Anatomy of a Friendship

By Robert M. Levy

"Don't look up," he yells as he strips off another few feet of monofilament. What kind of nonsense is that? You're standing in a small boat being violently rocked by a beam sea, hoping to hell you can get a motor started before the whole shooting match gets swamped and some joker yells, "Don't look up." Of course, I look up. The

• Language: English
• Publisher: Aspire Publishing Hub, LLC
• Release date: Feb 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781962611572

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Anatomy

of a

Friendship

Robert M. Levy

Anatomy of a Friendship

Copyright © 2024 by Robert M. Levy

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN

978-1-962611-56-5 (Paperback)

978-1-962611-57-2 (eBook)

This book is dedicated to our children and grandchildren, Charlie’s and mine

Table of Contents

Prologue

Disclaimer

Chapter 1Early Adventures

Chapter 2Charlie

Chapter 3Bob

Chapter 4The Li’l 14

Chapter 5Bridge

Chapter 6Marcus

Chapter 7Sierras

Chapter 8Charlie

Chapter 9Bob

Chapter 10Reminiscences

Chapter 11Fly fishing

Chapter 12Katmai

Chapter 13Sun Valley

Chapter 14Sunriver

Chapter 15Boating

Chapter 16The Last Fishing Trip

Chapter 17Revisiting Old Haunts

Chapter 18Words after the fact; the memorial service

Postscript

Author’s note

Anatomy of a Friendship

What is a friend? More than a brother, more than a father: a traveling companion with whom we rebuild the route and strive to conquer the impossible even if only to sacrifice it later. Friendship stamps a life as deeply as—more deeply than—love. Love can degenerate into obsession, but friendship never means anything but sharing. It is with friends that we share the awakening of desire, the birth of a vision or fear… What is a friend? The person who first makes you aware of your own solitude and his, and helps you escape it so that you, in turn, may help him. It is thanks to him that you can fall silent without shame, and unburden yourself without loss of face.

The Gates of the Forest

Elie Wiesel

The past is not dead. It is not even past.

William Faulkner

Prologue

Twelve years ago Charlie and I were standing shoulder to shoulder in a trout stream in southern Montana. Three months later it was over.

Three months from diagnosis to grave. Incredible! Three months of heartache, of anguish, watching him metamorphose from an intellectually insightful, fun loving man to a cancer ridden shell. Charlie and I were brothers, or at least the closest thing either of us will ever have to a brother, all the more so because we got to choose each other. His pain was my pain and my joy was his and so it went.

Charlie died fifteen years ago. I tried to write these memories then but found it was easier to worry about his wife and daughters and mother, gentle ‘Mother H’ who, in her own mind, adopted me as her second son, than to sort through the kaleidoscope of shared memories, of places and people, and of adventures, both dangerous and hilarious, at least in the retelling, of life’s lumps, bumps, thumps and crashes. There were the highs as well, of course, the successes, unexpected pleasures, personal coups and the rare time that we, together or singly, got something … just right. We rarely talked about the heavy things in life. Surely, we discussed technical things, difficult cases and the like, got in our share of politics and a bit of philosophy, but rarely did we find the need to talk about personal matters. Our understanding was tacit, but absolute.

I am semiretired now and miss him more than ever. It is time for me to try to understand why and how this friendship was-no, is, so important to me. I suspect Charlie figured it out long ago. He was often quicker than I at that sort of judgment. Of one thing I am certain, though; neither of us would have given it a second thought unless bludgeoned by circumstance to do so.

It’s over, and yet, it’s just beginning, for if friendship is the mirror of personality then brotherhood is the counterpart of soul. This journal, then, is my catharsis, my education, my mirror … my odyssey.

Disclaimer

Memories are their own descendants masquerading as the ancestors of the present.

Ghostwritten

David Mitchell

I have reported these events as I remember them. No attempt has been made to embellish or diminish them in any conscious way. They are, of course, subject to the magnifying and distorting power of memory but this is out of my control. I am absolutely certain, however, that, in the way of fishing buddies everywhere, Charlie would swear to the veracity of every word.

I

Early Adventures

The year is 1967. Charlie is a second year medical resident, I’m an intern. Somehow we’ve learned we both like to fish and play bridge. He’s a fishing nut, an almost pathologic obsession. I’m sure Sandy, his wife, would agree. Me, I like soaking up the weather with a rod and reel in my hand. Catching fish is less important. Clearly, the fish know this as they feel much less inclined to oblige me than Charlie. At this time in our lives we do not have a pot to whistle in between us so our forays into the ichthyologic world of San Francisco Bay are accomplished with more bravado than brains. The scenario goes something like this:

Hey Bob, I hear the kings are running at the mouth of the Sacramento.

Yeah, right. I’ll pick you up at eight Saturday morning. I’ll get the bait. Don’t forget to tune your motor.

Will do. Did you ever get the bugs out of yours?

Dunno. We’ll see.

Saturday morning we arrive at the marina, rent a 16 foot skiff and bolt on the power train, my 1.2 h.p. Mighty Mite and his thirty year old, 3 h.p. Montgomery Ward. We try to orient them in the same direction, tie them in tandem with a homemade tie bar and off we go. Understand that this is not nearly enough power for the weight of the boat and two adults even if the motors were new and the power was all in a single outboard. What’s more, the Mighty Mite, once turned off or stalled had to be allowed to dry out on deck for at least a half hour before it had a prayer of restarting. No matter. Nothing was to interfere with the hunt. No matter, there are six to eight foot rollers as the westerly wind and the flooding tide meet the outflow of the river. No matter that I’m standing in the stern, knees braced against the transom, trying desperately to start either of the motors while Charlie, characteristically, is paying out more line.

Don’t look up, he yells as he strips out another few feet of monofilament.

What kind of nonsense is that? You’re standing in a small boat being violently rocked by a beam sea, hoping to hell you can get a motor started before the whole shooting match gets swamped and some joker yells don’t look up. Of course I look up. Trouble is, I don’t see anything because there’s an eight foot wall of water staring me in the face. Vintage Charlie, only I didn’t know it then. Sounds funny as I tell it now but at the time it (and other similar events) was enough to convince me that if I survived life with Charlie without dismemberment or other serious injury I must possess some good karma. This particular incident, however, convinced both of us that the dual unreliable motor system was unworkable. It really wasn’t so bad for me since I was single but Charlie had a wife and two small kids who were not very understanding about the chances of an untimely drowning.

Suffice to say, the wave did pass beneath us leaving me with only three or four bruised ribs and a large colorful map on my right hip that accurately depicted the contour of the port gunwale. Charlie, again characteristically, as I was to learn over the next quarter century, was unscathed, although he was demonstrating wonderful creativity in the art of combining expletives as he spent the next fifteen minutes unraveling a world class line snag from his trolling reel.

A quick word about gear. In those days expensive, quality equipment was out of the question. We both had plastic sided, metal spooled Penn reels, not level wind, five bucks at Sears. To spend more not only would have been impossible, it would have carried the stench of affectation. An interesting thing about all this; although I had moved many times in the next twenty years and had bought a lot of fishing gear, I found that old reel about a year before Charlie died and, with reluctance, threw it out after repeated failed attempts to rescue it from its terminally rusted state. Shortly thereafter, I was chasing salmon aboard Charlie’s boat when I found, tucked away under and behind a mess of other non-specific stuff, his edition of that original Penn reel, moderately rusted, barely functional (a loose interpretation of its condition) and held together with baling wire, electrical tape and Marine-Tex (a tough resin that seems to bind anything to anything). The fact that those reels were even recognizable after all those years of use, abuse and neglect speaks worlds about how well they were made. The fact that both of us, independently, had saved them speaks worlds about the depth of our tacit understanding.

It was a long, painful ride home in Charlie’s suspensionless Chevy station wagon. Two hours later, the pain easing under the influence of my second scotch and water, seven year old Debbie and four year old Stacy bounced into the room.

Uncle Bob, uncle Bob, how was the fishing? How many did you get?

Hi ladies. The fishing was great. The catching wasn’t so good. It would be years before they understood that this was the story of my life with rod and reel. Sandy, of course had enough sense not to ask.

It’s interesting. Very early in our relationship I became uncle Bob to the girls. None of us can recall how this came about but it has always seemed natural. The implied relationship persists to this day even though the girls, now women, are grown and have families of their own. Similarly, it would never occur to my sons to address Sandy and Chuck in any way other than as aunt and uncle.

Later, dinner devoured, a brandy freshly poured, Chuck and I look at each other and understand that the present fishing arrangements are unsatisfactory and have to change. We add up our resources and decide to see what we can buy for under three hundred dollars. Even in those days three hundred dollars did not buy a lot of fishing boat but we were flexible, having already endured grossly inadequate conditions.

II

Charlie

Surprisingly, Charlie and I knew relatively little about each other’s childhood years. We found each other as young adults and sort of took us as we found us. The past was ancient history. Of course, we shared a few of our experiences but the feeling was more like reading a book than anything that occurred in real time in a continuum of development.

Charlie’s parents were good Mormons, his mother more so than his father, from Salt Lake City. Before Charlie was born they moved to Chicago where his father was a middle level manager for an insurance company and his mother was the office manager for a large dental office. Charlie was an only child, his mother being unable to have more children for reasons unclear to me. Sandy tells me that his parents doted on him although I cannot think of anyone less in need of doting. As is not uncommon, he had some attitudinal differences with his father who was an obsessive-compulsive type, the kind of person who goes back into the house three times to make sure the gas is turned off before leaving for a vacation and studies and evaluates everything before making a decision.

Charlie’s response was to take the opposite approach. He became a bit rebellious and much more impulsive, less concerned with the consequences of his behavior. Certainly, in the time I spent with him, I witnessed a lot of spontaneous ideas and decisions, some of them made without any regard to personal safety. Mind you, I’m not criticizing. After all, I was the guy next to him doing the same things. His attitude changed 180 degrees when he was playing doctor. Then, there was not a more compulsively thorough person on all the earth.

His rebelliousness took many forms, not the kind we see today with drugs, juvenile delinquency and constant TV, video games and other computer related garbage. Instead, he, for example, wanted a motorcycle, something of which his father disapproved. Either because he wanted one or because his father disapproved of the idea, or both, he bought, with money he had earned, an old bike mostly in pieces, reassembled it and got it in working order. He rode that bike for several years with some of his high school buddies who also had bikes, much to the consternation of his father. Again, it is not clear whether he got more enjoyment from the bike or from flaunting his father’s wishes. For certain, he enjoyed the challenge of putting that bike in working order, a characteristic that persisted his whole life. He always liked tinkering with motors, never with an instruction manual. He would just play with them until he got it right. I was to witness this phenomenon many times, always with some aggravation on my part. In this, I was probably more like his father and I’m not sure he didn’t take some small pleasure from my discomfiture.

It wasn’t that he had a running battle with his father but, rather, that he found his father’s compulsiveness oppressive. There were many good times when the two of them were on the same wavelength. The family made an annual trip to Salt Lake City to visit grandparents and other relatives. On the way they would always stop in Wyoming for a few days where father taught son to fly fish. His grandfather, a man of a distinctively impulsive nature, was also a fly fisherman and the three of them would spend many days chasing trout in Utah streams together. In many ways Charlie’s nature was more like that of his grandfather, absent the Mormonism. It’s funny how personality types often seem to skip a generation. Perhaps each generation reacts in an opposite way to the one before, thus creating a cycle of behavioral characteristics with some mixing and modifications.

Charlie was bored in high school, not entirely surprising since he was one of the smartest people I have ever known. At first his grades were poor to average but, once he decided that he wanted to go to college, they improved markedly year by year. He went to the University of Iowa, where he met Sandy, then to