A Fisherman's Cycle Of Loss And Redemption

A Fisherman's Cycle Of Loss And Redemption

- William Sisson

I’d known Noah since we were kids, part of a gang of feral boys who spearfished in the lighthouse cove where Fred kept his lobster skiff on a ramp that sloped down to the sea. To launch the boat, Fred would wet the planks with a few buckets of water, and then we’d all eagerly embrace the skiff’s rough skin with our arms and shoulders and backs and shove her down the ramp and into the drink.

Noah was like an older brother and mentor to me. I lost track of him for a time, but he showed up on our doorstep one summer needing a place to stay. He’d recently split with his wife.

“She says, ‘All you want to do is fish,’ ” he told me. She had him pegged pretty good, I thought.

He’d been sleeping on friends’ couches for a couple of months, and his little skiff was moldering in his soon-to-be-ex’s driveway, looking like a tern with a broken wing. To add to his woes, a family of crows had camped in a tree outside the window at his last way station, and their cries woke him each day at dawn. The prodigal son was looking pretty frayed when he showed up at our abode and moved in for a few weeks.