The Language of Fishermen
By Richard Wagamese
I had a hero when I was six. He wasn’t a hockey player, a rock ‘n’ roll icon, a comic book hero or even a movie star. He was a mechanic, a tall, slender, chain-smoking grease monkey who smelled of oil, tobacco and Old Spice aftershave.
His name was Joe Tacknyk, and he was a Ukrainian Canadian. He was a quiet, reflective man who cackled when he laughed, told stories of Jimmie Rodgers, the Old Chisholm Trail and life during wartime. He was my foster father. I came to live with him and his family when I was five. He saw the fear in me from that first moment, the confusion, and did what he could to make them disappear.
He’d come for me early spring and summer mornings. He’d scratch at the soles of my feet with a wooden spoon and hush me to silence with a finger to the lips. Then, while everyone else slept, he made an elaborate game of sneaking me from the house with our fishing gear and into the old green pickup truck in the driveway.
As we drove out of Kenora, Ontario, on the gravel road that ran north from town, he’d slip me a cup of coffee and some warm perogies wrapped in a napkin. We’d watch the land roll by, and the silence we sat in was a profound as any I’ve ever experienced. There was nothing to say. Mystery. We sat in the hold of the mystery of the land. There were no words to describe that feeling.
When we got to the marina, my job was to load the gear in the old wooden boat while Joe hooked up the gas tank. Then we’d pull away from the dock and he’d look at me. I’d scan the water of the river, pick a direction and point, and he’d head us that way. Once he’d found a cove or a bay or a rock point somewhere we’d start to cast. Wordlessly. Always. The only language we used was the quiet way of fishermen, the nod, the gesture when we needed tackle, each of us content to look at the land and the water and the deep endless bowl of sky.
I landed a huge jackfish one morning. When it hit my bait, the rod bowed under the keel of the boat, and I could feel the whale like pressure of the fish at the other end. Joe sat and watched me. The only words he offered were cautionary ones, cryptic tips on how to play it. After twenty minutes or so he netted the exhausted fish and hoisted it into the boat. It was enormous. My hands were sore from clenching the rod, but I held that fish up by the gill case and felt proud and noble and strong. He smiled at me, ruffled my hair some and went back to casting, but I knew he was proud of me. That made the effort worth it.
We let that fish go. I sat in the boat and watched it heave for breath, and something in me understood that it was the battle that was memorable and the fish deserved to live to fight another day. Something in me understood that I’d been graced with some of the spirit of that magnificent creature and that it could be free again. I asked him and he looked at me quizzically for a moment, then nodded and helped me ease the fish back over the side of the boat.
We never spoke of it after. Never shared that moment with the rest of my foster family. But there was an unspoken bond between us, and I knew that I had earned his respect. I could see it in the way he looked at me when we were on the water, like an equal, like a partner, like a man. I’ve never forgotten that.
Joe understood that I was Ojibway. He understood that I needed a connection to the land to feel safe, real, right. He also understood that there were things in me I could not express, and he gave me the language of fishermen so I could start to find the words.
Of all the men who came into my life as I was growing up, Joe Tacknyk was the one who fostered “father” in me. He gave the word meaning. See, Joe understood that we all have one basic human right coming in – the right to know who we are created to be. He took the responsibility to show me that in the only way he could.
For me, at six, fishing was as close as I could get to my roots. Joe got me to the land because he knew that was where my spirit could renew and reclaim itself. He knew that who I was, who I was born to be, was directly connected to the land and its mystery. He got me there. Always.
Cancer claimed Joe a year after I was adopted by another family at age nine. When I heard I took a long walk on the land and breathed the news deep into me. The tears the landed on the grass that day were tears of gratitude. He was my hero, Joe Tacknyk, and I would never forget him.
I don’t fish now as much as I once did, don’t get out on the water as often as I might like, don’t surround myself with the mystery of the land nearly as much as I should. But there’s never a moment when I don’t feel Ojibway, and I can thank Joe Tacknyk for that.
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