The Last Fish – Part 2:
(A 4-part series. Read Part 1. Subscribe)
Terns can talk if you learn how to listen – and that may take a lifetime.
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Craig and I stood side by side the last time we fished together, hardly aware of the other as we probed the tide with our minds and rods.
“Terry!”
Craig was pointing at a slight disturbance on the surface 50 feet off shore. The cat’s paw scratch of a breeze? A drift of sea grass? Baitfish? If so, what kind? It matters.
“Anchovies?”
“Could be, but they aren’t scared. Looks like they are feeding. Their noses are sticking out.”
We aren’t looking for hungry anchovies.
As we stared, there was a subtle change. The surface water shivered nervously and darkened as the little fish suddenly bunched up and lowered their noses. They seemed to tremble. Craig spotted a tern hovering above them.
Birds tell us a lot – birds such as gulls and terns and pelicans that eat the same meat as bass. Each bird species preys differently, sometimes so subtly that it takes interpretation. That hovering tern, does it see the dark shape of a bass making the anchovies nervous or is it the dark shape of a bat ray flying beneath them? You can tell after a long, long time of staring for answers. A lifetime of staring.
Pelicans, God bless ‘em, aren’t subtle at all. Here they came, cruising gracefully above the water until they sprawled mouth agape into the anchovies. My lower jaw would break off at such a stunt. Theirs snapped shut on little ones who made the pelicans’ chin bags twitch on their way to the gullet.
“Terry!”
It was happening. Big fish exploded among the anchovies. Terns dipped to snatch anchovies that had become flying fish in their terror. Pelicans dive-bombed.
“Craig!”
How many times have we yelled at each other while stumbling through thick mud as we raced to the scene of massacre? God, the blood lust that drives us, that exults us as we throw lures into the melee.
How can I explain the excess of joy when a streaking force suddenly seizes hold of your lure, your life.
“Craig!”
“Terry!”
We both were tied to heavy, fleeing fish.
All things bad and neutral vanish in these moments. There is no pain or yearning or disappointment. This is life! LIFE!
People on the shoreline gawked at screaming men and screeching reels. People in houses that line the shore gaped through windows at frantic actors in a silent film.
Seagulls, those thieves, arrived in a mess of rough talk and rude acts. They’d steal the milk from a baby’s mouth. They bullied a delicate tern into dropping his catch, then took turns stealing it from each other in mid-air. Away they went and I never did learn who won, because I was so damned anxious to win myself.
My fish was big, fast, quick and powerful. He knew how to use the tide. He ran off with it towards San Francisco as I prayed – to God, I tell you – for intercession. Stop him, please! Don’t let him break my line. For God’s sake, stop! All I heard was the cry of gulls and the tidal rush in my brain and the scream of just one other living creature.
“Terry!”
Craig was fighting his own fish.
Mine spit out the lure. The rod straightened. I drooped. There is no God.
But there is Craig, dancing and whooping and re-igniting my spirit.
We both whooped for minutes before Craig finally eased in a tired striper – silver and black like a Raiders running back – the length of his arm. He held it gently with his palm beneath its belly and the other palm beneath jaws that gasped open and close. He carefully moved the fish back and forth to flush water and oxygen through the fish’s gills. Craig is a catch-and-release fisherman, like me. Like I used to be.
The fish suddenly found its strength and disappeared, no worse for wear than a hole in the thin membrane at the corner of its mouth. I looked at that hole and recalled what the Southern gent told my 5-year-old self when I caught my first fish: “Fish ain’t got no feelings.” So why do they struggle?
“Too bad, buddy, there’ll be another one,” Craig said. The consolation was heartfelt. It made me feel good.
After the March run of stripers in 2016, Craig went off to Mexico and caught the greatest roosterfish of his life. Roosterfish are…magical. He sent a picture of it to me on his cellphone.
Meanwhile, I was high in the Sierra mountains catching wild and beautiful brook trout. I took a picture of one held high for the camera with a hook in its mouth. It was struggling. I was happy.
I never sent that picture – of my last fish – to Craig because something happened shortly after it was taken. Something that convinced me to never again pick up a fishing rod.
(Tomorrow: Part 3 – The First Fish. Read Part 1. Subscribe)