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.

A Mess O' Dungeness

Tom With Crabs

There's nothing better than good friends. But if there was, it would be good friends with a boat and a beach house. Our good friends Margie and Tom invited us to the coast for a combination fishing/crabbing expedition, which meant there was something for everybody.  I love to fish, and Dave loves to crab. Fishing is wonderful. You can fish all day long without ever having to come into contact with anything slimy that needs to be slain and gutted. There you are with your pole in your hand, trolling along in the rain, knowing that at any moment something exciting might happen, or not. Just like life, and I like life. Many people, including Dave, profess to be bored by holding a motionless fishing pole for hours on end, but they do not properly appreciate anticipation. Which is the best part of Christmas, after all.

You can leave the pole in the pole-holder, and then react when it does, but I always hang onto mine. I want to feel it at the very moment it snags up against a huge log and must be battled back up to the surface, covered in weeds and debris. Just like life.

The agenda was to put in seven crab-pots first thing in the morning as the tide comes in, then fish for a few hours until it's time to pick up the pots. Dave loves picking up the pots. He likes nothing better than to reel up a pot heavy enough to engage the stomach muscles, haul it aboard, and begin sorting through a frightening melee of crustaceans that might, at any time, separate him from his thumb. It's like sticking your hand into a vat of knives. What fun!

Crabs themselves are pointy and malevolent and capable of great self-expression when faced with the proposition of a short ride in a bucket. They appear rigid, but they are nevertheless capable of hinging themselves backwards if held from the rear and signing autographs with your blood. Dave plunges in without fear and without gloves, although he does keep his crotch out of range. In an instant the boat is filled with scuttling prehistoric meat-eaters in search of fresh toes. Myself, I prefer my food more apathetic.

I also do not eat much crab. It's sweet and delicious, not revolting like something in the Sea-Loogie family (oysters, clams, etc.), but I overdid it one day just before a long ride in the back seat of a rhythmically rolling old-model Pontiac, and struggled not to go all Jackson Pollock on the floor-mats. It has affected my crab consumption ever since. I feel the same way about Scotch.

In general I question the wisdom of going to all that trouble to eat something with sci-fi monster mouth-parts that you've pulled off the bay bottom after luring it with rotten chicken. Dave is unmoved by this and unfazed by the prospect of tossing them into a vat of boiling water. He is very comfortable in his position near the top of the food chain.

I was comfortable with the previous several hours spent not catching a twenty-pound--my mistake, it was fifty, easy--Chinook salmon that would have to be dispatched in some way and relieved of its unattractive innards. Left to my own devices, I would be a stellar vegetarian. It's my good fortune to have been born in a time when someone else does the distasteful stuff, and yet there's still pigs.