Growing Gills Read online

  As the men headed back toward their pickup truck, Bobby’s light outlined another, and Uncle Oscar instinctively shot forward, the gig piercing the profile dead center. The instant prongs broke flesh, Oscar’s arms went berserk as the fish jolted forward, held to the gig by pointed barbs. His shoulders rotated in figure eights like he was paddling fast in a canoe race as the fish swam in every direction in bursts of contracting muscle. They all knew that it was no flounder putting up such a fight—flounder barely bobbed the stick. Oscar, on the other hand, was being dragged through the shallows, his uneven steps sloshing through the water, the fish almost pulling him in. The battle lasted minutes for Oscar but must have seemed to go by like hours. Blood blurred the water around his wading body as he finally heaved the fish through the surface. Once it was plopped into the inner tube, they all gathered around staring down at something they had never seen before.

  Back at the beach house, they cleaned the flounders on a warped board table, saved the beast for last, and walked over occasionally to stare down at the oddity in the cooler. With the flounders gutted and bagged, Oscar pulled his fish from the cooler with a pair of channel locks, scared to touch the toothy leviathan: the upturned eyes sat like marbles atop the fish’s head, the gaping mouth turned upright, the giant pectoral fins like veined paddles, the olive skin freckled with white spots growing larger toward the tail. They didn’t know what it was or what to do with it, so they took pictures, named it Spike, and declared it the ugliest fish in the sea. The legend was born.

  Looking at the picture as Dad told the story, I stared at the details and determined, like them, that Spike was one ugly bastard, but I wanted to know exactly what he was. I searched through field guides and tried to find the answer. Finally I recognized the fish as a northern stargazer, a benthic (bottom-dwelling) species that inhabits the eastern seaboard from North Carolina to New York. They were most commonly found in water at least a hundred feet deep but could be found in sandy shallows during the spawn. Their mouths are on top of their heads so that they can suck in prey while remaining hidden on the bottom. They even have electrical organs as a defense mechanism, but I never heard of Uncle Oscar getting shocked. Their Latin name, Astroscopus guttatus, is a combination of two words meaning “one who aims at the stars” and “speckled,” but in my family the fish has always remained Spike.

  *****

  Blood and Water

  I know that most families have stories of fishing trips, but with mine it’s a little different. These aren’t tales told and born anew each time everyone’s back together. These aren’t stories marking the one or two outings when a father took a son fishing. These stories are our lives, the cornerstones of our existence, the reason that we continue to wake up and give the world another go. The tales are the points along our linear journey through this world and the only thing to assure us that we ever lived. In the quilt work of our lives these are the patches stitched together by our breathing, the only thing that holds it all together. Fishing is not a hobby; it is who we are.

  We are a family defined by time on the water, time shared with rods in hands. When I try to find the reason that I’m so attached to fish, it always goes back to heritage. Although my family is not the only reason to explain why I sit for hours watching trout rise to a cloud of mayflies, everything I have become (as well as my entire journey as a fisherman) can be traced back to where I came from. My roots are embedded in water like those of a cypress, and I cannot imagine it any other way.

  Our chromosomes are strung with monofilament line. We are so attached to the fish we seek that it’s almost as if our skin has become scaly, our limbs have turned to fins, and we swim through a world amongst people, nothing more than fish out of water. We never fit in with the crowd because unless we share blood, the crowd could never understand. We are oddities like Spike, disappearing into sand, moving only to catch a passing fish. We are bound together in the seine of the world, continuing to be drawn in closer, until another day can be shared, another legend told, another fisherman born. Every baby born into this family must hold a rod and must continue the line. I can still remember when I grew from a fry and finally joined the school.

  *****

  Casting Onward

  I was eleven years old when I missed a week of sixth grade in order to join my family on their yearly trip to the Outer Banks. I had never been allowed to go before, but the magic of what had occurred on Hatteras Island always gave me goose bumps, and my hairs stood on end as my father told stories after arriving home. I couldn’t believe I was finally going to be a part of those tales, finally joining the ranks of my piscatorial family.

  On the shore of the Atlantic, a cold November breeze blew in from the east and shifted sand along the beach. The smell of seawater was heavy on the chilling wind. Past the breakers, where the ocean calmed into one continuous straight line, the sky blended from cobalt along the horizon to a peachy orange, then into flax yellow gradually rising to white. The winter sun had sunk behind the swaying sprigs of sea oats and disappeared beneath the smoothed dunes. A slick pane of wet sand, a remnant of receding waves, shone like a sheet of ice in the dying sunlight.

  My family stood along the shore, each member with a shimmering line extending from their pole into the green breakers. Darkened silhouettes grew smaller the farther the bodies stood down the beach, each shadow holding a long rod bowing to the incoming tide. The profile farthest away rotated toward the dunes as she set the hook, her rod doubling over from the tension of current and fins. Granny had a fish. Everyone along the shore turned and looked at her for a second before concentrating again on the pull of his or her own rod.

  I stared at my family lining the cold shoreline, my grandmother reeling in a spot, the first stars coming into view over the ocean. We were a family of fishermen, the need for water pumping hard through each of our veins. I never had a choice about this matter, and I’m glad for that.

  The rod twitched. I yanked back on the cork grip and back-stepped from the shoreline into softer sand. The rod bowed to the incoming tide, and I reeled toward another tale.

  Breaking In the Cork

  Her hands—scattered with age spots and veins raised like roots running under thin skin, each wrinkle holding a story—stitched tight curves through the colored fabric of a Wagon Wheel quilt. Granny told me a tale about working for Union Carbide after the “last great American war,” but all I could focus on as a twelve year old were her hands. Hands that had picked cotton, cleaned fish, mixed cobblers, and held young’uns now exposed brittle bones and fragile skin as delicate as tissue paper. The story of her life was spelled out across her palms, each line a narrative of her eighty years.

  About that time Granny gave me one of her old spinning rods. The steel rod was chocolate brown with tan and gold thread wrapped around every guide. That rod was as flimsy as the hickory switches she used to spank my legs with and would double over every time a fish was on the line. A small Mitchell spinning reel was fastened tightly to the reel seat, but a broken screw meant to hold the arm on the reel made it impossible to cast. I dreaded taking off the old Mitchell, separating the partnership of rod and reel, but that rod begged to be fished. Saving every dime I could find, I bought a new Quantum reel and continued the tradition she had started—catching fish.

  Thirteen years from the moment I first held the rod, I rocked back and forth in a tattered recliner and stared at her rod resting in the corner of my living room. The limber tip curved into convergence with the wall, the tarnished guides pressed against painted sheetrock. I walked over to the rod, eased it away from the wall, and carried it back to the chair. I sat back down, caressed the smoothed grip, and looked at every nick in the aged cork. My mind flashed back to images of her hands. The same hands that offered me cornbread had softened the layers of cork over the years.

  I had held that rod many times, and I’d caught thousands of fish with it, but I couldn’t take credit for such a masterpiece. The cork grip of that rod defines what it m
eans to be a fisherman. That handle was not aged from sitting in a garage becoming a support for cobwebs or left forgotten in an attic begging to be cast. That handle was worn, smoothed, and perfected by the hands of an artisan. Holding that grip, I grasp a piece of history, continue her tradition, and, in a way, become what she was.

  I don’t recall her fishing with that specific rod, but my memory is chock-full of scenes of the two of us casting saltwater rigs into breakers at low tide. She held the worn grip of a 9-foot fiberglass rod and waited for the repetitive ticks of a whiting nibbling shrimp from her hooks. Her tanned arms yanked hard as she backed up the beach with her gray hair blown sideways in the wind. The cork of that rod also told stories. Sand and salt were embedded into the seams, and dried fish slime coated the cork. Buried into that grip was a piece of herself, a piece that I cherish, the fingerprints of a master.

  *****

  If you ever doubt whether a man truly fishes or simply says that he does, just ask to hold his rod. It’s easy to tell how consumed people are with their craft by examining their tools. Paintbrushes speckled with acrylics, shotgun barrels blued from open seasons, knife blades tarnished but sharp, cork grips worn dark and smooth—these are the signs of artisans. I can tell a lot about a man by holding the grip of his fishing rod. Unblemished handles and the cork still as tan as the freshly plucked top on a cheap bottle of wine tell the story of someone who’s rarely touched water. Fish stories remain tales until I see the rod. A virgin rod will call out the lies of a so-called fisherman faster than shifty eyes give away guilty children. Cork grips are my polygraph. Show me a rod with a cork grip lacquered with fish slime, scales and sand deep in the crevices of the cork, and I’ll know that person has devoted time to mastery.

  An author and friend of mine, Ron Rash, had been asking me to take him fishing for years. I knew of his love for Appalachia, fly fishing, and native trout from reading his words. His descriptions are alive, so I never doubted that he had been there and that he shared my passion. The only reason I’d yet to take him on the water was because I knew he had bad knees and a stiff back. I also knew if anything happened to him while we were on the water, every bigwig at Western Carolina University would be ready to tan my hide. Through time, our friendship had grown past a master-apprentice relationship in a creative writing classroom and blossomed into a mutual respect of wild places. There was no doubt; it was time to take him fishing.

  One afternoon in late spring, we met in his office and headed for a hole on the Tuckasegee River where I’d hammered fish a week before. He understood the significance of saying he was a fly fisherman to a man like me. His lyrical descriptions of native brook trout were too deliberate to be faked. I knew he probably dreamed of twenty-inch trout just as I did, and I couldn’t wait to see him on the water.

  Earlier that week when I’d asked Ron what he was fishing with, he had explained to me that he’d broken his bamboo rod the previous weekend. That wasn’t a problem, considering I had six fly rods waiting for water, but the fact that he fished bamboo said it all: people who fish bamboo do so for one reason, tradition. Tradition comes from respect, respect from trial and error, so there was no doubt that he’d spent time waist-deep in a stream. I knew he was a fisherman.

  The morning of our trip, I threw a 5-weight and a 2-weight on top of a 7-weight that had been left in the cab of my truck for night-fishing. The plan was to let him fish the 5 while I chucked dries on the limber 2-weight. When we got to the hole and parked in a red clay pull-off beside a bulldozer, I hopped out of the truck and started pulling waders over my brown Dickies, quick as a rubythroat. Ron methodically drew his Don Bailey waders onto his long legs and tightly laced his wading boots.

  “There were a couple of people fishing that hole when we drove up,” I told Ron. From the road, I’d seen two men in our section of river. One was on the bank gathering his gear, and the other was casting, thigh-high in the current. “What do you want to do?”

  “Well, we could kill them.” He spoke with a thick Appalachian accent. There was seriousness in his voice like a character from a Faulkner story.

  “With luck, they’ll be gone by the time that we get down there,” I said. The water would have already been touched, but I hoped that the fishermen hadn’t pressured the trout too hard.

  “We could kill them,” he repeated with little expression. “There are plenty of places to hide the bodies.” High in Appalachia, I knew he was right. The mountains held plenty of places to dump a body or two where no one would stumble upon the remains. Continuing the scenario, I thought to myself that we were there to fish, and a messy cleanup would mean less time on the water.

  Ron was tall and lanky like myself. He’d run track in college, and the thirty or so years since hadn’t changed his thin frame. Brownish gray hair parted across his head, and the scruffy, unshaved stubble on his face held the same color. His steel blue eyes reminded me of the way a hound’s are set, with a certain seriousness and sadness in their stare. Ron’s hands looked like they’d spent time doing work, scratching stories, and holding rods. I would have liked to have seen his broken bamboo rod, to hold the grip, and to understand how it had been fished; but today he would add a few lines to my cork and that was fine by me.

  I grabbed the olive rod tube out of the cab and unzipped the cover, unveiling my baby: a gorgeous 5-weight rod with the cork grip aged to perfection in my hands and a tarnished reel held firm against the rosewood seat. I tried to unscrew the reel from the rod so that Ron could put his onto it. I would have preferred his just using my reel, but he’s left-handed, making my line and drag setup backwards in his hands. “Now, Ron, you know this reel ain’t ever come off this rod,” I said, half-jokingly as I struggled to loosen the reel away from the reel seat.

  “Is that right?”

  “Yeah, I think it’s bad juju to take a reel off a rod.” I was kind of kidding with him, but the strain of getting the reel off made me wonder. I see the relationship between reel and rod as a marriage that never needs a divorce. If something breaks on the reel, I’d rather retire the whole outfit than separate the two. The retaining ring finally broke free and the reel fell into my palm. I handed the 81⁄2-foot rod to Ron and began putting the sections of my 2-weight together. He tightened the rings on a battered Medalist reel he’d had since childhood.

  We were both pulling our leaders and line through the guides when I heard something really strange—under his breath, Ron had cursed. The reverberation of that single syllable echoed through my eardrums. It wasn’t that the word bothered me; I had just never heard this man who commands language revert to the archaic utterances I was so accustomed to using. I looked up from the tippet I was fastening to my leader, and Ron stared, puzzled, tender-eyed as a beaten dog. In one hand he held my rod, and in the other hand, the top section from between the last guide and the tip-top.

  “I broke your rod.” He spoke as if someone had died.

  “Ah, it’s all right.” I forced each word from my lips. My heart sat low on my stomach like a fat man sinking into the cushions of a worn-out couch. I wasn’t mad, not even frustrated, but I was dumbfounded. I stood in horror but sucked it up and didn’t let any emotion show. Ron was too good a friend, and I respected him too much to let a fumble ruin our day on the water.

  “I don’t know what happened. I was just pulling the leader through the guides and it snapped. It wasn’t like I was pressing real hard on it.” He repeated his motion with his hands. “I don’t know what happened.”

  To this day I don’t think that Ron did anything to break that rod. I think that there was a weak spot in the graphite, probably a result of something I had done, but he felt awful. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll just let you use this 2-weight, and I’ll fish with the 7-weight I’ve got in the truck.”

  “Now, David, I ain’t going to let you take me fishing unless you let me buy you another one just like it.” He meant every word; I could read it in his stare.

  There was no arguing. I’d have to
let him buy the rod. “Fine. You fish this 2-weight and I’ll fish my other rod. Don’t worry about it.”

  Bad luck continued when I lost my truck keys, but I was unfazed, knowing that I was about to be wrapped in the cool embrace of a trout stream. I don’t know for sure that Ron shared the same attitude, but for me it was easy. Screw it, I thought, at least I’m going fishing.

  On the stream, trout were feeding fairly consistently. The fish weren’t coming to the surface, but I could see their shadowy bodies ascend to take drifting nymphs. I was sure we were going to get into some fish, and judging from the luck I’d had there the previous week, I thought one of us might have a shot at a monster.

  My assumptions about Ron being a fisherman were right. His overhead cast was nice, but when he cast side-armed, he was an artist. His side-arms swept line under low oak branches overhanging the bank, his mends were marvelous, and his instinctive ability to read water was the final answer. One thing I wasn’t right about, however, was that we would catch fish.

  Two hours on the stream and neither of us had gotten a bite. Finally, I hooked one small, stocked brookie, but besides that we were skunked. The fish I caught is hardly worth mentioning, but I’ve got to try to find one bright spot. Ron got a decent bite, but by the time he raised the rod, the fish was gone. His hand was quick on the draw, but the fish was a runner, rising and disappearing in an instant, what pheasant hunters would call a cock that flushed wild.