Thompson: In that horror, a 'precious' day

HERE'S the image from Sept. 11, 2001, that sticks in my mind:

An old man walks towards me on an inlet beach at the Jersey Shore, a small dot at first, growing larger as he nears the point, pausing once or twice to sneak a cigarette.

The old man is my dad, and he's trying to make out like he's not smoking, pretending to enjoy the view, to watch a passing boat, and who knows why he pretended. We all knew what he was doing.

And looking back, I'm glad for every stolen puff. In the end, it wasn't the cigarettes - his old doughboy habit from WWII - that got him, but something else, with no proximate cause.

As he and I fished the point of the sandy peninsula that day, the disease was probably already within him, biding its time. That day was 9/11, and, of course, to the wide world it is rightly known for its epic infamy.

And yet, to me, it is also the last time I fished with my dad, the last chapter of my favorite book, an epic in its own way, written on rivers, ponds, streams, bays and oceans over 40-odd years of fishing together.

The book was to close that day, 9/11, as we stood obliviously in the surf, throwing lures into the clash of ocean waves and tidal pulls, hoping for a bluefish, a king, a striper.

Maybe we should have thought it odd that no other fishermen came to the busy point that day; maybe we should have noticed that there were no jet trails, no plane traffic at all, no puddle-jumpers dragging advertising banners behind them for the benefit of the late-season bathers on the beach.

We didn't notice, because we were shoulder-to-shoulder in the spray, laughing at fish lost, fish caught, like we'd done a thousand times. There were a few keepers in the bucket when we made the half-mile hike back to the bridge and the parking lot.

We passed a man hunkered down in a beach chair, his rod planted in the sand beside him, headphones to his ears. He asked us what we'd caught, and we told him. He then mentioned that hijacked planes had crashed into targets in New York and Washington.

"The World Trade Center. The Pentagon. They're blowing up everything."

I'll always remember that guy. Great landmarks were falling, and for all he knew, so was his government. But before there was civilization as we know it, there was the fisherman, and his priorities endure: First, find out if they're biting.

For the rest of the day, the week, the year, we were like everyone else - swept up in the disorienting fallout of the attacks. It wasn't until Christmas that we noticed the weird bruising on my father's hands and legs, and it wasn't until the spring that we all realized what it meant. We were going to lose him, and we very quickly did.

My dad and I did all our meaningful talking on fishing trips, and it was on one of them that he said that he never wanted to be kept alive by machine, and he wasn't kidding.

That made it a little easier when the doctors said that the time had come.

His lungs, even after all of those Camels, still worked after the machines were turned off. They kept on working for a couple of days, and then they stopped.

And that was it. The beginning of a lost year. It wasn't until the second 9/11 anniversary that it finally registered - that this infamous day for the U.S. was a precious one for me.

As time has passed, I find that the anniversary of 9/11 brings me, eventually, back to the sandy point, where the water empties into the ocean, where we stood against the undertow and cast our spoons into the roiling baitfish.

The tide was strong there. Each passing wave rooted us more firmly and deeply in the sand. After a few minutes, substantial effort was needed to pull our feet from the suction of the wet sand.

Perhaps had we not moved, the tide would have rooted us there permanently.

Time and storms, however, dispel such notions. Returning to the inlet today, I see that the sand bar is gone, and as the bells toll for 9/11, I know that so is the fisherman.