As most readers know, I grew up in central Massachusetts and, for a long time, I tried not to fish for stripers because I understood that I would love it and that it might ruin the fishing that I already loved back home. When I got my driver’s license, I decided to let the floodgates open, allowing the history, the unknown… and the vastness of the Atlantic to wash over me. And I spent years with butterflies permanently fluttering in my stomach, as I imagined the magnitude of landing a giant striped bass, a vision I couldn’t yet conjure, a size I couldn’t yet comprehend.
At the core of all this, were the writings of Frank Daignault. I read Twenty Years on the Cape so many times I could recite it. Some of the stories that graced those pages, almost feel like they’re my own memories. They – quite literally – shaped me, they hardened into my still-ripening brain, as I blindly stepped into adulthood, leaving home and moving to the shores of Buzzards Bay at age 22. When I think about that time, and consider how easily I could have stayed, or ricocheted in any other direction, it almost feels like a near-death experience, if I had zigged when I zagged, where would I be now?
Christmases and birthdays came and went, each one seemed to bring a new Daignault book; Striper Surf, became an instant favorite, then The Trophy Striper took top honors. I was starving for more information before the information age, and Frank was there to fill the need. But above all the knowledge that has seasoned the surfcaster and fisherman I have become, there was one thing that really reached out and dragged me into the tunnel-vision world of surfcasting obsession, and that was how he captured the very obsession that I was feeling. I reasoned that if this white-haired “old man” was this rabid about it, than it somehow seemed okay that I was too. It made it seem okay that I was leaving my 19-year old girlfriend to sleep alone night after night so I could go fishing. It made it seem okay that when I wasn’t fishing I was thinking about fishing and when I wasn’t thinking about fishing I was mindlessly doodling pictures of striped bass chasing baitfish, or plug designs or a silhouette of a surfcaster on a beach with a bent rod.
The quote that really drove it home was Frank talking about having to go back to teaching each year in the fall and thinking about what he was missing. I’m paraphrasing, but he talked about dragging his spoon through his Corn Flakes and wistfully picturing it as if it were a lure swimming through the surf. That was the aspect of Frank’s writing that really captivated me.
But as much as his writing fueled my hunger for surfcasting success, it was the fact that he made a name for himself through writing that inspired me the most. He was a shop teacher and a writer. Up to that point, I thought you were a writer, or a carpenter or a dentist… it never occurred to me that I could be a paint store clerk AND a writer. It was that tiny revelation that changed my life forever. It’s an irrefutable fact: had I not found Frank’s books, I would never have followed this path through freelance writing that led “non-college-educated me” into the editor’s seat at this very magazine at the tender age of 27.
Revelations are what they are, and they serve as markers of achievement or turning points in our lives. The sad part is, that so many revelations come along at points of reflection, and many of these points mark the moment when it becomes too late to say ‘thank you’ to the person that inspired them. Through all my correspondences with Frank, assigning work and editing, I never told him any of this. Strangely, I guess I just hadn’t realized it yet. All this came rushing into my mind when I heard the news of his passing. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Frank and he never knew it.
But, I have Corn Flakes for breakfast almost every morning, and I still swim my spoon through the milk, and now I feel as though I can see a faint reflection of that bygone era when Frank, Joyce and their four kids lived out their summers on the beaches of Cape Cod. Staring into my bowl with tired eyes, I sometimes find myself longing for those memories, and they aren’t even mine.
Thank you Frank, rest easy.
