Pier Pressure

As a teenager I had a habit of riding my bike down to the beach of my dying hometown in the dark, before the orange glow of streetlights faded with the break of dawn. This usually happened in early fall when the chinook started showing, often following a light rain that barely raised the creek flowing into the harbor.

When the chinook gathered, so did a collection of motley townies, mostly gear chuckers but a couple with fly rods, always along the lakeshore pier. Canton Moore was one of them, and he might have been the first person I ever saw using a full-sinking line to get a Half & Half down to where the chinook hung out along the dredged shipping canal opposite the beach. Canton was, by most standards, a deadbeat loser. A well-known drug dealer not averse to becoming violent, it was said he’d been stabbed multiple times in a deal gone wrong and almost died. 

My fourteen-year-old mind couldn’t wrap around why, or how, someone like that could be down in a place like this, because I’d always thought the beach and the adjacent pier created a paradise free of worry—disregarding the body parts that sometimes washed up on the nearby shorelines, like a severed foot with a shoe still on it, or the people who walked to the end of the pier in the middle of the night to drown themselves. 

Canton, for whatever reason, was nice enough to talk to a kid like me about what was working, what wasn’t, and why a sinking line was better for staging salmon than just a sink tip: “Salmon want the fly vertical, man. Everything else they see is fucking horizontal! You gotta do something they haven’t seen.” Simple fishing logic, yet effective, because when that guy’s 10-weight keeled over in a perfect arc, his reel screaming a frequency usually reserved for bats or dolphins, everyone knew to get the hell out of his way. Partly out of respect, and partly because no one knew if Canton might be packing heat. 

Bev McNamee was another regular, dividing her time between launching double hauls with a saltwater 9-weight and using various surf-casting rods when the lake was a roiling mess. It wasn’t uncommon to detect black eyes behind her glasses, and she spoke with a slight accent that I could never peg. Canton once told me that Bev’s boyfriend pimped her out to his biker friends at a local bar near the General Motors plant, deep in the heart of the dying industrial town, and that most people really didn’t seem to acknowledge her existence if they didn’t have to. 

But both Bev and Canton knew how to catch salmon with fly gear on those dark autumn mornings, and it pissed off a lot of the older guys who spent their entire day haplessly sending hardware into the abyss of Lake Ontario. 

My town has a tendency to erode away the best of people, leaving only the tough, weathered, empty shell of who they once were or might have been. Canton was found dead in his car the same year I graduated high school, having finally succumbed to addiction of several amphetamines, his sinking fly lines and dangerous aura now only a whispered memory down along the pier. Bev, best as I can tell, vanished entirely. Maybe she escaped that place and her circumstances, loaded her Cherokee with all of her gear and headed for somewhere she could feel new again. 

Last fall, I drove down to the pier after almost sixteen years. The beach was under a rainy gloom, the south wind pushing cold water against the northern shore. The parking lot sat completely barren, a far cry from how it looked this time of year two decades ago. Or maybe the fish weren’t in just yet. With a steady rain pounding on the roof of the jeep, I pulled out and headed for the highway, never even making a cast.