Born to Fish Page 11

  So now, as he hung around with his friends who were graduating from URI, he decided he would take Alice and Danny up on their offer and head to Nevada. At the graduation party, Greg ran into his friend Butch from Portland, Maine, who had been a defensive lineman on the university’s football team with Greg until he broke his neck in a game, ending his athletic career. He listened with great interest to Greg’s plans for a cross-country driving adventure.

  “Oh man, I’d love to come,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you?” asked Greg.

  “I don’t have enough money.”

  “I’ve got plenty for both of us. I’ll cover everything.”

  At that point, Greg was still living at the Henry farm, but he wasn’t working there anymore, so they were getting ready to toss him out of the house.

  “I had all this money, so I just fished and partied all night and played golf during the day. I thought about getting a boat, but I knew I would be leaving soon. And the Carlsons were still letting me use their boat whenever I wanted.”

  Butch finally called Greg back and said he definitely wanted to go. The next day Greg picked him up in the big blue LTD, a great cross-country cruiser. He left his new Jeep behind with some friends.

  On their first day, they drove to Atlantic City, New Jersey, the epicenter of East Coast gambling. Greg was determined to do everything as over-the-top as possible on their journey, so he stopped en route and bought them both great new suits. At the hotel, Greg asked for the penthouse suite and put all of their cash and travelers’ checks in the hotel safe.

  Greg started making wild bets on the roulette wheel the minute he got to the casino, laying down $100 or more at a pop. He had a vision that this would be the journey to end all journeys, a blur of wild partying from one end of the country to the other. They would party down until all the money was gone, and then figure out what to do to keep going. Why worry? Butch looked a lot like Elvis Presley, so they joked that he could do some Elvis impersonations to make money. But as it turned out, Greg couldn’t lose at the roulette table. He hit . . . and hit . . . and hit. It was crazy. They walked out of the casino with an additional $20,000.

  Next they stopped to see some friends in Virginia Beach for a few days, and then headed to Atlanta to visit some of their former classmates from URI. While they were there, Greg met a beautiful woman from North Carolina who was living in Atlanta, and he ended up moving in with her for three weeks. Butch was completely at his mercy—Greg had the car and all of the money—and called him every day, asking, “What’s the deal? Are we going?” They’d been gone for nearly a month, ostensibly to drive out West, and they were still stuck on the East Coast. But eventually the day came when Greg said, “All right, let’s go.” They loaded up the LTD and pointed it westward. As they peeled away, Greg asked, “So, where you wanna go?” This would become an almost daily mantra for Greg.

  In some ways, they were like the Odd Couple. Butch always had everything figured out for the trip, including a list of places he wanted to visit and things he wanted to do as they traveled across America. Greg could care less about any of that. Butch would pull out the map and start planning the day’s journey as Greg drove.

  “Let’s go to the Jack Daniel’s distillery,” said Butch. So they headed to Lynchburg, Tennessee. Next, “I want to see Graceland.” So they drove across the state to Memphis and dropped in at Elvis Presley’s house. Then it was on to Oklahoma City, where they hung out for a while before driving down into Texas, taking Highway 40 to Amarillo. It was all a wild, impressionistic blur as they streaked down the road, stopping at various sites Butch had marked along the way.

  They left Texas and drove to New Mexico so Greg could go fishing on the famed San Juan River, one of the top trophy trout rivers in the country. Greg loved it and caught several huge trout, but Butch was eager to see Colorado, so they left a few days later. They met two women there and wound up staying at their apartment for a couple of weeks while Greg fly fished. But one day they got the itch to move and disappeared without another word, heading west once more—to Salt Lake City, to the rock formations, to Moab, to Monument Valley. They hiked. They went mountain biking. Greg went fishing.

  On the open terrain of Utah and Nevada, Greg opened up the throttle of the LTD, rocketing down the highway at blistering speeds, sometimes driving 130 mph for an hour or more at a time. Butch would scour the distant vista with his 10x binoculars, trying to spot any cops who might be lurking up ahead with a speed trap. The journey became a blur of pastel colors—sand, desert rocks, and pale blue sky—as panicked jackrabbits raced back and forth across the hot tarmac to avoid being hit.

  Greg and Butch finally arrived in Reno. Danny and Alice were great hosts and gave each of them their own spacious room in their house for as long as they wanted to visit. Danny had a speedboat, and they would all drive to Pyramid Lake to water-ski at least once a week. Greg went fly fishing there for native Lahontan cutthroat trout, the state fish of Nevada. He also hiked into the Sierra Nevada Mountains to fish the remote streams and tiny lakes of the high country. The trout there were small but vividly colored, and he enjoyed catching and releasing them. Once, a bear surprised him as he stood beside a creek, casting dry flies at trout; it roared loudly at Greg to make him leave. As soon as he turned to walk away, the bear splashed into the water, trying to catch some trout.

  Greg and Butch eventually started painting houses to earn some money. “We met this guy who was a drunk, but he had a spray-gun machine to paint houses, and he was good at it,” said Greg. “But I noticed right away, the people out there are not hustlers like we are in the East. I started landing all these jobs painting houses, and all he wanted for spray-painting them was thirty bucks and a case of beer.” Greg and Butch did all the prep work and paid for materials, but they charged hundreds of dollars to paint each house. “We were making all kinds of money.” The job finally fizzled out when the painter became ill, so they were left looking for something else to do to keep busy.

  Greg connected with two old Lyman Hall friends, Bill and Ralph, who had played on the football team with him. The two had been sharing an apartment in San Francisco, but Ralph was currently working in Reno. Ralph knew a woman who had gone to Lyman Hall with them and was now leasing a condominium on the shore of Lake Tahoe, so they went to visit her. She told them she couldn’t afford the place anymore, but they were welcome to take over the lease if they wanted to live there together. It was a beautiful but expensive condo in picturesque Incline Village. Greg, Ralph, Bill, and Butch decided to move into it together and split the cost.

  “I got a job as a bouncer at a nightclub in Tahoe,” said Greg. “It was great. People were slipping me hundred-dollar bills. I let anyone in—sometimes parties of a couple hundred people from Las Vegas or Los Angeles. I really didn’t care who came in. I met a lot of people.”

  Greg would occasionally get invited to some big houses along the lake that had their own casinos inside, complete with roulette and blackjack tables. Some nights Greg would act as the bank, fronting all the gambling money and taking a major cut of the action.

  “I’d put up $10,000 and walk out with $20,000,” said Greg. “I was loving it there.”

  Greg called up his friends Brad and Verne in Connecticut and told them what a great time he was having and that he had a condo on Lake Tahoe where they were welcome to stay.

  “I’m living it up here,” he said. “Things are really great.”

  “We’re coming!” they told him. So they drove Greg’s Jeep all the way to Lake Tahoe and moved in with him.

  “It was really crazy, just like Animal House,” said Greg. “We spent the summer there, and it was the greatest thing. I would go driving along in my Jeep through the desert with the top down, with the stereo blasting the Eagles’ ‘Hotel California.’ I was hanging out with UCLA students on the beaches at Lake Tahoe and meeting all kinds of skiers and famous people at the club. But my money was starting to dwindle away. I was just burning t
hrough it.”

  Of course, Greg was still going fishing every day, but now he and his friends really needed the fish to eat. “By then, we were all eating these chicken pot pies every day, two for seventy-five cents at the 7-Eleven,” said Greg. He decided to try a new spot on Lake Tahoe that looked promising. Parking his Jeep, he hiked down to the beach and started rigging up his fly rod. Then he happened to look at some of the nearby sunbathers and noticed they were naked. It was a nude beach. “So I said, ‘What the hell?’ and stripped off all my clothes.” He stood on a rock near the shore, casting flies, and caught the biggest trout of his entire western journey—an eight-pounder. “I had to carry this huge fish back across the rocks and along the beach with no clothes on, stepping over naked sunbathers.” The trout fed Greg and his friends for days.

  But it felt like their western adventure was nearing the end. It wasn’t just the lack of money—a sense of weariness was setting in with all of them. Greg was still partying as hard as ever, abusing alcohol and drugs and getting into fights whenever anyone challenged him. “The partying and all of the shit that was going on,” said Greg. “We were starting to get in trouble, and the cops had their eyes on me.”

  A short time later, Butch said he’d had enough and bought a plane ticket back home to Maine. Not long after that, Greg began gazing longingly eastward and thinking about home. Before leaving Connecticut, he’d had the foresight to stash $5,000 in cash in the garage at his parents’ condo, so he wasn’t broke. And he’d recently gotten a phone call from his old boss, Joe, at the electrical company in New Haven where he’d worked summers during college. Joe had lost one of his workers and needed to replace him. He knew Greg would be the perfect man for the job, because he was hardworking and knew the Yale campus so well, where the company had its most important projects. Joe told him if he came back from Lake Tahoe, he’d give him the job and also get him into the International Brotherhood of Electrical Engineers apprenticeship program, so he could become a union electrician.

  That was all it took. Greg loaded up all his belongings and began the long journey homeward.

  * * *

  The Deerslayer

  With the money Greg was earning from his work in the electricians’ union, he started going on trout-fishing trips with his friend Bear Judkins from college. Greg had introduced Bear to fly fishing, and now he couldn’t get enough. They traveled together to rivers and streams all around the Northeast and also sometimes headed west to the famed San Juan River in New Mexico and to Colorado. They often camped along the Kennebec River in Maine. On one of their trips driving through Vermont, they found a cabin along the White River near Bethel and decided to split the cost and buy it together. In addition to being avid anglers, they both loved snow skiing, so the place was perfect—right on a river and close to Killington Ski Resort.

  “We became regulars at Killington and would ski about a hundred days a year there,” said Greg. “Whenever my union jobs finished and I got laid off, I would go up there and work for the steak house at Killington, beating up people who were out of control. Killington owned it, so I had a free season ski pass. So it was skiing in the winter and fly fishing in spring.”

  But in autumn, as the chill of the changing seasons settled over the land, Greg’s mind always turned to hunting. He had seen a great buck several times in early fall, always in the same area—a small meadow in the woods along Highway 107, at the edge of the Green Mountains, just a couple of miles from his cabin. It was big, easily topping 200 pounds, with the best rack he’d ever seen on a whitetail. He couldn’t help thinking about it as deer season approached. This was his buck, and his alone. He knew he would be there waiting at the edge of the meadow as dawn approached on opening day.

  Several friends stayed at his cabin the night before and planned to go deer hunting nearby, but Greg didn’t tell them about his buck. He got up before anyone else and stood drinking a cup of hot coffee, staring out the window as the first snow of the season fell in the darkness, accumulating quickly on the ground outside. Everything was ready: his rifle was clean and oiled; his scope sighted-in. As his friends slumbered, he slung the rifle over his shoulder and stepped outside.

  It was a black, moonless night, and he hadn’t brought a flashlight, but he knew the way by heart. He hiked a couple of miles down the small two-lane highway, then turned at the place where the forest opened into the small meadow the buck frequented. Snow was falling heavily, thick and fluffy, as Greg made his way carefully into the woods. He sat quietly at the edge of the meadow, waiting as the first rays of daylight began illuminating the forest. All of his senses were tuned perfectly to his surroundings—his ears, his eyes, his very spirit. The woods seemed to pulsate like a single organism, living and breathing around him and within him. He felt a complete awareness of everything: the ground, the trees, the wind sighing through the treetops, and the falling snow. He shuddered for an instant and turned his collar against the cold.

  A faint rustle broke the silence ahead of him in the woods; then everything was still again. Greg made his way swiftly to where the sound had come from, but there was nothing—except a bare patch on the ground where the buck had made a scrape. (In rutting season, bucks will scrape the ground and urinate there to leave a scent and announce their presence.) Greg knew it was fresh; the snow had not even begun to cover it yet. He saw the deer tracks leading away, up the steep mountainside. As the early morning began to brighten, he peered upward along the side of the mountain, his eyes tracing the buck’s most likely path. He did a double take as he finally spotted the deer, standing on a promontory, looking back down. The buck obviously knew he was being followed and was trying to see who or what was after him.

  Greg and the buck were engaged in an ancient dance—predator and prey—and they both knew it. Greg’s heart was racing as he knelt in the snow and carefully raised the rifle to his eye. But it was no good: the eyepiece of the scope had filled with snow. He cursed his stupidity for letting this happen and quickly cleaned out the snow with the thumb of his glove. Raising the scope to his eye again, he saw that it was fogged, but by pressing his face hard against the eyepiece, he could make out the shape of the deer. Greg tried to relax, inhaling deeply, then slowly released his breath as he squeezed the trigger.

  The rifle’s recoil slammed the scope into Greg’s face, knocking him to the ground. He lay there stunned and barely conscious for several minutes. As he came to, his face felt burning hot and wet, and he realized it was covered with blood. He slipped the glove from his right hand and felt his face. Having broken his nose several times before, both playing football and in fights, he recognized the feeling at once. He grabbed a handful of snow and held it against his face until the flow of blood slowed and then stopped. Then he raised himself to his knees.

  Where was the deer? He knew the buck had lurched just before the rifle fired. Had Greg missed the shot? He had no idea. He didn’t even know how long he’d lain there before coming to. He got up quickly and hiked to the spot where the buck had stood when he fired. The buck’s tracks were there, but there was no sign of it now, and no trace of any blood. It must have been a clean miss. But he saw its tracks in the fresh snow, going higher and higher up the mountainside, and he felt his blood rising inside him. He raced after the buck, going ever higher and deeper into the Green Mountains, moving down through deep ravines and up again to lofty ridgelines. Hours went by—he had no idea how many. Single-minded in his pursuit, Greg felt no pain, hunger, or thirst. He was oblivious to the cold and didn’t even consider his own survival. His sole focus was on killing the buck. At that moment, it was his only reason to exist.

  Greg didn’t see the buck for hours, but he never lost sight of its tracks. Occasionally he would come to a spot where the buck had paused at a vantage point to peer back down the mountain, to see if Greg was still following. No doubt it felt the psychological pressure of being pursued by a relentless predator. For the buck, losing this battle would mean the end of its life—but Greg, too
, had his life on the line. He was mentally incapable of giving up this chase, even though all common sense argued strongly against continuing. He would get that deer or die trying.

  Shortly before dusk, Greg pulled himself over a ridgetop, and there was the buck, standing right before him, less than fifty yards away. He was taken aback for an instant by the sight of it and hesitated. The two of them were exhausted. Greg sensed the buck had given up, worn down by his unrelenting pursuit. The end was almost anticlimactic: Greg raised his rifle, took careful aim, and fired; the buck dropped without even taking a step.

  But now what? It was getting dark and, in his obsession to kill the buck, Greg hadn’t paid attention to where he was going all day. He had not stopped once to eat or drink or rest. He was hungry, exhausted, and dehydrated. He had spent all day pursuing the buck, and now that he had killed it, the deer had become a huge liability for him. It was much too big to haul out that night, and he didn’t have any idea where he was. He knew if he left it out overnight, animals would find it and feed on it, and everything would have been a waste—all the effort and brutal hardships of this day. But worse, this magnificent animal would have been killed for nothing, and that knowledge gnawed at Greg.

  He looked at the trees around him. Maybe I can haul the buck into one of them, he thought. He took out his hunting knife and quickly made a vertical slit from the anus to the sternum of the deer, then pulled its guts out onto the snow-covered ground, where they lay steaming in the cold. But the buck still weighed well over 150 pounds. Greg grabbed it in a headlock, dragged it to the nearest tree, and began climbing up the lowest branches, moving upward one step at a time, clinging to the deer. By the time he’d climbed five feet up the tree, he was panting and nauseated from the effort. And he was covered in blood—both his own from when the scope had struck his face and the deer’s from its open gut cavity.