Growing Gills Read online

  Although the recapitulation theory has been completely dismissed by modern science (with whom I tend to agree), I cannot ignore my connections with fishes. Something holds true in dim memories, and occasionally when I hold a trout or stare into an aquarium, this connection resurfaces. I hold onto my piscine past and throw the rest of the theory out the window because this is the only scientific answer I can find for my inherent desire to grow gills. My tail may have curled under the skin, my gills may have developed into other organs, but inside I still want to have fins and swim away.

  *****

  I no longer keep fish in an aquarium, not even fish from the pet store, but my desire to observe them hasn’t waned. I find it unnatural to bring fish into the terrestrial world, so instead I enter theirs. Now, when the summer sun raises the temperature of Southern Appalachian streams to seventy degrees, I swim against cool current, head submerged, watching fish dash away from my ill-attuned body. Through goggles, I gaze at schools of golden redhorses, warpaint shiners, and horny-headed river chubs shimmering through the sheen of thousands of scales reflecting sunlight like clouds of mica dust disrupted from the streambed. I see brook trout with blood red fins run through mazes of smoothed rock and disappear from sight. During these moments—I am alive.

  I wish that I could tail through crevices, follow the fish into dark spaces between rocks, hide, blend into the bottom, and dart back out when the coast is clear. Instead, my 6´5˝ frame wallows around like a hog in mud while the fish shoot through the stream as if water offers no resistance. The fishes’ pectoral fins direct them in sharp angles like red-tail hawks’ wings turning their bodies through thermals. As much as I wish otherwise, I am human. I feel closer to fish than I do my two-legged counterparts, but unfortunately I can never fully fit in underwater. Yet in moments when I see fish, my humanness vanishes and I revert.

  In the shade of a fifty-foot river birch, I sit on a mattress of soft moss surrounded by trout lilies and Solomon’s seal. The cold mist of a waterfall sprinkles my skin, and I see a native brook trout rise to a trico—a minute species of mayfly—laying eggs. After engulfing the mayfly, the trout vanishes among the riffles. My ears begin to move back and forth again like gills as a part of my unconscious bubbles to the surface and I feel home.

  A School of Cannibalistic Fish

  On the Water

  Blooming mimosa trees always signaled the height of summertime bream fishing. My father first made the connection between trees and fish, but it was an event that we both came to anticipate. Dad would notice the first trees as he drove along the highways on his way home from work or to a Methodist Men’s meeting. In the evening he sat in the gooseneck rocker reading the Charlotte Observer. His voice would come through the thin paper: “Mimosa trees are blooming.” He spoke matter-of-factly, but the magnitude of each syllable hung in my ears. “Bream ought to be biting pretty good about now.”

  “You want to go?” I responded without looking up from the television. I was sprawled out across the worn-out sofa that had once matched the blended colors of the shag carpet. Our house was decorated in outdated 1970s furniture, fixtures, and carpeting; but the “vintage” look was not deliberate.

  “Yeah, we can go this Saturday if I get the bills done in time.”

  My father was always an accountant, whether at home or in the office. The monotony of paperwork always came first, a routine that never made much sense to me but was just the way it was: electricity bill first, fishing second. My mind never has worked like that, a key difference between my father and me. My lights will probably be turned off sooner or later for missing a payment while I’m out on the water, but that’s just a risk I’ll have to take.

  Dad was also a workaholic, so if he wanted to fish on Saturday, he did everything he had to do to make sure that was possible. So, late Friday night he finished the bills, and the next morning we headed for the Catawba. My mother’s Jeep rattled through gears as it pulled the aluminum boat behind.

  A giant mimosa bloomed along the bank of Withers Cove, the summer air intensifying the perfume of large pink flowers. Catalpa worms had spun thick nests entangling branches and leaves in shimmering threads of silk. Channel catfish and bedding bream roamed through the shallow waters beneath overhanging limbs and waited for one of the green worms to lose its grip and fall into the river. As soon as a worm touched water, the fish erupted on the helpless pupa. As the catalpas continued to fall, a late-July feeding frenzy sent triangular lines across the surface as racing pectoral fins cut Vs across the sheen: first come, first served.

  Dad and I sat in faded chairs spotted by mildew, the sixteen-foot Starcraft anchored parallel to the tree line just within casting range. A muskrat swam along the bank, its wet head just above the water’s surface. When the slick-haired mammal reached a fallen tree jutting out into the river along the right side of the mimosa, its head dunked under, and the muskrat was gone.

  Running the point of an Aberdeen hook through the squirming rings of a night crawler, I knew the muskrat was there for the same reason we were. Dad and I weren’t the only ones who knew mimosas brought schools of bream. Raccoons, muskrats, ospreys, hawks, and snapping turtles all saw the same thing each year and understood. The hairy blossoms sprouting like amaranth pink Koosh balls on the mimosa trees meant one thing: fish.

  I slipped my first cast just under the tangled branches. The fluorescent orange cork skittered across the surface and came to rest in the cool shade. Within seconds the cork was high-tailing toward the fallen tree on the right. The bobber disappeared and I set the hook. I yanked low and fast in the opposite direction of the fish, the wobbly steel rod wisping across the surface and then bowing as the tension of the sunfish set in. I wound the handle of the Quantum spinning reel, and the rod pulsated with each burst of fins. I lifted a hand-size bluegill from the river, grabbed its scaly body, ran my thumb over the spiny dorsal fin, and removed the small hook, the worm still attached but running up the monofilament line. Dad glanced over, his hazel eyes hidden behind his Ray-Ban Aviators and his red face shadowed by the brim of a desert camouflage boonie hat. He smiled and reached down, flipping the livewell switch on.

  Water ran into the compartment beneath my feet as Dad made his first cast along the left side of the tree. I opened the carpeted lid of the livewell and dropped the opaque bluegill into the plastic compartment. The fish slapped against the dirty bottom as water rose in the tank. These fish were headed for hot grease. As Dad set the hook on his first catch, I knew by the end of the day we would, in the words of my Uncle Nanner, “have a whole mess o’ fish.”

  *****

  Hot Grease

  The fish that had swum in the hot current of the Catawba River were brightly colored when I caught them, but lying on the plywood board in my backyard their vibrancy had faded, the eyes had glazed over, and the gills no longer moved. Always responsible for scaling, I held the sunfishes’ stiff bodies and ran the shining teeth of the scaler against the grain of their skin. The scales flicked off like specks of mica and stuck to my face, arms, and shirt. I could see white flesh beneath uplifted lines of green skin.

  Dad ran the knife blade behind the pectoral fins, lopped off their heads, cut the anal vents out, and ran the knife up the stomachs, the innards seeping out like an opened bag of giblets. We threw the guts and heads into the woods for animals and took the cleaned fish inside to cook. I saw the blood smeared across the wet plywood and understood what had occurred: fish dead, nothing in vain, take only what you need, waste not, fry them hot, and eat.

  On my father’s side of the family eating fish was a hands-on affair. There was no need for forks or knives; we all learned to eat them off the bone. With the smell of hot grease and fried fish hanging in the air, my family would tear into fish. When I was a kid, the scene reminded me of those moments in cartoons where the cat holds the fish by the tail, shoves the fish in its mouth, and pulls it back out with nothing but the skeleton remaining.

  Watching my dad and me shove catfish
into our mouths, my mother’s side of the family gasped and thought we would certainly get a bone caught in our throat, but in our eyes that’s what the hushpuppies were for. Besides being the perfect side at a fish fry, the doughy wads of hushpuppies made sure that anything caught in the throat eventually went down. Topped off with hand-churned ice cream (a hint of rock salt sneaking into each bite from the churn), there was no better meal.

  I was taught the fried fins and tails were the best part of the fish, and it didn’t take much convincing for me to realize they were right. Uncle Don, my father’s uncle (nicknamed “Cruiser” from late nights in pool halls), always called fried bream “potato chips.” When Dad was a kid he’d walk home from Burr’s Pond, and as he passed Don’s house, Cruiser would yell out from his porch, “Got any tater chips?”

  Crunching into the crispy tail of a bluegill, I understood why. There’s no other way to describe the flavor to anyone who hasn’t eaten them, and that’s exactly the taste: crispy, salty, greasy, delicious. If my family knew anything at all, it was how to fish and how to eat.

  We spent so many hours casting to bream and eating their fried bodies that we all started resembling the fish we caught. This may have made it hard to find suitors, but none of us minded. We were all ugly as hell but were tied close to the fish we sought. Like Vardaman’s famous chapter in Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, “My mother is a fish,” everyone on my dad’s side of the family might as well have fins.

  I was born into a school of cannibalistic fish. We eat our piscine brethren and always have: grilled, smoked, baked, poached, stewed, but mostly deep fried. The general rule of thumb has always been and will always be: if you can stand, you can fish. Fishing was not only a pastime for my ancestors; fish in a bucket meant one less meal that had to be bought. So, everybody in my family learned the ways of the past and the traditions continued: if you can fish, you can clean a fish, and if you can clean a fish, you can eat a fish. Early on I learned the reality of life and death by partaking in scaling the catch.

  *****

  The Matriarch

  I can’t remember how old I was, but my family was at a Carolina beach with Granny, my father’s aunt who raised him. I stood on the shore next to her as she peeled transparent shells off a couple of shrimp and threaded the curled flesh onto the two long-shank hooks of her saltwater rig. I remember my feet and legs were gritty with sand. The smell of bait was stuck in her fingernails, and her straw hat was secured to her head with a white sash. We walked to the waterline together, the long saltwater rod held firmly in the grip of Granny’s age-spotted hands. I stood on the wet sand where periwinkles dug down, and I watched as she waded knee-deep into the ocean and cast the line, the pyramid sinker landing just beyond the breakers.

  With the bail still open, line coming out, Granny back-stepped toward me, locked the bail, reeled in the slack, and handed the rod to me. That fiberglass rod was at least three times as tall as I, but I held tight to the worn cork grips, the butt of the rod extending to the sand behind me.

  “Now, when a fish bites, it’ll feel like this,” Granny explained as she tapped her hand hard and fast against the brown blank of the rod. “If it feels like this and just pulls for a minute and lets go, don’t pay it no mind ’cause it’s just the waves.” Demonstrating the motion, she pushed down on the rod and then let it pop back up as she released her hand.

  The line angled out into the ocean, and with each wave it was pulled by the breaker and snapped back up as the surge crashed ashore. The feeling of a rod being tugged on by waves is something that will make most fishermen set the hook, but Granny had shown me right. I knew the pull was not that of a fish, so I stood and waited; the gulls cawed as they held steady on the wind over the ocean, sanderlings and sandpipers scattering along the shore.

  “Popper used to be able to cast way out there past them waves,” Granny said, pointing toward the ocean’s horizon. “Folks used to say he was fishing plumb over on the England side of the Atlantic, but he could catch some fish.”

  Granny spoke of her second husband, a man that I only knew through stories, a good man who died before my time. Her words were broken with clicks as she repeatedly sucked at her top teeth as if trying to get a piece of pork chop out that had been there for days. The sounds reminded me of the noises made by an angry gray squirrel, a sound that I often tried to mimic after I’d been around her. It was one of those quirks that you don’t realize how much you love—or how much it defines a person—until that person’s not around to do it anymore.

  “Man, he could fish,” she continued. “It didn’t matter what we was fishing for; he’d catch them just as soon as his line hit water. Ol’ Wade used to get so mad at him when we was up in the mountains fishing for trout.” Wade was a friend of theirs who once tried to sell me a gun outside of church when I was in eighth grade. He was a wiry old cuss, and Granny had known him well. “Wade would be putting on all kinds of gadgets (because he was a fly fisherman, you know), and by the time he got his stuff ready, here we’d come with a stringer full of trout. Popper would tell him, ‘Guess we can go on home—seeing how we done caught our limit,’ and Ol’ Wade would get red in the face and yell, ‘Go to HELL, Popper.’”

  Granny broke into a cackling laugh, and I smiled up at her as if I knew what she was talking about. I was too young to know any of the people she mentioned at that point. I’ve since met many of the men and women brought to life in her stories, and each was made real during my first introduction. Older now, I look back on photographs of Granny in her prime, smiling into the lens as she stands next to Popper and Wade. On the water with her, I was too young to fully appreciate what was happening. My childish mind took a tangent fairly quickly—the smell of saltwater, the swoop of a pelican, the sound of ghost crabs waltzing across the shore. I handed the rod back to Granny and turned away.

  I ran back up to the lawn chairs where my parents were sitting and started playing with a bright orange bucket and shovel. Dad popped the top on a Cheerwine—that cherry-flavored soda, the staple of all my family fishing trips—and broke the silence. “She’s got one.”

  I turned toward Granny, who was standing on the beach, and watched as she walked backwards into loose sand. The long fiberglass rod was jerking as the fish tailed through the waves. Dropping the bucket and shovel, I ran toward her and saw a gorgeous golden-colored whiting lying in the sand. It hadn’t taken her long to do what I hadn’t had the patience for. She picked up the fish in her tanned hands to put it in the bucket. I recall the blue veins peeping through the skin of her hands like the forks of an azure river, even her blood mimicking water. I grabbed the rod and this time I wouldn’t let go.

  *****

  Fish Tales

  Besides being a family of fishermen, we were all storytellers. Our stories were stitched tight with details of time on the water. There was never a moment together when tales weren’t swapped or laughs weren’t shared. Whether we were at Thanksgiving dinner or gathered outside the church on Sundays, stories of fish caught and fish seen sprang back and forth between each other’s lips, each person adding his or her own interpretation of what really happened.

  I spent weekends at Granny’s house rocking on a rusted bench swing, the hinges creaking with every pendulum thrust. Nestled in the crook of her arm, I listened to tales about the Catawba River but from a time when condominiums didn’t line the banks and when Henry Ford was first paving toward the unknown future. Sometimes her thick southern accent rattled on about stringers of bream, jug fishing for catfish, and the fall run of puppy drum (her name for redfish) along the Outer Banks.

  Granny was the greatest storyteller of us all; her stories were the root that the rest of the family’s tales stemmed from. Of the stories told, some became legendary. One such tale was about a time when some of my family was flounder gigging, and one of them put a spear into something that he hadn’t expected. Although I wasn’t there to experience it firsthand, the details have been stamped into my memory, the spoken word
s setting off a scene in my mind, a scene of my own creation, but nonetheless true. The Legend of Spike is one that brings belly laughs with it, a story that seems utterly impossible, even now, until I look back at the photographs.

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  The Legend

  Dad, Granny’s son Tim, Uncle Oscar, and his son Bobby went out one night into an inlet somewhere along the North Carolina coast to gig flounder. A moonless night made the stars brighter in the summer sky as the men waded into the water in search of their prey. Each one carried a broomstick with a pronged-metal gig attached to the end, a deadly weapon against the unsuspecting flounder on the bottom.

  Bobby had a rope lassoed around his waist dragging through the salty shallows a black inner tube with a plywood board underneath. A car battery rested on the wet board and provided electricity for the lights that would illuminate the outlines of flounder against the sand. Dad and Bobby held onto long sticks with light bulbs rigged to the ends, with cords running from the bulbs to the battery. The trick was to submerge the bulbs under the water before attaching the cords to the battery; otherwise, the lit bulbs would burst as soon as they touched water.

  The burning bulbs provided the only focal points of light; everything else was black, nothing visible but the uneven layers of sand and shell. The inlet was only knee-deep as they waded through low tide. A wind pushing in from the east whistled across the hollow reeds and spread along both banks like waving hair. The marshlands were silent except for that low, steady, oscillating resonance of grass flutes. Blue crabs sidestepped quickly as bright light passed over their shells.

  Soon enough the light exposed a flattened flounder. Only the fish’s faint outline distinguished it from the bottom. Tim’s dark, hairy arms gigged hard, the spear shooting through flesh and into sand. Blood slowly clouded the water around the broomstick as the flounder slapped violently against the bottom. Tim lifted the gig—water beading off the long handle, prongs driven through the starred brown flesh of the flounder—and flung the fish off the prongs into the inner tube like he was shoveling loose dirt. The flounder continued to flap against the wooden board and battery. None of them gave the fish a second glance, their eyes fastened hard on the lit sand beneath their bare feet. The fish weren’t thick along the bottom but present enough that every fifteen minutes or so somebody would gig another. The inner tube was getting full with layers of camouflaged flounder lying on top of one another, and blood spilled out of the white undersides of the fishes’ bodies.