Given how little I cared for fishing, it surprised even me when, during high school and college summers in Maine, I started waking up early to go fishing with my father and grandfather. When you’re a teenager, sleep is the most precious commodity. Yet there I was, rising before the sun was even up. I crept out of bed, slipped into my clothes, and tiptoed past my sleeping sister. I ran down the dewy grass path to the dock, where I met my dad and granddad by the water’s edge.
Out there on the boat, in the morning chill, we talked about everything and nothing. Most of the hours we spent just looking out to sea, alone together. No one was there to interrupt us. Politicians spend their days in a constant state of high alert, surrounded by people and noise, so for my dad and granddad, it was a blessing to have a quiet moment outside. I enjoyed having time alone with them, and I especially appreciated being the focus of my Gampy’s attention—away from the demands of my other cousins. I also liked the calm feeling I got on the water.
No matter how unsuited I may have been to the sport, the times with my father and grandfather out on the ocean were some of the best of my life. Whenever I caught a fish—entirely by accident or with the help of their seasoned assists—they beamed with pride. They whooped and hollered as if I’d won a marathon. I was happy, but the fish was almost beside the point. I just loved their pride—making them smile and laugh—and feeling the glow of the sun on my face. I always slept well after a day spent in the ocean air.
One sweltering August day in 2004, our family was in Kennebunkport, Maine, for my cousin George’s wedding to his girlfriend, Mandy. My father, grandfather, and I took a morning off from family activities to go out on the water in Gampy’s boat, the Fidelity. How peaceful it was floating in that boat. Then all of a sudden we had company. A boatload of reporters appeared on the horizon.
We were never truly alone on the water. There was the black Coast Guard boat filled with Secret Service, along with the press, who went everywhere with my dad. My father was president, after all, and everyone knew the wedding was happening that weekend. I guess I should have brushed my hair, I thought. I’d been so eager to get out on the water that I’d just thrown my hair up under a green ball cap, put on a white tank top, and grabbed my sunglasses.
Then I felt a tug at the end of my line. A bite! I reeled in and felt another huge pull. This was a big fish! It took all the arm strength I had, but I battled it into the boat.
“Jen!” my father shouted. “Look at that fish! Let’s get a picture!”
Then instead of pulling out a Polaroid camera, like the one he used on Rainbo Lake, he said, “Dad! Drive over there!”
Gampy smiled broadly and turned the boat into the wind. In that light and doing his favorite activity, he looked like the nineteen-year-old sailor he once was. As he steered the boat over to the reporters, a hundred cameras flashed, documenting my catch for the country’s major newspapers.
“Jenna caught it!” my dad yelled to the reporters. “Jenna caught the fish!”
They got a shot of my thirty-eight-inch striped bass. Then my dad helped me get it off the hook and put it back into the ocean. Unlike the Polaroids, which faded with age or were lost in the course of many moves, this picture of me with the bass ended up on the front page of the New York Times.
For the past several years, we haven’t fished off the rocky coast of Maine. Our captain, Gampy, was in a wheelchair. I wonder now if maybe my dad spent so much time fishing for the same reason I did—if he, too, was out there for the time alone with his father, in those early mornings when no one cared whether the fish were biting.
From his bedroom window those last few months of his life, Gampy looked out on the rocks where he’d scrambled as a young man and where, as a middle-aged man, he’d taught my father and my cousin Jebby to fly-fish. I know he thought of those happy times and wished he could feel the spray of the sea and the pull of his line once again.
At age seventy-seven, Gampy had a plaque made that read “CAVU: Ceiling and Visibility Unlimited.” That was the weather he and his fellow navy pilots always hoped for.
In a letter to his children, he wrote, “I used to seek broad horizons in life and found plenty. Now I don’t care if I can’t even see Ogunquit. Limited horizons are okay by me just so long as family’s in view.”
One rainy gray Maine morning, during his last summer on earth, when he was ninety-four, my grandfather looked out on the rocks and saw a fisherman standing there for the first time in years. It was my husband, Henry. He had woken up early that morning with an immediate need to fish. Henry stood in the same spot where generations of Bush men had stood before. As Gampy watched, Henry caught striped bass after striped bass.
When Henry returned to the house after several hours on the rocks, he was soaked through with rain and seawater.
“I can’t believe you stayed out so long!” I said, handing him a towel.
“I did it for Gampy,” he said, tears in his eyes.
This past Christmas, with Gampy having passed away, Henry took Mila out on the little bass boat on our ranch in Crawford, Texas, for the first time. She stood proudly next to him with her Fisher-Price rod, casting her line into the murky waters. She looked so much like I did as a little girl—and her interest in fishing was just as tepid as mine had been when I was her age. She was more interested in collecting the worms to keep as pets than in catching a fish. Why did she go? For the same reason I did—for time with her dad.
The other night, Poppy asked me, “Mommy, do you think Gampy is in heaven?”
“Yes, of course he is in heaven,” I said. The girls have made his passing so bittersweet. These innocent babes of mine: through their unbridled joy and innocence they have helped me walk through the pain of losing someone I loved.
“What do you think it’s like in heaven?” she said. “Is it like earth, or is it different?” From the mouth of a three-year-old.
“Well,” I told Poppy, “I think in heaven you see the people you love who you’ve lost. And I think you get to do what you loved most in life.”
I can see Gampy now, sitting there in the captain’s chair of the Fidelity, smiling, holding his fishing rod, letting the ocean take him where it will, ceiling and visibility unlimited.
Henry’s Letter to Gampy
Dear Gampy,
Oh, how I wish you had been there.
I woke around 6:30 and instinctively checked the fishing conditions and tides on my phone. I’m really not sure why. I haven’t checked it the entire trip. And we like a morning with the girls, enjoying the view and thinking about the day’s activities.
Conditions were perfect according to the link that popped up, so I headed out to the fishing shed and put a blue Rapala lure on one of your rods. I went to work on the rocks facing southwest and immediately had a strike on my second cast. Wow! There are fish here. A few casts later I was hooked up and watched twenty fish on the surface around the one I had on! Tons of fish!
A few minutes later I was hooked into a monster taking line and fishing all directions except home. I saw him go left into the rocks. I had to land this beast but didn’t think the odds great. So in my jeans and your fishing jacket (a hall-closet special), I went down into the water and started tiring him out and trying not to break the line. One big wave brought him all the way in. Okay, there’s a chance!