Saturday, October 4, 2014

Gone Fishing

Dave doesn't care for fishing, much, until it's late enough in the game that the frying pan comes out. He'd rather go crabbing. He likes that because there's always a heavy crab pot to pull and muscles to use and of course there's the excitement of taking all those nasty slicey freakish prehistoric alien spook-ass creatures out of the pot without losing a finger. He thinks fishing is boring, because a lot of the time nothing happens. I like to fish.

Once you've bought your license, you only need one thing to go trolling for salmon. You need a good friend named Tom with a place on the coast and a well-maintained boat and his own poles and tackle and a net and know-how and a working knowledge of the water and a jar of headless herring, and then you're all set.

The herring is the bait fish. You take their heads off so they don't get any ideas, and then there's a particular way you string them up with a pair of hooks so that they do a slow roll in the water and look exactly like living herring except for the not having a head part. You add a nice weight to the line so as to position your headless herring near the bottom of the river as you're trolling, because that's where all the Chinooks are hanging out.

That's all you do.  Periodically you reel in your line to take seaweed and algae off of your flashers. A lot of people put their poles in the pole holder so they can sit back under the canopy and drink beer, but I never do. I want to hold it in my hands. I want to feel the pole thrum as the big old Chinooks nose past the bait. I'm living in the present, just as we are meant to do, sensing the studious indifference of the mighty salmon, the rippling of seaweed accumulating on the tackle, the gentle lurching and chugging of the zombie herring. The Chinook are stacked in layers three deep on the river bottom and slide past each other, excuse me, excuse me, excuse me--salmon are very polite--and their graciousness and civility are transmitted through the line. But it's even better than living in the present. It's living just a little bit in the future, in heightened anticipation. Because that pole could bend over at any second. It could be a second in a whole different day, but it could also be the very next second.

When I was little, I used to hide in the coat closet when my mom came home and I'd wait for her to open the door and then I'd jump out and scare the living daylights out of her. We didn't have any words like "crap" in our family, so the living daylights was the best I could do, but it was plenty enough. The anticipation was delicious. I could spend all day in there, with my mother apparently requiring nothing from the closet and not unhappy about how quiet her "little handful" was being; meanwhile, I was quivering in excitement. I was fizzy with suppressed giggles, my joy under pressure and on tap, and I could remain that way for hours.

I was born to fish.

36 comments:

  1. Where are you fishing, is that the Columbia?
    I used to fish in that area a lot, Tillamook bay, the Trask.
    Here in MT I tend to catch and release, but a nice King makes me want to kill and eat. Same with that Dungeness crab you're holding.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's the Nehalem. Some of my favorite spots are catch and release now, so I don't fish much anymore. I wouldn't be that good at it and it would be Catch, Torture, Release, and Watch Sink To The Bottom.

      Delete
  2. Really? Again? Two comments digested.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Ooh, I hate when that happens. I have nothing to suggest, though.

      Delete
  3. all those nasty slicey freakish prehistoric alien spook-ass creatures

    Not to put too fine a point on it, they're bugs. Take a close look at what you're holding in your hand in that picture. It's a frickin' bug, and a pretty big one at that. People are eating bugs.

    The herring is the bait fish. You take their heads off so they don't get any ideas

    Lately some of the more grimly vehement Islamotards are also adopting this tactic. The results are mixed at best.

    If I ever see your boat out there, it will be a relief that at least one person isn't hitting the beer. I hope they have you as the designated driver for when your salmon-filled vessel finally heads back to land.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Not to worry--that boat is beer-free. I was talking about all those OTHER people.

      Delete
  4. My father used to take us trout fishing when I was a kid; I put worms on the hook and everything. Somehow I lost my stomach for it. I'm still not sure if it's the worm or the trout I felt more sorry for.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I feel sorry for both of them. Do it anyway, though.

      Delete
  5. Oh the memories this post caught. We used to follow my father along the river bank with a frying pan. When he caught was when we ate...
    Mmm rainbow trout.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It sounds like you were stalking your father with evil intent. Probably not.

      Delete
  6. I always got stuck cleaning all my cousins' fish. Oh, and baiting their hooks, too, if we were using live bait. One of them is now a Marine, and I assume he's killed people on his numerous trips to the Mideast and Afghanistan. But could he bait his own hook or clean his own trout? No.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wouldn't do it either if there was someone there to do it for me. But at some point it was explained to me that I was on my own.

      Delete
    2. Nah, just bring me along. I got your back. And hook. And guts.

      Delete
  7. Anything this well-written, I'm gonna love it no matter what it's about. Salmon is just bonus. What a great Alaskan you'd make!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I wonder. That might take too much intrepiditude.

      Delete
  8. Redux I know, but humor me. A couple of your comments that referenced squeamishness in cleaning fish reminded me of a instance a decade or more ago. My girls and I often shared thanksgiving with a long-time friend after their mom died. Once my buddy decided we'd get the turkey from a local rancher...he released several baby turkeys into his fields in the spring and ignored them...some made it, got big. We agreed to get one that year, drove the 30 miles to his place on the Big Hole valley 4 days before t'giving. Arriving we were told it was still in the pasture, he'd not got around to 'harvesting' it. He handed us a big knife, a machete really and pointed. "Take the head off, bring him back and I'll help pluck." We stared....me, my buddy, his daughter, and Emily, my youngest. She stepped up, grabbed the blade. "Where is it?" she said, a bright smile.
    We watched, cringed. She hauled it back by it's feet. The 14 year old that I watched carefully for years afterwards. A grad student now. She reminds me of someone that might be a worry....me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "The 14 year old that I watched carefully for years afterwards." That sure wouldn't have been me. I was the ten-year-old who heard we'd have to dissect a frog in tenth grade, and vowed to not get any older.

      Delete
    2. Excuse the response at this hour, not much else to do. This is the same, the youngest, who at age 5 bothered the neighbors by putting a naked barbie in one of those radio controlled pickup trucks, taped with duct tape of course, in the bed, spread-eagle, standing up, sparklers taped to both arms, caroming down the sidewalk. The neighbor next door said "something wrong with that girl...".

      Delete
    3. That's okay, I wasn't sleeping. Now. What is she studying, and how far away from me is she studying it?

      Delete
  9. When I saw the first pic I thought,"OMG! Murr's got crabs!" It reminded me that when I was a kid my little brother was champion bringer home of crabs. Always enough for dinner. I miss salt water. :(

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's kind of a little Boomer miracle that I never got crabs. Now that you bring it up.

      Delete
    2. We used to refer to them as saber-toothed crotch crickets.

      Delete
    3. Just "crotch crickets" would have been good enough!

      Delete
  10. Is that a blue swimmer Crab? My favourite. I used to have a curry crab recipe where you made the curried crab and served it in the shells. It's fiddly as hell to make, so we didn't have it often. I don't like or go fishing, I get my fish gutted and filleted at the shop, or from my son in law who has a friend with a boat, they go out and come back with bucket loads of prawns for the barbecue.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That is the mighty Dungeness crab. I don't think I'd want it stuck back in the shells. They look funky.

      Delete
    2. The recipe said to serve cold in the shell with salad on the side. I only ever did the shell serve once, the rest of the time I served it hot over rice.

      Delete
  11. When I was young, I used to love fishing in my Grandma's pond or the creek with her. I remember bringing home a "mess" of fish once and Grandma instructed me to gut them. When I sliced open the first one, my response was a heartfelt "EWWWW". She said, "You'll have your hands in worse than that before you die!" Danged if she wasn't right.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Danged if she wasn't. I also remember being disgusted when I watched my mom pull the giblets (and the Etc.) out of the chicken, and she said it beat having to pluck them. It's all (as always) a matter of perspective.

      Delete
  12. When I told my dad I was gay, he was convinced it was because he hadn't taken me fishing enough.

    Go figure.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Apparently he thought you were confused about where to put your bobbers.

      Delete
  13. Infidel753 is absolutely right. Those crabs, lobsters, shrimp and prawns are all big bugs. Delicious, succulent, high-protein bugs. And then there's oysters . . . drool!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We're just off to get ourselves some oysters right now. I will be having a dainty salad. Sea loogies: bleah.

      Delete
  14. I really love this one. Second paragraph: perfection.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I really love you. I'm going to love your second act.

      Delete
  15. I, too, love to fish. I believe I want to catch something, and I believe that I will, soon. But sometimes when it happens it's just an intrusion into my lovely, relaxed time on the water.

    ReplyDelete