Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

We felt good in Alaska, napping and driving on, encountering more caribou, a drunk woman who wanted a ride but smelled horrible and dangerous, and an abandoned Chevron station overrun with rabbits. In Denali, we followed the lumbering rumps of grizzly bears, watched them stop and rake berries, their dark faces and blonde backs inspiring our own wildness. So we drove on, sipped whiskey, popped a couple beers, and parked along the Jack River looking for more fish.

  In was August on the Taiga, and where the wide gray sky met the icy Jack, arctic grayling ran. Eugene threw spinners, and I walked upstream and cast a Royal Coachman—for no other reason than it was the prettiest fly in my box. I started feeling the rhythm, setting those white wings long across the river and sharply following the fly’s drift and bob downstream. Such pleasure, even without a strike. Then a grayling grabbed the coachman, ran, somersaulted out of the river, fighting hard and veering twice from my net before I lifted it—its sail-like dorsal fringed in red and dotted iridescent. As the fish died it grew as gray as the sky. After a couple hours of casting, catching, and releasing, I walked to the riverbank and set the one dead grayling on piece of driftwood. Knife-scoring one side, I pulled off some skin and then lifted the fish to my mouth and took a bite.

  In the eighteenth century, Jean de Crèvecoeur, living in the American wilds, posited that eating wild meat could make a man wild. “I’m worried about you,” Eugene said, counseling toward a hamburger and some noontime human exposure at the Cantwell Lodge. The bartender, Ron, a big bearded man around thirty, set us up with draft Molsons and bourbons on the side. There was a quiet, friendly mood to the place, and we started talking with Ron and a bony, smudged, retired old railroad man who said he was cutting wood all week and needed to get home and cut some more. Ron seemed delighted to have the extra company, and we threw dice to see who would coin up the jukebox. Larry, a middle-aged man who once tended the Cantwell bar, regaled us with local history—gold mining, snowmobiling, fishing, trucking, women, and drinking. A dark varnished clock on the wall was said to hold actual gold nuggets. The clock maker left the bar drunk and angry one night and drove his snowmobile right into the spinning prop of plane. His clock keeps the time he lost.

  “Any shootings around here?” we asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Larry said. “I was behind the bar, and this woman came in and she was mad at me cause I wouldn’t go out with her.”

  We laughed and whooed. “Larry, you lady killer.”

  “Other way around. She comes in and pulls out this pistol and starts shooting. There’s the hole.” He pointed to a bullet hole under the bar labeled in pencil .44 Mag.

  “She was shooting right for your family jewels,” Eugene speculated.

  “Well, I was already way down the bar and took my jewels with me. But she hit a jar of mustard that went all over the place.”

  “Like mustard gas in the Great War,” the old railroad man mused.

  We drank, talked, and laughed. More people gathered around. Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” played, and we sang over with, “Free, free pouring.” And that’s how it began to feel. The currents of the universal being flowing through us as we relived fish caught and lost, bought a couple rounds for the bar, tipped Ron, absorbed and told more stories. I bought a silver ring from a mustachioed woman and promised to give it first “to my girlfriend, Teiko,” then “to my girlfriend, Caitlin.”

  “You got some things to figure out,” Larry said and tipped his beer at me. “Be careful.”

  Down at the end of the bar was a man they called Second Chief, an Athabascan Indian neatly coiffed and dressed in a collared shirt and sweater. His discerning eyes behind square-rimmed glasses reminded me of the Japanese teachers with whom I worked. We asked Second Chief about the fishing. His soft voice was hard to hear over the jukebox, so we leaned in close, and he told us about the mountain lakes to the south, “Good fishing. Nobody ’round. But you’ll need horses. Take a few days.”

  “Better try a plane,” Larry interrupted. “Go see the bush pilot, Ray Atkins. He’ll fly you in.”

  At 5:30 in the afternoon we were drunk but full of energy. We brushed our teeth in the camper and followed Larry’s directions to Ray Atkins’ house. His pleasant wife answered the door and showed us into the living room dominated by a television set and a massive moose head, the animal’s taxidermied face glued to endless reruns of Cheers and Frasier. Ray and his wife must have known we’d had a few, but we held it together, asked his advice, and hired him to fly us to Caribou Lake for lake trout. “Pack light,” he said.

  We drove our camper down the rough road to a long pond where Ray docked his plane. In those days we drove drunk too often, regretting it the next day and swearing never to do it again. But when you’re drunk, it seems fine, even necessary.

  Ray’s plane filled quickly with a cooler, shotgun, ammo, fishing gear, and our heavy selves and seemed to barely lift off the water before the ground smeared below. Eugene and I looked anxiously at each other. “She was a little dead under that left wing,” Ray spoke calmly into his headset.

  Ray flew us south through deep, craggy canyons and pointed out mountain goats and bighorn sheep. It was grand, but the long day of fishing and drinking had stirred my pool. Hunched in the back seat, shifting to the banking turns and turbulence, I felt increasingly sick and uneasy. The plane suddenly dropped, and I clawed Eugene’s shoulders, saw the approaching ridge, heard the engine accelerate, turned away, and nearly vomited as we cleared the rock. We flew another ten minutes, and Ray put us down smoothly on the lake. “Thanks, Ray,” I said. “That was a lot of fun.” A few years later Ray and a client crashed in those mountains but survived.

  Above four thousand feet under a leaden sky, Caribou Lake winked against a bare shore of lichen and moss-printed rocks. Amid the low brush and a colony of curious ground squirrels, our cabin was a simple wood frame covered in tent plastic with a stove and cots. With plenty of light and our heads clearing, we stepped down to the water, threw small green spoons, and caught a brace of lake trout for dinner. Grizzly bear tracks followed the shore, and I glanced back at our shotgun leaning against the cabin.

  The little lakers turned out bright orange fillets that I fried in some bacon grease glommed from a jar above the stove. We ate, poured light vodkas, and talked. “God’s country, all to ourselves,” Eugene said, chewing a piece of lake trout.

  I nodded, knowing what he meant, but skeptical about there being any God, any sort of mystical realm beyond the human imagination that could conceive of a metaphor like “God’s country” and our rights to it.

  “So, trips like this bring us closer to God?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “What about people around the world who can’t fly to Alaska or some pristine wilderness for a little spiritually uplifting fishing? How are they gonna see God?”

  “A park, television, shrooms? I don’t know. Church?”

  “Seriously, man. Not many people could afford to take a trip like this. Do we really deserve it?”

  “Hell, yeah,” he said. “There’s no shame in spending money on a fishing trip.”

  “So it’s like money well spent on your spiritual enrichment?”

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I’m having the time of my life. But just think of the fuel alone it took to get us here. For what? A little recreation?”

  “No, to get us closer to God. Aren’t you paying attention?”

  I lay down confused, thinking maybe we should have ridden up here on horses like Second Chief counseled. This country and its fish needed to be earned more physically, more intimately. But we were modern, first-world pilgrims who had to get back to our jobs and credit card statements. I slept fitfully and rose hungover, stepping out of the cabin to the mad chirping of ground squirrels. Then, on the ridge behind our cabin, a wolf—its unmistakable silhouette a sharp symbol of—what? Wildness? Maybe. And perhaps even the rightness of my being here to see and feel it. “We need the tonic of wildness,” an
educated but financially strapped Henry Thoreau declared. I watched the wolf until it disappeared and then put away my guilt about being a privileged American and grabbed my fishing rod.

  Eugene said he needed some exercise, and he headed off on a long fish-walk to the west. I worked the lake before me, fly casting a high floating White Wulff and raising fish after fish. They were heavy-headed, lanky lakers—each one fourteen inches long—from a long lean lake. Although Alaska has a reputation for big game, high altitude waters surrounded by so little flora and with a long winter freeze just manage to sustain their fish. Conversely, shaggy shallow ponds in the South get too hot—the oxygen drops, and the fish gulp at the surface, dodging herons and good ole boys with bows and arrows. It’s a tough world at all latitudes, I thought. Gray clouds massed and shifted behind dark ridges, a peregrine falcon glided high and away, and I felt far from the peopled world, drinking in the “tonic of wildness,” both humbled and exalted by its sublimity. A good feeling, a spiritual feeling, at least while it lasted. After a few hours of casting, I walked back to the cabin and mixed myself a Bloody Mary. One good tonic deserves another. Our light packing did not exclude olives and celery. Eugene walked up with a stringer of fish and a huge caribou rack over his shoulder. “Yea, I wrestled it right off the beast,” he said and smiled.

  “Well done, man. Have a drink.” He had gone several miles to the next lake over, glimpsed the wolf, caught fish, napped in the sun, and found some fresh antlers. Ray Atkins picked us up in a couple days. We handed him a bag of fillets, lashed our antlers to the wing strut, enjoyed the return flight to Cantwell, and rested on the warm rocks beside the Jack River, watching grayling rise.

  Back in Japan in the autumn of 1993, I brought Teiko persimmons and a bottle of sake. She smiled and thanked me, but I knew she wasn’t happy.

  “I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore,” Teiko said.

  “Your father is still angry?”

  “No, me. You just want to play. It’s hard for me.”

  I had been with other women during the time that Teiko and I were together, but there were no stated expectations or exclusivities in our relationship. On one extended weekend in Tokyo, I met a younger woman who asked if I had any marijuana—extremely illegal in Japan. I did, and we got high in her little apartment. She had magazines depicting women with elaborate tattoos, and she said she wanted a phoenix or a koi on her back. “They’ll think you’re a gangster,” I said, and she ran her fingers over my mouth to close it. We underdressed, and I traced a koi across her lower back, its wide tail caressing the rise of her ass, my hand a pale fin over smooth stones at the base of a waterfall. We spent a few wild hours together. When I tried calling her the next day there was no answer. I called again and discovered it was the wrong number.

  I had been reading the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, who described emancipation using the term todatsu, a fish slipping from the net. Dogen referred to the Buddhist-inspired freedoms from desire, materialism, and selfishness, and I twisted the application to sexual freedom from social conventions. When I tried to explain some of this to Teiko, she laughed at me—“You are too selfish.” She was right. The desire for independence is a selfish desire. Then later she told me, “You hurt my heart.”

  I did not want to hurt Teiko’s heart, but I could not marry her. Through many talks and my apologies we remained friends, but it was never the same. There were other women, Japanese and gaijin, delights, disappointments, and some downright regrets.

  Under the pretext of English lessons, a Niigata housewife invited me over while her husband was away on business. Like King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, I knew that many a man has “his pond fish’d by his next neighbor,” but when this woman served me glass after glass of whiskey and a bowl of whale stew—the dark meat tasting like soapy corned beef grazed on seaweed—I felt like the prey. Like one of those sharks Frank Mundus of Long Island chummed in with ground grampus. I vaguely remember rolling around on the futon, and I’ll never forget waking up in the middle of the night on the salty sheets with an earthquaking hangover, the agonizing, seismic cries of a dying whale sounding through my brain.

  There were love notes from Caitlin, and we talked about getting back together. Would I meet her in New York for Christmas? She even sent me a photo of herself in a tight top, licking her lips, the inscription, “You’ll never catch another like me,” drawn out in luring, looping pink ink. I wanted to send her the ring I bought in Alaska, but I couldn’t find it. She was always beautiful in my mind, and I thought long and hard about Caitlin, but I didn’t want to settle down.

  I got handwritten letters from Aunt Lil. She was receiving radiation treatment for cancer, but her words were full of life from home: the mums were in bloom, my brother caught two big blackfish, she liked the scarf and silk slippers I sent, the cat ate some old bait in the garage and threw up, a dusting of snow made the oaks in the backyard glow. Lil’s letters pulled on me. Friends and family from New York urged me to come home, even my colleagues in Japan suggested I be with my family at a time like this. My supervisor, Sagi, said he’d understand. The Japanese honored family responsibilities. But when I spoke to my father on the phone he said I should stay in Asia, travel around, “See how Korea is doing.”

  “It’s your life,” my father said. “You gotta do what you really want to do. Don’t live your life for other people—not now, not at your age.”

  “What about Lil?” I asked.

  “She’s sleeping,” he said and fell silent. “Go on. Go.”

  My father knew what I wouldn’t admit—that I wanted to see and fish more of the world. His words, “It’s your life … do what you want,” stayed with me. I know some of my Japanese friends saw my actions as selfish, even reckless, but I packed my bags and tackle and headed to South Korea, where a friend, Jon, and I hiked through Seoraksan National park and down into the fishing town of Sokcho, where I caught herring off the dock, tossing a few to a pride of cats that had gathered around me. They clawed the flipping fish, biting off pieces, chewing and purring loudly.

  Jon and I found a seafood restaurant in Sokcho, knocked back a few glasses of the local firewater, soju, devoured a seaweed salad, and then stared at a flatfish pulled directly from a glass tank and sashimied, still breathing, before our eyes. I’m not sure how we ordered it, but the neatly sliced flesh was replaced on the fish’s horizontal bones so the living creature became its own platter. I had eaten living sashimi in Japan but without Jon’s imagination comparing it to an Aztec priest cutting the beating heart out of a sacrificed slave and showing it to him in the last moments of his life.

  “Fish and people are very different,” I said.

  “Yeah, still,” Jon said, nodding. “Can’t they just put the thing out of its misery?”

  I had read several studies arguing that the simple nervous system of a fish did not allow it to register “pain” the way it is experienced by mammals. Perhaps that’s true, but fish express an obvious physical reaction to being bitten or hooked. They don’t like it. Maybe the human words “pain” and “like” are impossibly distant from what this flatfish was feeling. “Who knows what birds and fish feel?” Basho wrote in a seventeenth century haiku, “Or how the year’s end party will feel to us,” suggesting that the inner workings of nature are as unknowable as our own means of handling sorrow, aging, and death. I suddenly thought of Aunt Lil lying in her sick bed and my father encouraging me to make this trip instead of returning home. I looked at the pulsing flatfish and recalled my father’s conflicted feelings on killing foxes and eating veal, his only advice, “If you can live with it, go ahead.” Living flesh between my chopsticks, I chewed and swallowed an allowance that I’d never fully digest.

  In December, I traveled alone to Malaysia, walking the colorful streets of Kuala Lumpur, past throngs of people, mosques, and Chinese altars, stopping at Yong Soo Pets Shop, hung with Moorish wooden cages, fluttering chocolate brown finches, tear-eyed thrushes, and brilliant blue and gr
een leafbirds plucked from the trees of Southeast Asia. Deeper into the dark store, I studied fish glowing in glass aquariums. There were tanks of tarantulas, and turtles in tile tubs. Near the back door, guarded by a goose on a foot leash, gasping eels thrust their heads out of a dirty aquarium while a flat black catfish glummed below the tangle. I wanted to let them go. You might ask how the same person who eats a still quivering flounder could worry about a bunch of choking eels? I don’t know, but this felt like neglect. The animals’ suffering was completely unnecessary. From a barred window I could see a canal running down the alley behind the store. I might be able to tip the whole tank into the canal, at least giving the eels and catfish a chance. When I reached to test the back door, the goose honked.

  Down the road from Yong Soo’s, I stopped at a restaurant that rivaled the pet shop with its wide glass tanks of live arowana and catfish. I sat down, flipped through my phrase book, and ordered what sounded like “bee chew,” (I would later learn it was the Chinese word baijiu) the popular spirit among ethnically Chinese Malays and a good buy at fifty cents a glass. Antique refrigerators hummed away with shelves of Coke, Sprite, and Carlsberg Beer. One of the men spoke some English and noticing I liked to drink, pointed to museum-like jars of baijiu infused with hairy ginseng roots and whole snakes. “Good for man,” he said, gesturing a fist in front of his groin. “Okay,” I said, waving in a glass. The sapor of musty root was fine, but I felt no special effects from the reptilian promise except a growing sympathy for creatures crowded in glass. I ordered stingray, flapping my arms for clarity, and it arrived grilled and very dead, wrapped in banana leaves and topped with a sweet and sour sauce. I ate, paid, bowed to the staff, and sailed into the cooling night alone with my freedom.

  On Christmas day 1993, during an hour flight to Malaysia’s Langkawi Island, a stewardess in a blue hijab delivered a “Meddy Christmas Mister Hug-gess” over the intercom. I smiled and picked up a magazine advertising “Tundra to Tropics—Make You A Cool Hot Chance,” and thought of the wild Alaskan tundra and the broiled confines of the Kuala Lumpur pet shop. How does one ever make sense of the wide world, compressing space and time inside a jet, the place we stand, or right inside our own head? I once dated a brilliant and overweight nutritional psychologist. We were talking about conflict and contradiction, and I quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald from the “The Crack Up”—“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” She smiled, chewed a buttery hunk of lobster, swallowed, wiped her mouth, and said that a mental breakdown is more likely to occur in a first-rate intelligence because the person is aware that so many ideas are opposed and still true. Unable to reconcile the constant barrage of contradictions in the human condition, I simply dismiss them with a cocktail and a nap, saving myself from the dangers of a first-rate intelligence or insanity.