Catch & Release (5 page)

“These guys were here when Lewis and Clark came through. Well, not these exact guys . . .” says Odd, “But there were five billion of the little fuckers. There were prairie dog towns that went for miles . . . miles, Polly,
miles
. A guy could walk all day and never get out of prairie dog town.”

“They carry bubonic plague,” I say. My dad is a vet, so that's the kind of thing I know about prairie dogs.

“Lewis and Clark caught one. They had all these guys digging and pouring water down the holes. They caught one and kept it with them like a pet. Then they gave it to Thomas Jefferson,” says Odd. That's the kind of thing he knows about prairie dogs.

“We could fish here,” says Odd, “Tie some grass or granola bar on the hook and—” He mimes air-casting. “Ga-zing!” He's got an imaginary prairie dog on the line. “Get the net, he's a kahuna!”

I turn my back and walk to the car. I don't want to imagine a fat, furry animal jerked into the sky on a hook. I can hear the prairie dogs whistling and chirping. They want to keep each other safe from danger. Each other is all they got in a dangerous world. It probably isn't going to be good enough.

 

One good reason not to fish the hole below the Natural Bridge: steep cliffs. Another: fast water that disappears underground into a giant natural drain here and comes blasting out—oh, I don't know, somewhere over in the invisible there, maybe. Welcome to certain death dressed up postcard pretty. It is the sort of place a person needs to supervise small children and pets. That's what the interpretive sign says. That list of those who need supervision should probably include amputees and the visually handicapped too, I'm thinking.

I am so very not happy.

I never used to be afraid of heights—not like
afraid
. When I lost my eye I also lost depth perception, and it turns out that the world is scary damn place without it. Now I need to inch along when I'm faced with a sidewalk curb—or a precipitous limestone cliff. Meanwhile, Odd is sort of lurching along ahead of me. My terror is divided equally between the future where I will see him plunge to his death and the future where I plunge to my death. Those seem to be the only two options.

There is a third, it turns out. We both make it to the bottom.

It's a fine, deep pool, but it would be tricky to cast, to let it drift on the current. The force of the cascade stirs up the water, and it's just not that obvious what's going on down there. It looks fancy, but it isn't the fishiest place on the Boulder. I'm inclined to go a little further, at least until I can set myself up to be downstream from my cast. This is it for Odd, though. I don't know if it is bad judgment about the water and what he can accomplish or even worse judgment in leading us down here, where the best path is often underwater and the next best alternative is rock-hopping from boulder to boulder. Rock-hopping is a thing a one-legged fisherman probably shouldn't do.

I am torn between the need to watch out for Odd and the desire to maybe, actually, fish. Polly-That-Was would definitely choose responsibility to others over self-interest. Post-MRSA-monster me says, “Hey, I'm going downstream.” Then I add, “Remember, ‘This reever can keel you in a thousand vays.'”

Odd gives me a blank look. I guess he's not a fan of movies about giant people-eating snakes. His loss. Worst case, I'll see him when he floats by and I'll tell his parents he died happy, wild, and free. For now, though, I'm just going to ignore him and go fishing.

 

I drink from plastic cups at home because I missed the stream of water coming from the faucet and hit the back of the sink so hard a regular glass shattered in my hand. I was going to sew a button back on, but I couldn't thread the needle without my mommy's help. Now I'm going to get a nearly invisible nylon line through the eye of a hook.

My fly book is so pretty, so well organized, so full of things that are too tiny—hello, sweet little Flashback Pheasant Tail Nymph—or too fuzzy-headed to give me a fighting chance of getting the line threaded. Grasshoppers have been helicoptering up under my feet since I got out of the car, so a hopper is good, I got to figure. So I pick a Joe's Hopper from the fly book.

I take my good-luck fishing scissors out of my pocket and give myself a nice, clean-cut line to work with. I steady myself and I hold my breath and it actually works. I've got a fly on. I can fish. It's probably more luck than skill, but I'm adding it to my imaginary list of coping skills anyway: able to thread a fly and tie a hook knot.

 

Trout have good vision and a hard-earned sense of self-preservation. I can't say I've got research to back it up, but I bet most fish of any size have been jerked out of this water a couple of times. Part of growing up a trout, I guess. That sort of experience makes an impression on their raisin-sized brains, so the fish in this river are cagey fish. They are wily fish. They want to eat, but they know it isn't that simple. They know better than to trust the world. They know happiness sometimes has strings attached. They have to be tricked. The first trick is invisibility. All that takes is a nine-foot rod and a careful approach to the water. The second trick is to bring the dead to life. The fly at the end of the line is not just deadly but dead. I have to make it look like life, I have to make it look like food. I can do that. I'm a practiced liar.

Fishing is all about lies, and not the ones people tell about the monsters that got away. Fishing is about the lies we tell to the fish and the lies they choose to believe.

I stand up and haul out some line. The reel ticks like I'm winding up a clock; the only other sound is the water talking over rocks. There is a moment—there— that likely-looking place where the current brings the food, that is the moment where I want to the hopper to drop. My first cast falls short. Nothing is where or when it appears to be. Even the rocks are a lie. Light bends when it moves through the water, and the result is deceptive. Things are dislocated. So even the river tells lies, I guess. I just have to adapt. I give myself more line, enough to pull its own weight, enough to build some distance and carry me, or at least to carry my bad intentions. Then I reach out again into the world. I put this moment, I put this moment, I put this moment—here— and the fish consents to believe. BAM! ZING! All that time wound up in the reel unwinds. Let's dance, you fishie, let's dance.

In a moment I will have this fish in my wet hand. I will remove the hook. I will lean forward and place it back in the water, and, after a second, it will dart away. I'll feel the water on my own hands, taking away the traces of slime. That slime and glow of colors on my memory are all that the trout leaves with me. After the release, I will move downstream a little bit more and cast again.

That's the way it's supposed to go, but it doesn't.

It is a little tiny fish, and the hook isn't in its lip. It's through its eye. Through good and hard, since when I set the hook with the smart tug it pulled the barbless wire point right into the bone. Weirdly, the eye with the hook in it looks as bright and marginally intelligent as the other, perfect eye.

It's blushing: it's a little cutthroat. It's beautiful and it would have been more beautiful tomorrow. Stupid damn fish.

I smack it hard on a rock to stop everything that's gone wrong. Then I take out my pocketknife and slit through the tender belly. I push out the guts with my thumb. I don't check to see what he has been eating, because I'm finished with fishing for the day.

The catch-and-release fantasy is over.

 

“Shit,” says Odd. “That all you caught. Better than me. Total shutout.” He looks at the tiny fish again, “That's, like, a bite for each of us. I might go cannibal on you.”

I realize that Odd wasn't fishing catch-and-release. He wanted to kill fish. He wanted to eat them. I know next to nothing about Odd Estes, but he fishes for meat. Maybe that is all I need to know.

Odd's as busy as a beaver, a whacked-out zombie beaver, dragging chunks of tree around.

We are at a campground a few miles upstream from the falls. The water here looks like excellent fishing. Much easier to navigate than below the falls. Even Odd could have caught something here, but that's all water under the bridge and way downstream. We are here to eat and sleep. As far as I'm concerned, the fishing is over.

“Alrighty then, I'll get this fire going and cook that fish,” says Odd. He has accumulated a heap of branches, roots, and bark in a ring of blackened rocks. He doesn't seem to have any system to it. No “start with the kindling” for Odd. It's just a chaotic slash pile.

It's not going to be a tidy, efficient, campstove dinner.

I'm not especially hungry, which is a good thing, because I might be watching Odd try to get a fire started for the foreseeable future. Or at least that would be the case
if
Odd were sane and stupid instead of just stupid. Turns out, he knows what he's up to—in the way that the guys who build fires at keggers know how to get it done. He pulls a coffee can out of the trunk. When Odd cooks, the essential ingredient is gas-soaked sawdust.