A Fish Story

Me in front of the woodstack, circa 1986. Six-pound Largemouth caught on a fly rod.

"Grab it by the sides, like this," he said, banging the cricket cage against his knee and what looked to me like a thousand skittering, twittering, hopping insects fell to the bottom, then jockeyed for their old positions on the screen. He reached in and expertly tweezed just one between his thumb and index finger. "Now, take your hook with the other hand and insert it in the neck just under the jaws and come out through the abdomen," he continued as I watched the impaled cricket grasping the shank and attempt to climb higher up, presumeably out of danger. "Lively bugger. That should catch a big fish!" my dad exclaimed as we cast our lines toward the shore from a rowboat on the Ziels's pond.

Nort and Virginia Ziels were a sweet elderly couple my parents befriended when I was a kid and we made monthly excursions to visit them on the outskirts of our hometown. They owned acres of apple, pear, peach, apricot and walnut orchards. Bordering the orchards was a forest of oak and hickory that needed occasional thinning. Collecting wood and fallen fruit was a family affair. We heated our house with it in the big stove in our basement and wrapped the fruit in newspaper and stored it in the canning room to eat all winter. My dad would cut the wood and my mom and sisters and I would stack the rounds in the truck. At home, dad would split the rounds and we would place the quarters neatly so they could be stacked, sometimes up to eight feet high.

I remember being transfixed by the inch wide longitudinal scar on my father's midthigh, worrying it might get cut again as he ran the chainsaw; by the pungent green smell of oak biting my nose as cleanly as the blade on the wood and the fear and exhilaration that accompanies dismantling such a magnificently rooted creature into bite-sized chunks befitting the maw of a stove. After filling the old Chevy almost to the axel's breaking point and the cab with a few bushels of fragrant apples, we would fish for large-mouth bass, bluegill and crappie on one of the Ziels's ponds.

Dad banged the cricket cage again against his scarred thigh. "Now you try," he said, handing the cage of indescribably stinky-sweet bugs over to me. Eventually I mastered my fright and their unpredictable jumpiness and successfully fixed one to a hook. After that I was officially an independent fisherwoman, just like my mother and two older sisters.

Once our stringer was full, we headed back to the main house and found Nort reliably in his old green leather chair smoking a pipe with Sam the smelly bassett hound curled at his feet. Sam invariably bayed, announcing our entrance and Virginia hurried from the kitchen wiping her hands, yelling in her shaking voice "Hush Sa-am! Sa-am, hush!" We stayed for dinner and afterwards while the adults talked I amused myself watching the raccons on Virginia's feeder ouside, looked for hawks through binoculars or spied spiders spinning in the window mullions, webbing both the inside as well as the outside. Virginia either didn't care about dusting much or she was a real nature lover. I think both were true.

Nort introduced my father to fly-fishing, chamois cloth shirts, gum boots and L.L. Bean. It was because of him that we made a pilgrimmage to Maine every summer in the VW camper my grandma imported from Germany on her way back from working in the Peace Corps in India in 1965. We were a completely self-sufficient family of five in that van with it's pop-top cot made just for my sisters to fight over, a sink, and a 100 lb. yellow and blue canvas tent with it's red striped flap. The whole ensemble, including our afro-permed hairstyles and my dad's lambchop sideburns made us look like a gypsy caravan. We have Super-8 video somewhere of those six or seven summers spent at a campground in Casco Bay, just outside of Freeport.

We befriended a Mainiac family, the Ferrins, who fished for a living. Milt and Dee took us out on their boats, launching from Boothbay, back when the harbor was edged by disentegrating shacks of the fishing industry and before mini-mansions and Pottery Barn took over. They shared all the best spots with us, where to find lobster and crab and Milt outfitted us with clam hods and pitchforks so we could dig when the tide went out. The Ferrin's introduced us to clam-bakes and soccer, two experiences Midwesterners lacked exposure to. My family was thrilled. They love seafood. I, on the other hand, never have. The smell makes me nauseous.

I enjoy fishing as an instinctual pastime, hunting and gathering to feed others. Give me a rod and I will catch a fish for you, clean it and figure out a way to cook it. But please don't make me eat it. Fish and seafood has never tasted good to me. "Just try it," my family cajoled me endlessly as a child. This taunting went on for years, yet I remained content with the items at the bottom of the menu.

Until two weeks ago when I ate fish that Robert had prepared and liked it. I had told him my fish story, then stepped out of the kitchen for a moment. I returned to find him smearing a salmon colored paste on a slice of toast with a funny knowing look on his face.

What's this? I asked, stuffing it in my mouth. Pause. Mmmm...Mmmm!

Salmon Rillette, said he.

End of story.


Me and a Jack, caught with squid from a pier in Florida, circa 1983.