Tied up in Knots

I’m sure some of you may already have the wrong impression. This tale does not involve bondage. If that floats your boat you’ve moored in the wrong marina¹.

But it does involve a boat. Or boats. So there’s that.

Freddie Whitlock loved to fish. Every weekend, in fair weather, he’d head down the Piscataqua past Portsmouth and the Naval Shipyard with its nuclear subs lined up at the docks, the odd seal² bobbing up to have a look-see at his 18-foot craft, gulls wheeling and screaming overhead together with the fwap-fwap-fwap soundtrack of fiberglas on the swells.

Sometimes he’d anchor in the broad mouth of the river just at high water and drop his line straight down, bearing a four ounce weight, angling for flounder. Strange-eyed and tasty as could be, ever hungry for the sand worms on his hook, to be hauled up from the bottom heavy as wet towels.

Floundering described the quiet angling, but equally his thoughts. Bottom fishing tends toward the meditative: Drop the line and wait. In recent months Freddie’s felt muddled, sorting the threads of a failed marriage, and now and again considering possible benefits of a good old-fashioned midlife crisis. A red Miata® might be just the ticket.

He and Melissa had somehow drifted apart after almost seven years. No explosions. No infidelity, at least on his part, or that he knew of on hers. Drifted apart, like that time when he’d anchored, fishing for blues, and gradually realized the boat was moving, the anchor rope slack. He’d reeled in his line, then hauled the rope, to find the distal end intact. It hadn’t broken, it had come undone. So much for his knot-tying skill³. He’d thought the marriage anchored as well. But no. At least for the boat he could purchase another.

“This isn’t working.” Her pronouncement had left him mute. She’d moved out a few days later. Divorce ensued, with all of its attendant unsplicings.

When the blues were running he’d moor in the current of an outgoing flood tide, toss scoopfuls of chum over the transom and pay out two hundred feet of monofilament with a wire leader (blues have sharp teeth) and a lure. When blues get into a feeding frenzy they’ll pretty much bite anything half-way resembling food.

The thrill of reeling in a big blue is visceral. All that life energy as the fish cuts right and left, transmitted like juice in a bare wire to hand and arm—nothing less than, well, let’s follow up on the simile, electrifying.

And then there were the stripers. Only two in his life, but striped bass were nothing less than staggering. (Did we just use the sorry banality of “nothing less than” twice in two paragraphs? So, shoot me.) Stripers’ power in the fight was wedged deep in his muscle memory, more real now than Melissa’s distant embrace. Was she already two years gone? And based on what he’d heard from mutual friends, tangled up with a golfer.

A golfer? Bejeebus! If her standards were that low, what did that say about her “dear” Freddie? If he was going to be cashed in he’d at least have liked her to find a match with someone half-way respectable. A golfer?⁴

Ted Williams®, if memory serves, commented that hitting a pitched hardball was the most difficult accomplishment in all of sports. Given his obvious talent, that could be viewed as self-serving, but the point is well taken. A hard little dimpled ball sitting on a tee isn’t even moving. You can wobble your club right next door to line things up, so missing is approximately impossible. Then you climb in your little electric go-cart and putz off to find it, stationary once more, and hammer away. That’s not a sport, it’s a pastime.

Freddie’s once formidable self-assurance had been beaten like a drum.

That was something to think about, but today he was neither floundering nor bluing, nor striping for that matter, his boat being back home in New Hampshire, while he and his fishing rods were perched on the sandy shore of Fort Clinch State Park, a thousand miles south of his outboard and thirty miles north of Jacksonville, hoping to hook sea trout. This enterprise involved casting and retrieving his baited hook which, due to the incoming current, would move from his cast point (to the right), toward his left, closer and closer to shore, thence to be reeled in and recast.

A nuclear powered submarine hove into view, running against the current, obviously departing Kings Bay on its mission to parts untold. Crewmen were standing on the deck, flapping hands and hats high in the air, and a few dozen people on the beach, likely family members, were waving and cheering as the sub passed. Which turned Freddie’s thinking from golfers and their sorry ilk, and the sad demise of a marriage, as such things will.

The whole point of the exercise, this seagoing of a missile-bearing sub, was to be in a useful position to launch nuclear weapons in the event of a major war. Part of the triad: land based ICBMs; long range bombers; and these moving launch pads with their Trident® missiles—all poised to participate in blowing up the planet.

What a strange mental space those sailors’ minds must inhabit: If they ever do what they are out there to do there’s a good chance they’ll never see their families again. Same goes for the shore-bound kin, though survival odds might be better for those in the sub. At least for a while. Got to think that the naval base itself would be a target, and thermonuclear detonations tend to leave a pretty big footprint.

This on top of the usual concern of sailors the world round who reputedly diddle as they will in ports of call, ever dealing with the possibility, some say “likelihood,” that their marital partners are similarly diddling at home. Oh what a tangled web we weave, knotty problems and so forth.

Of course, even if they never do what they’ve set out to do,⁵ accidents aboard a submarine have a decided downside. There were the U.S.S. Thresher and the U.S.S. Scorpion that imploded on their way down to their landings at 8,400 feet and 9,800 respectively.

That will unstring your fiddle in a heartbeat.

Sailors can be certain that when a submarine implodes there’s not a whole lot left to recover.⁶

Then again, if a mishap occurs in shallow water, as for the Russian Kursk (380 feet), and you don’t die immediately (23 plus the captain held out for a good while⁷) you are looking at a long, slow demise, hopefully passing out due to lack of oxygen before anything more unpleasant can transpire.

So off they go, modern Jonahs inside a big fish, not knowing if they’ll ever get spit out on a beach again.

Such were Freddie’s cheerful thoughts as the submarine headed out to sea. That’s the part he liked best about fishing alone: time to think. And more intellectually pleasant to contemplate the ways of the underwater world than the weight of his past, though the latter remained the lodestone of his musing.

They’d surely been in love. Their self-composed wedding vows had stated as much, out in that green field within a small circle of close friends, each concluding with “As long as mutual love shall bind us.” It was clear-eyed, they’d agreed, to address the reality of modern marriage. No promises of forever. Ties that bind should include a shoestring bow with agletted ends to be plucked as occasion might dictate. Though, of course, no sensible person ties that knot intending to pull out. The idea is forever or why not simply shack up?

Well, sure. Social Security when incomes are disparate. If spousal benefits are going to be bigger than one’s own, there’s that governmental incentive. But, trust me on this, it’s a rare young couple who give any weight to that argument.

So who pulled the string? Melissa had made the declaration, but he hadn’t answered. He’d known they’d slipped. He’d known they were adrift. Shoestrings are bowed for a reason. Just walk away Renée, shod or barefoot.

The pernicious problem with thinking about other things when you’re casting and reeling, versus dropping a lead weight to the bottom or paying out yard after yard in the tidal wash, is that you might not pay attention to matters at hand.

The matter in Freddie’s hand consisted of a surf-casting rod and an open faced reel stocked with braided line. A Ted Williams® signature combo, purchased from Sears® back when Ted was the retailer’s sports endorser, back before Amazon® belted Sears® out of the park. That a baseball player would endorse fishing rods and basketballs and tents and golf clubs is one of those numinous mysteries of the consumer age.

Yes, hard as it might be to believe, Freddie is just sentimental enough to continue to use his Pop’s old surf-casting outfit, Ted Williams® or no. Ted Williams®’ endorsement of golf clubs or no. (Golf? Really? Geez!) The reel was as bound up with memories as line, and that was something. More than some. Many things wound up there to think about as well.

At the moment of the cast in question Freddie was thinking about neither sporting goods endorsements, naval psychology nor paternal piscary, nor Melissa and her putterer, but rather adroit German craftiness⁸.

During WWII the U.S. Navy strung a submarine net across the mouth of the Piscataqua River. As you may well imagine, this “net” was composed of steel cables, the intent of which was, as again my A-list readers will have already surmised, to prevent enemy U-boats from sneaking up on the shipyard and wreaking mischief. Hence the name “submarine net⁹.” The net could be lowered to permit egress and ingress to U.S. ships, but elsewise strung high enough to block the opposition.

What Freddie was contemplating was a historical chronicle he’d read in a pointless short story collection about wastes or wants or knots or some such, about a discovery made after the war. When U.S. investigators had access to German naval records they found the ship’s log of a U-boat that had spent months in Portsmouth harbor without detection¹⁰. Coming up at night for fresh air and a bit of fishing, and back down in the daytime, evidently arriving and departing when the net was down. The sailors were apparently able to do some terrestrial spying as well.

Which thoughts led him back to naval psychology. Those Germans must have been wildly amused, albeit scared to death of detection, to have pulled that trick on the U.S. He imagined them, back in their home port, laughing over tankards of good German brew.

He cast. But in his meditative state he failed to keep his thumb pressure “just so” on the whirling spindle, and consequently obtained a terrible backlash.

(For those of you inexperienced in such, this involves the reel over-spinning the speed of the uncoiling line, hence developing a nearly impenetrable tangle.)

As Freddie began the task of plucking at loops and curls and knots, a very large trout took the bait. The snarl was such that he couldn’t simply reel in the line over the mess, with intent to sort it out later, so he dropped the rod on the sand and endeavored to pull in the line hand over hand.

All thoughts of Melissa and anchors and Germans and submarines and implosion and even nuclear annihilation fled.

The taut braid dug into his hands as he pulled and pulled. It must be a biggun! Closer and closer to shore. Then the line went slack. When he drew the rest into shore the stainless leader was missing.

Poor knot.

Poor Freddie.

Poor fish.

*****

Note: Substack starts footnote numbers anew each time I paste in a story. But footnotes are wildly important and sometimes refer back to previous matters, so I’ve thoughtfully put the correct numbers in brackets, like so [#].

1 [19] Sail away friend. Sail away!

2 [20] More about seals anon.

3 [21] A Bowline would have served better than Two Half Hitches.

4 [22] He would be happier about this if he knew that Melissa didn’t know about the golf problem at the start of things. And that she’d soon abandon ship, but that’s a story for another time.

5 [23] Launching, that is, not diddling.

6 [24] Consider the physics. At 2,000 feet the water pressure is approximately 890 pounds per square inch. The implosion of the Thresher took approximately half a millisecond. The upside, of course, is that more than in most cases where the phrase is employed, “He didn’t know what hit him,” would certainly be true.

7 [25] “Good” is a relative term here.

8 [26] No, not beer, though at the moment he was sipping on a craft-brewed “Kolsch” from a local brewery. Florida water being what it is, Florida beers verge on the undrinkable. But fisherman are inclined to take everything in stride, disappointment being a constant feature in the angling biz.

9 [27] This explanation is for my B-list readers.

10 [28] True fact. Everyone’s entitled to their own stories, but not their own facts, IMHO.

*****

Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.

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