Gone fishing

On retrodiction's fictions

Untitled, Howard Finster

When my grandfather taught me to fish on the York River, every time he would cast, he would say, “Go out there ranger and bring in a stranger!” Mostly we caught spot, croaker, sometimes flounder. And mud toads—or that’s what we called them, inedible bottom feeders that my grandfather would brutally conk against the side of the boat when he tossed them back. I guess to knock them out or even kill them so we wouldn’t catch them again? But I don’t know. Would that even work? Maybe he was just mad that mud toads existed in the universe. Maybe it was just a habit.

The York River is an estuary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The very first catches I made on my own were weird novelties. The first was a flying fish. The second was an eel. I don’t know if my grandparents normally kept eel, but we kept mine, and my grandmother pan fried it that night. It was fantastic.

I really enjoyed fishing but I did not enjoy cleaning fish. This is poor form, inexcusable really, but it was true. Maybe I would like cleaning fish now. I haven’t done it since I was a teenager. Other than half-heartedly messing around on a dock and tossing them back, I haven’t gone out fishing in many years. I still have the pole my grandfather gave me, but it’s in storage. Grace, my wife, has rightly prodded me to get rid of it. I probably will, but I haven’t yet.

My daughter, Marigold, wants to get a pet fish. I overheard her telling Grace that she had been promised a pet fish some time ago and it was time to make good. We’ll have to talk about it as a family, Grace told her. I thought: Why not?

Twenty years ago, almost to the day, I was living in Little Rock and took a walk to a nearby park. (Well it was almost to the day when I first wrote this paragraph, more than a month ago, but then I didn’t get around to finishing this post and kind of forgot about it until perusing my draft folder today. Time flies.)

So: I was living in Little Rock and took a walk. There was a pond in the park. It was, of course, hot outside. And an older woman sitting by the pond said, of course, “How ’bout this heat?”

I concurred. Then she said, “You like to read, don’t you?”

I told her that she was right, I did, and she said it was a nice place to read, by the pond. “It’s calm,” she said. It is, I said, and also it’s a great place to walk with nothing much to do.

Then her husband approached and asked me if I’d seen the catfish he caught. He had it tied to a stake in the ground and pulled it out of the water. “Thirty-five pounds,” he said.

At the time, this must have been the biggest catfish I’d ever seen. It was disgusting, in the way of catfish, but the blue glisten on the skin looked pretty in the light. In height, it would have come up to my mid-thigh. It looked more like a beast than a fish. I don’t mean the size. An enormous bass, or even a shark, still looks like a fish, just very large. The big catfish looked more like a rodent, maybe a possum. The whiskers were tremendous and solid and sharp. I held the rope and for a moment my arm quivered with the weight.

“You should have seen the one that got away,” the fisherman said.

I laughed because I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t.

”The one I almost had,” he told me, “was twice this one’s size. Oh man, it would have been a state record.”

Then he said, “I had it in my hands three times.” He kept repeating this again and again. Three times.

I asked what happened.

“I just assed around too long and eventually I assed out,” he said.

In the end, the rope got around his pinky and the fish took off with such force that it broke his pinky, or at least that was his diagnosis. The pinky was in bad shape, I can confirm. But he didn’t seem too bothered.

“I’m thankful that the Lord at least blessed me to have been able to feel it in my hands,” he told me.

I agreed that this was a blessing.

“I cried though,” he confessed. “I voluntarily cried over that situation.”

I’m thankful that the Lord at least blessed me to have been able to feel it in my hands. At the time I found this immeasurably sweet—or to be truer to myself at the time, I found it wise. Recounting it and typing it now, it feels almost cheeky, or cheesy even. Or I feel like someone who is only pretending to get the contours of a joke. But anyway. That’s what he said, and it made me feel very satisfied, very whole.

The only reason I remember this memory is because I emailed the story to a friend at the time, and I was looking something else up on an old email account and I came across it.

Or that’s not quite right. I do also remember the event itself. Or I think I do. I would remember it even if I had never written the email, but without the email I might never have bothered to access the memory. I’m not sure. But anyway, as soon as I read it, the memory was there in nearly pristine form: I remembered the fisherman, I remembered the wife clocking me right away as a reader, I remembered the way the catfish looked, and the hotness of the day, and the lake. The email gave me other details that I did not remember—the precise wording of what was said, the fact that my arm shook when I held the rope. Or it gave me the details in the form that I wrote in recounting it to a friend a couple days after it happened.

And the other thing is that I remember emailing about it to my friend. That’s maybe the clearest memory of all. In other words, I remember not just the experience but the fact that I registered it and the fact that I wanted to share it with a friend. So from the beginning, the story was shaped by its telling.

Another thing. It wasn’t recently when I found the email that prompted this. It was many months ago, maybe a year ago. But I filed it away—maybe I would like to write again about that day, or write about writing about it, or something.

There is so much refraction when I sit down to tell a story that it can make me feel a little dizzy. There is an analogy here, a self-help story to soften my anxiety about memory and about stories, something about the fish you catch, the fish you let go, the fish you have on the line just for a time. But I could never be a self-help writer of any use because this always happens to me. I can glimpse the metaphor but can’t find the punchline. Keep fishing, I guess.