Gone Fishing
Though I was never treated like my brothers, and always told I couldn’t do what they could do, I do remember fishing with my dad.
He didn’t see girls, or at least me, as capable in the same way. He saw certain tasks and activities as only for his boys.
I guess I thought fishing was fun because he really enjoyed it. And he let me come along.
Up north at our cabin, my dad was a more relaxed version of himself, in his huge-armpitted tanktops, with his hairy chest unabashedly sticking out, sitting proudly at the helm of his boat.
I used to put the minnows on the rods, by sticking the hook through their heads. I felt boyish doing this, super brave, as I remember numbing myself to the fact that I was killing them.
One of my many attempts to man-up as a little girl. To try for his attention and approval.
*
Here I am, four decades later, finding clever ways to teach my daughter to fish. I hire a local guide to take us out every summer and show her how much fun it is. How to do it. To be sure someone else is there in case I can’t get a stubborn hook out of a throat or something gruesome like that.
Tate loves our guide Don, who’s become a friend. She’s sometimes into learning to cast better and other times, would rather play with the buttons on his boat or share her snack with him.
She’s brought up feeling badly for the fish but I turn her focus immediately, instinctively, to the fact that we always, gently let them go. And how she loves watching them swim away.
Tate must fish. My dad loved fishing. It’s a part of what we do up here at the cabin. And I encourage her and tell her she can do anything …
*
This year, being the environmentalist I am, I decide it’s important to show her about the fish going from lake to table. I ask Don to keep, clean and fillet what we catch.
We watch him work on his deck beside the lake after we’re done fishing. It’s bloody and messy and stinky. I flash back to when my dad cleaned our fish and how cool I thoguht it was. Or wanted to think.
Tate is playing with his dog while I’m recording his family’s passed-down walleye breading recipe.
We bring our catch home in a plastic bag that she wants set in the front, away from her seat. I lay out the same griddle we used growing up and fry the fish.
We eat and I while I overly explain the idea of eating what you catch, I know I’ve done it again. Forced an old memory - to try and reform it, remake it.
I ignore this knowing.
As I tuck her in that night, she tells me that she has decided something. I sit down on the side of her bed to listen closely; her clarity always blows me away.
“Thanks for showing me how to prepare the fish we catch and it was really yummy tonight, Mama. But, I never EVER want to do that again. EVER.
In fact, I don’t ever want to fish again, Mama. I love you so much. G’night.”
