A bonefish is one of the best fighting fish in the world. People come to the Bahamas from all over to try to hook one. While many game fish bite and run, peeling off maybe twenty or forty yards of line, a bonefish will strip a hundred before you have time to blink. They are highly sought after. They live on shallow flats, and consequently, getting to them requires a boat that can float in just a few inches of water. That type of boat is called a skiff, and nobody made a better bonefish skiff than Hack.
Hack had no family, no wife, and no children, which meant that the skill and artistry involved with building his skiffs would die with him. The more I got to know him, the more I realized that it was that fact that bothered Hack more than anything.
Months passed. Hack helped me with my house, and I helped him in his shop—learning what I could. One of the things that made Hack such a master craftsman with wood was his ability to seamlessly fit it together. While his boats may have required hundreds of pieces of wood, it was tough to tell that when you were sitting in one. So tight and smooth were his joints, it was as if he’d carved the thing out of a single tree. And if I had to state the one quality that made this possible, it was patience. Customers paid Hack $40,000 to $60,000 for one skiff. He made, at most, two a year. He wasn’t in a hurry and wasn’t motivated by money; he just loved building boats. Sometimes I’d catch him with his eyes closed, running his fingers along the wood he was sanding.
Bonefish braille.
One evening in his shop, Hack stopped sanding, ran his fingers along the lines of the wood, lost in the grain. His eyes a thousand miles beyond that shop. A whisper. “This is where I work out my anger. I rub this wood, and it forces it out, spilling it on the ground, where it drains into that water. The tide pulls it out to sea.” He nodded, speaking not so much to me as the memory of something or someone. “My baptism.”
A second passed before I asked my question. “How much anger is left?”
A smile. “Don’t know.”
“How will you know when you reach the end of it?”
“Never gotten there. But I guess I won’t be angry anymore.”
Tied hand in hand with his love of boats was his love of fishing for the elusive bonefish. Eighty years of casting for them meant that Hack knew where they were. Knew their patterns. What currents brought them where and what fly needed to be thrown when and how. Here, too, Hack gave me an education. And while I truly loved spending time with the old man, my gut told me that Hack was sharing what he knew with me, both about boats and bonefish, about coffee and cigarettes, about shaping wood and life in the Bahamas, because he was alone in this world and had no one to share it with. I think Hack was looking at the end of his life and taking a lifetime’s worth of experience and knowledge with him to a grave on the northwestern side of the island. This explained the resident sadness I experienced while around him. And while he knew some joy being around me, my presence did not redeem whatever he’d lost somewhere in his past. The more time I spent around him and the more I listened to him cough, the more I came to realize that Hack was saying good-bye to the world. I didn’t know how long that process would take, but when Hack came to me and told me that he wanted he and I to build a skiff together—a skiff for me—I knew it was a going away present.
Hack worked most mornings before sunrise in his shop; then about once or twice a week, a client would show up and Hack would putter off in his skiff to some hidden bonefish hole. When he left with his clients, he left me alone in his shop so I met most of the guys with whom he fished. They were all the same. Überwealthy guys living the life I’d chased under Pickering, looking for peace of mind. Peace of heart. A break from the pace of their lives. They didn’t love the bonefish, or Hack for that matter. They came here to conquer a bonefish so they could go home with pictures and a story and brag to all their friends. Hack knew this. He also knew that they needed what he had to offer, so he didn’t judge them for their lack of character or the fact that they let their lives back home dictate the pace at which they lived. Rather than decide what pace they wanted to live and then live at that pace. When I realized this, it hit me. Hack was doing the same thing with me. He was readjusting my internal clock. The pace at which I lived. I realized this one morning sitting on my porch, staring west out across the Atlantic. My coffee had grown cold. I looked down and saw a half cup of cold coffee staring back at me. That meant, in my haste, I had not sucked it down so fast that I hadn’t truly tasted it. Working with Marshall, I learned how to find and brew great coffee, but living with Hack, I learned how to taste it.
Big difference.
Somewhere in my second year with Hack, he double-booked clients for a day. Two guys show up, fly rods in hand, expecting the storied James J. Hackenworth to “put them on the fish.” Hack turned to me and said, “You mind helping out an old man?”
Thus began my career as a bonefish guide.
When the guy protested, Hack backed me up. “He’s better than me.”
Setting out, it struck me how that was the first time anyone had backed me up in a long time. And as much as I guarded my heart from anyone, I felt a twinge toward Hack.
My client was the CFO of a Fortune 500 company with a Stanford MBA. Because I didn’t want to answer a bunch of questions about how I ended up here, I decided not to give him my academic résumé. Figured it was just less complicated if he thought of me as an island bum who happened to know the location of the elusive bonefish. By the end of the afternoon, I’d put the guy on so many fish that he was rubbing his forearm to get the cramp out. Finally, he just sat down in the front of the boat, swallowed four ibuprofen, took off his hat, and shook his head. I asked, “You okay?”
“Best day of fishing ever. Period.” He paid me $500 for the day, plus a $500 tip. I tried to split it with Hack but he just laughed. “What am I going to do with it? Can’t spend what I got.”
We sat, staring out across the water. Hack with his cigarette and I with my water. Seldom was I without a bottle of water in my hand. Hack noticed it. “You drink that a lot.”
“Figure it’s better than Scotch.” I laughed. “Or the latest fad light beer.”
“Why the bubbles?”
I glanced at the plastic bottle. “I guess I like the way it feels.”
He took a long draw on his cigarette. He gazed out in front of us toward the coast of Florida some forty-four miles away. “I know you’re here running from something that hurt you—from someone—but you need to know that to the folks you meet—” He pointed his cigarette at my water. “You’re like that bottle of water.” He squinted at me, and I thought I saw the residue of a tear. “Don’t let the pain of whatever or whoever hurt you bottle itself up inside.” A breeze rippled across the water and settled on us. “Everywhere on the face of this planet, water is life, and I don’t know why, but you have that effect on people. They are drawn to it.” He reached for my bottle and swigged from it. “They like the way it feels going down.”
How I loved that old man.
Word spread and pretty soon Hack and I were both spending our days on the water. We built skiffs mornings and evenings and guided during the day. One morning I looked in the mirror, tanned, my hair turned blond in the sun, a few pounds lighter, and realized that the lifestyle agreed with me. I was reminded of the kid I once saw in the mirror. I don’t know what my blood pressure was, but I knew it was a good bit less than when I worked for Marshall.
And Hack was right. Working that wood, drawing out the oil, pulled the anger out. I could see Marshall’s face in my mind and not want to kill him or drive a fork through one eye and a spoon through the other. Between my folks, high school, being alone, Harvard, Amanda, her dad, I don’t know how much anger I’d buried in my life, but working with Hack brought me up against the rock of it. I’m not saying that I had found a way to blast through it, but I am saying that for the first time in my life, I had pulled away the facade that masked it. If Hack had given me a gift, it was honesty with myself. Through his patience without expectations, Hack had dug down inside me and brought me face-to-face with the stone that separated me from my heart. And what he showed me was not a pebble, but rather the Great Wall of China. While I was more comfortable being honest with myself, I would not say that I grew to be honest with others.