Body of Water. Chris Dombrowski

on themselves in frothy lines. Late day, dead low tide: the sand from which the water had recently receded shining like billowing silk. Hands full of rigged rods, a backpack of tackle strung over my shoulder, I bumbled down to the docks where a few guides lingered after a long day’s work, hosing down their boats, scrubbing the chines free of grime.

      “What’s all the gear for?” Meko called, wringing out a sponge. “I thought you were driving and I was fishing!”

      “I wasn’t sure, with all this—” I pointed up at the roughhousing palms.

      “You know what they say about the wind,” said a tall mustached guide I hadn’t met. He took a toothpick from his mouth and shot hose water at Meko’s feet. “It blows.”

      “You’ll have to forgive my uncle William,” Meko said, putting a hard-bristled brush to the floor of his boat. “He was out with the governor today so he’s a little chippy.”

      Later I would learn that a high-ranking elected official from the South was indeed visiting the lodge—also that William Pinder was one of David’s sons—but for the time being I just nodded, like I was in the know.

      “Up to the Cross Cays,” William said. “Fussy fish. Spooked every fish we saw except the mudding ones. Fit, though. Man, you could pole a skiff through a puddle with him.”

      “Up to Big Sound, maybe?” Meko asked.

      “Worth a look tomorrow afternoon on the flood,” William said, motioning for Meko to throw him the brush. “You’ve got the governor tomorrow. Everybody wants to fish with Meko.”

      I hung my feet over the edge of the dock and listened to a third guide—baby faced, twenty years old, I guessed—seated behind the silver steering wheel of his unwashed skiff, complain animatedly about how the veterans always got more experienced clients, thus handicapping the youth. How am I supposed to find a fish for a guy who can’t cast two pole lengths? Meko nodded, acknowledging, I assumed, the youth’s soliloquy as the clichéd lament of an angler who could find fish but lacked the ability to communicate with nuance and thus establish a trusting client base. Once the young guide had motored off to the gas tanks, Meko and William began to recount the day’s trips in detail.

      Always a bit therapeutic in nature, these postguiding exchanges usually contained a bit of truth, a dose of braggadocio, a jab at a client’s ineptitude or ambivalence, and maybe even an element of friendly trickery—were the bonefish truly spooky in the Cross Cays, for instance, or was William simply reporting as much so he could have the flat to himself tomorrow? In Montana, anyway, I might buy a fellow guide a drink to grease the proverbial wheels, but the top-shelf stuff was attainable solely through the barter system: tell me something true, and I’ll do the same for you.

      I reflected on how, to some extent, my own guiding had become, after over a decade of work, largely transactional. True, my days rowing the boat helped supplement the threadbare living I made as a poet and a teacher, but my passion for fishing—which I had loved to distraction since adolescence, even when pretty young women complicated the equation—had devolved into the occupational. My brief conversations with David had led me to believe that down here, anyway, the occupation of guiding was considered a vocation. Vocari, I remembered from an old poem. To be called.

      FORETOLD BY WING-WHISTLE, A TIGHT FLOCK OF greenshanks spilled over the boat and disappeared up the bight, vagrants in the islands. We motored east in the gradually falling light into the backcountry in search of calmer poling conditions, but also so that Meko, already on a busman’s holiday of sorts, could scout a flat he hadn’t fished in weeks. The spot, he told me, was frequented by a few very large specimens, and he was hoping to get the governor on a double-digit bonefish the following day. He couldn’t show it to me, of course; he would have to drop me off on the south side of the island after the poling lesson.

      “You can fish your way back as the tide comes in,” he said, cutting the motor. “About a mile to the lodge from where I’ll leave you. Just keep moving toward the sun and you’ll be there long before dark. David’s planning to meet you after supper.” I understood his instructions not only as a test, but also as a small gesture of trust. I was a freshwater guide from somewhere up north, but could I walk a straight line without getting lost, find a bonefish without someone holding my hand? Meko reckoned I could. “When I come to Montana someday, you can show me a spot.”

      Once up on the skiff’s poling platform, I crouched, closer to kneeling than standing, certain I would topple, the foot of the push-pole reaching to the sand and grinding against a staghead. Vertiginous or not, I felt as if I were looking at the flats for the first time: I saw into the small tidal lagoon ensconced in waist-high mangroves, and noted not only the seafloor’s subtle gains in elevation, but the turtle grass, slack as a grounded kite, unbent by tide; I noted what was stationary, a small midden of conchs at the periphery, as opposed to moving, a fringed filefish named by an ichthyologist, I guessed, who hoped his mouth would experience in the saying of its name the same richness his eyes beheld.

      “We’re drifting too close, man,” Meko said from the bow. He wasn’t holding a rod, perhaps indicating his level of confidence in my poling abilities. “Back us off from the trees.”

      Weighing nearly a ton all told, the boat—with motor, gas, coolers, and humans—leaned back against my pose. I muscled against the angle of the pole and we slid away from the bank.

      “Now try to hold us here,” he said. “Put the pole on the other side. But swing it around behind you or you’ll knock your guest in the water. Yep, like that.”