Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  And there is loss, too, for all of us. Where I grew up, there is no play fishing, and there are no play fish. There are only real fish, the kind that show even a three-year-old boy what it means to fight something alive, to watch it bleed real blood and void real bowels and flip toward the sky. It’s as ancient as breathing, the desire to be free. And when you maneuver such a fish away from the rapids and haul it up the beach, only to see it flopping still, fighting still—and realize all of a sudden that you have already killed too many fish today, that you are long past the legal limit, that even if you’re eight years old and very bewildered and unable to understand that you’re grieving the end of your family by killing everything you can get your hands on, you can also understand that something big and ugly is happening, because of what you are doing.

  And that you can stop. You can put the fish back in the water. And when it flops and floats to the surface, even after the hook has been removed and it’s free to swim off—convinced, the way humans can also be, that it’s dead, that everything is over—then you must do what my dad taught me how to do: Stand that fish upright in the running water and massage it back and forth, back and forth, until its gills take over, until it pauses and shudders and suddenly with a muscular gasp darts off, remembering, all at once, how to live.

  To my family

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the friends and family who kept me writing over the years, for their kindness, love, and support: Lawrence, Anne, Patrick, Jon, William, Wilder, Sarah, Elisabeth, Anna, and everyone else who urged me after seventeen-plus so-called final drafts.

  Thank you to my oldest friends in the wilderness who never let me forget who I am: Lesil and Jason.

  Thank you to the generous and talented people who worked with me, listened to me, and always told me the truth: the amazing Jennifer Smith, Hannah Elnan, Karen Fink, Susan Kamil, Richard Pine, Mamie Healey, Lisa Kogan, Emilie Stewart, Fiona Maazel, Elizabeth Koch, Amy Brill, Allison Amend, Lisa Selin Davis, Robb Spillman, Michelle Wildgen, Hannah Tinti, Karen Russell, Danielle Claro, Heather Greer, Maeghan Kearney at the Alaska State Library, and Daniel Jones at The New York Times’s “Modern Love” column.

  Thank you to the institutions that provided me the holy writer’s trinity, a desk, quiet, and time: The Corporation of Yaddo, Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, and the L. E. Eichorn Foundation for Non-Income-Producing Writers.

  About the Author

  LEIGH NEWMAN’S fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, Tin House, and The New York Times’s Modern Love and City sections. She is deputy editor and head of books coverage at Oprah.com.