my life in fishing: solo
much longer than the first one. i find it hard to internal edit on something i'm so stuck in the middle of. anything that follows will not be so much.
I pull up to the lake, the very next day, and a guy is standing over his trunk, pondering something of great importance. I get out, with my newly purchased worms and newly purchased reel, the kind with a big flat button to make the line dole itself out and the familiar flywheel handle next to it, and he's on me in a moment.
"Hey, do you have any bait I can buy off you? I can't believe it, I forgot my bait." He's exasperated, and paces between my car and his, torn. I say sure, brandishing the nightcrawlers I just bought at G&W Bait, down the street from the deserted Balloons are Fun, Incorporated storefront. It's a long wide room filled with big coolers, and one wall dripping with rods, reels and other fishing ephemera, with an old man selling a set-up to someone and a slow-moving, younger man who looks like his son, sitting at a table with an old woman, some relative who looks older than the other two combined. He produces the worms from the fridge, dumps them into a metal scoop so I can approve of how they squirm around in the dirt.
They squirm just as much when I dump them onto the paper bag of the trunk, where we set to the task of dividing them up. Dirt tumbles everywhere and he laments, "Aw man, I just washed my car. Damn. I just washed this." He gave me 2 bucks for half my worms, and then we decided to fish together. Suddenly I belonged, the fishing society had taken me in, obviously aware that two appearances within 24 hours meant that I was serious.
"Do you wanna see what I caught yesterday?"
"Sure." I'm a bit unsettled by the constant manic expression in his eyes, but I play along.
He pops the trunk and opens the cooler inside, where a large turtle shell sits on a layer of half-melted ice. He pulls it out and turns it over, where I can see healthy hunks of once-living turtle still hanging from the pink inside of the shell.
He explained how he had caught it yesterday and that a girl had asked him if she could have the shell. That's why he was back at the Lake again, to give her the shell and whatever else she was willing to entertain.
"I serve more meat than Wilson's." And I laughed, because, well, we're part of something bigger, so we dismiss our flaws in favor of our strengths. Our strength was the commitment of being out, fishing, at 5:30 in the evening, when people were still straggling home from work, or just starting their shifts, or worrying over the absence of either. Us, we fished.
He gave me a pair of peach-colored surgical gloves, from a box brimming with them in his trunk, looking like they'd just fallen off a hosital supply room shelf.
"I'm an anesthesiologist."
And with that, we fished. The reel was still new to me, so my fellow fisherman showed me, repeatedly, how to cast, telling me, repeatedly, how he was taught just the day before by a very young girl, probably the same girl who I'd seen catch a fish and casually dismiss it. After a few tries, I got the whole cock-your-arm-back-push-the-button-release-and-snap öforward concept down cold and began marveling as my line flew farther and father each time.
"Oh, I'm James." This was about 20 minutes into us fishing. Silence is a natural byproduct of fishing, where you get so caught up in checking your knots and hooking your bait, that to devote any part of your brain to the act of conversation makes everything seemingly go awry.
We stand there, the sun pounding down behind us, the 90 degree weather and the utter lack of hydration draining us as we cast over and over, often watching our nightcrawlers sail much further than our hooks, a product of poor threading.
You cannot just stick a worm on a hook, there's no such thing as quick and painless when it comes to hooking your bait, because the aim is to make it impossible for the fish to nab the bait without its mouth coming in close proximity to the hook. This involves threading, like knitting with the hook as your needles and the worm as your fabric. You fold and re-fold the worm onto the hook, until it is impaled at least 7-8 times and wrapped in a tight ball around your hook. This ensures the fish have to work to eat, and risk a little, and that your worm holds on while you cast far off, where, ostensibly, all the good fish are just sitting and waiting for a half-dead worm to come squirming in worm agony, eager to be eaten.
James has already told me the story of catching the turtle, of the way it kept moving even after he chopped all its limbs off, the slow, vaguely dangerous jutting out of its head and biting motions of its jaw. He stops, sets his pole down and imitates the slow extension of a turtle head, becoming the turtle. He tells me again about whacking each leg off, and then finally lopping its head off. In his basement with his girlfriend watching on, pleading with him not to butcher it. He'll end up telling this story three more times before I leave.
Finally, something grabs on to my line and it's heavy and it's fighting, and all I can hear is the whirr of my reel, like trying to spin your pedals when the bike is racing down a steep incline, the whirr of something happening but nothing you can do about it. I reeled and reeled and finally it broke the surface: a turtle. Just as I made it out and James did too, the turtle let go and dropped back into the brown lake. James became incensed and began baiting up again, determined to catch that turtle and put it's meat right next to the other in his freezer.
"You ever had turtle meat? It's good."
My worm was still intact, I cast out.
James dangles his worms just around the dock, following the bubbles that surface every now and then, excitedly prepared for the turtle to hit. "I'm gonna get him. That's right. Right over there." My line hits again and after what feels like endless struggling, of reeling in far more line than came out, of tugging back on my pole, to tire it out, I finally lift it from the water. A huge clam. What the fuck?
"That's a oyster."
"What do I do with it?"
"You gotta step on it. Then use it for bait. The fish love that shit, eat it right up."
"Step on it?"
"Yeah man, just smash it open. Hell, there might be a pearl inside."
I didn't want to get into the whole clam/oyster differential, and James had gotten a sense of my squeamishness, first in overcoming the repeating spearing of worms and now in the prospect of mindlessly stomping a clam open to harvest its flesh to catch more of its ilk. So I did it. The clam split open with a big gush of water and pieces of shell spinning away from underfoot. No pearl. James, disappointed, returns to pursuing his turtle.
I'm still flush with the excitement of it all. The man vs. briny deep scenario, with man victorious, the last few seconds, the clam splitting the water, the confused victory. For being such a lackadaisical and lazy sport, fishing is most engaging for the whole 'suspense in the anticipation of the bang' school of thought.
Then the old fisherman shows up. He has two tackle boxes, three poles, one big cooler and a take no bullshit from youngsters attitude. He regards the both of us with a slightly leery disposition, me even moreso since I'm the nave white kid come to fish with no knowledge at all. When I point out the clam I caught, he brushes it off, a literal sweep of his hand. "Everyone's caught one of those." He takes James under his wing and teaches him how to cast. I hook a hunk of clam onto my hook and cast out.
The old fisherman has set up his three poles, casting them way out, James' voice singing the theme song to "Going Fishing" in between discussing what he'd like to do to that girl when she shows up and how much of a chump her man, who she apparently bought a Mustang convertible for, really was, afraid to even grab the turtle from the previous day. The old fisherman gets all the stories I've been getting, every boast and lewd comment followed by "You know what I'm sayin?"
A woman shows up. She is HUGE. She's dressed in all black velour-esque material, and she waddles down the dock÷to catcalls from James÷carrying a chair, a tacklebox and a few poles. She and James talk back and forth for 15-20 minutes, each convinced they know the other through a totally different set of friends and circumstances, until they both figure it out.
Choicest dialogue: "Damn, Shondra waited all that time for him to get out of jail, just so he could shoot her in the face."
"Mmm hmm."
Mary, I think her name is Mary, casts out two lines and watches the bobbers while shooting the proverbial. I am in a rut of nothing biting, or something biting well before I ever get the notion I'm giving the worms away for free, giving the fish no action. Mary gets the turtle story, and the story about the girl, and more bursts of crude non-sequiturs until James starts bursting out into song. His voice is pretty good.
Walking down the dock, singing so loud it echoes back as clear and distinct, James heads to his car, grabs the turtle shell and comes back with it and a big knife and begins carving the remaining hunks of meat out, doling them out to us to fish with.
Mary is using wax worms, which look like beige, overgrown maggots. At one point she casts out and literally has a fish on the end of her line 20-30 seconds later. It was blink of the eye fast. She does it again a minute later. Old fisherman sucks down a Pepsi from his cooler and calmly smokes another cigarette: filterless and all-white, no trace of brand or origin. Each one takes him ten minutes. He regards everything with weariness and resignation.
James leaves to talk with a couple who've shown up and occupied one of the picnic tables nearby, looking to mack on the girl in the stead of the one who stood him up. Old fisherman doles us out soda from his cooler: Dr. Pepper or Pepsi are our choices. Mary gets several bites, discussing how she's also baiting with Italian sausage. Old Fisherman pretends not to hear or care, I watch the sun drop, half paying attention to my line, which just lays slack.
I fish with the turtle meat, which is gray and stringy, but stays on the hook without fail, mostly because the fish aren't interested. Even the clam didn't inspire much more biting than the worms, which were fairly unappealing from all indications. Then the mustang pulls up and James lights up and it's the girl's man, looking like Ashford from Ashford and Simpson, carting a chair and fishing gear. James shows him the shell, now a darker pink from where he accidentally sliced his thumb open while carving out the meat.
It's right about now that I figure it out. The voice coming from across the lake, the overloud proclamations to "cut it's head off," that was James. I somehow felt immensely satisfied.
By now the sun's completely gone down the slope and it's getting harder to see, without benefit of flashlights or fluorescent bobbers or nightvision, while Ashford is just sitting on his chair in the middle of the dock, no closer to actually fishing. James is still bouncing around, on some sort of strange sugar high, belting out song snips and his constant one-liners, while Mary and the Old Fisherman laugh, roll their eyes, call him crazy. Meanwhile, I'm doggedly feeding the fish whatever is within reach. They refuse the turtle meat altogether, they gnaw at the clam meat now and again, they steal the worms without fail.
So I pack up. I feel sunburned, dehydrated and in need of something chemically persuasive. Everyone laments that I'm leaving, telling me that I'm leaving right when I should be getting started, assuring me I don't have to worry about people messing with me. Apparently Swope Park becomes home to wildings of local youth. Not that I'm worried about that, I tell them, its just that I've been out here for four hours now. Besides, I have a knife and a car and a box full of hooks.
I shake hands with James, I throw my stuff in the back of my car, pull a U and head home. Hands covered in dirt, face burning, mouth toxic from cigarettes and in desperate need of water. I am something, now, approximating a fisherman.
Posted by xtop at August 17, 2003 11:04 PM
