Fall Fishing on the Cape.....

The best of the fishing season comes when the summer people have gone back to their cities, when the last ice cream stand closes and the screen doors are taken down from the cottages. Then the Cape belongs again to the wind, to the salt, and to the men who keep their eyes on the tide. Autumn settles over the dunes with a patience that only the sea knows.

The mornings start with a gray hush. The mist comes off the kettle ponds and drapes itself low across the cranberry bogs, where the harvest is already underway. Out on the shore, the surf runs cold and clean. The bass move closer now, pushed by hunger and instinct, chasing the last great schools of menhaden and herring down the coast. They come heavy with muscle, marked by the dark journeys of the sea. To feel their weight on the line is to feel a kind of truth, a raw and wordless one.

The fishermen gather in ones and twos along the outer beaches, their trucks parked above the wrack line, tires half-sunk in the sand. They speak little. There is no need. The language is in the cast, in the rhythm of the retrieve, in the bend of the rod when a fish takes. A man alone with the surf hears the same old story the ocean has told forever: that life is fleeting, that the tide never tires, and that beauty often comes in the shape of something wild and silver in the dark.

In the afternoons the light changes. It falls softer and longer, and the water shines with a copper glow that can make a man forget the weight of years. Gulls wheel above, laughing their hard, greedy laughter. The air smells of woodsmoke from the first fires kindled in summer cottages gone quiet.

It is not the catch alone that makes autumn fishing on the Cape the best of it. It is the solitude, the return of the land and sea to themselves. It is the knowing that this season will not last, that soon the winds will sharpen and the beaches will be barren except for the ghosts of those who have fished them before. And yet in those few weeks, when the bass run strong and the light burns low, there is a sense of completeness—a brief and perfect joining of man, water, and sky.