by Henry Hughes
Also by Henry Hughes
Poetry
Men Holding Eggs
Moist Meridian
Shutter Lines
Bunch of Animals
Edited Collections
Art of Angling: Poems About Fishing
Fishing Stories
Copyright © 2016 by Henry Hughes
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover artwork courtesy of Rebecca McCannell
Cover design by Tom Lau
Interior illustrations courtesy of Richard Bunse
Print ISBN: 978-1-51070-363-6
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-51070-372-8
Printed in the United States of America
For Chloë
Illustrations by Richard Bunse
Frontispiece, “Woman Swimming with Fish”
Chinook Salmon
Bluefish
Mackerel
Schooling Bluefish
Walleye
Striped Bass
Common Carp
Brown Trout
Flathead Catfish
Steelhead
Tailpiece, “Woman Holding Fish”
Contents
A Note on Truth
Fishdate
Casting Off
Snappers
Tickle Trout
The Shark and the Fox
Holy Mackerel
China Cat
Swimming
Back Seat with Fish
Schooling
The Big Hard
Sashimi
Cool Hot Chance
Kings and Emperors
Auld Lang Syne
Law Abiding
China, Too
Arc and Pulse
Acknowledgments
Give him a place by the fire,
pour whisky and cold beer,
for he is a far casting angler
who’s put a hook in my ear
—Inscription found in longhand on a Long Island bar, long washed away
A Note on Truth
Truth can be a slippery notion for anglers who have traditionally been exempt from precise accuracy. The very word, “angling,” appearing in possibly the first English language text on the subject, Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, possibly written by the nun Dame Juliana Berners in 1496, refers to the shape of the hook and those angled relationships between fish, line, rod, and agent. The author also tells us to “take good heed that in going about your disports ye open no man’s gates but that ye shut them again.” So I’ve adjusted a few names and details to set the neighbors at ease. Dame Berners further enjoins that in fishing we avoid vices and the pursuit of wealth and fame and angle “principally for your solace, and to cause the health of your body, and especially of your soul.” Much to aspire to, but I’m willing to grant the good nun her passions and secrets if she and you would grant me mine.
Fishdate
At the age of thirty-seven, I had no lover, and my only fish was a chipped plaster striped bass that my brother picked up at a yard sale and put on my backseat to keep me company. In the summer of 2002, I drove my beat-up Buick from Long Island, New York, where I grew up, to Monmouth, Oregon, for a position as an English professor. During the job interview they did not tell me that Monmouth was dry. In the neighboring town of Independence, I found a tavern called Leonora’s Ghost and watched the New York Mets lose to the San Diego Padres, wondering if my father was also tuned in. Two women sat at the end of the bar. I tried to make conversation, but they weren’t interested. I finished my beer and walked across the street to the Willamette River. A couple Latino kids plunked worms from the bank, boats dripped from trailers, and an osprey tore something gold from the current. Fishing, I thought and smiled.
Fishing new geographies can be challenging until you get to know the waters and the people. At eighteen, I left Long Island and the Atlantic Seaboard to live in South Dakota, Indiana, Japan, and China with trips around the Pacific, always fishing and meeting people, angling new environments and customs, connecting at all depths in every kind of weather, landing lifelong relationships, and losing what might have been.
After a couple hot days of unpacking and orientation, I walked back into Leonora’s Ghost and saw a rotund man inking fish and women on bar napkins. “That’s my kind of art,” I said. The man turned, a pink smile creasing through his thick white beard. “Pull up a stool,” he said. Richard Bunse and I talked, while sipping a couple Mirror Ponds, about Oregon trout, steelhead, salmon, rivers, lakes, bays, boats, and techniques. His words illustrated by quick-sketched maps and fly patterns. When the shapely bartender leaned back against the glass door of the beer cooler, purring “This feels nice,” Richard drew her, but instead of long-necked bottles, he penned trout swimming up beneath her as if she were floating over a placid river teaming with rainbows. “There’s something about the smooth lines of women,” Richard mused, “that remind me of fish.”
A week later I joined Richard’s drawing group, stepping into his River Gallery studio a few doors down from Leonora’s, smiling at the men and women setting up their pads and charcoal. Richard waved me over and pulled out a drawing horse. “Just relax,” he said and patted me on the shoulder. I looked forward and nodded respectfully to the voluptuous model undressing and sitting on a velvet-draped table. After an hour of pushing pastel, my hand stiff and sweaty, we took a break. The model put on her robe, Richard poured a round of homemade wine, and we all talked in soft tones about the session. The windowless old studio was like a cobwebbed grotto cluttered with art supplies, fishing tackle, statues, and walls of women and fish. “It’s a temple,” I declared. Richard smiled, rose, and called the congregants back to prayer. But prayer is nothing without action. Richard and I fly fished together a few times, and he gave me boxes of his hand-tied nymphs and dries and chartered shadowy streams, where we caught and released small cutthroat trout of spectacular speckled beauty. I met other anglers, like Jefferson, a lean, bearded rock climber who would smoke a bowl and then guide me along slick canyon ledges and across swift runs of mountain water, waiting patiently for me to catch up and always offering a hand and the first cast into to a sweet spot where a steelhead sometimes lay. Steelhead, a race of rainbow trout, have evolved like salmon to leave their natal rivers for the sea and return after two or three years. They are wary and gorgeous—an olive back, spotted, and shading to cherry-blushed silver sides—and every bit as powerful as their name. I kept a clear head on these rushing adventures, but when the waders came off I’d join Jefferson in a beer and a smoke, listening to his colorful stories of people and fish. “Fishing is life,” he’d say without an ounce of pretense or affected philosophy. “Life is fishing,” I’d say, exhale, and smile.
Then there was Reverend Bob, the husband of our department secretary, who took me on his wooden drift boat down coastal rivers where we hooked, lost, an
d landed several salmon. Bob loved to talk about church, family, and fishing. “Right there,” he lifted a hand off the oar and pointed to a bend in the river, “twenty years ago after service on a freezing-cold Sunday, my father tossed a pink corkie behind that rock and hooked a thirty-inch coho with a seal bite on its belly.” I cast my bobber and pink jig in the same spot, mending the slack line and watching intently as Bob delivered a detailed reverential history spanning three decades of every fish hooked behind that rock. My bobber spun in the eddy but never winked.
“He can’t remember to pick up milk,” Bob’s wife shook the empty jug one morning when we were heading out, “but he can tell you the weather, the lure, the time, and the place, spot, hole—is that what you say?—the hole where he caught every fish. It’s uncanny.” And so it is, the focus and intensity of catching fish sharpens the hooks of memory and brings a net under the past.
That very morning twelve years ago, Bob and I drank bitter black coffee and cast pink-bellied spinners with chrome blades into the tidal surge three miles from the ocean on the Salmon River north of Lincoln City, Oregon. I told him that my father disliked fishing but took me often when I was young. “That’s a good dad,” Bob said. I was using fifteen-pound test and making long casts, recounting distant details from a fishing trip with my father on Long Island some thirty years ago. Bob smiled, closed his tackle box decorated with the intersecting arcs of a Jesus fish, and then pointed to an eagle sweeping down over a swirl in the river. The tide rolled in, sea lions barked, and around ten o’clock I hooked a fish that torpedoed a creamy wake upstream, taking line and sounding with the smack of its wide spotted tail. Bob hallelujahed—“Fish on!”
Landing a large fish on light line is realizing high hopes on modest means, and it always thrills me. You must stay firm to what you want—no slack—and crank in when you can, but also let the wildness run or it will break away for good. All living connections demand a little give and take.
Bob pulled the anchor and we followed the powerful salmon, working its energy away from a logjam and back toward our boat—its long silver suddenly glowing in the marbled water.
“What a blessed creature,” Bob intoned. The fish raced around the boat, taking and surrendering line, finally tilting flank-up in exhaustion. Bob leaned over with the landing net, but the water exploded in scales and fur as a brown hump breached and rolled in a sucking swirl. “Damn sea lion!” Bob yelled. The revived and terrified fish shot a few feet from the boat, and I reeled and arched back on the rod, hoping the line would hold, finally horsing the salmon’s head toward the net, the sea lion chomping at its tail. Bob dropped the twisting salmon at our feet, pulled off his hat, and looked to the gray skies, “Dear God, thank you.” When Bob, a born-again Christian, finished his prayer—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—I hugged him, tipped my hat to the sea lion, and bowed to the thirty-six-pound Chinook salmon that we shared with Bob’s family, a couple of my colleagues, and Richard.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Richard said after hearing my story. We were sitting at a long table in the River Gallery, sampling some of the salmon, which had been smoked by Jefferson using a bourbon-molasses brine and local alder. “Mmh-mmh,” Richard said as he licked his lips. A couple visiting the gallery from California came to the table, and I offered them some fish. The woman puckered and said, “No thanks,” but the man took a piece, chewed, and nodded approvingly. “So you catch these around here?” he asked. I told him about Oregon salmon and mentioned that California still had some runs. “We just buy fish at the supermarket,” the man said. “I have no idea where it’s coming from.”
After the couple left, Richard and I talked about how little most people know about their food. Although the fish I catch make up only a small portion of my diet, it feels good to get out on the water and pursue, hook, and land some of my own food. Most meat eaters never do more than pick up a shiny wrapped package from the cold market, and perhaps that comfortably widens the distance between the necessity of killing to eat and the necessity of eating to live. Fishing shortens the distance, bringing us a little closer to our positive primitive vitalities. Our very language reminds us that fish are wild in our hearts. French-Norman conquests brought to Anglo-Saxon sophisticated words such as beef, pork, and poultry that attempt to fence us from creatures we know and eat. Fish remains fish. When I landed that Chinook, cut its gills to bleed out in the river, patted her hard bright sides, gazed into the black pupiled eye, and later sliced off deep pink fillets, taking a clean, raw hunk into my mouth, I felt close to my animal joy.
Centuries from now, if humans survive, they may look back on fishing as a barbaric blood sport gone the way of bear baiting and fox hunting. It may be perfectly acceptable to raise fish, chickens, and cattle on industrial farms, perhaps genetically engineered without pain-feeling nerve centers, or better, to synthesize their nutritious and delicious proteins in food factories. But to enjoy hooking and fighting a struggling fish—maybe even to let it go, so the torture could be repeated?—my God, what savagery!
Richard smiled and ate another piece of salmon. “There’s no way we could exist without doing some harm. Even the vegetarian is a killer.”
“What about vegan?” I asked.
“I’m not going there.” Richard folded his arms tightly, as if refusing to eat his vegetables.
“Well, it’s true,” I said. “Agriculture does its damage.” I told Richard about helping with the harvests in South Dakota, where I’d also seen rabbits, birds, and snakes chopped up by the combine. There’s erosion and the deadly effects of fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Worse yet, our fruits and vegetables are flown and trucked across the world on toxic fossil fuels that countless people fight and die over.
“Damn,” Richard shook his head. But we also knew that even careful sportfishing led to some waste and destruction. “Ah, you do the best you can,” Richard said and raised his hands like a referee. “We’re all killers. At least with fishing you own up to it.”
Our conversation moved from relationships with food to relationships with women. Richard had just turned sixty and he still enjoyed a good marriage with Carol, his wife of thirty years. At first Carol was frustrated with all the time he spent angling. So they started taking camping and fishing trips together.
“On those trips, fishing isn’t the priority,” Richard explained. “It’s all about give and take and sharing time in a beautiful place.” Richard’s wisdom allowed that serious anglers would always want and need some time alone, but learning to balance fishing with the rest of life was important. “Maybe you’ll find a woman that’s as crazy about fishing as you are, but I doubt it,” he said. “You just need to find a woman that likes fishing—or at least is okay with it.”
“What about that new bank teller across the street?” I asked.
Richard laughed. “Does she like fishing?”
I withdrew cash the old-fashioned way and chatted with Haley, a perky bank teller with blue eyes and a frosted swirl of short blonde hair. She liked the outdoors, especially running, and we stepped out on a jogging date that ended nicely with a glass of chilled pinot gris and a brief kiss. She and I jogged together, ran a few road races, and even started the Portland Marathon together, but Haley steamed ahead and finished a half hour before I collapsed over the line. Haley was high energy. She loved to exercise, work extra days at the bank, shop, clean, and have occasional sex—her tan shoulders, small chest, and narrow muscled hips moving in rapid, almost convulsive spasms. And we had to keep it tidy, showering before and after, the drier always tumbling with a fresh set of sheets. Her Salem apartment was immaculate, her kitchen counters and stovetop gleamed like showroom store models. “I make a lot of salads,” she said, slicing a tomato on a polished granite slab.
Haley said she also ate fish, so I planned to cook us a healthy dinner one Friday at my apartment in Monmouth. I caught a few trout at Detroit Lake that afternoon and had just set the cooler down on my kitchen floor when she pulled up
. “Smells fishy in here,” she said as her nose twitched.
“Probably my waders and jacket. I’ll take them out back.”
“So, did you catch anything?” she asked, kissing me lightly on the lips.
“Of course,” I answered and smiled, popping the cooler and showing her five pretty ten-inch rainbows. Her face tightened.
“Bloody,” she looked away.
Sensing Haley was put off by all the fishiness, I poured her a glass of pinot gris and set to chopping leaks and parsley, dropping them into a pan with bay leaves, peppercorns, salt, and an inch of water. As the paisley broth simmered, she went on to tell me about a manipulative supervisor, her coworker’s wedding plans, and some policy changes at the bank. I listened then set the cleaned trout into the steamy pan and covered it, quickly turning to a marinated cucumber salad. “I can help with that,” she said. And when I started to tell her about my day on the lake, she frowned, “It must be nice to have a day off.”
When the fish came out of the pan, Haley asked, “Does it still have bones?” I showed her how the flesh easily slid off the spine and suggested she dapple it with a little mayonnaise and dill. She didn’t like touching the trout but managed to fork up a translucent wedge, chewing and swallowing with a crooked smile. Haley ate her salad and some of her fish, but she clearly didn’t savor it. When I held up my skeletal trout by the tail, her eyes went wide and then she screamed.
“It’s okay. It’s just Dash.” The neighbor’s cat peered in through the dark window. I pushed up the sash and Dash jumped in—the friendly gray tabby often stopped by for a bit of fish or turkey—and I set down my plate. Haley shuddered and went to the bathroom. When she came back to the couch, I could see she was tense.
“This place really does smell like fish,” she said again. “So I have to ask you—why do you like fishing so much? I mean, isn’t it boring just sitting there with your pole?”