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.

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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 one o’clock, then release as you bring the pole forward in front of your body. Follow through, then reel in a bit to tighten your line.”  

 

            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.

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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.

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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 Gunnison River in Colorado bends and twists around us. I am awed by the beauty of this place, thankful that my parents have brought me here with them. Golden light sparkles off the weeds and the water; the river cuts loops and swirls through the tall, waving grasses, and the dark mountains loom at the edges of the plains all around us. The air is sweet with the smell of horehound, like licorice, and when I return home I will find that I can not stand to eat licorice candy because I have learned to associate its smell with the handling of bait and worms.

 

            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.

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I am thirty. My father is fifty-nine, standing at the edge of a trout stream in a canyon somewhere in our home state, West Virginia. Trout leap from the water, emerging in the air and reentering the stream with a splash. We have hiked through white mountain laurels and pink rhododendrons down into this gorge, over stones and fallen trees to get to the stream. “Be careful of these rocks; they’re slippery. This is rattlesnake country—step on this log, not over it.”

 

            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

20 July 2005

 

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