Born to Fish Page 14

  The party on Friday night, their last night in the rental house, became a nightmare for Greg. Dozens of people showed up, and it was loud and raucous, with heavy drinking. But no one drank more than Greg. He’d been snorting cocaine, had finished off a quart of Tanqueray gin, and was starting in on a bottle of Jim Beam. Suddenly an intense pain gripped his chest, almost dropping him to his knees. He staggered a few feet, holding his hand against his chest and leaning hard against a wall to stay upright. He was gasping for air, incapable of drawing a deep breath—the pain was so deep and crushing and sharp. Greg has an incredible threshold for pain—all of his coaches, football teammates, and friends will tell you they’ve never known anyone who could tolerate as much pain as he can. But this was beyond anything he’d ever known, like a great dark pall was descending over him, and he felt he might not live until morning. Was it a heart attack? It could well have been. Although he was only thirty-three years old, he’d been abusing his body with drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes for more than half his life, and it was taking its toll.

  Greg made his way painfully to the master bedroom and locked the door to keep the other partiers away. Throughout his life, he’d been drawn to water whenever he was having any kind of problems: he would go fishing, or sometimes just plunge into the ocean to swim. This time was no different, except that the only water available was the hot tub on his private porch. He climbed into the tub with his clothes still on. Sitting with steaming hot water right up to his chin, he prayed to God to help him. He swore that if he lived to see morning, he would change his ways—no drugs, no drinks, no cigarettes—cold turkey, just walking away from the life he’d known for almost twenty years.

  He fell asleep right there in his sodden clothes, up to his neck in hot water. If he had slipped under or had any further heart complications, he probably would have drowned, and no one would have known about it until the next day. As it turned out, he awoke at midmorning to the shouts of an angry woman standing below the balcony where he still lay in the tub. The water had turned cold, and he was nearly hypothermic in the frigid tub. He no longer felt the excruciating pain in his chest, but he was nauseated and ached all over. Hauling himself out of the tub, he dragged himself to the railing, gallons of water pouring from his clothes. Convulsive surges gripped his body. Leaning far out over the rail, he spewed projectile vomit nearly ten feet out, barely missing the rental manager below, throwing up again and again until only bile came, followed by dry heaves.

  The woman was furious. Greg and the others were supposed to have had the whole place cleaned out and ready to reoccupy by now. The next group of renters was due to arrive in a couple of hours, and the place was a shambles, with passed-out revelers sprawled everywhere amid empty bottles, cigarette butts, trash, and vomit. She called the police and had everyone thrown out. She threatened to take them to court and make them pay for all of the damage and cleanup as well as the next week’s rental fee, because she was going to have to turn away the people who were arriving that day.

  Greg was a wreck. He told his friend Jeff what had happened the night before and that there was no way he could drive back home for the next few days. His anxiety level was through the roof, and he was genuinely terrified. Jeff told him not to worry. He checked them into a cheap (for Block Island) motel, and the two stayed there another week before Greg felt comfortable enough to make the trip home.

  When he got back to his apartment, Greg holed up there for weeks, barely even going outside into the yard. Finally, a couple he had met on Block Island telephoned and said they’d like to get together and take him out to dinner, but he told them he had bad anxiety and wasn’t going out anymore. They dropped by his apartment later and saw what bad shape he was in. The woman said he should see a therapist as soon as possible, and she set up an appointment for him.

  When he got to the therapist’s office the following Tuesday morning, CNN was playing on the television in the waiting room, and it was all about something going on in Manhattan, a huge emergency of some kind, and one of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire. As he watched aghast, a jetliner flew right into the second tower. It was September 11, 2001, and the terrorist attack unfolded on the screen before him.

  By the time he was called in to see the therapist, Greg was in a major panic attack and having trouble catching his breath. She prescribed large doses of Xanax for anxiety and Paxil, a powerful antidepressant used to treat a host of problems such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder. It took a couple of weeks for the Paxil to have an effect, but when it did kick in fully, the difference was profound. He seemed to lose all of his desire to fight people or to hang out in bars and chase women. Instead, Greg dug deep into the essence of his life, returning to the things that had sustained him as a child—being close to nature; hunting and fishing. He was finally able to leave his apartment, after spending weeks alone there.

  He had a good amount of money saved from all his work in the electrical union. Since he wasn’t wasting it on partying and buying drugs and alcohol anymore, he began to turn his life around. He bought the house he’d been living in for several years and moved upstairs, renting out the basement where he had previously lived. He began to enjoy life in a way he’d forgotten was possible.

  * * *

  It’s Over

  One morning Greg was sitting in a chair, watching the lobsters in his aquarium, when his mother dropped by. It was 2004, already three years since he’d turned away from abusing drugs and alcohol.

  “I’ll never forget that,” he said. “I was sitting in my chair, staring at my fish tank, when she came up the stairs. She said, ‘It’s over,’ and I knew instantly what she meant. My father was dead. And it was such a relief. The torture we’d all gone through, including my father—it didn’t end right away, but it started fading. And I was on my way to becoming the person I always wanted to be.”

  Greg went to his parents’ condo that same day and took all of his father’s equipment for the disabled—his adjustable hospital bed, his special elevating chair, his wheelchair, and everything else he could find that reminded him of Herb’s decades-long ordeal—and threw it out in the yard. Then he began smashing it with a sledgehammer, breaking it, bending it, crushing it until there was nothing left but a barely recognizable mass of bent and broken steel and plastic. His mother walked out as he was carrying the broken pieces to the dumpster and tossing them inside.

  She frowned. “You know someone probably could have used those things.” Greg stared straight ahead, expressionless. Then Diane’s look softened. “But I can see how that might make you feel better.”

  Later, at Herb’s funeral, Greg’s brother was surprised to see how many people showed up. “I pulled in, and there were all these cars,” said Dave. “I thought there must be two funerals going on, but no; it was all for my dad. There were all these mobster types who came to pay their respects. I’m standing there with my mother, and they’re all going up to Greg. And my mother says, ‘I feel like I’m in an episode of The Sopranos.’ I said, ‘I actually think we are.’ ”

  “A lot of people came, all different kinds,” said Greg. “They loved him and respected him.”

  Greg took his father’s death well. Herb had been living such a tortured existence for so long—twenty years. Now his suffering was over. It had been a much different story a few years earlier when his maternal grandmother passed away, at the height of Greg’s period of substance abuse. She had meant so much to him for his entire life. He’d gone to see her whenever he couldn’t get along with his mother and stayed with her for months at a time.

  “We were always really close,” said Greg. “She taught me how to pray. Every morning when I woke up, she’d have toast with butter and jelly and tea for me. She’d be praying in the living room, and I’d sit there and pray with her. That’s what we did every morning. When she died, it was one of the worst things in my life.”

&
nbsp; Greg was to be one of her pallbearers. The night before the funeral, he had pulled an all-nighter with some friends, drinking and snorting coke until the early hours of morning. It was a cold, gray, miserable winter day, with a mix of sleet, snow, and rain falling steadily. His friend Brad drove Greg to his house to get ready. He put on his dress clothes but no jacket, and Brad dropped him off at the funeral home.

  “I stumbled inside and broke down,” said Greg. He was an absolute mess, crying uncontrollably for hours. His mother, his brother, and other people kept trying to console him so the funeral could proceed, but he sat in a chair along the side, his head buried in his hands, and wouldn’t look up. When it was all over, he and the other pallbearers picked up her casket and carried it outside. Everyone else had dressed appropriately for the weather, wearing raincoats or overcoats. Greg wore only a thin dress shirt with no T-shirt underneath, and leather dress shoes, as he stood in the slushy snow, wet from head to foot.

  “No one else was as affected as I was at that funeral—not my mother, not anyone,” said Greg. “My grandmother and I had such a close relationship. I was always with her.”

  But Herb’s death was not a sorrowful event for Greg, or for anyone who had witnessed his suffering in the final years of his life. Now he would never have to hear his father pleading with him, begging him to take that pillow and hold it down on his face until he was dead. Greg shuddered to remember it, and he felt an immense sense of relief, like a great weight had been lifted from him.

  * * *

  Arrowhead

  Life was good now. Greg owned his own home, he had some money in the bank—and he had met a woman named Jackie. She lived next door with her two young sons from a previous marriage, and Greg loved to hang out with all of them. Eventually he and Jackie got married, had a daughter together, and bought a beautiful, spacious home in Wallingford.

  It was a dream house for both of them, with wooded hills full of deer behind and a stream in front. When they first moved in, Greg rented a backhoe to enlarge and deepen the stretch of stream flowing past the front of the house, and moved boulders around to improve the fish habitat. Several decent-sized trout soon took up residence there. He didn’t fish there though. The trout in his stream were almost like pets to him: something to watch and enjoy. Occasionally he’d flip a grasshopper into the water and watch with delight as it got hammered by a big trout.

  Yet something was missing. Greg couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He had fully embraced the nine-to-five life, working hard to support his family and maintain their home. But still, he felt a sense of emptiness and anxiety.

  As he had done many times before throughout his life, he turned to nature for solace and went hiking in the woods behind his house. It was early fall, and he felt the change in seasons keenly—the chill air; the brilliant blaze of autumn colors spreading orange, red, and yellow through the woods; and, above all, the urge to hunt. It was rutting time and signs of deer abounded in the woods he hiked through: scrapes in the ground where bucks had urinated to announce their presence, like a gauntlet thrown down in challenge, and gouges in the bark of trees where they had been rubbing the velvet off their antlers, in preparation for their fights with other bucks competing to mate with does. He paused by one tree and put his hand on the remarkably large gouges in its bark. This buck is huge, he thought. He imagined it: an eight-pointer, perhaps weighing close to 300 pounds.

  Greg went home and fetched a deer stand. He climbed a tree adjacent to one the big buck had been rubbing against and attached the stand securely to its trunk, about twenty feet up. Greg would climb up to it dressed head-to-foot in camouflage before dawn on opening day of deer season and wait . . . and wait, hoping the buck would return.

  He continued his hike through the woods. He hadn’t gone far when he spotted a small, shiny object glistening in the early morning light, half buried. He reached down and plucked it from the hard ground. It was a stone arrowhead, and he turned it over a couple of times in his hand, examining the perfection of its form, still razor-sharp after lying there perhaps for centuries. He imagined the hunter who had crafted it so long ago and wondered what his life had been like.

  Greg had been fascinated since childhood by stories of the Native Americans who had lived in this area when the Europeans first arrived in the early 1600s. The coastal Algonquian, called Quinnipiac, inhabited all of what is now New Haven, North Haven, Hamden, Branford, Guilford, and the surrounding area, and had taught the English settlers how to hunt and fish to survive the harsh winters. The forebears of the Quinnipiac had lived there for some 8,000 years. Sadly, they fell victim to smallpox and other imported diseases, which quickly reduced their populations by more than 75 percent. Only a handful of Quinnipiac remained by the time of the founding of the United States, and by 1850—according to John William De Forest, who wrote The History of the Indians of Connecticut that year—the Quinnipiac no longer existed as a tribe.

  If you trace the boundaries of Greg’s life—where he grew up, where he developed as an outdoorsman, and where he lives and hunts and fishes to this day—they match the tribal lands of the Quinnipiac almost exactly. And he always felt their presence. As a child, he would find their arrowheads and stone implements for grinding acorn meal, and be in awe. He longed to be like them—to fish, trap, and hunt deer. He imagined what it must have been like for them, living in this paradise for millennia before European civilization came to these shores and changed everything forever.

  Another person might have kept the arrowhead as a talisman, perhaps something to be worn around the neck in a pouch. Not Greg. His mind went immediately to hunting: to building an arrow around it; to hunting with that single arrow and killing the giant buck with it. He’d already been a bow-hunter since his early twenties and had killed many deer with arrows, but they were always modern, aluminum-shafted arrows tipped with razor-sharp metal broadheads. He’d never done it like a Native American.

  Greg searched for straight willow branches, just like the ones the Quinnipiac had used, because of their strength and flexibility. He cut them from trees growing along the stream in front of his house, whittled them down to the right size, and tested their straightness by rolling them along a flat surface. Some of them wobbled, indicating they were slightly bent. But one of them was perfectly straight, and he chose it for his arrow, notching its tip and lashing the arrowhead securely in place with a thin strip of buckskin. He put feathers on the shaft to steady its flight and drew a design on it using natural colors. By the time it was finished, the arrow looked like a museum piece crafted by a Native American a couple of centuries or more ago.

  As he was about to leave his house in the early morning darkness of opening day, Greg put the arrow he’d made into his quiver, along with several aluminum-shafted arrows. But then he paused. He knew if he took the other arrows with him, he’d end up using one of them instead when he saw the deer, and it would ruin the experience. The arrow he’d made with the ancient arrowhead was the thing that would make this hunt special, and he was determined to kill the buck with it. He removed all the other arrows from his quiver, then picked up his bow, went outside, and hiked through the woods to his tree stand.

  “I got up in the tree and started rattling a couple of antlers together,” said Greg. The buck showed up instantly, snorting and stomping, enraged by this perceived challenger in his territory. Greg was taken aback by the size of the buck. “He was a monster, almost 300 pounds, pissed off and ready to fight,” he said.

  Would he really be able to kill it with the wooden arrow he’d carved? He began doubting himself. Above all, he didn’t want the buck to escape wounded and endure a long, lingering death. So he waited . . . and waited as it slowly came closer. When it was just ten feet away, he drew back on the bow, inhaling deeply and holding his breath as he carefully aimed. His mind was absolutely locked in the moment, everything in his being focused on the bow, the arrow, and the deer—and then with a whoosh the arrow flew to its target. The buck lifted his
head at the sound and bolted as it struck.

  “I shot him right in the heart with the arrow,” said Greg. “It didn’t pass through, but went right in and killed him almost instantly. He only ran maybe thirty or forty yards, and then fell dead to the ground.”

  When Greg gutted the deer a short time later, he found that the arrow had pierced the buck’s heart, so it bled to death nearly instantly. Greg kept the arrow—this was the only time he ever used it—and it still has the blood of the great buck on it. He dressed out the buck and ate all of its meat and mounted its head himself. It now hangs on the wall of his house, and it is magnificent.

  * * *

  Tournament Angler

  Something changed for Greg after he killed the buck with the ancient arrowhead. He felt a deep sense of inspiration. All the things that had moved him as a child—the deep need to be close to nature: the hunting, fishing, and trapping—came flooding back, and he began spending every free moment engaged in these pursuits. He was as much or more obsessed with them as he had ever been in his life.

  The following summer, in 2010, was a life-changer for Greg. He was fishing most nights, catching some of the largest striped bass he’d ever hooked. And he was releasing most of them. In a lifetime of fishing for stripers, he had come to greatly admire them. He loved the challenge of outsmarting them, drawing them in with the rattle sinker he’d designed and catching them using the techniques he had perfected. But he felt no desire to kill them—he simply enjoyed the hunt, and preferred to set them free once he’d caught them.