under one glinting shard.  “I’m going to use it…for bait,” he said and fed the rusty hook through the softest part, letting the line dangle in front of him; and Paul saw why a fish might be tricked into eating it.  He continued down the beach, away from their aunts, holding David’s hand, until they came to a jetty.

Sitting along the line of rocks, men in wide straw hats cast into the waves and drank.  Paul eyed their quick swigs and their overzealous laughs with wary eyes; but his dark dream vanished when these men spoke in quick tongues that he didn’t understand.  He forgot about their drinking and watched them as they whipped their lines into the ocean.

“Come on,” he said to David, as he climbed onto the first rock towards the fishermen.

David cocked his head and looked back at Dee and Aubrey.

“Come on, David.  Let’s go.”

David crawled up the rock, inserting his little fingers in the crags and holes smashed by the tides, and followed his brother out over the ocean.  The whitecaps unfurled and beat on either side and lapped up onto their feet, leaving salt between their toes as it dried.  Just short of the men with hats, Paul stopped and watched again.

David sat down.  A wave crashed behind him on the jetty and sucked out to sea like a hunting paw coming up short of its prey.

Paul watched the men for a moment longer and then, before he knew what was happening, he’d cast the rusty old rod.  His motion was awkward and jilted but somehow the hook and clam plopped a short distance away and sank out of sight, a lame coil of line extending into the spidery floor of the waters below.  He looked at the other men, sat down and waited.  The sea breeze blew over them and whipped little droplets off the white caps; they spattered and stung them and dried.

After a minute David said, “Paul, I want to go back.”  His eyes searched for the familiar women back on shore.  “I don’t feel good.” He stood, but Paul clasped his wrist.

“Wait a second—please David.”

David chewed the back of his knuckle and looked at the rusty fishing rod his brother held between his hands.  He plopped down.  As he did, the tip of Paul’s rod bent forward and shook.  Paul’s hands, unfamiliar and untrained, clamped the handle as it waved from side to side and the line disappeared into the huge, unknown depths of the ocean.  David took a step back and his face became tight with fear as the dark sucked away line.  Another wave thundered behind him.

But Paul stood and held the rod tighter.  He looked over at the men, who’d taken a mild interest in his whining line.  He fastened his lower lip to the top of his jaw, hard and set, and turned back to the ocean.  He started to turn the reel, and for the first time, could feel the fish actually pull back on the line itself.  His eyes hardened and he kept reeling, the rusty and cracked gears of the crank clunking as they brought in the fish, each turn coming in a circular spasm.  Soon little darts and flashes of white appeared among the rocks and through the lapping waves.  Paul lifted his rod high and a little pogie, no longer than his fists laid side by side, popped onto the rocks around them, flopping and searching for air with gasps of its thin white mouth.

David looked at his big brother and down at the fish, his eyes wide in terror—he had never been around a live fish—but before he could stumble backwards, a great cheer came from the men next to them.  They clapped and held up their thumbs and whistled with joyous loops at the end of each blast.  David looked over to them, taking in the kind applause and yelps.  A void in his heart, smacked open by drunken hands, filled with the foreign men’s support.  He couldn’t understand what they said, but he could feel it.  They laughed and their eyes told him that he was standing amongst something very wonderful, something to take pride in.  An accomplishment had occurred and an addictive warmth flourished in his chest.

He wheeled back around to his big brother.

Paul beamed at the flopping fish, his face drawn in a wide grin, his chest broadening and swelling.  David’s eyes darkened and he reached for the rod.  “My turn,” he said defiantly, having lost all interest in the flopping fish between them.

Paul pulled the rod away from him.  “No it’s not,” he said letting his words trail and lay empty with no justification other than a similar desire to make the men proud.  “No it’s not,” he said again, putting himself between the rod and his brother.

“Paul, yes it is.  My turn.”  David lunged this time.

But before they could fight, the panicked voices of Dee and Aubrey filled their heads, stumbling and huffing out onto the rocks and thanking God that they were okay.  The rod was confiscated and they walked back to their towels and sandcastles.

David still focused on his brother’s applause and the warmth the men’s support had put in his heart.  “It isn’t fair that you got to catch one and I didn’t,” he said in an undirected whisper when they were alone again.  “It was my turn.”

Paul didn’t hear him.  He looked back at the waves crashing against the dark rocks of the jetty, chewed on the inside of his cheek and thought about what he’d just wrought from the waters of the ocean.

~

From there, fishing infected the Ambrose brothers and flourished in their hearts.  They snuck out of the house and pedaled their bikes to the estuaries near Beverley and Marblehead, teasing baby bass from the marsh grasses. As they got older, they learned the bus systems around Boston and moved on to the shadows of the tall docks and abandoned piers between Hingham and Quincy and learned the tricks for the bigger fish beneath.  Eventually, by high school, they worked charter trips in the summers between high school around Boston harbor and on Cape Cod, helping doctors and lawyers catch bluefish, striped bass, tuna, marlin and even shark.  They knew the world of fishing; they knew the world as fishing and they planned to make it their life forever.  Someday, they agreed, they’d start Ambrose Brother’s Charters.

But over those young years, a benign fissure had been growing between the two brothers.  While fishing served them as a reason and a means to get out of the house, Paul’s angle on the sport developed a different shade than David’s.  He didn’t just learn the tide charts, he set down the tables and found books on the lunar orbit, eclipses, planetary motion and the history of the Moon Race.  He didn’t just learn the shifting focus of fishes prey over the course of the summer, but learned about the cycles within the entire food chain in which bait and game, plants and ocean currents participated.  His stock was not of powerful, innate intelligence and he quietly reasoned this; yet it only drove him to work harder to learn.

Quietly and slowly, this began to drive David away.  He’d look on with distant jealousy when Paul would answer a question and then tie the answer into a far greater picture than what had originally been asked.  Paul never did it with hot air, always casually, as if he simply explained the interworkings of a great network with no singular piece more impressive or less interesting than the next.  When Paul left for college on a partial academic scholarship, David watched him go with veiled support and encouragement.  He also knew that he didn’t come from a stock of powerful minds, but in his own manifestation of the insecurity, it drove him farther from knowledge.  He rejected because it had already rejected him.  He would have been content fishing the same waters each day and spending each night discussing the Red Sox and siphoning talking points from local headlines.  Yet, when he finished high school with no college in sight, he did not stick to his young visions of starting a local charter company, nor a local replication of them.  He moved away.  He worked bartending and construction jobs in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington DC.  As soon as he’d feel the footing of one city coming firm, he’d pick up and go somewhere else.

He and Paul kept in vague contact; they would catch up every month or so with brief conversations that touched the extremities of life.  Paul spent his college days studying economics, philosophy and science so there was little common ground other than their health and perceived happiness.  Yet, curiously, when he graduated, Paul returned to Boston, taking a job at a market research firm, working long days and nights, navigating the moments of stress by gazing from the office window to the islands of Boston harbor, known to hold striped bass.

~

Life has its strange way of throwing wrinkles at us.  One of the benefits of being a fisherman is that you have a lot of time to think, so I’ve tried to understand why—why it can’t just leave us alone, why it won’t just let us be by ourselves.  But I suppose that’s just simple.  To think the breeze won’t affect us somehow is a tad naïve.  Every breath and bump of our world, layered together with our proclivities and psychologies are folded together like a rat’s nest of line, as much as we’d like to cut our way out of it.

So in one of those curious twists it took their father’s passing to bring the two brothers back together.  After the wake—one of those dark moments where the void of grief is the true tragedy—Paul and David had loosened their ties, shared a few beers and reminisced about young days fishing.  They rehashed their favorite spots in the marshes and around the docks and eventually, started looking to the future.  They wound the conversation to the idea of taking a trip.  As the empty glasses stacked up, they agreed they would get out of New England.  They needed to see the West.  They would learn freshwater fly fishing and try their hand at trout.  The science of the sport would be for Paul, the adventure for David.  Their glasses rang in cheers and they quickly flicked their eyes to the heavens, shaking their heads—then looked west, out the window to the blood-red sun settling into a horizon of shivering oaks and tall sycamores.

(A second excerpt to come next week, after they’ve headed West…)

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Caleb Garling lives in San Francisco and is the author of the book The St George’s Angling Club.

A Wolf Below Anoterra Lake (I)

[This is Part I of a Garling Files Short Story.  You can find the PDF version here.  Note: if you are reading this from an email/RSS feed this link often breaks, please click on the link to this web page first.]

When Avery Hall saw the low form across the sash of distant trees, he knew it was pure wolf.  Softened by man’s harbor, dogs waste movement.  They lean, they bounce, their hindlegs extend too far, they waddle, their tongues loll, their eyes fail.  Time is their only predator, a bowl near the pantry their only prey.  However, the cold indifference of the woods keeps the wolf’s arrowpoint sharp.

In the early light and across the morning mist of the meadow, Avery watched it stalk against the trees, the spine a sleeve on an infinite wire.  He squinted ahead to find what it hunted.  The trees only held a couple finches, also watching, in boughs too high.  He scanned the trunks for an oblivious squirrel and saw nothing.  There were no deer, elk or moose calves grazing the meadow.  Then, in a short pile of rocks with wet wildflowers at their edges, just off the bisecting stream, he saw the slight bounce of a shoulder—a rabbit, nibbling low to the ground with its ears tucked down.  The wind picked up and it blew across the rabbit’s back, then across the gray wolf’s face.  One of the finches cried out in an unspoken allegiance of prey—the wolf stopped, one foot bent in step—but the rabbit did not translate, still poking and nibbling the rich grasses leeching life from the mineral flesh.

Avery put his hands over his small fire, rubbed them together and sat back.  He’d been without a companion voice for almost two weeks; his entertainment came in short doses, yet a sense of shame and compassion flushed through him.  He jerked forward and stopped, unsure of his own intentions; then, spasmodically, he grabbed a stone and hurled it across the meadow.  The projectile, sailing in a strong arc, almost covered half the distance to the far edge of the trees.  But its thud and bouncing rampage through the grasses alerted the rabbit anyway, and it picked up its ears and stood on its hindlegs.  It sensed, then saw the approaching wolf.

Though a predator stalks in order to leave a quick, if not instant, pursuit and kill, they will always set a critical distance to the prey.  Should the prey catch a scent or sense them and flee when outside this distance, the predator will pick up its head and lightly trot away, searching for the next hunt—the chances of a kill were not strong enough to expend the energy of the chase.  This distance is not wrought from formal calculation, but derived from the whispers of ancestors, calibrated by the toil of life. But if the prey senses the predator inside this distance, then the terrified alert is nothing more than the explosion of a starter’s gun.

The wolf bounded into the field with savage alacrity, swirling and snapping teeth in the ancient dance—the rabbit, switched this way and that, cutting at the behest of whispers from its own ancestors, the thin filament of lineage that had learned to make teeth snap in failure.  The finches squawked in the excitement as chatter from the surrounding trees came alive like a Coliseum.  But the great dances of prey and predator are always measured in seconds, and with enough slipping in the morning grass, the wolf soon tired.  The rabbit continued at full pace and disappeared into the woods.  The chatter subsided and the gray hunter, passively defeated, subconsciously recalibrating, flopped down, rolled onto its side and let its heavy breaths slow and the normal pace of life return.  It then sauntered to the streamside and drank from the icy mountain water.

Avery sat down.

From the corner of the wolf’s eye, sensing the motion, it looked to him.  It had, no doubt, known he was there from the start—smoke does not go unnoticed by the woods—but with the nonthreatening distance across the meadow, and man’s unclear role in the wild, the lone wolf had taken no interest in him.  A wolf also lacks man’s proclivity to explain the apparent, so it would not generate an angry link between the thud of a stone and his lost prey.  But Avery saw the steel irises turn towards him from the streamside.  They did not see prey; they did not exhibit a hate; they acknowledged him evenly, as if simply saying: “Okay.”

The void of emotion left Avery cold around the heart.  But in the next instant the wolf picked up and trotted smoothly into the distant woods.  The finches flew away as it passed.

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By the time the sun had desiccated the grasses, Avery Hall had broken camp and continued north.  The term “breaking camp” can evoke images of packing tents, chairs, clothing, food and cooking utensils, but he merely rolled his lonesome blanket and fastened his frying pan to his pack.  His knife, he kept on his belt; his rifle, he’d keep in his hands.

Avery hailed from Montana.  Though romanticized by its big sky, as a boy he learned that the daily journey of the sun smiled upon a corresponding big country.  The wide plains and towering bookend peaks made for a long view, and with that, made for a long shot.  With a toss of grass in the wind and a moment to watch the distant treetops, Avery had once shot a paper wad from the center of a washer his father had hung 300 yards away.  When game hunting, he’d needed two shots exactly twice in his life to bring down his target.  The first was the first time his father took him for deer.  The errant bullet hit the doe in the shoulder, and even then, the second shot cleared a smooth hole at the base of the fleeing skull.  The second time was years later.  His father’s heart had failed while setting a gate on the edge of their property.  He’d tried to stumble home, but Avery found him slumped over a rock about twenty yards from the back porch of the house and carried him the rest of the way on his shoulders.  His cousins had taken him hunting the morning after the funeral, and his hand had shaken during the first shot.  The buck lifted up in a fury at the grazing sting in his foreleg and in that moment, an iron focus obliterated the sad tremor in Avery’s hand.  The second shot passed through two chambers of the beast’s heart and the great animal fell still.

The trail Avery now followed, rifle in hand, led him north through the Singing Winds Forest and towards, what he believed to be, the conclusion of the path at Anoterra Lake.  He had no map on him and worked from a memory he’d gained by a quick glance at a map displayed under the plastic counter of a gas station.  The trail itself, he remembered, worked along a thin seam of streams and lakes, through two parallel folds of mountains and pointed almost true north the entire way.  Other trails branched, joined and braided at various intervals, but the central trail never deviated from its heading.  As he walked and the sun began nestle into the western peaks, the pitch on his right fell to a thin lake.  He did not remember the name.  As he wound around at the head by the inlet stream, voices approached from the bend of thick trees.  He ducked into the shadows of the tall pines and shrubs.

“There’s no sense in worrying about it,” a lower voice said calmly.  “You can’t change the way he is.”

There was a brief, pregnant silence, then a second voice piped up, much higher, “He’s just annoying.”

“Well, the best you can do is not be annoying back.”

“But dad, he shows off every fish.”

“I know, and you’re more grown up for not.”

They stopped and through the brush, Avery could see the father rest his hand on his boy’s shoulder and look down the short pitch to the lake.  “I see two rainbows cruising.  Why don’t we see if we can show that Mark how it’s done?”  The boy nodded and they walked down to the water.

Quietly, Avery took off his pack.  He undid his belt and removed his knife, stuffing it in the bottom, then he cleared some space to one side and stuffed in his rifle as well.  The tip pointed out and he wrapped it in a handkerchief, both to keep out dirt and defray the aggression of the poking barrel.  Finally, he removed the box of shells from the side pocket and stuffed it with a pair of socks, also burying the now-silent container in the bottom of the pack.  He crept back downtrail through the woods, then returned to the trail and began walking north again, his hands open and free in front of him.

The father saw him approaching and waved.  “Howdy,” he called kindly.  “Good, clear afternoon we got.”  The son didn’t turn and continued casting and reeling.

“It is,” Avery said returning the friendly tone, then searched his glance uptrail.  He could make out a yellow and a red tent through the trees.  “I assume you guys are set up around the inlet stream?”

“We are.  My buddy and his two boys as well.”  His eyes flickered to the peeking barrel, but it didn’t alter his gaze or tone.

Avery nodded.  “I don’t suppose you’d mind—if I kept my distance—if I set up camp nearby?  I think it’s another three miles until a reasonable patch of flat ground with water close by, and the—”

The man waved carelessly.  “We’d appreciate the company.”

Avery tipped his hat, “Appreciate that.  I’ll see you up there.”

“Sounds good.  I’m George, by the way, and this is my boy, Reid.”  Reid closed one eye to the sun as he turned and gave an obligatory wave to the stranger.

“Nice to meet you, George.  And Reid.  I’m Mike.”

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Follow Caleb at www.twitter.com/calebgarling

Caleb Garling lives in San Francisco and wrote The St George’s Angling Club, available at

www.calebgarling.com