Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch

Author:Thomas Lynch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

Fish Stories

I taught my son to fish when he was four. It was a pond in Westchester County, New York. We’d gone there from Michigan to visit his mother’s family. I brought a bass rod with an ultralight spinning reel, hooks and sinkers and bobbers. We dug worms. I cast out the line and handed him the pole and launched into the usual preachments on Patience. I hadn’t ten words out of my mouth when the red-and-white bobber started popping, the line tightened and the pole shook and Tommy, without further instruction, set the hook and reeled in a bluegill the size of my hand. My first son’s first fish.

He held the thing, still hooked, both of them round-eyed and gaping in amazement, both of them gulping the blue air in each other’s face. He was hooked. He wanted to take it and show his mother.

I said if he took it to show his mother it would die and we would eat it. Or we could put it back in the pond and it could go see its own fish mother and tell her about the boy it’d caught and it would live to get bigger and bigger and bigger. “No, Dad,” he said, he’d just go show his mother. He didn’t want to eat it. He’d just go show his mother and come right back and send it back to its mother and everything would be right with the world. But I told him the fish couldn’t live out of the water. It couldn’t breathe out of the water. It would die out of the water. It was in its nature.

He wanted to keep it. And he didn’t want it to die. And I could see in his bright blue eyes the recognition that these aims were at cross-purposes. This was a game he couldn’t play for “keeps.” He was crying when he put it back in the water. Catch and release, like love and grief, are difficult notions. We’ve been fishing together ever since.

I know you’re thinking that’s cute enough to make you puke. I know you’re thinking to yourself, Oh, sure, I’ll bet—bluegill, blue eyes, the blue day in Westchester County. But it’s true. He was hooked.

After that it was carp fishing on Sunday mornings at the secret spot south of town. We’d pack soggy Raisin Bran around big treble hooks and heave it out and let it sit on the bottom until some old carp would come and suck it up. Tommy was a carp-killing boy. And long after I learned to sleep in on Sundays, he’d bike out to the secret spot and kill carp all spring and summer and bring them home to plant them in the garden, where now, near twenty years since, the perennials grow thick and hardy and fishy. Once I remember him golden among a dozen shorter admirers returning from fishing with a carp the size of a small child hanging from his handlebars, blood and creamy milt oozing from

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