MY FATHER TEACHES ME TO FISH
I
am two and a half years old, standing beside a rocky stream in the wintertime,
parka buttoned up to my chin, fur hood framing my small, flushed face. My father
kneels beside me. He is thirty-two, his unlined face clean shaven, a baseball
cap pulled down behind his ears. He is holding a fish for my inspection. It is
a rainbow trout, glossy brown at its back and belly, with gold, green, blue,
and red stripes arching down its sides. It is huge, twenty-four inches, nearly
as large as I am. It moves jerkily, its powerful body straining for life in the
chilly air, and I squeal in excitement, delighted by its size and its strength.
When I have looked, lightly touched, been fully introduced to this new being,
my father returns it gently to the icy water.
_________________________
I am
eight. It is a summer Sunday afternoon. The sun beats down on my tanned arms and
face, and a soft breeze blows across the still green water. My father is
thirty-seven. His glossy black hair is long on the sides, covering his ears,
sweeping over the top of his head to cover the spot where he is beginning to
lose his hair. Black sunglasses, police style, wrap across his face above his
dark beard. His skin is tanned, too, darker than mine, but white under the band
of his watch. We sit at the edge of a small pond sunk in a green hill, catching
sunfish.
He
puts earthworms on my hook, teaches me to cast, “Keep your thumb on the line
until your hand is at
I
watch the red and white bobber float along in the ripples, stare at the fluffy,
lazy clouds. He notices when I am not paying attention. “Keep your pole up and
your line tight. Watch your bobber!”
The
bobber dips, “Jerk your pole up!” and I yank the rod back a few inches, hooking
into a bright sunfish, which retreats deep into the water. It fights for its
life, jerking back and forth, and my small arms strain with the struggle of
reeling it in, but I do it myself. When I have brought my catch to the grassy
edge of the pond, my father leans over the water, grips the line, and lifts the
fish. This fish is small, about four inches from its mouth to the tip of its
tail. It is grayish green with vertical dark stripes on its sides. Its belly is
bright orange. Fins at the top of its body and by its gills are sharp, can cut
through skin if handled carelessly.
My
father takes it off the line for me, smoothing the fins back so they don’t
prick his skin. The slippery fish disappears in his large, rough, hand. He dips
it in the water and it flashes away, a streak of orange receding into the
depths of the pond.
_________________________
I am
fifteen. The pier sways in the waves and the wind, but I am not afraid because
I am not afraid of anything. The beach
is deserted in the dusky evening, and men are chumming for sharks at the end of
the pier. My father stands beside me, forty-four, his hair thin on top. Silver
streaks have begun to surface in his beard, moving from the corners of his
mouth to the space under his chin.
He
shows me how to slip shrimp on my hook, tighten the sinkers on my line, cast as
far as I can out into the ocean. “Cast in and let your bait sink. Keep your
line tight—reel it in slowly to take away the slack.”
I
am frustrated with his instruction, having heard the same spiel a hundred times
before. I know he thinks I am stupid, inept, incapable of doing things on my
own. I have spent this vacation trying to avoid my parents, frustrated with
their rules, their seeming control over me. “Keep your line tight,” my father
reminds, “and if you haven’t gotten a tug in ten or fifteen minutes, change the
position of your hook.”
I
feel a drag on my line, pull hard to set the hook, struggle to bring in the
aggressive fish. I have caught something huge from the feel of its fight. My
father helps me; it’s too heavy for me to pull in alone. It emerges from the
water, swinging and thrashing in the salty air below the weathered wood we
stand on. It is a skate—an animal like a small stingray—its silvery gray body
about a foot and a half across at its widest part. It flops on the splintery
pier, its jaws gnashing.
Reminding
me to avoid its sharp, barbed tail, Dad attempts to remove the hook from the
toothy mouth—I am afraid of being bitten. I am amazed that I have caught this
bizarre creature, an alien from another atmosphere, yet irritated that I need
help from someone else to reel it in, free it. As my father grips the hook, the
skate’s teeth slash into the pad of his thumb, and blood blooms there. My
father winces, jerks the hook the rest of the way out, then tosses the skate
over the rail and back into the water. I watch it sail through the air and
splash into the waves, gliding down into the deep until I can no longer see it.
_________________________
I am
twenty-three; I have just finished my first semester of graduate school,
training to be a teacher. My hair is pulled back from my face and my floppy
fishing hat protects me from the sun. Although there is a strong breeze, I am
sweating inside my neoprene waders and boots. My father is fifty-two. His hair
and beard are silver, his hat a larger version of mine. The
We
have waded out into water up to my hips. “Hold on to my left side as we cross
the stream. Hang on to my vest; don’t slip.”
I plant my feet in the pebbly bottom of
the river, cast out toward rocks jutting upward out of the current. “Always
fish upstream so the fish can’t see you—they face upstream when they feed.
Trout like to lay in the edge of fast water, in a deep hole, in front of a
large rock, out of the swift part of the stream.” My father’s face is bathed in
the sunlight, and creases form in the corners of his hazel eyes as he squints.
“When your bait floats by, a trout will dart out of its resting place to snatch
it up. They expend less energy this way.”
He
stands over me. “Keep your bait moving so it doesn’t snag on the bottom of the
stream. Keep the end of your rod up. Tighten the slack on your line.”
We
wait silently until I feel a tiny tug on my bait. I jerk to set the hook, and
there is a devil on my line. “Reel faster…Reel faster! Tug back your rod!”
I
struggle with the heft and strength of the fish, bending my knees to keep my
footing. The fish emerges from the water, glints in the sun, flies through the
air, splashes back into the water. My father is behind me; his hand is on my
elbow. The fish is still struggling, but I am winning as it weakens. It comes
toward us through the coppery green water, and my father scoops it up in the
net. It is a suckerfish, pale and golden, and twenty-two inches long.
Taking
my forceps, I grip the hook and lift the fish. “Don’t touch its skin if you can
help it. Fish have a delicate slime layer that protects them from harm, like
dust on a butterfly’s wings. Touching it can damage the fish.” With a twist of
my wrist, the sucker is unhooked, a gold flash vanishing back into the rushing
water.
_________________________
I am
thirty. My father is fifty-nine, standing at the edge of a trout stream in a
canyon somewhere in our home state,
He
is teaching me to fish, again. My father’s voice echoes off the rocks,
repeating the same words, spoken in the same deep, even tones I have heard every
time I have ever been fishing. I can recite them from memory, like a script.
This time, though, instead of hearing the instructions, I hear his voice behind
the words: “This I have to give to you. This is what I know. I will show you my
world.”
Then
understanding blossoms within me: there is a reason I teach—it is genetic, a
legacy—my father teaches me more than just fishing. I, like my father, catch
and release ideas, like fish, pulling them from the stream of my mind, reeling
them in to examine, releasing them out into the water of the world. This wonder
at life, this awareness of the world, the ability to hear, and see, and speak
what I know: these things—more than fishing—these are the things my father has
taught me.
Sarah L. Morris