Hi, I’m J.G. Sandom, class of ‘79E.

E because I took a semester off and worked on a freighter that sailed to Namibia, South Africa and Mozambique, a trip that became the inspiration for my honors thesis here at Amherst, and eventually my debut novel, The Blue Men.

Some of you may know me from my novels; I’ve written a dozen of them so far, with a couple becoming international bestsellers and one optioned by Warner Brothers. Some of you may know me because I started the first digital advertising agency in the business, Einstein and Sandom Interactive, in 1984, creating the first digital ads online ever produced, which in turn helped monetize the Net we see today. (Please don’t blame me for your digital addictions).

But I’m not here to talk about writing or digital advertising, although over the next thirty minutes or so, we will be undergoing a rebranding exercise of sorts, hopefully engendering a new way of looking at something as old as humankind.  I’m here to talk about something all of us will have to deal with, one way or the other, eventually. Unless … wait.

How many of you out there are immortal? Anyone? OK. Then this presentation is relevant to everyone in this audience.

Through a dubious provenance, I happened to inherit this 2,500-year-old Etruscan vase. My Dad worked for Amex and I grew up mostly in Europe, including in Italy. The vase was a gift to my father. It’s not particularly valuable from an auction house point of view but its delicate simplicity, its dark unglazed finish and elegant lines, and the fact that it’s still in one piece after all this time makes it precious in my mind.

Who once drank wine from this black clay goblet at some distant dinner party, toasting the ancient gods? And who scraped that one thin line that runs inside the lip and down across the base?

That imperfection has fascinated me since I was a boy, when my father first told me the story: how this dark lump had been unearthed by a wayward oxen hoof at plow in southern Italy; miraculously intact; seeing light for the first time since before the Romans ruled the earth.

My small Etruscan vase came to mind some time ago when I happened upon some photographs of pottery dating back to 16th century Japan from the town of Hagi in Yamaguchi, Japan. Like my vase, ceramics made in the Hagi style have shapes that are not quite symmetrical, and colors and textures that appear to emphasize an unrefined, intentionally simple style.

Wabi-Sabi

This style both informed and was influenced by an aesthetic philosophy known as Wabi-Sabi. In traditional Japanese aesthetics, wabi-sabi is a philosophy centered on the acceptance of the transience and imperfection of all things.

Ceramics made in the Hagi styles are not only somewhat asymmetrical and unrefined, like my Etruscan vase, but they are often intentionally chipped or nicked, made “imperfect” as a celebration and expression of the wabi-sabi philosophy.

Actively engaging with something considered to be wabi-sabi achieves three things:

• an awareness of the natural forces involved in the creation of the piece;
• an acceptance of the power of nature;
• and 3, an abandonment of dualism — the belief that we are separate from our surroundings, that we are here and everything else is out there.

Combined, these experiences allow the viewer to see themselves as part of the natural world. Rather than seeing dents or uneven shapes as mistakes, then, they are viewed as creations of nature, much as moss growing on a wall, or a tree bent from years in the wind.

To misquote Heraclitus: Nothing is. All is becoming.

To us, in the West, this aesthetic is anathema. We scorn impermanence, modeling our view on Platonic ideas of the Form, perfect and immutable. Not a table. Tableness. The essence of table. Eternal. To us, if it withers and wrinkles and dies, it’s more than inferior; it’s fatally flawed, for perfection is timeless.

And in today’s popular culture, trying to banish or dissolve the idea of the self at the center of all is akin to fomenting a Copernican revolution, when that Polish (then Prussian) astronomer challenged the Church and dared presume that the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth.

As we desperately try and fabricate a Platonic ideal of our lives, it is the idea of self that sits at the heart of this generation’s Instagram solar system, hyperinflated by the American notion of rugged individualism. But as particle physics has taught us, dualism is a myth. The observer and that which she observes are inexorably connected.

DISRUPTING THE FUNERAL INDUSTRY

As a novelist and poet, and as an entrepreneur, I’ve made a career dreaming up and creating new worlds. Literally — when it comes to the characters and realities of my novels. And, in some fundamental way, as an entrepreneur too. After all, behind every new business venture is an idea that reflects a new way of looking at things, some consumer need or business problem that needs fixing.

Let me ask you all a question again, if I may. How many of you out there have lost a loved one, someone close to you, in the past few years? Please raise your hands, and keep them up for a moment. [SHOW OF HANDS.] Now, if you were happy with the outcome, if everyone was pleased with the event, and if the final price was what you expected, drop your hands. [ONLY A FEW HANDS DROP.]

A few years ago, I found myself in your position. My father passed away and I saw first-hand the horror show that is the traditional funeral industry in this country today. Overpriced. Complicated. Time-consuming. And, ultimately, unsatisfying.

Back in 1984, as I launched what became known as the first interactive ad agency in the business, I recognized that the unique benefits of digital technologies and interactivity would eventually revolutionize the ad world. Today, digital accounts for more ad spend than TV, print, radio, outdoor and every other media channel combined.

In the same way, when my father passed, I realized that the deathcare industry needed to be disrupted, to be dragged from its Dickensian business practices and antediluvian methodologies kicking and screaming into the 21st century. The industry as a whole faced then, and still faces, 3 major challenges:

• The way in which we manage deathcare in the US today
• The way in which we memorialize lost loved ones
• And the way we look at our own mortality and at death itself

FIVE KEY DRIVERS IMPACTING DEATHCARE IN AMERICA

To address these challenges, we spent a lot of time analyzing the traditional model. Here are 5 key drivers impacting the funeral industry today.

1. The high cost of traditional end-of-life practices
   • Today, funerals cost between $7,000 and $10,000, and cremations more than $6,000. Even direct cremations (no embalming, expensive coffin, or traditional memorial service) average $2,000 – $3,000. But between 40% and 50% of all Americans do not have $500 set aside for a rainy day! This has stimulated the adoption of lower-cost cremation over traditional burial. In 2000, 75% of Americans opted for traditional burial. Today, more than 58% prefer to be cremated, and in some states the cremation rate is more than 80%. (Overseas, especially in Asia, it’s often more than 95%.) Americans care less and less about having a traditional funeral anymore, pumping our dead with toxic chemicals, gaping at their painted faces for an hour or so in a house of worship or funeral home, and then burying their polluted corpses in some expensive metal or hardwood casket in the earth, never to be seen again.
2. The secularization of the American culture
   • We may not go to Church like our parents did, but we’re still spiritual and in need of systems to help us while recovering from grief. If we are no longer looking for comfort and closure in our houses of worship, where will we find it? Friends and family? Support groups? Chat bots?
3. Greater mobility
   • We retire far away from where we were born. It’s a lot easier and cheaper to ship ashes than a body in a casket.
4. Heightened ecological awareness.
   • With the planning literally on fire, people are finally beginning to wake up to the challenges of the climate emergency.
5. And new technologies & buying methodologies.
   • Let’s face it: if it can go digital, it will. The Internet has transformed the way Americans look for information and buy. No longer do families have to endure two in-person trips to the funeral home (one to shop and sign, and one to settle up), which is where far too many funeral directors take advantage of grieving families to upsell them unnecessary products and services: “Doesn’t your mom deserve the gold handles on her casket” you cheap bastard, implied?

It was because of the experience I had following my father’s death, as well as these trends, that I eventually launched a deathcare service called Cremstar. After advertising and novel writing, I guess you could call this my third act. My daughter had grown and I was ready to sink my teeth into something new.

By offering our service exclusively online, with text and phone support, we at Cremstar (and companies like ours on the West Coast) are able to price our direct cremation solution starting at just $893 (vs. the national average of $2-3K), and instead of 150 minutes of meetings and travel when you’re least inclined to do it, you can order and arrange a direct cremation completely online in about 15-20 minutes.

While cost is a major factor in the transition from traditional burial to cremation, increasingly, so too is the environment. Studies have shown that traditional burial has a significantly higher ecological cost than cremation.

ECOLOGICAL IMPACT AND CONCERNS

This chart details the environmental impact of cremation versus traditional burial as measured by a composite measure called the ‘shadow price’; the higher the shadow price, the higher the cost to the environment and the less eco-friendly it is. Using these ecological metrics, burial has a 23% higher environmental cost than cremation.

One exciting technological development is the greater adoption of aquamation. Aqua cremation (or aquamation) is a water-based process also known as alkaline hydrolysis, which uses a combination of water flow, temperature, and alkalinity to accelerate the natural breakdown of the human body. Many highly regarded institutions – the Mayo Clinic, UCLA Medical School, and UTSW Medical School – have utilized aquamation for over twenty years.

Unlike flame cremation, which is already ecologically superior to traditional burial, aquamation adds no direct emissions of harmful greenhouse gases or mercury into the atmosphere. The process is very energy-efficient, offering over 90% energy savings compared to flame cremation, with only 1/10th of the carbon footprint. Furthermore, this smaller footprint can be mitigated via carbon offset programs. All that’s left over is water, which can be used for commercial irrigation. Already, one of our investors, who happens to be class of ‘78, has shown an interest in using it to irrigate some of his tree farms in Florida.

And what is the ecological cost of deathcare the old-fashioned way?

• More than 800,000 gallons of formaldehyde are dumped into the earth as a result of burials every year in the US.
  • That’s enough to fill a couple of Olympic-sized swimming pools. Every year.
• Conventional burials use 30 million board feet of hardwoods, 2,700 tons of copper and bronze, 104,272 tons of steel, and 1,636,000 tons of reinforced concrete every year in the US.
  • 104,272 tons of steel. That’s enough to build a 400-story skyscraper, 2 ½ times as tall as the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the skyscraper Tom Cruise ran down in Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol. Again, that’s every year!
• The amount of casket wood alone is equivalent to about 4 million acres of forest and could build around 4.5 million new homes every year in the US.
  • 4 million acres of forest: to put that in perspective, that’s roughly an area the size of Texas. And 4.5 million homes: That’s about 1 for every person in Philadelphia, where I currently live. But instead of building new homes, we’re burying them in the ground, never to be seen again.

Today, folks are still choosing to be buried …

but more and more folks are opting not to be embalmed, but to be buried naturally …

perhaps in a mushroom shroud …

or under a living tree.

Where available, instead of traditional flame-based cremation (top), they’re opting for aquamation (bottom) …

and even human composting, where the decedent is placed in a sealed chamber in a special solution, resulting in mulch that you can use to fertilize your garden. Though I will add that human compositing is rather expensive and not as green as it first appears.

While scattering remains the most common choice (and here is the complementary Cremstar scattering tube we provide), more and more families are choosing from the many unique and highly personal options available when it comes to the disposition of their loved one’s cremains.

• Putting the Cremains in a potted planter (clockwise from bottom left)
• Hand-crafted glass jewelry
• Transforming them into a diamond
• Embedding them in fireworks
• Shooting them up into space in an Elon Musk rocket to create a shooting star
• Scatterings on land and at sea, including by drone
• Green burial of cremains in forests or mangrove swamps
• And Integrating cremains into a live coral reef

Even urns have had a facelift. Another Spring company called Final Spring uses 3D printing technologies to create personalized high-quality funeral products — from urns to new products like biodegradable scattering stones and personalized night lights and mobiles.

Our bespoke Scattering Stones are made of biodegradable polymers and seaweed extracts, within which we embed the cremains. I’m sure you all remember that scene in The Big Lebowski, when John Goodman spills Donny’s ashes all over The Dude, Jeff Bridges.

For some reason, when it comes to scattering ashes on a beach, people seem to forget the properties of physics: the wind generally blows off the sea and onto the land. That’s just the way it works. With our customized Scattering Stones, instead of spilling out ashes into a sea breeze at the beach during a scattering, families can skip stones of their lost loved one out into the ocean, knowing they’ll dissolve and disperse their embedded ashes into the water over time … and not blow back all over those attending the ceremony.

RFID TRACKING OF LOVED ONES

I have a confession to make. I’m rather lazy. I have no interest in chasing animals across the African plain when I’m hungry. I’d rather hang out at the waterhole, at the spring, and wait for the animals to come to me. That was my approach when staking out our claim in the nascent realm of digital advertising back in the ‘80s. And that’s our approach at Cremstar today. Indeed, that’s the reason we call our parent company the Spring Holding Group. Our guiding principle is, if I or my funeral directors can’t do their job from anywhere they happen to be, we have failed. Everything has to be mobile-first.

This rather daunting picture (above) displays the Cremstar process. We are the only company in the US currently using RFID technology to place a chip on the decedent when we perform removals, and then tracking that individual using the driver’s GPS-enabled phone from initial removal all the way to the final cremation. Our funeral directors dispatch drivers using the Cremstar Funeral Director App, drivers accept and track removals using their own Driver App, and our crematories intake and record cremations using the Cremstar Crematory App.

This is tech at its best and it represents where the industry is going.

Finally, while Americans may be less religious today, we are still spiritual and, increasingly, we’re holding our own life celebrations at alternate venues — from natural settings to private homes, museums, halls and restaurants. Rather than funeral plots and stone mausoleums, folks are turning to digital remembrances at online media repositories such as MemoryBox.com, another Spring business.

Here, for example, is a MemoryBox in the Metaverse that we’ve created to memorialize those of us from the Class of ’79 who are no longer with us. Why spend a fortune on a physical venue, caterers, decorations, and printed materials to honor the passing of your loved one, especially in these pandemic times? For families that are distributed far and wide, for those who find traveling difficult, for folks who are sick and tired of videoconferencing, there is an alternative. Hold your Celebration of Life event … in the metaverse, an online location to memorialize lost loved ones and host virtual Life Celebrations in real-time, with live eulogies, and guests from anywhere in the world.

Take a look around this MemoryBox in the Metaverse after the presentation, and leave a Note by the portrait of friends you’ve lost. And if you have a photo of someone who’s missing a picture, please let me know. We’d be happy to add it.

These types of technologies are very exciting, especially as families become more far-flung. Another one of our investors from the Class of ’78, used the same tech to showcase artwork she’d created to promote animal preservation. I urge you to check it out the EyeAm.Art Show in the Metaverse for another example of what can be done.

With an entire generation of Baby Boomers beginning to transition, with the climate emergency, with animal life disappearing from the planet at an unprecedented rate, with war enflaming the Middle East and Eastern Europe, famine in the Sudan and Gaza, and with the world suffering from lethal pandemics, it’s no wonder we’re more focused on mortality today than we have been in years. Unfortunately, we are woefully ill-prepared for what’s coming. Here are some sobering facts:

• How many of you out there plan to, or would like to die at home? [SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • 90% of people want to be kept at home if they become terminally ill.
    • In reality, only 20% of Americans die at home; the figure is the same in Australia, slightly higher in New Zealand (30%), and lower in South Korea and Japan (15%).
• How many of you have an Advance Directive laying out your medical wishes (like a Do Not Resuscitate or DNR)? [SHOW OF HANDS.] And how many of you have a Will designating someone to decide what happens to you once you pass? [ANOTHER SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • 40% of Americans ages 65 and older don’t have an Advance Directive and fewer than 50% have a Will.
    • It’s important to note that the authority granted by a “Power of Attorney” loses validity once a person passes.
• How many of you have already pre-paid for your funeral or cremation? [SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • Fewer than 30% of Americans pre-pay for their funeral or cremation.
    • The rest leave this burden to their surviving loved ones to pay for and manage.
• How many of you have children who will take care of what happens to you once you pass? [SHOW OF HANDS. GUESSTIMATE PERCENTAGE.]
  • Of the 76.4 million Baby Boomers living in the United States, 20% do not have children to act as caregivers.
    • In fact, nearly 50% of U.S. adults are single today. In 2034, adults aged 65 and over will outnumber children aged 18 and younger for the first time in U.S. history.
• And finally, just in case you were wondering who is going to be there to take care of you in your twilight months, here are some sobering statistics:
  • The number of people aged 65 and over is projected to increase from 52 million in 2018 to 98 million by 2060. And yet, as the number of elderly people is increasing, the number of medical professionals is decreasing.
    • The U.S. could see a shortage of 120,000 physicians and will need 12 million new nurses by 2030!

It is the inevitable intertwining of mortality and nature that is key to understanding wabi-sabi. As author Andrew Juniper notes in his book Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, “(Wabi-Sabi) uses the uncompromising touch of mortality to focus the mind on the exquisite transient beauty to be found in all things impermanent.”

Like the falling of cherry blossoms.

Alone, natural patterns are merely pretty, sometimes mesmerizing, baubles for the eyes. But in understanding their context as transient items that highlight our own awareness of impermanence and death, they become truly profound.

Despite the promise of “Barbie”, the movie, the Barbie doll influencers we see on Instagram today are not real…and never will be. They are unrealizable, Tantalus crack, and doomed to make miserable all who reach for such sticky fruit, like monkeys in the upadana forest.

This is largely why we face a crisis of depression amongst our young—mostly young girls. This is why we’re now making the purchase of high-strength skin products to teens and tweens illegal. You’ve got 15-year-old skin; why do you need a skin cream, for crying out loud?

Rather than have us grasp for the unreachable, the cold and timeless Platonic stars, wabi-sabi lets us recognize the value and beauty in all that passes and fades.

Indeed, it is because of its individual stretch marks and wrinkles and scars, as well as its mandala transience, that life has beauty at all instead of a Groundhog Day banality. How monotonous would eternal perfection become!

It is our “flaws” that make us unique and special, not cookie-cutter impeccability.

Kintsugi

So enamored of these individual imperfections are the Japanese followers of wabi-sabi that some have gone so far as to actually highlight the cracks in their crockery. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.

Here there is no attempt to hide the damage; the repair is literally illuminated.

Look, see, I’ve lived, the golden cracks proclaim. I’m not out there, like some Platonic ideal, nauseatingly perfect, forever young. I am right here, in this moment, not timeless but timeful, not uniform but unique, with the eternal river literally written upon me.

Given our growing acceptance of multiculturalism and our evolving sense of what and who is beautiful, I’m hopeful that the wabi-sabi aesthetic will encourage a new appreciation for the cracks in all of us, diminish our fear of aging and death, and ultimately foster a heightened sense of tolerance and equanimity.

I started this talk by saying that the funeral industry faces three major challenges today:

• the way in which we manage deathcare;
• the way in which we memorialize lost loved ones;
• and the way we look at our own mortality and death itself.

By adapting to new market trends, by leveraging the latest digital technologies, Cremstar and companies like ours operating on the West Coast are well on our way to meeting the first two of these challenges. But the rebranding of death in our hearts and in our minds is an ongoing, almost Sisyphean exercise, and one which I hope you will help us in meeting.

As I stand here and gaze at my 2,500-year-old Etruscan vase, as I ponder each nick and scratch, and think about my own wrinkles and stretch marks and brown spots and scars, I have to smile a little. Once, someone toasted the ancient eternal gods and took a sip of wine from this small, simple cup. But where are the ancient deities today? Trapped in eternal youth, that nectar of Western dreams, do they sit idle and all-powerful, waiting for something — anything — new to happen?

In truth, I pity them. No matter how colorful, think how dull and flavorless their feast! For they will never taste the sweet fruit of mortality.

CONCLUSION

I’d like to leave you with some practical things you can do:

• Talk with your family about your end-of-life desires. PLAN, PLAN, PLAN.
• Get the legal stuff out of the way; i.e. define an AA or Designated Agent as POA goes away
• Set up a Living Will so your family and friends know what to do in case you become incapacitated
• Prepay for your funeral or cremation so your family doesn’t have this worry
• Begin to create your MemoryBox now so that you’re remembered the way you want to be remembered
• Plan your Ultimate Party (the one you’re guaranteed not to attend)
• Become a Wabi Sabi Brand Ambassador

The only way that we will rebrand death in this country is with your help.

Thank You.

For more information, visit https://SpringHoldingGroup.com, or email us at info@SpringHoldingGroup.com.

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The post Rebranding Deathcare for the 21st Century – How Eastern ideas can help us overcome Western prejudices against death appeared first on Home.

For Zane

It was in 1938, on the muskeg side of Eagle Lake, as a fog sluiced through the pine trees and a thunderstorm took hold, that Joseph Widmark trolled his way back to the boat slip and the lake unraveled with his first and only muskie.  He was only eighteen then, a freshman in college, and although the fish weighed less than thirty pounds, he won the trophy and a check for $27 that they told him he could cash at any bank in West Ontario.

They drove along the highway in a rented Ford Granada.  Joseph was sixty-two now and his son, David, had heard the story many times.  In all the years since that first muskie hunt, Joseph Widmark had never hooked another.  He and his son had traveled to Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario.  They had caught their share of pickerel and pike.  But the only muskies they had seen were nailed up on the doorframes of old roadside motels, or gill-pegged by some fishing cabin, their prehistoric mouths alive with jagged teeth, their long, thick bodies ribbed with orange tiger stripes.

The muskellunge was like a dream to the old man, as wild and nameless as the forests and the prairies racing from the highway to the glistening horizon.

David had been planning this fishing trip for months.  His last showing in New York had been a great success.  He had sold a dozen paintings, gathered commissions, and the thick manila folder, which his father kept inside his cherry wood credenza for significant reviews, was growing tattered at the edges.

At first the old man had been reticent.  “I’m flattered but it isn’t a good time,” he’d said.  “I may be working those two weeks.  Besides, it’ll soon be Christmas.  Your mother’s been cooking round the clock.”

David looked down at his telephone, at the charged cream plastic line that ran into the wall, along the highways and the malls, and down into the rich New Jersey soil.  “I already talked with her,” he said.  “Come on, Dad, it’s only for a week.  You used to take me fishing all the time.  If it’s the money, I already told you.  My treat.”

“No, it isn’t that.  But won’t the lake be frozen?”

“I checked. They just held the Great Muskie Hunt ten days ago.  Winner caught a forty pounder.”

“We’d have to buy new line, you know.”

“I did.”

There was a pause that stretched across two states.  “How would we go?” the old man asked.

“We’ll fly into Duluth and rent a car.”

There was another pause and David heard his father cover up the mouthpiece.  He looked up at the pencil sketch of Windsor Castle that hung above the telephone.  It was a Judge’s reproduction, with chestnut trees and a brace of desultory cows.  Rising high above the foliage, the northern tower wavered like a flag.  It had been a present from his father on his fifteenth birthday, the year that he had won the Harrow Art Prize, the year that he had gotten drunk for the first time and lost his innocence in London, the year he’d realized that without his painting nothing seemed to matter.  Nothing.  “Dad, are you still there?”

“I’ll drive the rental if you knot my wire leaders for me.”

*   *   *

Yeager’s Fishing Camp could only be approached by boat, seaplane or a long-abandoned logging road.  The camp had been designed by Fritz Yeager himself, a man of legend throughout the Vermilion Range.  He had left the town of Ely as a boy, become a kind of hero in the War, and prospered as an architect until his ascendance to Ontario’s Premier in ’68.  In truth, the man had been a middling politician.  But the people didn’t care.  He was one of them.  And, when he finally retired to his camp, they welcomed him with a celebration of such opulence that it drew national attention and put the town of Ely on the map.

Fritz Yeager drank.  At night he sat out on the front porch of the Trading Post, pulling at a bottle whose label had been boiled off years ago.  He was out there every night, regardless of the weather, smoking Player’s Medium Navy Cut cigarettes and talking to the fishermen and hunters.  The camp was usually deserted by November.  A few still hunted moose throughout the winter but most observed the same internal timepiece as the birds, migrating south to warmer climes, retreating as the ice advanced across the lake.

The Trading Post was a massive clapboard structure with a hint of Maine design.  The dining room took up the western wing, the Yeagers the rest.  There was a kind of general store just off the dining area that featured fishing gear, thick rods the size of walking sticks and garish muskie plugs with feather, steel and rubber band attachments.  Behind the counter, a local high school girl named Daisy Leech ran through the merits of each lure with practiced salesmanship.  “They call this the Torpedo.”

Joseph picked up the jointed plug and flicked the stainless steel propeller.  It was at least six inches long.  “Do I get my money back if I don’t land a muskie by tomorrow?”

Daisy looked aghast.  “I’m sorry, Mr. Widmark.  I can only guarantee the plug, not your luck.”

“We’ll take it,” David said.  “Put it on my tab.  No, don’t bother to wrap it up.  I’ll eat it here.”

Daisy wrinkled her nose.  “Okay.  I guess.”

David and his father sidled off to their dining table, snickering like a pair of schoolboys.  “Eat it here,” Joseph repeated once they were sitting down.  He looked down at the muskie plug, curled up beside his fork like some gigantic hornet, bright yellow and chartreuse.  Daisy had forgotten to remove the price tag.  “Seventeen dollars,” he said tightly.  “That’s a bit steep, isn’t it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” David said.

“No, really,” Joseph answered.  “We don’t need another lure.”

David put his menu down.  “Dad, it’s alright.”

“I bet it cost them only fifty cents to make it.  I’m going to take it back.”

He began to stand but David reached across the table and held him by the shoulder.  “Dad,” he said, “for crying out loud, you’re embarrassing me.  I told you, it’s alright.  Maybe it’ll change our luck.”

For the rest of the meal they barely spoke.  Joseph stabbed at his stroganoff half-heartedly, while David talked about the northern pike which they had spotted on the north side of the lake.  The fishing had been disappointing.  For five days they had combed the shores of Eagle Lake, their fingers growing numb against the wind, the silence only broken by the sound of anxious errant fins and the stutter of their outboard motor.

Their coffee came, followed by a fifth of scotch, and the room began to warm.

“I’m sorry,” Joseph finally said.

“What for?”

“About the plug, I mean.  I guess I over-reacted.  It’s just . . . ”

David put his empty glass down on the table.  “How’s business, Dad?” he said.

“A little slow.  But it’s the holidays.”

“I talked with Mom.”

“What did your mother say?”

“She told me to ask you.  You know how she is.”

The old man smiled.  “Yes, I know how she is.”  He sighed.  “It’s just a little slow, that’s all, David.  It’s the recession.”  He slipped the bill for their supper under the tablecloth and glanced about the room.

David laughed.  “I think they’ll find it.”

“Next year, perhaps.  After they clear these dishes.  We’ll be long gone by then.”

It seemed to David that his father only came alive when he went fishing.  No, more than that; it was as if the journey from New Jersey to the camp had been along the temporal plain, as if the roads and air routes were mementos on a line of gradual regression.

David recalled a fishing trip to France.  He had been a boy, no more than ten, and they had motored on the Continent.  All those years in Europe had passed by in a snowstorm of discovery.  Joseph had still worked for US Express then, and his American salary had led them to believe that there would always be a little more next year.   David’s mother, Kirsten, came into her own.  Her business parties always drew the most outlandish personages – concubines and priests, film directors, media tycoons and ministers of state.  They lived in Italy, in England, France and Greece.  They summered in Dubrovnik, and wintered in Marrakech.

To Kirsten, it was what she had expected, a bright extension of her youth and the world which she had fashioned on the ceiling of her childhood bedroom late at night in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the daughter of an orthodontist.  But to Joseph it had come with patience and devisal, the product of hard work and the ethic he had learned in the storeroom of his father’s tavern in Cicero, West Chicago, stacking cases as a boy.

Their compact was a merger of ideals.  His duty was to bring the grist to mill, and hers was to refine it.

David had just been accepted to Harrow in England when his father informed him they were moving again.  The old man had been offered a position in New York, a new bank after more than thirty years with US Express, a new title, and a raise of such dizzying significance that he just couldn’t say no.  For four years, David traveled back and forth between boarding school and home on Trans World Airlines.

At first, the new job proved to be exactly to what Joseph had aspired.  Kirsten bought a house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and Joseph joined the Club.  It was expected.  It was the prize, the averment of success.  Then the go-go years were gone and the promise was rescinded.  The man whom Joseph had been told he would replace remained to fill the same space on the ladder.  Responsibilities were shifted and Joseph found himself one day with a Conrail monthly pass inside his wallet but without a destination.

For weeks he traveled to the city only to wander along the streets and avenues, confused and purposeless, unable to find work or the courage to tell Kirsten that the morning ritual – the kiss and car ride to the station – was a sham.

It was at college in Massachusetts that David first learned the family was in trouble.  His sister told him that the old man’s stocks, secured as options, had fallen in the slump, and that the bank for which he’d worked for years was calling in the loan.  The entrepreneurial schemes he chiseled late at night in his home office turned out to be unsuited to the times.  The market was going through disintermediation.  The family moved again, to a condo in New Jersey.  David was told to get a scholarship, and then a student loan that Joseph promised to repay as soon as things went back to normal.  Time passed, and with it all their savings.  Joseph tried to keep his courage up.  He still had faith in all the dreams his father had bequeathed him.  He still believed that if he worked a little harder, a little longer and a little faster, the prize would come to him again.

*   *   *

The boat moved silently across the surface of the lake.  They had turned the motor off and as they drifted through the inlet, they worked the shoreline and the weed beds carefully.  Concentric circles marked the ingress of their lures.  Beyond the dead brown cattails, spruce trees scrambled for a foothold in the rocky soil.

David hooked his spinner on the eyelet of his rod and stretched out in the stern.  He was cold, tired.  They had already caught their lunch and he was anxious to relax, to build a fire and fillet the walleye.  There was nothing like the taste of flaky white fish fried up in lard in a cast iron pan over an open fire.

He watched his father cast his spoon beyond the tree stump near the water’s edge.  It was uncanny how the old man timed his casts.  David had never equaled his precision, the smooth unhurried movement of his arm, the way he jigged the rod so that the spoon looked more realistic.

“What do you think?” said David as his father cast again.  “I’m starving.”

Joseph looked up at the sky.  Fat bands of imbricated clouds moved lazily across the sun.  “Some people go hungry for days in order to catch a fish,” he said.  “You’ll never hook a muskie if your line’s dry.”

David shrugged.  Across the lake, a flock of seagulls floated on the water.  “I got my share of pike,” he said.  “Besides, look at this place.  I don’t care if I ever catch a muskie.  It’s worth it just to be here.”

Joseph shook his head.  “There are two kinds of fishermen, David.  One is content to throw his lure out and see what happens.  The other one hunts muskie.”

David pulled his watch cap down below his ears.  “Jesus, Dad.  It’s just a fish,” he said.

Joseph hooked a finger around the line and cast his lure toward the shore.  It landed just beside the stump.  David watched his father work the rod.  He swept the tip from side to side, his left hand turning constantly, the line retreating to the spool.  Then, suddenly, his movements stopped.  The thick rod bowed and, in the distance, David saw the water swell.

The old man snapped the rod back violently to set the hook.  Once, twice.  There was a splash and David heard the nylon singing as the spool reversed itself.

“What is it?” David asked excitedly.

“Don’t know.”

David slipped his own rod against the gunwale and reached down for the landing net.  The fish was running for the rocks.  “Looks big,” he said.

Joseph twisted on his seat, swinging his line across the bow.  The fish ran once again, then slowed.  Joseph pumped the rod, the nylon shivered, and David saw a dark shape crack the water for an instant.

It was a northern pike, and judging from the movement of the rod, the way its dorsal fin had slashed the surface of the lake, he knew that it was huge.  “It must be twenty pounds,” he said excitedly.  “Or more.”

David felt his heart race as he slipped the net into the icy water.  Joseph turned the fish at last; it headed for the boat.  He pulled the rod up, trying madly to retrieve the line, to keep the nylon taut.  The fish drew closer.

David could see it clearly now.  Its body shivered in the deep.  The spoon was hooked clean in the upper corner of its mouth, forcing the pallid jaws apart.  “This way,” he told his father.  “Just lead it to me.”

“I’m trying,” Joseph answered with a smile.  “Tell him!”  He paused and suddenly the smile was gone.  “Jesus,” he said.  “What’s that?”

His son looked deep into the lake.  The pike had twisted to one side and, clamped across its back, primordial and huge, David could see the thorny jawbone of another fish.  There was a flash of golden stripes.  A splash.  The frigid water heaved.  The reel began to sing again and David saw the pike collapse upon itself, the massive body cut in half.  He pulled his hand into the boat reflexively.  The pike began to sink, its severed head concealed behind an amaranth of blood.  The second fish advanced.  It swam lethargically beside the boat, the jaws maneuvering the remnants of the pike along its bony throat, the hackled fins extended and blood discharging through its gills.

For a moment it was still, its left eye fixed upon the fisherman as if in recognition.  The fish was as long as the boat.  Then, slowly and deliberately, it sank into the depths.

David looked up at his father.  The old man’s face was ashen, but his eyes were clear, and his lips were pulled back in a grin.  He fixed his gaze on David and began to laugh.

“Muskie,” he said.  Then he began to reel his line in frantically.  “Well, don’t just sit there.  Fetch me that damned Torpedo.”

*   *   *

David woke to the sound of voices arguing.  Water shimmered in the moonlight outside the window, and for a moment he was sure the lake had frozen over in the night.  It certainly felt cold enough.  The Franklin stove glowed in the corner of the cabin but the air was crisp and cutting.  David glanced across the room and saw his father’s bed was empty.  The arguing grew louder.  “Shit,” he spat.  David pulled a sweater on and stumbled out the door.

From the porch, down the path that ran between the cabins, David could see the outline of the Trading Post.  The front door was open and Fritz Yeager stood in the entrance, illuminated by a light which flickered from within.  He was shouting at someone, or at something in the night but – from the cabin – David thought the jetty looked deserted.

Who’s he shouting at?  Then he saw his father on the path only a dozen yards away.

“What is it?” David asked him.  “Dad?  Dad, what’s going on?”

“It’s Yeager.  I think he’s drunk,” said Joseph.  “Go back to sleep.”  He started down the path.

By the time Joseph reached the Trading Post, Yeager had descended to the jetty where the fishing boats were tied up to a line.  He was staring at the lake, his hands set deep within his pockets.  Joseph idled up beside him.  “Good evening, Mr. Yeager,” he said casually, as if he’d just passed him on the way to supper.

David could see Yeager spin about.  His hair hung loosely in his face.  “Who’s that?” he said.

“It’s me.  Mr. Widmark.”

“Oh, the Widmarks.  Yes.  I know.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Never mind.”  Yeager paused and looked back out across the bay.  “It’s the lake,” he said.  “It was always her idea.  Eagle Lake, I mean.”

Joseph stamped his sides.  “It’s a little cold out here, don’t you think?”

Yeager laughed.  The moon appeared between the clouds, translucent as a lollypop.  “I don’t know why,” he said, “but Sarah just hates me.”

“Mrs. Yeager?  How can you say that?  I’m sure that isn’t true.”

“It was always her idea.  They all were.  I just wanted to build houses.”

“It’s late, Mr. Yeager.  Why don’t you go back up to the house, try and get some sleep?”

“It’s the lake.  You just don’t see it.”

“That’s right – the lake.  It’ll still be here tomorrow.”  Joseph took Yeager by the arm and led him up the jetty toward the house.

When they had reached the porch, Yeager turned on his heels without warning.  He put a hand on Joseph’s shoulder, leaned forward, his mouth to Joseph’s ear, and whispered, “It was here.  Before we came, long before.”  The words came slowly from his mouth.  “All of those dreams.  Under the water, in the stones and trees.  At the bottom of the lake.  Waiting for us.”

“Go to bed, Mr. Yeager,” Joseph said.  He pushed him gently through the entrance.  Then he let the screen door slam, and made his way along the path back toward the cabin.

David was still standing on the porch when he returned.

“Drunk,” said Joseph, entering the cabin.  “Dead drunk.”

“And we’re paying for his poison.”

“No, you are,” Joseph said.

David didn’t answer.  He closed the door.  They undressed and got back into bed.  Neither of them spoke for several minutes.  David could hear his father shivering in the bunk nearby.  “Cold out there, huh?” he said at last.

For a moment Joseph didn’t respond.  Then he said, “What I don’t understand is why a man like that would drink.  I mean, he has everything.  He was a Premier, for Christ’s sake.  He’s rich.  His wife is charming and attractive.”

“And a good cook to boot,” said David, trying to lighten the mood.

“He almost ran for Prime Minister,” Joseph continued, ignoring him.

David turned over onto his back and tried to fall asleep.  He thought about his work, the paintings yet undone, the showing his dealer had set up for January.  If sales continued as they had, by spring he would finally have enough to buy that loft in SoHo.  Just barely, anyway.  David pictured his easel by the windows, the southern light exploding through the glass.

But then, of course, there was his father.  If his mother’s fears were justified, everything would change.  The money would be needed to support his parents, and the loft would have to wait.  Maybe a year or so, at least until his father found a job.  But what if Joseph didn’t take the money?  No, thought David.  He’d have to.  What choice did he have?  It was just a question of positioning the offer.  David would say it was a loan, an investment in his father’s new consulting practice.  Damn his old-fashioned pride.  Why could they never talk directly?  Why did it always have to be oblique, so many metaphors behind symbols behind words?

David looked over at his father’s bunk.  It was almost dawn.  He could hear birds singing outside all around them.  Joseph was lying on his back, his eyes open, staring up at the ceiling.  “Can’t sleep?” David said.

“Just thinking.”

“Not about that damned muskie, I hope.”

“No, about Yeager.  He kept going on and on about the lake.  He kept saying . . .”  Joseph turned onto his side and looked over at David.  “He was talking about dreams,” he said.  “He just wanted to build houses.”

“Then, why didn’t he?”

“I don’t know.  Why does anyone try living other people’s dreams?  It’s different for you, David.  You’re another generation.  But, in some ways,” Joseph added, “I’m just like Mr. Yeager.”

“You’re not a drunk, Dad.”

“Not yet, you mean.”

“Not ever.”

The old man looked up at the ceiling once again.  “I want to be a producer, David.  That’s all.  Do you understand?  Not a consumer.  I just want to make something.”

“You will, Dad.  I know you will.”  David tried to think of something else to say, but the words seemed to float above him, out of reach, brittle as ice, like the sounds of the birds in the trees.

*   *   *

From the inlet on the muskeg side of Eagle Lake, near the stretch of water where in 1938 the old man had begun his journey, David heard the calling of a loon, a mournful echo of remembrance, a sound as solitary as the muskellunge his father hunted.  They worked the shoreline quickly, their casts meticulous and true.  But with each flick of the wrist, the sun slipped closer to the burnished lip of the horizon, the termination of their holiday, and the onset of their journey home.

Joseph was using the Torpedo.  He was casting it again and again, across the inlet to the stump where they had raised that fish before.  David watched him from the corner of his eye as he tossed his own plug through the twilight.  The stars were beginning to glow.  A gust of wind disturbed the surface of the lake, chilling his bones.  As they fished, David sent up a silent prayer for his father to succeed, if only to relieve the gnawing hunger which that first fish, years before, had planted deep within him like a seed.  But he knew that it was finished.  Joseph would have to wait another year, another fishing season to find whatever he was looking for.

David put his rod down in the bottom of the boat and lit a cigarette.  The taste was bitter and delicious.

As if sensing his impatience, his father said, “Five casts.”

David counted them off in his head, the last one landing on the water with a splash so loud, so ominous, that they both sat up and stared into the darkness.  It was nothing.  The fishing trip was over.

Joseph slipped his rod beneath his seat and David started up the motor.  Across the lake, the green light of the jetty glowed rhapsodically.  “I don’t imagine Daisy Leech will take it back,” the old man said with a half smile.

“There’ll be another trip.”

“Could be.  Probably.  It doesn’t matter.”

“It doesn’t?”

“Not really.  It was worth it just to be here.  With you, I mean.”

David smiled.  “Is this the same guy who defined the difference between fishermen and muskie hunters?”

The old man stuffed his hands into his pockets and stared across the darkling surface of the lake.  “Almost,” he said.

The post After the Great Muskie Hunt appeared first on Home.

With only 350 official residents remaining after the terrible hurricane of ’55 in which 2,500 people died, with only a couple of restaurants, a fruit stand, a marine barracks, a dozen or so bed-and-breakfasts/small hotels spattered along the coast, with barely a beach and no distended cruise ship peer, today Xcalak is all but forgotten.  Only the intrepid traveler from Cancun, who ponders what lies beyond that bay, just along that coast, and who then travels for five hours by unforgiving road due south ever gets to know this quintessentially Mexican town as more than a dot on the map.

As the soldiers in camouflage finished rifling though our own bags, a white pick-up truck arrived and a lanky narrow-hipped gringo with a baseball hat slipped from the cab like a spoonful of molasses.  “I’m glad you had the sense to buzz the bar,” he said.  “I’m Dean.  Mike of Marina Mike’s had to go back to the States.”  He motioned toward the Mexican Marines.  “It’s okay, El Capitan.  I brought beer.”

*   *   *

 “The soldiers have been here in strength now for about a week,” Dean explained, as we bumped along in his beat-up Chevy pick-up over the broken coral road.  It seemed that only the week before, some boat had either run aground, or dumped her cargo at sea for fear of being boarded:  40 bales, and each one carried 30 Kilos of cocaine with a local value of $200K – one million on the street.  As the last town on the southernmost tip of Mexico, Xcalak is a main thoroughfare for smugglers making their way north from Colombia to the States.

 “A week ago,” added Dean, “there were only a couple of beaten-up scooters in town.  Now everybody’s got at least one.”

“How’s the fishing?” I asked.

Dean shrugged.  “Well, that’s just it.  No one really knows.  It’s off-season.  The entire east side of Chetumal Bay will only see one fisherman this week.  And that’s you.”

*   *   *

Victor Castro had been a member of the local fishing union for more than thirty years when he decided to strike out on his own and become a full-time guide.  “I had heard what was happening in Ascension and Spiritu Santu bays to the North,” he told me later on that night at Mike’s Marina.  “Their camps are drawing fishermen from all over the world.  I am getting ready.  Chetumal Bay is twice as big as Ascension and Spiritu Santu put together.  And it is the last place left, abutting Ambergris Cay to the south, another bonefish and permit paradise.  Yet it is unexplored.  I’ve fished these waters for 30 years and I’ve only just begun to venture deep into the Bay.  I tell you, these fish have never seen a fly.”

*   *   *

The next morning at 6:30, Victor came by with a woeful tale.  It was the conjunctivitis, the pink eye.  It was sweeping through the Yucatan.  More than half of the population was afflicted.  “But I have a replacement,” he added with a puffy pink wink.  “Jesus will be here in ten minutes with the panga.  He is very strong.  He can pole you around all day.”

“A half day,” I reminded him.

Jesus arrived with the boat and tied her up immediately in front of Marina Mike’s. The ocean was wearing whitecaps.  There was a brisk wind that made the palm trees creak.  It was not going to be easy casting.  We got in the boat and roared across the choppy waters of the bay, heading due south.

There were a few clouds in the sky, nascent thunderheads, the high-stacked snowy clouds of the Caribbean, bruised underneath.  As we skirted the town pier, I took in Xcalak:  primarily one-story concrete dwellings, skinny mongrels standing transfixed on the beach, reclining fishing boats, a battered abandoned truck.  This was Mexico to me – not Cozumel or Cancun.  This sleepy little fishing village, where everybody knew each other, where gringos still earned a stare or two from the locals ambling by, where only the night before, a giant feral pig rooting around in the garden behind the hotel had awakened me from my dreams about New York.  Only a line of modern windmills towering over the palm trees reminded me of the century.  Then, suddenly, Xcalak was gone, replaced by coconut palm and mangrove, the land of the crab and the ant.  The wind blew the salt spray into our faces as we swung around the coast.  The boat slowed down through choppy water and we spied the cut the Mexican military had dynamited through the reef.  To our right, a dredger sat lethargically on a barge, baking in the sun, slap dab in the middle of the canal leading to Chetumal Bay.  Jesus gunned the engine and we headed further south, around a bend in the coast, then slowed down and made for shore.

A passageway opened up in the dense greenery, a seemingly natural canal.  Jesus maneuvered the boat with ease along the Boca Bacalar Chica.  “Sometimes,” he shouted above the engine noise, “we see manatee in here.” 

Then we were through.  The narrow passageway began to widen, to open up onto a blue lagoon, hemmed in on every side by coral outcroppings or impenetrable vegetation.  Jesus cut the engine and began to pole.  I was using a Scott, 4-piece, 8’ graphite fly rod, and a Crazy Charlie with weighted eyed, tied light in pink to match the vast expanse of sand.  The water here was about 4 to 5 feet deep.  We inched forward toward the lee of a mangrove island.  I make a cast and wet my line, then stripped it back, laying it out carefully on the plywood deck behind me, fitted with Astroturf.  I pinched the fly in my left hand, pulled down my cap, and started to hunt.

It took me a while to find the windows in the quivering water but when I did it was just in time.

“Bonefish.  3 o’clock,” said Jesus.  He swung the panga closer.

“I see him,” I replied.  He was alone and he was big.  I lifted the rod, shot out some line, double-hauled on the back cast and let it fly.  The line slithered perfectly through the guides, riding a little high against the wind, unrolled and settled with a graceless splash almost on top of the fish.  To my utter and complete amazement, the fish did not spook.  It simply looked and turned away.

And this is how it went, all morning.  Of course, I lined my share of single fish, put down more schools than I’d ever care to admit, but most of the bones were generous to a fault.  As Victor Castro had said, it’s as if they’d never seen a fly before.  Without lodges and air-conditioned hotels, without flats boats and marinas, without ready access except for a grueling 5-hour drive from Cancun, and with only the occasional diver/fishermen to even begin to probe the vastness of Chetumal Bay, these fish pounced on my flies.  They fought over them.  They raced to be apprehended.

Jesus turned out to be a master with the boat.  He brought us into the most sheltered islands, the most protected lees, and I switched over to a Gotcha.  We tried everything:  from sight-casting to cruising singles, to dropping flies in tonsures in the turtle grass alive with schooling fish.  Within two hours, I had caught six bones, ranging in size from a mere two-pounder to one of nearly five.  Anxious for my friend to catch a bone, his first, I let Jimmie take the bow.  While not a fly-fisher, he put up a plucky effort with a borrowed spinning rod and pink shrimp jig.  But Jesus had no live bait, and Jimmie had a hard time getting the jig out.  Eventually Jesus felt sorry for us and we headed for a senota, a 30’ deep blue hole in the flat, carved out by freshwater aquifers.  Over time, the upper casing of the underground channel collapses, linking the lagoon via submarine river to the sea.  We caught jack and snapper on nearly every cast until our arms were sore.

As we made our way back to camp through the cut, we noticed a huge mud just downstream from where the barge was dredging.  But the source was no machine.  Not even in Belize or Argentina have I ever spotted such a school.  More than thirty permit winged their way past our boat in a flash, mooning their sides at us, giving us the finger with their carbon tipped dorsal fins.

*   *   *

The next morning, Jesus and I angled out across the bay to the same cut; Jimmie had elected to stay behind.  The weather had turned.  The day before had been windy and clear.  But a bank of rain clouds had swept in from the northeast during the night and the sky was pewter and pink.  The wind had died and I was worried.  Without the sun, our visibility would be next to nil, and with it our ability to hunt.  Frankly, I didn’t fancy the idea of blind casting into dark spots the whole morning.  Once again, Jesus didn’t let me down.

We made our way through the canal and deep into Chetumal Bay, threading through countless mangrove passageways, gliding along tranquil lagoons and flats for a good hour.  Eventually, I heard the motor slow and felt the boat begin to settle.  Jesus cut the engine and we drifted into another medium-sized lagoon.  There was a large spit of land jutting out into the bay.  Small mangrove plants and razor grass sprouted up from the sandy soil.  The flat seemed to stretch on indefinitely, no more than a few inches deep against the bank.  Jesus poled us forward.  The water looked like mercury, impenetrable in the half-light.  Then I saw the telltale sign of tailing fish.  We could hear them in the reeds, nosing around for shrimp and crab, up and down the entire coast.

I spent the next 4 hours sight fishing to tailing bones.  September may not be the premier time to fish the Yucatan but that morning Chetumal gave up twelve bones and I must have lost or lined at least two dozen more.  Some say the bones here are less numerous but larger than their cousins to the north in Spiritu Santu and Ascension Bays.  In my experience, they rival the fish of Belize, and they’re a lot less leader shy.  My largest fish that morning was about 8 pounds, but 10-pound fish are not uncommon, and a thirty-bone day is considered only a decent outing.

I fished mostly Crazy Charlies and Gotchas in light brown or cream or pink.  Crab patterns were more problematic.  Given the stillness of the water, they often drew too much attention to themselves as they penetrated the surface, putting the fish down.  At one point, as Jesus poled us into a narrow weedy bay no more than twenty-five feet across and fifty or so feet long, I realized that the inlet was alive with bones.  There were four distinct schools of between six and fifteen fish, and several singles and doubles rooting around in the weeds.  I began to pick up fish on almost every cast, moving from school to school, and although each hookup produced stinging runs down to my backing as they fled the inlet for the larger bay, although they often churned the waters to a froth, the remaining bonefish in the inlet never spooked.   They simply moved about in nervous circles for a few moments, then settled back to eating.  I was transfixed until Jesus pulled my sleeve and pointed.  I hadn’t even noticed him draw near.  I followed his finger and saw the telltale waving of a permit’s dorsal fin as it cruised casually around the opening to the inlet.  I spun about and cast, backhand, across my left shoulder.  In a second the fish would either enter the inlet or turn away, back toward the body of the bay.  The loop unfurled clumsily and landed with a great splash only inches from the permit’s nose.  I never saw the fish again.  It simply disappeared, without so much as a wake.

We shifted over to permit fishing after that, cruising through vast lagoons and sandy bays, in deeper water now, perhaps ten feet or more.  But despite our diligent efforts, the fish that had been so ubiquitous the day before – the authors of that impressive mud near the canal – eluded us today.  We made our way back under a threatening sky.  In the distance, lightning bolts clawed at the Caribbean, like stingers from the bruise-blue thunderheads above, celestial men-of-war.  We floated in between two liquid worlds.  We even enjoyed a small mud in a narrow bay as we headed back toward the canal; I picked up two more fish blind casting into the cloud.  Then I gave up.  I was tired.  Despite those last two bones, the day had really ended when I had spooked that permit back at the inlet.  I had known it even then.  I laid my rod back in the holder and buttoned up my shirt.  It had grown suddenly cold.  The front was heading our way.

We raced the storm back through the cut, then north to Marina Mike’s.  The storm won.  We got soaked.  And while I never did spot any bales in the mangroves during my stay, I was leaving Xcalak with a lot more than I’d carried in.

If you’re looking for the amenities of a fine fly fishing lodge, for tidy air-conditioned rooms, for experienced guides with well-maintained flats boats, for nightlife and shopping and restaurants too, Xcalak is not for you.  But if you’re one of those people who – for some unfathomable reason – simply have to know what’s down that road, due south, along the coast there, pack your bags.  But you’d better hurry.  Cancun was once a place where you buzzed the bar to arrange for pickup at the airport.  Already there are discussions about building a couple of large hotels and a marina just south of town.  Victor Castro is buying another boat and Jesus is going to work for him full-time.  A few miles up the coast they’ve put in a new cruise ship pier and a resort; they plan to transport 400 snorkelers a day to the Chinchorro Bank.  As Jimmie and I headed back out to the airport to fly back to Cozumel and home, we noticed a cherry-picker stringing a power line along the road.  Soon the entire town of Xcalak would be wired for electricity, 24 hours a day.  “There goes the Yucatan!” Jimmie said.

September 2003

The post The Mooney and the Bonefish appeared first on Home.

In contrast, I would argue that if free markets were truly free, laissez-faire economics would not be so patently pernicious. But they’re not free.

Rather, rich and powerful corporate interests do everything in their power to distort the market by securing tax breaks and special privileges through their armies of lobbyists resulting in the oligarchy in which we operate today, as revealed by the exhaustive research of Prof. Gilens of Princeton University. Indeed, corporate welfare completely undercuts the so-called free market system extolled by conservatives.

Commercial or “private” insurance administrative costs, for example, hover around 14–22%, according to the industry trade group American Health Insurance Plans. Meantime, Medicare’s “public” administrative costs are around 6–8% (including the cost of outside agencies). Why? Because these commercial overhead costs include 4–6% for commissions and 3–5% for profits.

It’s funny how when companies want to merge and consolidate in order to drive efficiencies of scale — despite the fact that this actually diminishes competition — it’s fine. But when it’s government doing the same thing, the Right screams bloody murder.

Human beings are bi-manual creatures, and yet those on the Right always seem to ignore the other hand of cooperation and collective endeavor — the “Helping Hand,” so to speak.

This conflict between the “fighting fist” and “helping hand” doesn’t just date back to the founding of our nation and the Age of Enlightenment. It dates back to the dawn of our species, or even earlier. Indeed, one could argue that without it, we would all still be living alone in our own Paleolithic caves, fighting off predators singlehandedly, trying to survive in singular isolation.

Instead, it’s the hand that saw infants handed off to relative strangers by females of the clan so that they could go out and gather nuts and berries unobstructed. It’s the hand that grasped the spear so that, back to back, we could collectively face predators. It’s the hand that gathered up seeds so that we could conjointly plant and harvest efficiently as the basis of agrarian sustenance. It’s the hand that, with others, eventually built and maintained the machinery that made possible the industrial and digital revolutions. And it’s the hand that today is manifested in such “socialist” organizations as our local police and fire departments, our road and bridge builders and inspectors, our public school system, our military, our Social Security and Medicare systems, the EPA, and all aspects of government.

“No man is an island,” Donne said, and yet so-called free market ideologues would have us celebrate this state of singular animal competition as the basis of all that is good and efficient and natural but it is, in reality, only one part of the natural order of things and, indeed, often far from efficient — as illustrated by the true state of private health insurance cited above, notwithstanding what the GOP tells us. In fact, there is a growing body of scientific evidence that this difference is not just naturally manifested but naturally based. The “me” (based on selfishness) vs. “them” (based on empathy-based cooperation) dialectic predates humankind.

As primatologist Frans de Waal said in his essay The Evolution of Empathy:

“We are so used to empathy that we take it for granted, yet it is essential to human society as we know it. Our morality depends on it: How could anyone be expected to follow the golden rule without the capacity to mentally trade places with a fellow human being? It is logical to assume that this capacity came first, giving rise to the golden rule itself … This capacity likely evolved because it served our ancestors’ survival in two ways. First, like every mammal, we need to be sensitive to the needs of our offspring. Second, our species depends on cooperation, which means that we do better if we are surrounded by healthy, capable group mates. Taking care of them is just a matter of enlightened self-interest.”

While those on the Right like to trot out Adam Smith when underpinning their justification for selfishness, it’s worth noting that this patron saint of economics only mentioned the “invisible hand” twice in his writings, and he never did so to justify heartlessness.

On the contrary, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), he said, “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition (is) … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

Yes, the “invisible hand” of we angel-apes cannot be denied. But as angel-apes we are not merely apes. Each and every one of us also has another hand, one of cooperation and collective assistance that is not simply angelic. It’s what’s helped us crawl out of our singular caves, abandon our Ayn Randist self-centeredness, and gave us succor and support as we fashioned and built civilization itself.

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On 9/11, I was living in a loft in lower Manhattan and I saw the towers fall. It was natural, I suppose, that as a writer I look to see which cataclysmic events had scarred New York as deeply. There was that Triangle Shirt Factory fire. There were a few tenement fires, some epidemics. And then I came across the largely forgotten Slocum disaster. Why, I asked myself, was the Triangle Shirt Factory fire so infamous, when fewer than 150 people died, and yet no one seemed to even know the General Slocum, when more than a thousand burned to death or drowned?

Then, it dawned upon me. The Slocum disaster had happened only a few years before the Great War. And when World War I arrived and so many Americans perished, no one cared about the Germans any longer. Now, they were the Hun, or the Boche. Somehow sub-human. Unworthy of remembrance.

When I decided to tell the story of the General Slocum tragedy as a YA novel, it was inevitable that the narrative should revolve around xenophobia and antisemitism, misogyny and prejudice of all kinds. In writing fiction, particularly historical fiction, one tries to create a narrative that speaks a truth transcending one specific life or set of lives, but rather one that represents all lifelines from that time, a bridge connecting the reader to the thoughts and feelings of the people living in that age. It also grants us an opportunity to relearn the truth that—despite vast differences in years—humans are driven by motivations which transcend time.

Kiss Me, I’m Dead is a story about love, about a love so strong that it conquers time and death in the face of prejudice, misogyny, antisemitism, and the mindset of the mob. It may be set in 1904, but these themes are very much eternal, indeed too omnipresent in our culture today. And yet the 120th anniversary of the General Slocum tragedy is more than that. It’s also the anniversary of New York’s greatest act of misremembering, the intentional collective sublimation of an idea, and the vanishing of a people.

In today’s culture, where we can create digital personae of ourselves on Tik Tok and Instagram that bear little resemblance to our true selves (just look at our politicians), at a time when AI makes it increasingly easy to manufacture alternate realities, indeed when VR permits us to actually immerse ourselves within these artificial worlds, the need for memory, to keep a foothold in truth, is more important than ever. To forget the past, Santayana warned us, means we are doomed to repeat it. To forget the holocaust, slavery, the Armenian and Rwandan Tutsi genocides, and all the other countless genocides before is to forget the current conflagrations in Gaza and the Sudan and the DRC, the wars of colonial occupation in West Papua and the Western Sahara.

One hundred and twenty years ago, New York experienced the greatest single loss of life in its history. That’s not fake news. No matter how hard we tried to ignore the event a few years later, it did happen. Indeed, our collective misremembering may be a truth as great as the loss of life itself. If the sinking of the Slocum teaches us anything at all, I hope it teaches us the power and essential nature of memory. Our most sacred trust, and our greatest obligation to future generations is to remember. Unflinchingly. Warts and all.

# # #

J.G. Sandom is an international best-selling author of a dozen novels including Kiss Me, I’m Dead. Originally released in hardcover by Penguin/Dutton under the title The Unresolved and pen name T.K. Welsh, the novel is being re-released by Cornucopia Press in both English and German under the title Kiss Me, I’m Dead in time for the 120th anniversary of the General Slocum tragedy.

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stringed by swift wings, the twilight lyre, only to fade before my eyes.

Devolved, invisible, a wordless cry; where has it gone, bright light’s desire?
Devolved, invisible, a soundless sigh; where has it gone, bright light’s desire?

Too short the day, eternal liar. Love is the way I learned to lie.

Extant of time, numberless die — All is nul set at eventide.

Devolved, invisible, a wordless cry; where has it gone, bright light’s desire?
Devolved, invisible, a soundless sigh; where has it gone, bright light’s desire?

09/11/2021 ~ PHILADELPHIA, PA

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and I was left alone in London with her flat

to promenade in Leicester Square. A drunkard sat

and played a dead harmonica.

The air was full of spring’s decay:

the pond ice, half-submerged and somewhat reticent,

uttered a groan for peace, a wish for winter spent

in hiding, covered by the light’s majolica.

And so I called a friend who said he’d come

to keep his company, and mine. Inside the dome,

the engines bled their passengers; a few for home

in Haslemere; a few to work,

with glances at the clock; and some,

like us, to play. The evening hid beneath the streets

and we ran slowly through the city veins, discreet

and fixed inside our trains, with silence our hauberk.

We climbed the night and drowned within the crowd

that pressed the pavement underneath the peacock light.

A woman’s laugh; the slamming of a door; tight

dissonance. Our casual hands

inside our pockets hugged the loud

green paper with assurance. We both knew the way.

We’d been there in our dreams, and on those lonely days

we’d spent chilling our white buttocks on the basement sand.

And so we climbed the stairs in silence, knowing that

this was a serious affair — a short crusade.

And, at the top, a woman with a pink Band-Aid

planted on her wrist smiled

at us. She’s just a little fat,

I thought, and handed her my money. And as I sucked

a foreign cigarette, I heard my friend get fucked

behind a curtain, with the moanings of a child.

1969 ~ Winchester, England

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clashing gray clouds with laughing light.

The pulsing sound of waves, laden with weed,

whisked past bare feet with even toes and even nails.

A mouth full of sand and fruit; rare strawberries.

And kites diving higher than they could.

And music organs, and monkey’s caps,

with monkeys in between.

And endless sails of endless dyes, sifting

silently between themselves, between the sea

and sun, and sun and sea.

Then, sudden movements empty emerald chests,

and shouts, and babies’ cries, and heat,

and flies, and sand, and mothers’ hands:

dismissed by regal whim.

Oh, emperors and poets, conquerors and kings:

come, paltry viewers, view

a blind salt-tinted prince turn

timely towards far deeper depths,

through choral bicycles and diamond tins,

past empty halls of glass

to breathe . . .

And fallen sand lies on the wooden floor

beneath an old man’s silent stare.

And cuffs, returned, fall even by dark leather feet,

with even toes and even nails.

New Canaan, Connecticut ~ 1971

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“Will you take me then,

pluck me like a faded flower from a branch?”

“Perhaps.”

“Will you open up my head,

cleave it as my father chops a sheep?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“And what of my wife, Maria?

Will she lay dried wreaths along this hill?”

“Perhaps.”

“Born;

and then the midwife’s hands around me;

crushing roaches at the table;

and my sister’s drowning;

my uncle beating, beating me;

and the little yellow wheel-barrow;

and cutting my first calf on the slaughterhouse floor;

and Maria’s breasts, creamy and soft,

suckling the child that never was,

nor will be.

What of them?”

“Into the earth.

Into the wet red earth.”

“Born;

and the miners’ hands, sweaty and hard;

carried on the donkey’s back;

melted in the furnace heat;

molded, turned and round;

hanging from the soldier’s belt;

gunpowder bed,

sleeping in the barrel of a gun.

What of me?”

“Into the earth.

Into the wet red earth.

With you.

In you.”

New Canaan, Connecticut ~ 1972

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There is a tranquil eye inside the hurricane;

I think (perhaps I’m wrong) that’s something you once said,

somewhere, hidden, on the other side of pain.

Last night, as I was walking to you in the rain,

the western sky above the hills glowed blue and red.

There is a tranquil eye inside the hurricane.

And, as I passed the trellis by your windowpane,

I saw you lying, naked, on your walnut bed,

somewhere, hidden, on the other side of pain.

You weren’t alone; another lay where I had lain

beside you on those summer days of words unsaid.

There is a tranquil eye inside the hurricane.

And in the cold, outside your window, as a train

incised the night, I saw you smile and hold his head —

somewhere, hidden, on the other side of pain.

I don’t know why I came to you again,

but a love that’s slipped away is never really dead.

There is a tranquil eye inside the hurricane …

somewhere, hidden, on the other side of pain.

New Canaan, Connecticut ~ 1975

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