Back Seat with Fish

by Henry Hughes

  “You tell me you have license.”

  “A fishing license, sure.” I pulled out my wallet.

  “No, no,” he shook his head. “Stay away now. Maybe come back at Spring Festival,” he looked around nervously, hustling us out with a case of expired bamboo shoots.

  Although we still gave fish to people and made an occasional trade at the Asian markets, our fishing business folded. Like fishing guides and pin hookers who love their work, I never fished purely for profit, but our carp trade did get out of hand. Turning once again to fishing literature, I was refreshed by the fifteenth-century advice of Dame Juliana Berners that you must not use the art of angling for “increasing and sparing of your money only, but principally for your solace, and to cause the health of your body, and especially of your soul.”

  “We had to bribe the guards with a carton of cigarettes, but yeah, we got in and caught some carp on flies,” I told this incredulous hawk of a man who had flown down the hallway, questioning the veracity of one of my China stories. And when he saw me cast a nymph below the Oakdale Dam one morning, he smiled: “You caught fish in China with that cast? Must’ve been a mix up in the language.” Willard Greenwood, a fellow graduate student in the English department, was a Maine-raised fly fisherman with family roots back to seventeenth-century colonial New England. “Imagine all the brook trout, all the Atlantic salmon,” he mused on ancestral anglings. Willard urged me to read Thomas McGuane, Nick Lyons, Margot Page, and Ted Leeson, and he showed me how to tie flies and prepare leaders. We sat at our desks in Heavilon Hall, pushed the ungraded freshmen compositions aside, and wrapped soft Woolly Buggers and spiky Muddler Minnows, trying to think like fish. Willard was a good teacher, and he read aloud passages from McGuane, “I try to tie flies that will make me fish better, to fish more often, to dream of fish when I can’t fish …” Willard glanced at the clock, wondering if there was still time to get on the river after office hours. Then he continued, “… and to take further steps toward actually becoming a fish myself.” Just as that bug in the vise was looking pretty yummy—like tempura between my chopsticks—a girl came in to talk about her paper. She saw the scalps of fur and hair, put a hand to her Greek-lettered chest, and cried, “Oh my God, did you eat those?”

  I led Willard to the south fork of Wildcat Creek near Monitor, where I had caught many smallmouth bass on jigs and live minnows. He parked his dented Mazda in the public access lot, and we suited up, entered the water under the State Road 26 Bridge, and waded downstream. “Nice place,” he praised. At first I just watched Willard work his magic. The Woolly Bugger can be a clunky fly to cast, but he sent out graceful rolls of line that dropped the heavy black charm into moving pockets between roots and rock. Fishing without an indicator, he mended and felt for tension through the line and soon hooked a foot-long smallmouth that skied like a copper rocket. Backed up against the bushes, Willard executed smart roll casts, showing me how to pinch line and power the rod with my thumb.

  We spread over the river. I plucked some plastic trash from the willows, shoved it down my waders, and then just took my time casting, mending, feeling, and eventually catching a ten-inch smallmouth with fiery red eyes. The pressures of school seemed far away, and I thought again of McGuane, “Angling is where the child, if not the infant, gets to go on living.” I listened to the water and birds, played at casting, caught another small fish, and enjoyed the flowing world.

  We worked our way downstream through the holes, took a break together, and ate some cookies while I told him about my old Indiana girlfriend, Caitlin, and how we tumbled out of the canoe and made love against a mossy trunk. Willard smiled and told me that despite all the proverbial warnings, he and his girlfriend had sex in a canoe—in Maine—“And that water is cold, man. So we took it real easy, and it lasted forever.”

  “Sounds like good tantric training,” I said.

  “Every teenager should do a little canoe screwing,” he professed.

  Willard and I walked back to the bridge and started upstream to what I remembered as the best water on the Wildcat. A sign planted in the middle of a gravel bar read No Trespassing. I was puzzled. Could it refer to the houses high above the bank? We were wading in the middle of the river. How could we trespass? I told Willard that I had fished this stretch many times and guided him to a deep, long, bassy cut. Willard started casting, and I saw a man walk across his shaggy lawn. “Didn’t you see the sign?” he yelled. “This is private property.”

  “Good morning, sir. We’re just passing through. Sorry.” I signaled Willard to reel up. “We’ll walk on by. Sorry.”

  “Hey, you’re on my property. Go back the way you came.”

  I looked back at him and waved. “Sorry,” I said again. Courtesy and a willingness to move on usually worked in these situations.

  “I’m calling the sheriff,” he yelled.

  I finally turned to him and raised both hands in exasperation. “I’ve fished here many times. I don’t understand. We’re in the middle of the river.”

  “You’d understand if you picked up all the trash. This is private property. Those aren’t your fish to catch. We’ll get the sheriff down here if that’s want you want.”

  I felt anger rise inside me. “Go ahead, call the sheriff.” I turned to Willard, “Come on.” Willard looked unsure, but we walked the edge of the sandbar against the shallow riffles and the man’s wishes. “Hey,” I heard him yell one more time, but we pushed through the water until we were out of sight. This stretch of the Wildcat held a lot of memories that suddenly felt brittle and stained like photos in a neglected album. How could a man own a wild river or its wild fish? It was a members-only law against the higher laws of nature of which we were all members.

  We continued fishing, but the mood was tense. My fly kept snagging in the bushes, and Willard was worried about his car. I knew a way up through the pasture back to the road, and we returned to the access lot with no signs of the sheriff. “Let’s get out of here,” Willard said and pulled out his keys. “Hold on.” I set my rod against the side mirror, bent down to reel up the slack, caught of glimpse of myself, and knew what I had to do. I heard a mower over at the property owner’s house and walked toward it. He was on a green rider, and when he saw me coming, he looked alarmed. He turned off the engine and dismounted. I took off my hat, bowed a little, and said, “I just wanted to say sorry. I fished that river so many times. I just couldn’t believe it was closed.” He was silent for a moment before repeating his complaint about the trash. “I’m the last person who would drop trash. In fact, I picked some up,” I said. The man stared, “Well I don’t know you.” I thought of introducing myself but just said, “It won’t happen again.” I put my hat on and walked away.

  China, Too

  When my father and brother drove out to visit the following Thanksgiving, they brought me a twelve-foot jon boat like the one I had as a boy. “Why don’t you call it Number Two China,” Jin Lei suggested. She’d heard about my old boat, China Cat, and thought it prophetic that I eventually traveled to China and made it a part of my life. Walking around the docks on Long Island, she also noticed that people often carried cherished names to their second loves—Annie II, Cricket II, Day Off II. So on a golden November afternoon, my brother, Jin Lei, and I launched the China, too, and the chilly waters of the North Pond gave up a few silvers that we admired and gently released.

  China, too freed me to row around the ponds and up and down the river when flows were manageable. An hour of steady rowing against the current worked my chest and back, and after a few weeks muscles reappeared in my upper body. I also took longer jogs along the river trails, jumping over sinkholes, garbage, and dead beavers. I did a lot of thinking during these long runs and hours spent fishing. Jin Lei and I hadn’t made love in many months, and it was clear to me that our relationship was in a platonic state. It was a form I could live with. We got along well as friends, roommates, and colleagues, and I was happy to stay together and safeguard her green card ap
plication. But I was also desirous of more erotic contact with women.

  Feeling better about my body always gave me the confidence to talk with women, and so I did. A couple of the younger secretaries in the office, including the very cute Debbie, were reading Mary Karr’s Liars’ Club, and they asked me if all fishermen exaggerated and lied. “Never,” I lied. I quickly read the engaging memoir and learned that one of the happiest moments in Mary Karr’s hellish childhood was an afternoon out fishing with her father.

  “Wanna go fishing?” I asked Debbie as she put mail into the department boxes.

  “I heard you were married,” she cocked an eyebrow.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “Well, I only date men who are really single,” she shot another envelope into a pigeon hole. “Besides, I haven’t been fishing since I was a girl. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

  “I could teach you,” I persisted.

  “I’m sure you could,” she answered with a smile but never accepted.

  One of the great joys of my sport was taking people out who didn’t fish or hadn’t fished since they were young. Matthew Vollmer, an emerging writer at Purdue, told me stories about fishing as a boy in North Carolina’s creeks, but it had been years since he’d wet a line.

  Matthew, Willard, and I planned an afternoon on the North Pond, but Willard had a terrible argument with his wife and had to cancel. Matthew and I unchained the China, too from the tree where I kept it locked, wiped off the seats, and slid the boat down the bank into the coffee-colored water. I rowed out to the middle of the pond, and we jigged near the bottom, talking about school and writing, wondering about Willard. Then I hooked a fish. The rod doubled and line peeled off the reel. It was a light Shimano bait casting outfit low on eight-pound test and I dared not tighten the drag. Holding on and smiling, I tried to regain a few feet of line when the fish came off the bottom, but the shallow spool was emptying fast. “Here, take this.” I handed Matthew the rod. His eyes widened, and he squared his shoulders behind the run. “Keep tension and reel if you can.” Coaching—even useless coaching—relieved some of the nervousness I felt when a friend was fast to a big fish. “That’s it. Stay with him,” I said, pulling gently on the oars and following the force.

  “Maybe it’s a turtle,” Matthew ventured.

  Over the years, I’ve hooked big snapping turtles, but they didn’t swim this fast. I’ve caught snakes, bullfrogs, bats, birds, and boats. I even snagged one scuba diver who was safely released. But this was a fish.

  “It’s a fish,” I said. “Sturgeon, paddlefish, maybe a big carp.”

  “Maybe a catfish?” Matthew added.

  “Could be,” I nodded, watching him raise his rod against the strain and then reel down to the fish. “That’s it,” I coached on. “You’re doing great.” I rowed after the fish for fifteen minutes, then shipped the oars and watched Matthew—mid-twenties, fit, with a Tintin haircut and a handsome farm-boy face that blushed between delight and panic when the fish made a move. For the next half hour the creature towed our boat around the pond, bolting suddenly for the river inlet and taking line. “Oh, no you don’t,” I said aloud. “See if you can rein him this way, Matthew.”

  “How?” He tightened his face into confusion.

  The fish steamed halfway through the channel then suddenly turned tail in the opposite direction.

  “Crazy,” Matthew laughed. “This is incredible.”

  I took the rod for five minutes while Matthew rubbed his hands and slaked his thirst with a soda. We heard the university’s six o’clock bells and a flock of geese somewhere downriver. I handed the fish-bent rod back to Matthew. “It’s all yours.” After an hour and a half, we had to get tough. “Steady lift of the rod, and then reel down to the fish,” I went back to my coaching.

  Soon the fish was directly below our boat, and we got the first glimpse of a long dark form. “Catfish”—I identified the creature. These moments are important in a fisherman’s life. To see the hooked fish—just to see it—is often enough. If the line breaks or the hook comes free, at least we have witnessed the miracle of connection. The fish sounded, line rolled off the reel, and I advised Matthew to tighten the drag slightly.

  We had seen the back of a huge catfish, but was that enough?

  “I want to hold this guy,” Matthew said, as if desiring consecration by touch.

  “Hell, let’s bring it to Burnham’s,” I went further. “We’ll make the papers.”

  I normally never worried about records or trophy photos taped to the walls and counters of tackle shops or printed in the newspaper, but this fish might be a record. Would I be willing to kill an old fish just for the record? Toxins accumulate over time in the fatty tissues of some fish, and it wouldn’t be wise to eat a portly old catfish from the Wabash River—but a state record might fill us with pride.

  Matthew lifted the rod and reeled, lifted and reeled. There it was again—easily four feet long, a massive dark head tapering to a mustard mottled body. I told Matthew about the mythical Onamazu, a giant catfish that lives under the islands of Japan, guarded by the god Kashima. But not even a god can manage complete control over Onamazu, and the fish’s periodic thrashings caused terrible earthquakes. Our catfish rolled, and its tail thumped the boat like a drum. “Jesus,” Matthew gasped, thrilled and amazed. “My God, that’s a fish.” It was a flathead catfish—the largest I had ever seen. “You’ve caught a god,” I said.

  Matthew was raised in a strict Adventist family, but he had gone his own way. When he moved to Indiana, he started visiting a different church each week—Presbyterian, Church of Brethren, Episcopalian, Quaker, and Unitarian—and found the varieties of worship fascinating and enriching. He even explored other mystical paths, such as Buddhism and Taoism. His mother grew worried. “She cried,” Matthew told me, “fearing for my wandering soul.” Matthew’s mother felt he had jeopardized his promised place among the family when Christ returned and raised the faithful dead. “I just want us all to be together in the end,” his mother wept.

  The catfish came up, the little gold jig pinned to the side of his monstrous head. Small eyes and thick whiskers trembled on the surface in a grotesque, fearsome, beautiful display of the aquatic primitive. Matthew touched its back and smiled. The fish measured forty-eight inches, an estimated fifty pounds. If it were a channel catfish, we’d have the Indiana state record, but the record flathead catfish, I’d later learn, tipped the scales at seventy-nine pounds, eight ounces in 1966. “We gotta let it go,” Matthew said. “This guy has lived such a long life.”

  “You finally catch a god, and you’re gonna let him go?”

  “Let him live. Yeah.”

  I reached down with my pliers, easily removed the hook, and we watched the great leviathan return to the murky depths.

  I told Jin Lei that my visions came true. “God is a fish. And we saw him today.”

  “Where is he?” her brown eyes widened in delight.

  “Back in the water,” I said. “Where he belongs.”

  When we told Willard the whole story—God and all—he said, “That catfish had great prana.” He was writing a dissertation on the sublime in nature and used the Sanskrit word, prana, a kind of élan vital, to describe the fighting life force of fish. Different species of fish fight differently. Cod come up like old tires; steelhead rage like burning maniacs. But even among the same species of the same size from the same waters, there can be individuality in the way a fish fights. Anglers sometimes receive these exceptional exertions as divine messages. I can’t tell you exactly what Matthew heard over the line, but his blue eyes glowed, and with the zeal of the newly converted, he repeated Willard’s pronouncement, “That catfish had great prana.”

  Matthew, Willard, and I shared long talks about fishing, religion, literature, and life. We talked about relationships and women. Matthew got along well with his wife, Kelly. Willard and his wife, Maddy, were having troubles. They had years of happiness and a beautiful young son, but thei
r union was on the rocks. My drifting relationship with Jin Lei did not seem as painful, but Willard told me that Jin Lei and he walked back from the library, and she cried and confided her heartache. “She really loves you, man. It wasn’t just an arrangement for her. She wants to be your wife.”

  The Indiana winter of the new millennium was very cold, and in January the Williamsburg Ponds froze over. I walked along the bank and a few feet out on the ice and marveled at the crystal transformation. Crows chipped away at frozen shad; feathers, leaves, flecks, and bubbles glistened in suspension; I traced a long blue subway trail that suddenly darkened with the chugging engine of a beaver. Life under the ice. I called Willard, who knew ice-fishing from his years growing up in Maine.

  “Come on over and show me how to do this,” I urged.

  He sounded depressed. “I’m not really into it,” he said.

  “Come on,” I pleaded. “Get out of that damn apartment. Imagine pulling a walleye through the ice.”

  Willard came over with a hand augur and a dozen tip-ups. We slide-stepped out on the ice, testing its thickness, and I followed his cues, eyeing the pale cracks like veins in granite. Our drill gnawed through six inches before the dark rush of water. “Good,” Willard said, scooping out the chips and shavings with Jin Lei’s dumpling ladle. He showed me how to rig the tip-up, setting the cross over the hole, the red flag tucked-in and ready to snap up and signal Fish! when the spool ran. Jin Lei came out on the ice in her beige wool coat and red scarf. “It’s like trapping rats!” she exclaimed. She walked around for a while, peered down into the holes, said we’d turn the pond into “swede cheese,” then went inside. Willard and I set tip-ups baited with nightcrawlers and mealworms, sat on overturned plastic buckets, and looked at each other. Cold and windless, winter spoke in crows, whale-like booms, and moans that startled me. “It’s just the ice,” he said.