The Hour of the Pearl
By Joseph Monninger
Each spring around ice-out in Maine, my two friends and I go to a cabin beside the 
Kennebago River and spend a week casting to brookies. We have been friends for forty-five years or more, back to Roosevelt Junior high in Westfield, New Jersey, back to Father Flannigan and the Tuesday afternoon CCD classes, back to Duke’s Italian subs on wide green paper dotted with oil and onions, back to Chris, and Birdie, and Joyce, and an eighth grade dance in Sue Pope’s basement when my friends went after the same girl, back to Coach Odie, and Mr. Gutek, the gym teacher, and back to wrestling matches and running golf carts on Echo Lake Country club, and first beers, Colt 45’s, and the smell of summer lawns, and girls out of the shower, and driving licenses and penny poker games in suburban rec rooms, and old friends, some now dead, and our parents and our hopes and dreams and absurdities. Back to our youth, in other words. Back to a land only three people on earth remember.
It is no use to try to divide the years and recall them separately. They run together and tease out only after a few beers, and often our conversation loops back thirty years or more in the time it takes to change a fly. I am not even sure how so much time could have passed. The years went by and seventh grade turned into high school, then high school turned into college, and then careers, and then families, and so on. Now we are the guys who are a little stiff getting out of the cars when we arrive, the guys on the stream who know a thing or two about fishing, the guys who send each other web sites like: Men Who Look Like Kenny Rogers.com. And we do. We do look like Kenny Rogers, gray and bearded and redder in the cheeks than we might like. We are all a double haul from sixty.
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If time travel is possible, then its portal is Cabin #1 on the Kennebago River, owned and operated by Reggie Hammond, Maine Guide and basketball fan, a busy sort of man with a gun on his hip and a laconic down-east accent that quavers to full flavor when the plumbing goes soft in any of his three cabins. He is possessed by his plumbing, and because we are usually the first visitors in the spring, it is a fixture of our time at the camp to have Reggie swing by and curse his pex piping and his submersible pumps, the white whale of his business operation.
Reggie’s visit, of course, is an essential element of our time on the Kennebago, because by now our week together has the cadence of a mass, with all the attendant ritual and superstition. I usually arrive first and set up camp in the cabin, lug in groceries, and try to get on the stream to catch the first fish for bragging rights. Then Bob, a salesman and father of two, arrives. He is a dedicated weight lifter and jogger, so he will have to go for a run to get the kinks out of his system. Finally Ted will show up, always late, always dragging some odd food item out of his car, his first beer open two steps away from his vehicle. He is a dad of three, a husband of thirty years and more, and a research biologist at the University of Connecticut. He is also the noise in us. He will begin gabbing, laying odds about fish catching, criticizing the food, critiquing our fly patterns, and generally causing a ruckus until we can get him on the stream and quiet him down. He looks like a cross between Jed Clampett and Jeff Bridges playing the Dude.
The routine of our inaugural fishing foray each year is fixed and immutable: for decades we have spent the first night on the northern end of the Little Kennebago, a fly fishing only section of this gorgeous lake in a remote section of Maine. We found this section of water when Reggie put us on it after we had miserable luck in the river one week. Rain, even snow, had dotted the weekdays, and we felt fairly blue and foolish that we had come all this way to catch almost nothing.
“Try it out,” our Maine Guide said. “You never know. You might have some luck. Lot of trout in that lake.”
We went. Wind piggybacking rain blew at us, making it hard to cast. Bob, the business-man jogger, a practical, laconic Mainer himself, said, “That’s a fair wind. Give a frog a ride if it jumps too high.”
We kept at it, though. And in time the wind calmed, as it always does at sunset, and we began hooking fish. They weren’t large, but they were eager. We stood three abreast casting to fish, happy to nab a strike from in front of someone else, each of claiming the largest fish, the most elegant cast. In the course of the night the Little Kenny had become our common benchmark, our home field, a vernal pool that we returned to over and over again. I stood shoulder to shoulder with these good friends, happy in a way that is different from the rest of the year. These men represented my past, and I theirs, and often I began smiling before they reached the point of their stories, pleased to hear an old tale of woe trotted out and examined once more. Thirty years of humor lingered behind most of the tales, and none us could say for certain what remained fact and what fiction.
We have seen some wonderful things on the rivers and lakes. One year an osprey hunted nearly overhead, dropping out of the air like a feathered stone to carry a trout off in its talons. A moose once ran the length of the lake, knee deep, its horny head turned to glance at us now and then. We’ve seen good black snakes, and coyotes, but the creatures provide a sidelight to the trip. We come primarily to visit with each other.
In the evenings, at dusk, we return to the cabin. The designated cook begins food preparation, while the other two sit beside the woodstove and kibitz. The food is rarely fussy, but it is nourishing and hot, and we eat it without complaint. Afterward the woodstove draws us closer and we talk until sleep catches up with us.
Whatever the media tells us about men’s inability to communicate is repudiated by my trips to the Kennebago. Each of us is a story to the other, and we tell and retell the elements of our lives. I know when Bob or Ted’s children have done well, or suffered a failing, and I know what the hopes of their dads’ had been. Often we talk about the mystery of the past, what it meant, how it shaped us. To forget one’s past is a form of suicide, the saying goes, and we know we will not forget the past as long as we make it to the lake in the spring.
Some years back my wife cut up a small board, wrote down various aspects of a good fishing trip – most fish, biggest fish, camp esprit – and placed paper arrows in front of them so that we could line up the names with the accomplishment. It is the perfect ductwork for our hot air, and the night before we break camp we hand out the trophy. Ted has never won it; while Bob and I live, he will never win it, because it is far more entertaining to hear him rail about injustice, conspiracy, and the lifelong burden he has endured by fishing beside us. On the last morning we clean the camp, wrap up the unspent groceries, then head back to our homes. We never fish that last morning. After a few days together we are ready to get out, put things to order, organize again. But we drive in a caravan down the dirt road that connects us to the pavement and then back to the Maine highways. We stop and get breakfast — some lost wager has invariably forced one of us to pick up the tab – and talk about what the rest of the year holds. Bob promises to make the camp reservations for roughly the same time the following year. Then we talk about a seventh grade dance, a play on a football field, a time we hitch hiked to the beach and slept underneath a rowboat.
I drive home through the prettiest season in New England. Window cracked, heat low. Usually the fields have turned green by this time, and the stonewalls appear welcoming to the long waking of frogs and snakes. I often smile on the way, shake my head. For nearly forty years we have been saying goodbye and then returning. We have the pictures to prove it. But in my mind’s eye I see Bob and Ted, boys still, holding the red dotted brookies in the gentle cradles of their hands. And all the trout slip from their fingers, and the wind catches their hair and pushes it back, dark hair, young hair, my friends’ hair.
“It won’t be any good until seven o’clock,” Ted says. “I’m telling you now, I’ve told you for forty years, and I’ll tell you next year. The fishing isn’t any good until right before nightfall.”
“The hour of the pearl,” I say, stealing a line from Steinbeck to describe that moment when the wind stops and the water flattens.
“The hour of the pearl,” Harv says.
The first night we will go to the southern end of the Little Kennebago, a fly fishing only section of a gorgeous lake in a remote section of Maine. We found this section of water when the landlord of our cabin, a Maine Guide, put us on it after we had miserable luck in the river one week. Rain, even snow, had dotted the weekdays, and we felt fairly blue and foolish that we had come all this way to catch, well, almost nothing.
“Try it out,” our Maine Guide said. “You never know. You might have some luck. Lot of trout in that lake.”
