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Outside Magazine, August 2004
Page:
1 2 3 4 5 

Code Orange

By Bob Shacochis

carl hiaasan florida
(Chris Buck)
SO, WHERE WERE WE?

Thanks to the cold front, the fish have vanished from the flats and receded back into my dreams. Once in a while a lone bonefish will jet across the eelgrass in front of us, but nothing you can throw at. My competence with a fly rod is on the low side of remarkable, but now the wind is screwing up my backcast. I sit down to untangle a figure eight in my leader.

"I'll do that for you," Hiaasen says kindly.

"No!" For a moment I feel like a kid fishing with my dad, and the sensation is depressing. With the line now unsnarled, I suggest we switch places—I'll pole for a while, Hiaasen can fish.

He won't do it. If I'm his guest, that means he's my guide, and it's a role that as much as anything seems to define the man. Guide, guardian—he became a father himself with his first wife when he was still a teenager. Married his high school sweetheart; went to Emory University, in Atlanta, borrowing money from his lawyer father to make it through; grew up way too fast; graduated from the University of Florida journalism school in 1974; went straight to a job as a cub reporter in Cocoa until two years later, when the Herald offered him $100 more a week. He's been "appallingly prolific" (he likes to accuse other people of this) at both writing and fishing every minute since, this morning being the exception.

By his own measure, Hiaasen is wound so tight that, he says, "relaxing is very hard for me." He's not a boozer or a clubber; traveling makes him uptight. Here on the boat is the closest he comes to cutting loose, poling himself around the flats for an hour and a half at sunset, sweeping the shit out of his brain, therapy for the driven man. Not a day goes by when he doesn't think about dropping the anchor on his career, not a single day when he doesn't say, "What am I doing? I'm killing myself here—my kids are growing up, and all I do is write?"

More than 1,500 columns, 14 novels—including a wonderful 2002 children's book titled Hoot, about saving rare owls from developers—the Disney book . . . five million copies sold and yet Hiaasen worries absurdly that if he doesn't produce a book every other year, he'll plunge into instant obscurity. Like his protagonist in the 2002 novel Basket Case, he frets constantly about mortality, especially since his father died at 50, a year younger than Hiaasen is now, and one of his closest friends, musician Warren Zevon, to whom he dedicated Skinny Dip, passed away last year.

BUILT TO GRIND is the logo on his cap, but it might as well be stamped on his prose-slaving soul.

Now Hiaasen's muttering again about the other boats on the water, and when the wind clicks around a few degrees to the east, I watch him study the horizon for approaching evils from the north. We zip our jackets, crank the Merc, and rocket back bay-side, to a baseball-field expanse of flats from which you could hit a home run into Hiaasen's compound.

Wind's the same, but the robin's-egg-blue water has less churn. Hiaasen begins poling, I step up onto the bow, poised with my fly rod, trying to push away the images that drop like white-hot pellets into my unrequited desire: the photo of Hiaasen holding an enormous 14-pound bonefish and the trophies for winning the Bonefishing World Championship in 1997 and 1999; another shot of Hiaasen barely able to lift a satellite dish that is actually a 43-pound permit; the saucy pictures of his gorgeous second wife, Fenia, hanging on his office walls . . . oops, sorry, pal.

"Nothing," laments Hiaasen as we drift closer to the south end of the flat. "Nothing." Pole. "Nope." Pole. "Not a fucking . . . Wait!"

The bonefish are right over there, a silvery school materializing out of the greener water to graze the shrimpy mud of the flat.

"Not yet," Hiaasen coaches as I strip line from the reel. "Not yet. Get ready. Another ten feet."

"Five feet," Hiaasen whispers with an intensity that underscores his total concentration. But then, suddenly, the bones are gone. We're skunked. Zed, zero, nada.


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Contributing editor Bob Shacochis wrote about Kathmandu for Outside's 20th anniversary, in October 1997.
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