"MY GRANDFATHER AND I:
FISHING FOR SECRETS"

Published in Outdoor America magazine, Spring, 1988 ©

         The lake, when we fished it those thirty years ago, was always as still as a lost temple. The surface of the Smith-&-Wesson blue water shimmered in the full sun like a sheet of aluminum foil.

         My grandfather and I sat at opposite ends of his rowboat, our fishing lines shooting straight into Lake James, telephone lines to the center of the earth. And that was how a summer day went for us, surrounded by the water and the sun and the cigar-shaped dragonflies, plugged into the middle of the earth, waiting for an answer.

         Fishing with my grandfather was a little like fishing with Buddha. It wasn't really sport; it was spiritual trolling.

         When my grandfather fished, he always did it with a minimum of ritual. No fancy tackle, no plastic lures stuck into his hat like campaign buttons. No expensive, mechanical fishing rods.

         If there were fish in Lake James who thought they were too good for earthworms dangling from the end of a long bamboo pole, they weren't going to make my grandfather's acquaintance, as simple as that.

         Late sleepers weren't, either. The sun was no more than half an enflamed eyeball, peeking over the sill of the horizon, when he plodded down to the dock, slipped his bamboo pole, a can of nightcrawlers, and a blue boat cushion into the rowboat, and shoved off. If his grandson could be lured out of bed that early, he brought an extra cushion.

         He rowed straight out into the lake, stopping halfway between the summer cottage and the island, and settled in for the day. When I was with him, he would help me bait my hook, and then we would drop our lines off opposite sides of the bobbing boat into the shining, gun-metal-blue water.

         We would sit there in mutual silence, like listeners on a party line.

         When a bluegill or bass or sunfish with a taste for worms interrupted, my grandfather would haul him into the boat and ease the hook out of his pleading mouth. He would hold the squirming fish in his hand for a moment and look it over, not with the arrogance of a hunter who had run game to ground but with the modest pleasure of a man who had found a new penny on the sidewalk, and then discard it in the keeper built into the middle seat of the rowboat.

         Without a word, he would shish-kabob another worm on his hook and return it and his attention to the section of lake on his side of the rowboat.

         The only other major interruption would be other boats. My father usually would come by on his way out in his motorboat, restless for bigger catches than could be had with oars and bamboo poles. My father was tall, athletic, and always after "the big ones."

         He would ask if grandfather would rather go to the other side of the lake with him, and my grandfather always declined politely.

         On the mornings when I was in my father's boat instead of my grandfather's, we would finally leave him in the widening wake of the motorboat, a solitary, white-haired man looking out across that wisdom-tooth-shaped northern Indiana lake like Balboa must have looked after he found the wide Pacific, a hand wedged under his chin to support the weight of his discovery.

         The countless other times I was in his boat with him, he had the same look, as we sat there, gently rocking with the boat. Boys being more restless than grandfathers, I looked over at him so many times that it is a mental photograph more lasting than any in my wallet.

         That picture of Orville Miller, my father's father, is of an old man -- he was already 56 when I was born -- with a face as soft and pliable as dough and wisps of white hair tracing across his head like snow blowing across a highway. An old man, at sea, with some secret treasure buried beyond the reach of my fishing line.

         It was years before I discerned what my grandfather was doing out there on the lake. He wasn't there to make small talk (obviously), or drink beer, although he might have a few in the keeper, or, for that matter, catch the biggest fish ever caught in Lake James.

         He was there, I have now come to recognize, to gather in the shimmering silence like a seamstress gathered in cloth and weave himself into the fabric of something deeper and cleaner than what passed for peace for the rest of us. I am convinced that it was there, in that rowboat with my grandfather, halfway between the cottage and the island, I learned of the existence of such secret, sacred things.

         My grandfather was, in his way, a Bible-belt Zen Buddhist. I am certain he never knew it, and neither did the folks down at the Hagerstown Congregational Christian Church who always prayed for him when he was sick. He had never read philosophy books, never even heard of poet Gary Snyder. The only book of poetry I ever saw in his house was a clothbound volume of James Whitcomb Riley, full of frosted pumpkins and shocked fodder.

         But somehow he did know, as surely as any latter-day Zen poet, that man's cathedral was not a building, but a hollowed-out place in nature, and his spiritual obligation was not to shout into the wilderness, but to join it, soak it up in reverent silence.

         That world of silent knowing was the bookmark of my boyhood summers. And, I suppose, I was the inadvertent bookmark for my grandfather's trips to his natural temple.

         I broke the long silences, to ask for another worm or say how hot the weather was or wonder if the fish had gone to another lake for the summer. My grandfather would turn toward me, dislodge his gaze from the lake, and give the answer that settled most of the questions of his life.

         "You bet!" he'd say, a smile treading water in his face like a fish near the bottom of a deep lake.

         My grandfather, in addition to being a back-door Buddhist, was a simple and pleasant man to spend time with.

         He had been born in a time when Chester Alan Arthur was president, and hard work was the national pastime, and it gave him a headstart on life that he never lost. He lived almost all of his 98 years on the belief that man's worst inventions were idleness and the automatic transmission, and he was a stranger to both until he died.

         He was born into the backroads of Randolph County, Indiana. Randolph County is a small, rural county that hits the Ohio border about chest-high. Its principal crops are corn, wheat, oats, and Congregational Christians.

         He worked all of his life. He farmed in Randolph County, then he was a railroad man and then a meat packer in Chicago. When he was 27, he married and moved to Hagerstown, Ind., in Wayne County, the next county south of Randolph.

         Hagerstown is another small Indiana town that spreads out across a shallow valley like one of those Alpine villages on the cover of a travel folder. The tyrolean illusion is disturbed only by the water tower, the color of old tin and wearing a scarecrow's hat, that rests on stilt legs at the south end of town.

         Directly beneath the water tower is the Perfect Circle Piston Ring factory, and my grandfather worked there for as long as some men live. At the same time, he raised his only son, who then, in 1939, provided him with his first grandson.

         Another daughter-in-law and 27 years later, he would get another.

         When he retired from the Perfect Circle factory, he went to work as a custodian at Hagerstown High School. I worked for him there one year while I was still trying to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. He was 74 and I was 18, and I was the one left weary when the last bucket of coal had been filled and the last classroom swept out.

         He was driven by the same, 19th-century, Chester-Alan-Arthur upbringing at home. He was the self-appointed custodian of the things hard work had brought him -- his house, his yard, his fruit trees.

         Oh, those fruit trees! My grandfather was their benevolent lord and master, religiously spraying them, pruning them, fighting against gravity to save them, long after he had enough bite in his false teeth to enjoy any of their harvest. He was, in fact, the good shepherd of my childhood.

         If Orville Miller was calm lake water, Carrie Miller was a minor whirlpool.

         My grandmother was a small, frantic woman. When you entered her house, she didn't welcome you; she flew at you. She busied herself with garden clubs, gossip, and badgering her grandson into eating his cauliflower.

         When the house filled up with family gatherings or euchre games, she stirred the waters. My grandfather would always settle quietly into his old leather easy chair near the front window.

         He would let my grandmother have all the line she needed, a fisherman playing out line to a headstrong bass. He would reel her in after everyone left.

         "I've only seen him put his foot down a few times as long as I've known him," my father would tell me, "but, when he does, you had better pay attention!"

         But I never saw that. A rowboat in the middle of Lake James, a bamboo pole growing out of it like a young tree, is the last place anyone would need to put their foot down.

         Now we have buried Orville Miller in the old, hillside cemetery halfway between Hagerstown and Harrisville that already held his three brothers and sisters, his only son, and his only wife. The weather was cold and Indiana-gray, the usual weather for Miller funerals, and the wind clawed at the flaps of the burial tent like a bear hungry for leftovers.

         "He was a good soul," one of the distant relatives said at the mortuary, then searched for something to add, like a fisherman who believes every hook should have a worm.

         But it was enough said. My grandfather neither cheated life out of anything nor was cheated by it. He knew its secrets and its calm places.

         He died, after a year of strokes and falls and heart attacks, in peace and silence. I am neither foolish nor pessimistic enough to believe that he ended up in a Smith-&-Wesson blue metal box beneath a marble marker with his name chiseled into it.

         He is surely at the bottom of a great still lake somewhere, clean as a sunfish and peaceful as Buddha. As long as I live, I will fish for him there.

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 Copyright 1988 by Jerry Miller ©

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