TO FISH
What is it to fish? It’s a loop. It’s the skiff man taking away the landscape on the back deck, the spires of corks, the hills and mountains of web, the dunes of chafing gear and leads. Endless variations with the same materials. The strained sea yields eternal surprises. A puffer fish the size of a water balloon with curiously pretty golden amber eyes, a wolf eel sidewinding like a ribbon. Little “mossy” crabs inching across the deck, to be stepped on, die of exposure or to be swept or hosed back into the ocean, and to tell his family and friends: the abruptness of it, the disorientation, the sudden blinding brightness then the cool water again and slow, terrified, peaceful descent back to the bottom. Tempting as it is, don’t get too carried away anthropomorphizing. For example:
Chum, King, and Sockeye are swimming home from some time abroad in the open sea, chatting amicably, traveling steadily, without haste to the reunion (more of a swingers party) at Bear Creek. Chum wondering whether his female stream-mate will be attending (wasn’t eaten in her years in the sea). The morning has just broken and an encouraging rain is falling, leaving inverted pocks on the ceiling of the ocean. A good long day of easy traveling seems eminent but suddenly and confusingly there is a roadblock. They scatter nervously and try again but a force, hard to see but easy to feel as the current drags them towards the impenetrable wall of…what? Other fish, strangers, and jellyfish are being pulled, sucked against this barrier and disorientation and dread surges as the confines seem to grow around them, with a sort of palpable, intentional enmity. Whereas just seconds ago the roadblock could be faced and regarded and the option to turn around completely and swim back to the endless, interminable, lonely, free ocean was still a viable and comporting option, now, the resistance is everywhere. The x and y access are at a loss. Chum, King and Sockeye, are suddenly slapping sides and swarming in a untidy school with strangers and then the unimaginable: they are hoisted in a bag into the air and spilled with jellyfish stinging their eyes, their gills, the inside of their mouths and they are writhing on alien surfaces.
The scene on the deck is in pandemonium: everything in motion, the ground rolling. Chum, instead of spilling in the bag onto the deck like the rest, tumbled onto a piled net where he begins to slide towards the inviting open ocean in a company of jelly fish and kelp.
Before he slips back with the feckless jellyfish, whose existence transcends this ghastly reality, he sights something he takes to his death weeks later: King, handsome and strong, having his gills ripped out and dying in a pool of his own dark oily blood. (Chum, suddenly ashamed for his long standing class resentment, now seeing it in a mirror, grateful for his ordinariness as a Chum salmon and that of his kin to avoid such a gruesome handling, but in the end he realized, for all, it ends with death.) He rights him self in the water and not knowing what else to do follows his path forward, alone. It turns out that the female Chum was eaten by an orca two weeks prior.
Next: THE GAMBLE
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