Tue 10 Mar 2009
Gone fishin’
Posted by james
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I must have been three years old. The memory feels newer, feels like I was older, but there it is on the trophy below a gold-painted plastic fisherman, who is holding a net and a rod but no fish (and there are, for no particular reason, two crossed swords embossed below):
1984
FISHING DERBY
Three years old, a work function of my father’s at some stocked lake probably not far from home, maybe even one of the artificial lakes that surround the city pretending that we don’t like on dry arid prairie, pretending that it’s normal to have large bodies of water filled with rainbow trout as big as a small child’s head and probably sailboats. I’m sure there was hot dogs. Maybe chips and pop.
I don’t remember much about the actual catch, the casting out on a sunny summer day and reeling it in slowly, probably with the help of someone much older. I don’t remember the nibble, the tug, the quickly spinning the line to bring the fish back toward the shore as someone, also probably much older, held out the net as the fish flipped and flopped above the ground.
I remember feeling very proud, knowing I had won, that my trophy meant something significant, that said something about me and what I could contribute to the world. I was the fishing derby champion. I had tamed a fish. And I was sure as hell going to eat it.
I remember the next day, the fish on the frying pan and then on my plate looking something like scrambled eggs. I had, in my three short years of living, never tasted a fish so good. But I suppose everything tastes better after you’ve won a fishing derby.
We went fishing a couple of weeks ago, in February, in between mountain ranges and valleys in Nicomen Slough that eventually empties out into the mighty Fraser. The guy at the fishing shop was skeptical we’d catch anything so early and without a boat — in fresh water, no less — but he sold us hooks and lures and floats and bait and directed us away from the stocked lakes, which would be completely empty until spring, and instead just passed Deroche, a small community with a gas station and a second-hand store and a post office that opened in 1891 but not much else.
So we drove, Christa and I (Christa, who says I don’t write enough about people on here, who has the rods and hooks and knows plenty more than me about fishing and so much else), for an hour on a slow highway we should have avoided and eventually parked at a cafe next to a store that sells fireworks across the bridge and walked down to the shore.
Not a single damn fish, not even a bite, but it was pleasant, in February, eating sandwiches as the sun fell down below the mountains and it started to feel cold enough that I imagined how the fish might feel underwater, keeping still, keeping warm, keeping away from all the hooks dangling from above.
