Stories
On Fathers and Fish Tales
And the tricky business of grasping memories.
A girl I once dated thought I would get along swimmingly with her father because he was a hobby fisherman.
“You know, just like your dad!” she pointed out. Her father and I disagreed on nearly every conceivable issue, but there was a tiny overlap in our appreciation for fishing. And so, in a last-ditch effort for the two of us to get along, my girlfriend orchestrated for me to accompany her dad on one of his deep-sea fishing excursions. Unfortunately for her, though, fishing would turn out to be the very thing that forever solidified the hard truth that her father and I were never going to see eye-to-eye, no matter the subject — especially when it came to fishing.
The kind of fishing I knew and enjoyed was freshwater fishing, which was my own father’s favorite brand. As soon as I was big enough to hold a rod, he set up a bucket and a lawn chair in our yard and had me practice aiming and casting the lure, walking the bucket further away with each successful sink. This was an important skill to foster because, when fishing for the coveted largemouth bass, the highest mark of an expert fisherman was the precision of his cast. My father could thread a needle from 30 yards away, which is what you needed if you hoped to stealthily land your lure into the tiny pocket of dark water under a fallen tree where the largest of the largemouth would be hiding.
When I was old enough to go out on the lake with him, we would wake up before sunrise, stock the jon-boat with ice, stop at a gas station for cream sodas, beans, Vienna sausages, Combos, and nightcrawlers (for the fish, not us). Then we’d drive for an hour until we arrived at one of his secluded fishing holes, often a small lake surrounded by hills that looked like mountains molded just for that spot.
We’d push the boat into the water right at the break of dawn, then we’d spend a few hours casting quietly — under the premise that any noise would scare the fish, when really that was just a clever excuse to spend some father-son quality time while conveniently shirking the awkward requirement to communicate. And it was nice. Even if we never caught anything, which was most often the case, it was nice.
I actually dreaded catching fish. The experience is terrifying. As soon as you’d catch one of these thrashing monsters, you’d have to jam your hand into the undulating maw of guts and visible bones and slimy muscle and teeth it calls a mouth. (Raise your hand if you knew fish had teeth. Anyone?) Which you could only do if the fish was behaving, otherwise you had to hook your fingers into its gills, which is as appealing as going knuckle-deep into a tracheostomy.
One day some enthusiasts at work invited me to fish a creek with them once they discovered I could throw a line. It would be my first time fishing with anyone outside my family, and I was excited, but also nervous. These guys were my age, but they regularly wore camo and had fishing hooks pinned to their hats while I, on the other hand, used rubber worms because real worms were too icky.
Turns out I had nothing to be worried about, because they were blown away when I showed up with one of my father’s Baitcaster. See, there’s many different styles of reels, but the Baitcaster is the most difficult to master. There’s no button or trigger — you just have to use the pad of your thumb to control the speed of the string. If your pressure is wrong or your timing off by even a nanosecond, you’ll end up with the dreaded ‘backlash’, which instantaneously turns your spool into a nest of microscopic knots and tangles. You’d sometimes spend over an hour trying to undo the damage while everyone else happily fished around you, only for you to end up having the same thing happen again on your very next cast, your rod hurled into the lake soon after.
None of my co-workers believed that I could use one, since none of them had the patience to learn. But I sure showed them, just as I showed them how to be the only person to not catch a single fish that day. And that’s okay; another thing I like about fishing is the cruel ironies and brutal wisdom you pick up along the way.
Now, when I accepted my pseudo-father-in-law’s invitation to come fish with him and his buddies (an invitation that was sent reluctantly, no doubt), I was looking forward to impressing them in a similar way that I had done with my co-workers — and if not impress, then to at least relate. However, this was saltwater fishing, not freshwater, and the difference was as noticeable as when drinking the two.
Much like the men whom I found myself on the boat with, saltwater fishing was loud, proud, and obnoxious. The boats, the rods, the noise, the excitement, the catches, the clothes — all were bigger and flashier than anything I was accustomed to. As these fishermen loved to remind me, my trophies were their bait. It didn’t matter that the only skill involved was having a big enough wallet — gas alone on that one outing cost nearly as much as my father’s first boat.
Casting was not the strategic artform I had spent so many years trying to learn. In saltwater fishing, you just drop the the line straight down, attach the pole to the hull so you don’t even have to hold it or pay attention, and then you wait until someone stops partying long enough to notice that you’ve been dragging a tuna through the water like a leashed dog across a highway. Then you reel it in, take your pictures, eat it for dinner, and mention the hard-fought battle at every barbecue pissing contest you ever attend for the rest of your life.
There was no ‘wisdom of nature’ involved in saltwater fishing. No chirping birds or rustling leaves or sporadic ploinks of fish taunting you by eating every waterbug floating around your bait. No dragonflies resting on your pole a few inches away from your nose. No cranes flying right over your head like a sun-blocking kite. No — all you needed to recreate the ambiance of saltwater fishing was to purchase nine blenders, fill them with chum, turn them on as loudly and aggressively as they’ll go, leave them on for hours, then try and drown out the noise with a Jimmy Buffet album. (Conversely, you could start with the album and then turn on the blenders of chum, depending on which sound you prefer to hear.)
Up until that saltwater fishing trip, I had always felt that me and my own father had very little in common. Our relationship always felt uncomfortable because of this. But after trying to fish in the majestic seas of New Jersey, I started to see how similar he and I actually were. In fact, one of the reasons we felt uncomfortable around one another, I now realize, is that we were both naturally uncomfortable people. We were both reserved. We were both easily embarrassed. And we both preferred our water not so salty.
My father was an imposing figure.
I think in his obituary, the opening line had the words: “a presence that was larger than life”, because this was an observable fact that everyone who knew him could quickly agree on. He was not boisterous or outgoing, he was just…mythical, almost. Six-foot-five. The build of a lumberjack. The style of a gunslinger. I know most boys think of their fathers like a superhero, but mine might have been the real deal. Even other kids, no matter how mean, would readily admit that their own fathers would not be able to take on mine.
I’ll always remember this one day after a field trip, when the parents arrived at the school afterhours to pick us up, that I proudly experienced the hush among both the students and the adults as my dad stepped out of the truck to claim me. He had come straight from working in the stable (that he had designed and built almost entirely by hand, by the way), still in his boots and black duster and dusty cowboy hat. He towered over everyone like a bull. As I walked to the truck with my head held high, one of the female teachers boldly introduced herself to him, toying with her necklace the whole time and somehow managing to pass on a hug — an honor than no other parent seemed to receive that day.
My mother tells a story of how on one of her first dates with my dad back when they were teenagers, that he was driving her around in a Volkswagen beetle that he was borrowing from his sister. It was obviously funny how cramped he looked in the small car, but later, when they accidentally rolled the car onto its side for a reason my mother doesn’t want to get into, he got the chance to redeem his lost pride by flipping the car back onto its wheels so that their parents would never have to find out. He did so just by pushing it. No tools required. And their parents never did find out.
It wasn’t just his size that made him larger-than-life, but also his demeanor. A gravity that required respect, whether he wanted it or not. A density that came from a complicated inner balance between great power and slightly-greater restraint.
As good of a fisherman as he was, he never kept the fish he caught, no matter how prize-worthy they might have been, always practicing the personal policy of catch-and-release. His friends were all proud hunters, but none of them questioned why he wouldn’t come hunting with them, even though he knew how to shoot a gun, even though he owned a few hunting rifles himself. “I just don’t like it,” he told me once. And that was that. No more discussion needed. He didn’t attempt to justify it, and it was a brief but potent lesson in non-toxic confidence.
There was a day when one of our dogs had to be put down. We had already lost so much money on the vet bills to keep her alive, and another bill to euthanize her seemed like one too many. My parents had a STRONG dislike for that dog, and rather than finance another go-cart for our local vet, my father decided that he would hold onto the money and put the dog down himself. “I’m going to put it out of both our miseries’,” he had said.
So he got his handgun out of the safe and took the dog to the furthest part of the property, with not a peep of protest from anyone; even us kids agreed that this dog had lived about ten years too long. We all waited indoors for the gunshot, pretending to focus on other things…but the bang never came. Half an hour later he came back with the dog in his arms, still alive. He couldn’t do it, and nobody dared tease him about it or ask him why he couldn’t pull the trigger.
When the dog eventually died of a myriad of natural causes, my father buried it in one of the pastures, giving it a makeshift cross and a blanket of stones, just as he had done with all the other pets we had lost over the years, just as he would do with all the ones to come.
I was in my twenties when he got cancer.
I was living in a different state at the time, but I moved back towards the end of his life to help my family with the process. To this day I still have some guilt about that, because I showed up at the very end, once most of the damage had already been done, the brunt of the trauma absorbed by the rest of my family like a head-on collision with a train, me arriving just in time to claim that I was there to witness the slaughter first-hand.
He worked at the hospital in the boiler room, and because of this, he refused to die at “work”, instead choosing his home to be his deathbed. (Which, it turns out, is a common request among those who work in hospitals.) Keeping him at home was also a convenient way to control visitors, because, in those final few weeks, my mother turned away anyone who wanted to see him, including his own parents, but only for their own sake. The more someone loved him, the more awful it would be to witness what he was going through.
By the time the cancer was discovered, it was hard to tell where it had originated. The oncologist’s best guess was that it began in his lungs, then moved to the marrow of his legs, then metastasized to the rest of his bones and organs, ending with the liver. Typically, when the liver goes, the brain soon follows, since all the bile and nastiness that would normally be filtered out instead gets backed up in the blood, eventually rotting the brain. So it wasn’t just having to watch the cancer eat his body, but also take away his mind. It was during this stage of the cancer that we as family silently arrived at our joint stance on human euthanasia for the terminally ill. “We don’t allow our dogs to go through this much suffering,” my mom would say.
While I was staying with my parents, I slept on their couch. One night, as I was halfway asleep, I heard the door to their bedroom open, then listened to the shuffle of someone walking out into the dark space of the living room I was in. I had assumed it was my mom since my father could barely stand by that point. But when I groggily called out to her, I didn’t get any response back.
I turned on the light, and there he was, in nothing but a diaper, trying to open the door to the basement. We had wrapped the doorknob in a child-proof case so he wouldn’t fall down the steps, and he was getting frustrated, as if it were covered in butter that he couldn’t see. He was whimpering.
All of his hard-earned body mass was gone, all that old muscle accumulated from years of chopping wood and slinging sledgehammers and flipping cars to impress girls. He was now skeletal, and I remember how big his bald head seemed in comparison to the rest of him. This man who was larger than life had been so easily dwarfed by death.
My mother — who continued to share a bed with him through it all, even then, a feat of spirit that I can’t even begin to comprehend — had slept through his escape that night. He needed to be supervised at all times because he was forever lost in hallucination like a troubled sleepwalker and likely to accidentally kill himself, which would not have been difficult with how delicate he had become, nor would it have necessarily been considered a misfortune.
I didn’t want to rob my mother of any more precious rest, so I guided him to a recliner and sat with him while he talked gibberish. If he stopped talking, I’d ask a question like it was a regular conversation, and he’d nod and start talking nonsense words again. If he drooled, I’d wipe it off. I doubt he even knew I was there. Even when you looked him in the eye, you could tell he was looking at something else.
And so I sat there with him for an hour or so, with tears on my cheeks, listening to him, sitting him back down if he tried to get up, until my mother apologetically came in and helped walk him back into bed, locking the door behind her. And that’s how I learned what my family had been putting up with while I was 200 miles away trying to keep my mind off the fact my father had an expiration date. That he was, in fact, already gone.
A few days later I stood by his bed, my mother’s hand white-knuckling my own, my brother and sister behind me, as we watched him catch and release his final breath. An hour later, I watched the funeral-home suits zip his body up. For some reason, I had to help carry out the bag. It was light. We took it straight through the living room full of family and friends who had somehow known that this day would be the day, same as how me and my immediate family knew that this minute was the minute to meet by his bed and say goodbye.
Months earlier, when the cancer had first started to eat at the bones in his legs, I asked him if it hurt, and he had surprised me when he told me no. That the feeling was hard to describe. That it was kind of like trying to walk on a boat in stormy weather. When he picked his foot up, he wasn’t too certain where the floor would be when he put it back down. As the disease progressed, I imagine this sensation worsened, especially when I watched him sway from side to side in the hallway. The storm was getting worse. The boat rockier.
Eventually, though, when he reached a point where he couldn’t walk at all, the storm he was experiencing seemed to calm. As his brain went, all that was really left of him was his motor memory, so you would watch him go through the subconscious archive of tiny, repetitive movements a person doesn’t even realize they do a million times over the course of a lifetime: taking a drink from a glass, changing the channel on the remote, opening a car door, switching gears on a stick shift. All were exactly mimicked with empty hands. And towards the end, there was one motor memory he kept coming back to — once the storm had calmed enough, the boat steady — and that was the perfectly straight flick of the wrist as he’d sling the line of his Baitcaster into the peaceful waters that he was crossing into.
My father’s sister refused to see him when he was sick, even before we enacted the No-Visitors rule.
She’s a sensitive soul, prone to anxiety and obsessive dread, and the thought of seeing her brother and best friend in such a state was too much for her to bear. “I want to remember him as I knew him,” she said. And I think, still, all these years later, she doesn’t regret the decision. And I can’t blame her. Since I chose a more heads-on approach to my grief, I have had to live with the searing image of him zombified and infantilized and scared. I would not wish such a sight upon my worst enemy, nonetheless my own aunt.
Today, my larger fear is forgetting him all-together. Already, with my mother remarried and my childhood home unrecognizable and under new ownership — the home that he halfway constructed and later died in, along with the pastures where he buried our pets — it feels like I’m deep into a new lifetime, like he was a character in a book that I read a long time ago.
Right after his death is when I purchased my first real camera. I had a sudden urge to capture moments, preserve them forever, especially since I could feel so much precious life slipping away. My father was a linchpin that held a lot of of my family’s world together, and within two years we had to sell the mini ranch my family had worked so hard to turn into a home, returning one of the horses to the foster stable we got it from, leaving both donkeys and one dog with the new owners. The dynamics within my family changed so drastically that the holidays I cherished so much I soon learned to dread like a regular American. Happiness was starting to feel like wet sand between my fingers.
It wasn’t just my life slipping away, but my memory as well. Or, at least, I was finally aware of how poor my memory has always been. I had never needed to consider my memory before, since everything I cherished had always been right beside me in the current moment, easy to reach out and touch whenever I needed it. But my father’s passing was the first time that something I loved remained in the past, never to be in the present moment again. Like watching the thrusters of your ship break off and fall into space, never to be seen again.
I recently found an old home movie that had my father in it, and I was blown away by the sound of his voice. I could not believe he had ever sounded like that. But it wasn’t that his voice was different — it was just that I had entirely forgotten what he had sounded like. Even now I know that his face is fading away too, just like his voice has, and there might come a day when I look at his picture and be surprised that I don’t recognize it either, a day when even a camera won’t be able to help me hold on to the past.
In Saving Private Ryan, a soldier expresses his concern about how quickly he is forgetting what his brothers look like, all of whom had just died in the war.
“I can’t see my brothers’ faces. I’ve been trying,
and I can’t see their faces at all.”
And the war-hardened commander, who seems to know exactly what the soldier means, tells him to stop trying to remember their faces and to instead remember their “context” — to zoom out on a memory, not in. And so the private recalls a funny story involving his brothers, and you can tell that his memory is immediately restored to a crystal-clear vibrancy.
In a similar way, even though I had forgotten my father’s voice, I remembered exactly the events that took place on the day that home movie was recorded. It had snowed, and even though we kids were fairly grown by that point — at least two of us were in college, I’m sure — we hadn’t seen snow in years, and it was rare that we were all back home at the same time. So we bundled up and went out to play in it, parents included.
We didn’t own sleds anymore, but someone had the idea to use the old fiberglass rowboat as a toboggan. So we dragged it up to the top of the largest hill on our property — us kids taking turns pulling the rope until we all grew tired and just made Dad do it, since he was an ox even then, right at the beginning stage of his illness — and then me and my brother and my sister would pile in like we were six again and fly down this hill with a nice running push, our two farm dogs chasing us excitedly. I can see it so clearly — all down to the ‘FISH TALE’ lettering my father had used to name the little green boat, which was his first vessel of any kind. That was also probably the last voyage that boat ever took. And I think he would have approved of such a finale.
The further away I get from the point in time when I had a father, the more difficult it is for me to see the individual trees that make up my memories of him. If I stare closely — say at the twisted, charred trunk of his death, or the weather-hardened bark of his sun-worn, laugh-lined face, the sound of his voice — I can still make out the distinctions in those trees…but only if I squint really hard, or take out my binoculars as I’m doing right now.
The more distance I gain with age, the harder it will be to see the details of him, no matter how hard I squint. And perhaps that’s a mercy, because it will be nice if I never see those ugly bits up close again, even if that means also losing the ability to closely admire the good trees too, the softer ones of boat sledding and cream sodas.
In the end though, no matter how blurry my hindsight gets, no matter how disfigured the trees at the end of his life were, there will always be the forest of my father, a memory not in my brain but in my heart, a feeling that I will always be able to tap into, even when I no longer have a name for it or remember where its coming from. Because if you love somebody enough to feel pain at their departure, it will always be the love itself that lasts, outliving even the memories, and certainly outliving the pain itself.♦
