© 2016, Text by Chris Dombrowski
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Published 2016 by Milkweed Editions
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover photo by Andy Anderson
Author photo by Erik Peterson
16 17 18 19 20 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dombrowski, Chris, 1976-, author.
Title: Body of water / Chris Dombrowski.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016015127 (print) | LCCN 2016031357 (ebook) | ISBN 9781571319159 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Bonefishing--Bahamas--Grand Bahama--Anecdotes. | Fishing guides--Bahamas--Grand Bahama--Anecdotes. | Pinder, David. | Dombrowski, Chris, 1976- | Bonefish.
Classification: LCC SH691.B6 D66 2016 (print) | LCC SH691.B6 (ebook) | DDC 639.2/7097296--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016015127
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Body of Water was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Edwards Brothers Malloy.
For the Pinder family
and for my father, who took me fishing,
even in the rain
Contents
Prologue
Beginner’s Mind
Tablet
Holocene
Albula vulpes
1945
Known Inhabitants
The Old Feeling
1968
Southerly
Through the Guide’s Eyes
Incongruences
Arc of Acuity
Limits of Pursuit
Minds Like Fish
On Vision
The Tug
Generations
Stupid Questions
Ennui
Horizonward
The Great Democracy of the Possible
Far Country
The Hunt
Chance Baptisms
Of Principles
Alma’s Diner
The Little Town
Epilogue
Sources, Stimulants, Acknowledgments, and a Note on the Text
From ancient times wise people and sages have often lived near water. When they live near water they catch fish, catch human beings, and catch the way.
DOGEN, “MOUNTAINS AND WATERS SUTRA”
The man steps barefoot through shallow water, moving as if he carried a candle threatening to expire. He lifts his left foot from the ankle-deep slack tide and holds it poised in the early-morning air until the last drops from his pant cuff return to the salt. Then he advances, setting his foot down toes first, dark brown on the pale Caribbean sand.
Now he stands so still a passing cormorant might light and perch on his shoulder, mistaking man for mangrove.
Now he proceeds.
So that a single bonefish feeding along the tidal flat’s periphery won’t startle, he walks this way; so his wake won’t alert the nearby assemblage of mojarras, the myriad minnow eyes trained already on his shadow. He holds the borrowed fly rod behind his back, a strange nine-foot tail, so that its lacquered finish won’t redirect sunlight toward the fish. Again he steps, closing the distance between his body and his quarry’s hovering form, its bottom-cast penumbra.
Sensing danger, the fish maintains shrewd space and near invisibility. Since it arrived on the flat, the five dark vertical stripes have disappeared from its flanks, and before that its scales maintained the hue of the narrow blue defile it negotiated on its way to these shallow feeding grounds. Now its sides are star white, chalky, its location perpetually vague and mirroring whatever surrounds it until it tilts, nose down, to root a bellicose crab from a burrow. Then its sloped back and dorsal fin cut through the surface, light shellacked, announcing its location to the airy world.
Its tail shimmers, a loose-fitting bracelet affixed to the wrist of a beautiful woman seated at a bar, the likes of whom the man has seen only in movies, or through the dining room window of the fishing club where he works. Before the foraging fish, a puff of inhaled sand the fish’s gills expel, clouding its vision. The man gains a yard while the water clears and the fish finishes pulverizing the crab with the crunchers in the back of its throat. Then he stills again and waits until the hovering fish inverts its nose, now pink from the rooting, toward another meal.
Low on the horizon, a single crown-shaped cloud lifts toward the rising sun. The man’s sighting light is limited; when the cumulus obscures the sun, the water’s surface will turn opaque, gray as a blind eye. The tide is due to turn and the south wind, low now but sure to advance with the day, will harry the incoming water onto the flat, pushing the lone fish into an apse of mangroves, a maze of many-fingered roots. Small, eager snappers will emerge there, busying the water, quick to jump on his offering before his fish