Heaven on earth

Steps

Like ev’ry flower wilts, like youth is fading
and turns to age, so also one’s achieving:
Each virtue and each wisdom needs parading
in one’s own time, and must not last forever.
The heart must be, at each new call for leaving,
prepared to part and start without the tragic,
without the grief – with courage to endeavor
a novel bond, a disparate connection:
For each beginning bears a special magic
that nurtures living and bestows protection.

We’ll walk from space to space in glad progression
and should not cling to one as homestead for us.
The cosmic spirit will not bind nor bore us;
It lifts and widens us in ev’ry session:
For hardly set in one of life’s expanses
we make it home, and apathy commences.
But only he, who travels and takes chances,
can break the habits’ paralyzing stances.

It might be, even, that the last of hours
will make us once again a youthful lover:
The call of life to us forever flowers…
Anon, my heart: Say farewell and recover!

Hermann Hesse

Jack Hofen sat on the trunk of a fallen white cedar and looked out at the bay. The cedar, a casualty of the ebb and flood of tide and the hard nor’easters of fall, lay where the bay lapped the sedge island. Jack’s free hand was resting on the bare wood of the trunk – waxy smooth and buttery yellow. It was lovely to the touch and somehow comforting on this Mother’s Day.

Jack looked out on Meyer’s Hole, the deep water just inside the inlet and the lighthouse, and the beginnings of Barnegat Bay. He was waiting for the tide to ebb. The tide was at full slack, the bay’s surface as motionless as a mill pond. He needed the moon to act so that the waters of the great bay would be drawn back to sea, that magical pull draining the bay all the way up its tiniest tributaries, even to the distant pineland bogs where the sweetwater and bay brine intermixed. Then the richness of the backwater, the great salt marsh, would yield to the pull, giving itself to the bay and the inlet. The backwater would drop, forcing killies, spearing, shrimp and crab to come out of hiding. And the striped bass, tide-runner weakfish, and bluefish would be waiting, set up to gorge themselves as the tide washed its bounty seaward. As Jack waited, he remembered an Athabascan Indian saying: when the tide goes out, the table is set.

Jack checked his leader and tied on his favorite fly – a white half and half. It was weighted with heavy eyes and on an intermediate line would get down to where the fish would be holding. He carefully tied the fly on to his leader with a loop knot that would give the fly more life in the current. After doing so, he wondered if he should have tied on a bite guard. Experience had taught him if he had a take and the leader was cut clean, it was time to tie on a bite guard. He decided to wait, hoping that fishing “naked” would bring him good luck.

Rigged up and ready, Jack sat and watched the water. A light sea breeze soon came up as the sun crept above the horizon. He thought about his mother. He remembered her smile most of all, and how she gave endlessly to others. He remembered her making breakfast for him on Opening Day, driving him to the Saddle River while it was still dark, just so he could get a good spot. He remembered birthday lunches – thick roast beef sandwiches and a Hostess cherry pie. He remembered her enthusiasm about his fishing, how he always felt the hero coming home with fish. And he remembered one of the last fish meals they made together – fluke with a delicious Chablis sauce. The dementia had started creeping into her life then, so he gave her simple repetitive tasks that made her smile.

His mother was a devout Catholic and her faith had been everything to her. Since her passing he had wondered what faith meant at life’s end, for though he believed in God, and believed she was now in heaven, he did not know what or how to think about heaven. Catechism taught about the soul but it had not taught where it went, other than “to heaven.” Heaven seemed like the universe – endless – but how did one think of “endless.” And what was heaven like – was the soul in heaven a person, a thought? Did it come and go like the wind? All his life all he had known were the Hollywood images – people clothed in white, the soft light, and the clouds. It bothered him that he had never asked his mother about it while she was alive.

Soon enough, the bay began to stir. Jack saw sea grass on the surface, moving imperceptibly with the still young ebb tide. Now he waited anxiously. The breeze had freshened and left cat’s paws as it skimmed the bay’s mirror-smooth surface. There was no bird-play as far as he could see. He knew from experience that the herring gulls and laughing gulls would sense the fish long before he did. And so he watched the sky and the horizon for them.

With time, the tide ebbed, the water now flowing like a stream past the sedge island on its way to the inlet and the sea beyond. Jack got up from his perch and walked to the sod banks. They were soft and spongy and bounced as he walked them. The strong tidal currents had undercut them in places and he knew enough to fish them carefully. The drop-offs could be 2 feet from the edge and plunge to 20 feet or more. He knew of a fisherman who had drowned at the very spot, and he wondered what heaven was like for him.

The birds finally arrived and wheeled overhead. They were seeing things that Jack could not. He laid out some line and began to false cast, shooting his fly, quartered up tide, just like he had done so many times when fishing a streamer in rivers. He mended a few times to let the fly get down deeper, then let the fly swing in the current, bringing it back with short strips. He repeated this as he moved along the sod banks and saw an area where there was a point in the bank. He looked at this area as a good ambush site, where fish could hold just off the current in the lee of the point, much like trout might hold behind a big boulder. He cast again quartered up current and let his fly do its seductive dance as he stripped it back on the swing. The fly stopped and Jack instinctively strip-set, feeling that good heavy sponginess of life on the line. His rod took a deep bend with each surge of the fish, so powerful that they had all the markings of a bass.

He fought the fish in the current for several minutes. The fish surged heavily with the tide, using its broad, powerful tail. He gradually got the fish out of the current and slid it into the shallows. It was broad-shouldered, bright, and thick – everything a striped bass should be. He released it quickly, smiling as it sprayed him with water with a broad slap of its tail.

The fishing continued with a slow but steady pick over the next hour. They were mostly schoolie stripers with a few that pushed the mid 20″ mark intermixed. But as all good things must end, the pace soon slowed to nothing but unrewarded casts. The lull seemed odd to Jack as the current was approaching full ebb and running at its strongest.

And that is when the blues showed up. They arrived under circling, hovering birds, like a swarm of hornets, slashing at a school of baitfish, sending it flying in all directions. The birds dove into the fray, risking being bitten in the effort to feast on the bait now pinned to the surface. It was barbaric how nature played. He watched the blitz surround the edge of the sedge island.

Jack stripped line and made a quick cast. The fly landed in the midst of the fray, the line coming tight with a thump that nearly jerked the rod from his hand. A bluefish raced off and bored deep into the current, stripping line with ease. Jack tightened the drag and his rod doubled over, bucking with the fight. Where striped bass were all torque, blues were all speed and power. They were fast, dogged battlers, yellow eyed demons, armed with razor-sharp teeth.

Jack landed the first blue, rushing to get it released and to throw another cast before the blitz moved on. He hooked and landed a second blue that ran him into his backing – a big chopper stuffed to the gills with baitfish. And then they were gone almost as soon as they arrived. That is how they were – a brutish hit and run wolfpack. All that was left of them now were pieces of flesh and vomited baitfish drifting in the current, the aftermath of their lust to gorge. He watched as birds again circled and dove in the distance, now far out of reach. His mind drifted off again.

He thought about the call in the middle of the night from his sister. He knew before he even answered the phone that his mother was gone. His brother had gone to the nursing home to identify the body and as he returned and drove up the road to the house, he saw an unusually bright light. The light was at telephone pole height, and arced across the black night sky from the house and in the direction of the nursing home. His brother did not know what to think of it. It was too low to be a shooting star or low flying plane. And it was too bright and too fast also.

Jack thought more about heaven while searching the bay for more life. He could not think of heaven as a spring creek cutting through a soft meadow where every cast was met by a big rainbow or brown. This did not seem real to him. He wondered if heaven was no more than a void where pain, suffering, and fear did not exist. Or maybe it was like it was before he was born – unknown, unreachable, unthinkable. He was sure his mother was in heaven, but where?

The ebb tide gradually slowed to slack low and Jack knew he’d have to wait hours for the flood tide.  It had been a nice morning. He had gotten into them good and he smiled for that. But gnawing underneath was still the question.

It would be a long trudge to his car, skirting deep drop-offs on the sod banks along the back of the sedge island. He set off, the sun creeping higher in the sky, heating the day, and with the heating of the land, the onshore breeze stiffened.

As he waded along the sedge island, he caught movement in the grass nearby. Looking closer, he saw a terrapin struggling. It was tangled up in a mass of mono-filament line, exhausted by its bindings. Jack bent down and pulled the terrapin from the tall grass. He laid him on his bag and cut away at the tangle with his nippers. At last he freed him, carefully placing him back where he had found him.

The terrapin slowly moved deeper into the island grass. As it disappeared, a cool soft breeze seemed to envelop Jack and the heat of the day lifted, the sounds of distant laughing gulls, hushed. Jack stood up and looked around. The blanket of air surrounded him for a few minutes, then moved off, exposing him again to the heat of the sun and to the sounds, smells, and sights of the bay. But what was momentarily stilled seemed now much more clear and alive.

He continued his hike to the car, coming to the trail that crossed the sedge island. The trail weaved in and out of bayberry and holly, patches of sea grass, and stands of cedar. The sun was bright and high in the sky, and the laughing gulls cried out in their jesting way as if to make fun of Jack’s struggle. He stopped to look out on the bay one last time as he approached the access, the bay deep blue and white-capped. He felt his mother’s presence more clearly now than he ever had since she had passed. Looking back on the morning, he realized she was there in everything he saw and sensed. And it occurred to him then that his search had been too deep – his thought of heaven had been far more complex than it needed to be. Heaven, he believed, had always been right right under his nose – in his struggles, his passions, his needs, his questions, his joys, and his tears. And his mother, and indeed all of those he knew who had passed, were with him every time he thought of them.

Jack Hofen reached his car and raised his eyes to the bright sky. He was thankful for good fishing, but more so, for a catch he would not release. Heaven truly was, on earth.