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When Writing War and Healing Waters meet
byEric C. Hammerstrom
There is a time to kill, and there is a time to heal. Both of them happened on rivers for Philip Caputo—some in the jungles of Vietnam, some in the wilds of Upper Michigan.
Caputo was a lieutenant with one of the first Marine divisions to land in Vietnam in 1965. When his duty ended, the Chicago native came to the rivers and streams of the Upper Peninsula to heal.
“For me, coming home was nothing like the movies…,” Caputo told a packed house at Upfront & Company, where people had come to hear him, Iraq war veteran Benjamin Busch and best-selling author Doug Stanton speak about their works.
“I spent four days flying home, and all I remember was landing at the airport (in Chicago) at 2:00 a.m.,” he said. “A few of us straggled off an ancient DC-6 propeller plane, and my parents were there waiting for me. It was ‘Hi Mom. Hi Dad,’ and it (the homecoming) was over.”
But homecomings don’t heal, and Caputo explained later that evening he didn’t begin healing until he packed his fishing gear and headed for the Upper Peninsula, where he had fished as a boy. He stayed in the U.P., fishing streams and rivers for quite some time, he said, adding that fishing helped him process what he’d been through.
“There is a moment in The Big Two-Hearted River by Hemingway that captures it,” Caputo said. “Nick Adams stands on a bridge over the river and looks down to see trout swimming against the current, and when Nick sees those fish, things return to the way they were before…and that’s how it was for me.”
…At the bottom of the pool were the big trout. Nick did not see them at first. Then he saw them at the bottom of the pool, big trout looking to hold themselves on the gravel bottom in a varying mist of gravel and sand, raised in spurts by the current…
Nick’s heart tightened as the trout moved. He felt all the old feeling.
Like Hemingway’s protagonist, Caputo went to war. He killed. He watched friends die. And, like Nick Adams, the first place Caputo traveled when he returned from war was to the U.P.—Adams fished on the Big Two-Hearted River in Hemingway’s masterpiece; Caputo fished on the Ontonagon and other U.P. rivers as he processed what he’d been through in Vietnam.
When Caputo learned the Michigan Author Homecoming wouldn’t begin until 7:00 p.m. on May 20, he asked Greg Parker of the Michigan Humanities Council to find someone who could take him fishing that day. Parker called a friend in Marquette, who called a friend, who called a friend.
When Herb Grenke answered the telephone and was asked if he could take Caputo fishing, his first question was, “Who is Philip Caputo?” Grenke had never heard of the Pulitzer Prize winning author, of his war memoir Rumor of War, or his novel Indian Country, which is set in Marquette County. But that didn’t matter to Grenke; if he had the time, he’d love to go fishing, he explained. But it would be a busy week.
“I won’t be in town at all on Tuesday, because I’ll be down in Iron Mountain teaching veterans from the Veterans’ Administration hospital to fish,” Grenke said.
There was stunned silence on the other end of the line. Parker and his friends had found the perfect man to take Caputo fishing.
On May 18, Grenke taught a group of ten Vietnam veterans the basics of fly fishing on the lawn in front of the V.A. Hospital for a Trout Unlimited program called “Project Healing Waters.” The goal of Healing Waters, Grenke explained, is to teach former soldiers the therapeutic value of nature.
Grenke lined up his students in front of the veterans center with rods and asked them to pick a spot as a target. He called one of them a “natural.” When instructed to aim his cast for a particular tulip in the V.A. flower bed, the veteran practically dropped the bait right inside the flower’s blossom.
“Most had no experience at all with fly fishing,” he said. “But they’re ready to fish. They all caught on real fast, and they’ll catch fish.”
According to Grenke, most of the veterans do not have a physical disability, but suffer from lingering emotional issues and psychological difficulties. Grenke’s voice softened when he added that the veterans’ scars went “deeper than the skin…and Healing Waters is really great for that.”
Two days later, Grenke picked up Caputo and Doug Stanton, author of New York Times bestsellers In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers, in the lobby of the Landmark Inn. He drove them to a friend’s camp on the Escanaba River, where they spent six hours relaxing and catching fish.
After six hours of fishing, he dropped the authors off at the Landmark, then began reading Caputo’s novel Indian Country, about a psychologically troubled Vietnam veteran named Starkmann who settles outside Marquette. The novel chronicles Starkmann’s struggles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“I started reading, and the next time I looked up from the book, it was seven o’clock,” Grenke said. “I had to hustle to get in to town for the program.”
If one has read Indian Country, it is easy to understand why Grenke was engrossed. The novel begins with Starkmann hunting and fishing in the U.P. as a boy. Starkmann’s horrific war experiences are graphically portrayed, as are the psychological traumas that continue throughout his post-war life.
During the program entitled “Writing War: Iraq/Vietnam/Afghanistan,” Caputo, Stanton and Busch spoke of war and the literature of war.
Busch, who lives in Reed City with his wife and their two daughters, served two combat tours in Iraq as an infantry officer with the Marine Corps. His memoir, “Bearing Arms,” appeared in Harper’s, and his latest essay, “Growth Rings,” is in the Michigan Quarterly Review. Stanton is the author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers, about American soldiers who entered Afghanistan secretly and fought the Taliban on horseback.
Caputo and Busch talked about the attention to detail soldiers learn in order to survive. That discussion registered with Grenke, the fly fisherman.
“When you’re in combat, you have to pay attention to everything,” Caputo said. “Something that wouldn’t seem significant in civilian life, a plastic grocery bag on a busy street in Baghdad, could be your death.”
Busch nodded and said, “A plastic bag would be very bad.”
Busch said it was as if his mind recorded photographs of his experiences in Iraq. He even found himself searching through photos looking for those images, then realizing they existed only in his memory.
When Grenke heard Caputo and Busch mention attention to detail, his day of fishing with writers of war made perfect sense.
“In fly fishing, you have to be able to read the water. It’s all about edges and seeing them,” Grenke explained. “The edge of the drop off. The edge of the weed bed. The edge of the current. You have to focus and see. There is attention to detail. That’s one thing both of them (Caputo and Stanton) had, which is very unusual.
“I take people to that stretch of the Escanaba all the time, and they don’t just walk into the river and start catching fish. These guys did. And it was hard to read the hatches, the currents swirl there…but these guys knew how to manage, to mend the line, and they got it to the fish.”
When asked how that type of concentration helps veterans deal with the traumas of war, Grenke paused, then mentioned the conversations he and Caputo shared on the river.
“When you’re concentrating on all these different things, you are completely in a zone and everything else is oblivious. Hopefully, the guys in Healing Waters will start to do that and forget the other things for a time.” Grenke paused again and lowered his voice, almost to a whisper.
“It’s therapeutic that way…and it’s therapeutic for me, too, with my grandson Everest’s illness and my daughter Stephanie’s suicide… with all the crises I have had in my own life. The class has just been about fishing, but I might mention to the guys sometime how fishing has helped me make it through these things. It’s the trees, the rocks, it’s the whole U.P. and being in that zone. It’s not about the fish.”
When asked, Grenke said he wanted his daughter’s suicide mentioned in this story.
“We have to talk about suicide,” he said. “There is so much stigma that we have to talk about it. She fought a brave battle for ten years. If she had battled cancer, she would have had so much support, but she didn’t have cancer. She had what I can only think of as a brain disorder, what else is a more appropriate description of it?”
Grenke’s grandson, Everest Leach, is five years old and was diagnosed with neuroblastoma on his fifth birthday. Fortunately for him, it did not affect his brain tissue, but is in the nervous system.
“Right now, the doctors are confident based on his response to treatments,” Grenke said.
Everest will be in Philadephia until Christmas so doctors can be sure the disease does not recur. Grenke said the doctors cautiously use the word “remission” to describe Everest’s current situation.
Grenke looked up from the table and out the window toward Lake Superior sand dunes that stand between his house on Lakewood Lane and the big lake, then mentioned that most of the veterans involved with Project Healing Waters battle substance abuse alongside other symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“The rod is a way to get them into the woods…once there, Mother Nature just takes over. It’s amazing,” said Grenke, a retired professor at Northern Michigan University. “It’s a safe place, where veterans can put their experiences in a context, somehow—a place that is not traumatic.”
The mission of Trout Unlimited’s Healing Waters Project is to “assist in the physical and emotional rehabilitation of disabled active duty military personnel and veterans through fly fishing and fly tying education and outings.”
Classes ran on Tuesday evenings from April 27 to June 1, with a Saturday outing at Strawberry Lake on June 12. Grenke said he can run the program “as many times as there are people interested.”
The program was started by Kimberly Wetton of Negaunee, who currently serves as chairperson of Trout Unlimited in Michigan.
“You should see the videos of veterans without limbs tying flies and going fishing,” Wetton said. “I was sold on it and made it my personal mission to bring it to Michigan.”
Veterans Administration facilities in Detroit, Saginaw and Iron Mountain began offering the program this year. Grand Rapids will begin a program soon, and Wetton hopes to expand in Marquette and other parts of the U.P.
“Ten guys attended all the programs in Iron Mountain and have built relationships,” Wetton said. “During one of the first classes, we started talking about fishing and one of the guys said there was a moment in fishing when you think of absolutely nothing else. Then, in fly-tying class, the therapist noted how much everyone was concentrating on the flies. One veteran kept dropping the fly as he worked on it, but then he said, “Ya know, not one person here is thinking about drinking, or women, or problems.’ Instead, they were all thinking about fly-tying.”
While fishing helped Caputo process his experiences at war, his writing has helped millions understand the experiences of combat veterans. Caputo said his time spent fishing helped him understand his time at war. He wrote about the experience in an article entitled “Till in Some Living Stream: A Warrior’s Art of Redemption” for the Vietnam Veteran’s of America magazine.
In the article, Caputo writes “In combat, one is both god and beast, which means one is no longer fully human. A door had opened for me in Vietnam, and I’d peered into the heart of darkness, and the heart was mine.” Then, he explains, he picked up his fly rod and drove north.
Whenever I see someone casting a fly rod really well, I know I’m looking at a person who is centered, calm and in control... The virtues it called forth were the opposite of the warrior’s—gentleness rather than brutality, serenity rather than fury.
A few days later, I was near the town of Paulding, Michigan, fishing Bluff Creek, a stream I had fished before I’d put on a uniform and picked up a rifle. It was the living stream in which I could begin to redeem my mind from its captivity to the war. Bluff Creek was the color of strong tea and flowed through silent forests of fir and spruce, and just being there was a balm. I felt my old, pre-war self. Standing in a deep, still pool formed by the pilings of an abandoned railroad bridge, I cast a streamer back and forth, back and forth, and eventually caught two big brown trout. The catching of the fish wasn’t the point, however. Doing it right required concentration. Therein lay the grace granted by art: I couldn’t think about Vietnam. Those obsessive memories of blood and fire were, for the moment, forgotten.
Grenke plans to use Caputo’s article in future sessions of Project Healing Waters. When he does, chances are he will not have to explain a word. The healing waters will have explained enough already.
—Eric C. Hammerstrom
Editor’s Note: For more information on Trout Unlimited’s Healing Waters Project, visit www.tu.org or contact the local Fred Waara Chapter of Trout Unlimited at 228-3052.
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