“He drove beneath a canopy of elms, then along a stretch of open shore, then past the municipal docks, where a woman in pedal pushers stood casting for bullheads. There were no other fish in the lake except for perch and a few worthless carp. It was a bad lake for fishing and swimming.” Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
A novelist vivifies memory with a well-chosen image or two. An essayist negotiates among memories, and walks through a certain amount of hopeful haze.
My lake in Minnesota was a shallow, muddy one near Edgerton in the southwest corner of the state, name unremembered, probably within 40 miles of Okabena Lake in Worthington where Tim would have been a teenager, although of course I didn’t know that, and in that lake, on a hot August morning, the only creatures stirring were those ugly scary little six-inch fish, bottom-feeding in the shallows. We fished from shore, my grandmother, my brothers and I, with cane poles and red-and-white bobbers, observed by my mother who every once in a while had to bookmark her novel and help Dave and Steve re-bait their hooks with pieces of hot dog and rolled-up pellets of stale bread. I was old enough, around ten, to do it myself. We caught several dozen.
The summer before bullheads, fishing had meant northern pike, when my grandparents on their annual day of vacation from the chores of the farm took me to big Mille Lacs Lake, my first time in a boat powered by a motor, my first time trolling for monsters. My heavy grandmother sat in the middle seat, like ballast. The rest of us – Grandfather, Father, Uncle John his twin, me – fit in somewhere, but not my mother; she stayed back with my two brothers, who were too young to handle the cold strong wind. Five long cane poles stuck out from the boat like quills and they dipped and rose as waves hit. My pole was heavy, alive with portent, and I held on for dear life. I don’t remember if I caught anything. Someone did, and a couple of pike, strung with rope through the gills, trailed alongside the boat.
The summer after bullheads, fishing meant the ocean, when we visited my uncle and aunt in Seattle, and Hilmer promised a trip out into Puget Sound. We had to wait for the perfect day. “The Sound can be nasty,” he said. He was an inveterate teaser of women and boys, and I didn’t know if he was serious. All I knew that I was terribly anxious that our visit would run out before the perfect windless day appeared. Two days before our departure, it did appear. Hilmer hooked the Skepsel to his car, and he and Dave and I drove to the marina. Steve was too little. My father stayed back. We were on the ocean for hours, and I watched sky and water with equal intensity, but mischief of weather stayed away. Aunt Hattie said that “skepsel” meant “rascal” in Dutch, which didn’t seem appropriate today to this large, red-headed postman and the way his thick fingers manipulated the rods and reels and lines, all seriousness in anticipation of what beasts of true depths (“Let her drop all the way to the bottom, Jimmy”) we might encounter. I caught a dogfish shark, heavy and primeval. The thrill of capture left me shaky and proud.
But these memories are not the precise, penetrating bolt I got from that throwback to a woman in pedal pushers casting for bullheads. I don’t know the exact years, for example, of these fishing dreams; around 1960, they must have been, and they are not newly recalled but have been part of a well-worn and slightly fuzzy litany of tropes that helped get me through a lonely boyhood.
A few years later, in the middle 60s, I became a teenager, and now memory intensifies, and recurs, and echoes…
My parents bought property on the Little South Branch of the Pere Marquette River near Baldwin, Michigan, perhaps as recompense for moving us to the arid plains of central Minnesota. For four summers we escaped to live in a log cabin on a river bank. When I turned 15, I was required to work five days a week at the grocery store in Baldwin, but I still came home in the evening to a father temporarily freed from a principal’s Christian-school discipline, to a mother freed from Mothers’ Club and Ladies’ Aid, to brothers converted from nuisances on the prairie to conspirators in the woods, and most of all to the river, clear and cold and rushing and reportedly full of trout. The previous owner left all of his fishing gear, and on Tuesdays, my day off, I put on Mr. Harlan’s waders, vest, hat, all too big and wide for me even when I grew past six feet, and walked along the bank to the place past the deep pool where I could safely enter a Hemingway life, a real life of rainbows and browns. So many sharp images remain from those summers that I feel they’ve been made up into a perfect novel by now.
I remember, for example, one banner day when I caught two rainbows. Over the years I’ve undoubtedly enhanced the details of that triumph but they must be true – a couple of lucky casts, and the trout rising, and the fly line singing out against my trembling fingers, and playing the fish, and grasping the prize tightly, and reverently unhooking the fly from the jagged mouths of each, and staring at their unearthly sparkle and shine, and bringing them home for the family’s admiration. Because two little 10-inchers weren’t worth the effort to clean for dinner, my father probably told me to bury them at the base of his rose bushes.
Dying is almost a sacred, non-thinking act to a boy in his madness for trout fishing. When a boy catches a rainbow, when he holds a living thing in his hand, it’s an act of possession: his heart pounds, his brow sweats, he thinks it’s a way to understand his life, for the fish will soon die. Its iridescence fades fast, it flops for a while in the creel, it lies still. Catching a fish is a safe way to access emotion, to master, sublimate, or even kill pain and joy, anger and fear. A boy looks at water as a spiritual medium: underneath the surface are wonders he can control. He feels like an adult, with dreams of a clear pure river running into the future.
I thought then that a trout’s death was noble. But I never thought that those pike or that dogfish had to die too, nor how they died, whether John or Hilmer whacked them on the head, or they merely suffocated. A young boy wouldn’t. Maybe not an old boy either. And then Tim’s writing brought me that bolt: how we killed bullheads for food.
At the end of that day of fishing, I helped carry a couple of pails of them into the shed behind my grandparents’ house, most still squirming in that catfish-never-die kind of way. Uncle John grabbed one, impaled it through the head on a large spike nailed through a plank, girdled the skin around the neck with a razor blade cutter, and peeled it with pliers like a banana. When the fish was stripped, Grandpa brought down a heavy knife, separating bloody body from ugly head and dropping it into one of Grandma’s white porcelain bowls. Only then did it stop moving.
The pails seemed bottomless. On and on went the killing, like a guillotine. I couldn’t eat much for dinner that night.
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And now the suffering, the killing of our own seems to go on and on again – children abused at the Mexican border, old people thrown off health insurance, poor people denied food, the lands of indigenous people fracked and poisoned, bats and bees and sage grouse murdered in their homes – and it’s from a three-years’ idiocracy of slimy bottom-feeders in charge and I’m feeling anger and fury as never before. Sure, Nixon in the 60s was evil, but we were young then and surely we would fix things once he was gone. Now we’re old, and feeling helpless under the predations of white men without conscience, and those eight hopeful years of Obama seem like some kind of boyhood dream of fishing on a trout river.
What to do when anger is a fist aching for a plasterboard wall or a fat pasty face? People like me are wary of their feelings and deal with them through words, but memoir and exposition and poetry now seem inadequate, and this repressed person, chilled all the long years by Dutch probity and American ambition, just wants to let go and make stuff up. Fiction gets at the truth – the violence we share with animals, the personae of gods we hope for, the desolate stories of war. Doesn’t it?
Of course it does, especially if you write like Tim O’Brien.
My own desperate need to change the world undoubtedly conflicts with good story-telling, and I should continue to tell the story of Earth, not society. But some days it’s not enough to walk a granite shore and expound on life in an essay, not enough to remember a trout pool and possess it. A man must learn not to fish like a boy. Memory is a bad place for fishing. A man does not grasp at quicksilver and put it in his pocket. A man imagines the best of fishing, casting free, swimming free, rushing with emotion, innocent of doctrine. A man embarrasses his teenagers with love letters, a man gives out hugs, a man praises a colleague, and a man confesses his fears to his wife.
Then he goes out to a front line and screams.
For more on Jim Krosschell, please see our Authors page.
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