Cool Hot Chance

Eugene kept his head during the software boom and bust and moved up as a systems designer for a pharmaceutical company. “But the best drug is fishing,” he’d always say, and in 1993, while I was still in Japan and riding a strong yen, we arranged a late summer rendezvous in Alaska. My father’s older sister, Aunt Shirley, lived in Anchorage, and she met us at the airport. I didn’t know Shirley well. She was sixty-nine with the tan, creased skin and lean figure of a lifelong skier and hiker, her wind-whipped hair suggesting a recent flight from a grizzly bear or ex-boyfriend. On the drive back to her house, Shirley said, “My son, Doug—your cousin who you met when you were just a little boy—wants to take you to church tonight.” Eugene shot me a severe look. I hesitated, then spoke.

“We’ve had a long trip, Aunt Shirley.”

“Well, we’ll go over to my place and have a drink first.”

I’d heard that Aunt Shirley liked gin and tonics, so my panic turned to confusion. When we got to her house the Tanqueray and Schweppes were on the counter. “I’ve got ice and limes. You boys make yourself at home,” Shirley said, smiled, and crossed the room decorated with watercolor paintings she’d done of her favorite ski runs. Eugene and I knocked back a couple drinks, and when my cousin Doug and his wife arrived, he asked about Japan and our fishing plans. “Well,” he finally said. “I hear you’re up for a little church tonight.” His wife laughed and walked into the kitchen. My gin-tuned receptors sensed a code cracking moment, and after a fine supper of moose stew and local squash, Doug drove us to his favorite strip joint for a few hours of worship and hymns like Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and Warrant’s “Cherry Pie,” the elastic offering plate frequently filled. The drink-serving altar girls wore T-shirts depicting lady anglers above the testimony, “I Love a Good Pole Dance.”

The next morning, after pleasant reflections on the evening service, Eugene and I gave thanks and took to the skies in a small plane for Fish Lake, seventy miles northwest of Anchorage.

“There must be a thousand Fish Lakes in Alaska,” Eugene spoke to the pilot through the headset mic as we leveled off below the clouds. “How will I know where I am?”

“Because in a couple days I’ll be back to get you on this one,” the pilot answered and laughed.

Looking past the wing strut over the woods, rivers, and vast wetlands of Alaska, spotting moose and caribou, it’s easy to believe that the planet is still a wild and beautiful place.

“It’s all ours,” Eugene cried as we landed. The outfitters provided an A-frame cabin and a small aluminum boat tied to a wooden dock. Unpacking our simple gear, we launched within minutes, casting floating Rapalas, twitching, and retrieving until a pike attacked. The northern pike is a magnificent predator with sight grooves down its snout to target prey and a vast mouth of needle-sharp teeth to seize and swallow anything that moves. I had caught pike in South Dakota and Indiana but never of this size and number. We landed several long fish up to eight pounds and kept one, from which I cut translucent white slices of sashimi that we dipped in soy sauce and wasabi brought from Japan.

On the second day of fishing, Eugene hooked and fought a tremendous pike. It ran and jumped and rolled like an alligator, and I swear it was more than four feet long. “Of submarine delicacy and horror / A hundred feet long in their world,” the poet Ted Hughes, imagined the pike’s powerful place in the little lake community. This fish thrashed and circled the boat, but those brilliant teeth sawed away the twelve-pound-test leader, and it was gone. “I can’t believe I lost it,” Eugene groaned, and I reminded him of that time he was so cool after hooking and losing a five-pound bass on Lake Ronkonkoma. He groaned on. Then I offered Izaak Walton’s adage that, “No man can lose what he never had.” He groaned some more. Big fish lost haunt us more than big fish caught, but they deepen the angler’s soul, reminding us that it’s not “all ours,” that there are still great, ungraspable forces alive and free in the universe.

Big fish lost can also deepen our worries and guilt. I fretted over the pike swimming around with a Rapala stitched to its mouth. Hooks rust quickly in water, I told myself, and this beast was a survivor. But we can’t deny that anglers injure some of those fish we lose or let go. I love fishing, but I know it does harm. It’s a dilemma I’ve never resolved.

Fly fishing is gentler. I brought along my fly rod, which I owned for years but used only occasionally to whip poppers over sunfish and bass, not thinking much of the style or efficiency. The beautiful film A River Runs Through It had just played in Japan, and I went on to read the novella by Norman Maclean. It was a deeply moving, lyric story about an early twentieth-century family and fly fishing in Montana. The angling metaphors spoke clearly to me, and I was ready to seek grace through the metronomic rhythm of the fly cast. “Come on, Yooze. Will you get that serve—that cast—down,” Eugene ducked from my wild delivery. At first the fly cast felt all whippy, my tippet hopelessly tangling, and the back cast requiring much more rear tolerance than I was used to. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for grace. But I slapped out enough line to put my streamer near a log, stripped back a few inches and there was the fantastic strike of an over-willing pike. All aspiring fly anglers should be brought to an Alaskan pike for confidence counseling, which sometimes doubles as the illusion, perhaps the sensation, of art and grace.

Flown back to Anchorage, we rented a camper and drove up the Alaska Highway—for many miles a gravel, washboard, two-lane road—toward Denali and got stuck behind a slow moving Army convoy. When the sign for Willow Creek appeared, we pulled off and parked. The air was heavy with spruce, fish, and the cries of gulls. Walking past a stand of birch to the river, where a few people were casting, I could see a silver-gray parade moving upstream. I had never seen salmon so close and dense in a river, and my hands trembled as I snapped on a bright spoon and cast into the school, immediately snagging a twenty-inch fish and putting it on our chain. A boy with a crew cut and bright red jacket walked up to me and said, “You’re not suppose to snag them. You can’t keep them when you snag them.” His father nodded approvingly from a distance. “I had no idea,” I said, thanking the boy, bowing humbly to the father, and adjusting my practice. We caught several three- and four-pound pink salmon, still quite bright and full of fight. Gulls and eagles crossed the sky, and boot and bear tracks dented the sand.

Back at the camper, Eugene sliced up raw salmon for a nice plate of sashimi, while I marinated the jewel-like eggs from one fat hen in a little soy sauce. Eugene vinegared and sweetened some leftover white rice, and I reconstituted miso soup from shiny packets. We sat down for lunch with the pink salmon. This pretty fish spent two years at sea dining on herring and anchovies and then journeyed up Cook Inlet into the Susitna River and Willow Creek, where she met two humans who were born on Long Island but traveled thousands of miles to catch and kill her. A crazy lunch date, I thought, spooning her eggs into my mouth, divining over the briny, creamy crunch. “The essence of fish,” I pronounced. “Now the essence of us.”

“Okay, Mr. Poet,” Eugene took it down a notch. “To us and the fish,” he raised his beer.

We felt good in Alaska, napping and driving on, encountering more caribou, a drunk woman who wanted a ride but smelled horrible and dangerous, and an abandoned Chevron station overrun with rabbits. In Denali, we followed the lumbering rumps of grizzly bears, watched them stop and rake berries, their dark faces and blonde backs inspiring our own wildness. So we drove on, sipped whiskey, popped a couple beers, and parked along the Jack River looking for more fish.

In was August on the Taiga, and where the wide gray sky met the icy Jack, arctic grayling ran. Eugene threw spinners, and I walked upstream and cast a Royal Coachman—for no other reason than it was the prettiest fly in my box. I started feeling the rhythm, setting those white wings long across the river and sharply following the fly’s drift and bob downstream. Such pleasure, even without a strike. Then a grayling grabbed the coachman, ran, somersaulted out of the river, fighting hard and veering twice from my net before I lifted it—its sail-like dorsal fringed in red and dotted iridescent. As the fish died it grew as gray as the sky. After a couple hours of casting, catching, and releasing, I walked to the riverbank and set the one dead grayling on piece of driftwood. Knife-scoring one side, I pulled off some skin and then lifted the fish to my mouth and took a bite.

In the eighteenth century, Jean de Crèvecoeur, living in the American wilds, posited that eating wild meat could make a man wild. “I’m worried about you,” Eugene said, counseling toward a hamburger and some noontime human exposure at the Cantwell Lodge. The bartender, Ron, a big bearded man around thirty, set us up with draft Molsons and bourbons on the side. There was a quiet, friendly mood to the place, and we started talking with Ron and a bony, smudged, retired old railroad man who said he was cutting wood all week and needed to get home and cut some more. Ron seemed delighted to have the extra company, and we threw dice to see who would coin up the jukebox. Larry, a middle-aged man who once tended the Cantwell bar, regaled us with local history—gold mining, snowmobiling, fishing, trucking, women, and drinking. A dark varnished clock on the wall was said to hold actual gold nuggets. The clock maker left the bar drunk and angry one night and drove his snowmobile right into the spinning prop of plane. His clock keeps the time he lost.

“Any shootings around here?” we asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Larry said. “I was behind the bar, and this woman came in and she was mad at me cause I wouldn’t go out with her.”

We laughed and whooed. “Larry, you lady killer.”

“Other way around. She comes in and pulls out this pistol and starts shooting. There’s the hole.” He pointed to a bullet hole under the bar labeled in pencil .44 Mag.

“She was shooting right for your family jewels,” Eugene speculated.

“Well, I was already way down the bar and took my jewels with me. But she hit a jar of mustard that went all over the place.”

“Like mustard gas in the Great War,” the old railroad man mused.

We drank, talked, and laughed. More people gathered around. Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” played, and we sang over with, “Free, free pouring.” And that’s how it began to feel. The currents of the universal being flowing through us as we relived fish caught and lost, bought a couple rounds for the bar, tipped Ron, absorbed and told more stories. I bought a silver ring from a mustachioed woman and promised to give it first “to my girlfriend, Teiko,” then “to my girlfriend, Caitlin.”

“You got some things to figure out,” Larry said and tipped his beer at me. “Be careful.”

Down at the end of the bar was a man they called Second Chief, an Athabascan Indian neatly coiffed and dressed in a collared shirt and sweater. His discerning eyes behind square-rimmed glasses reminded me of the Japanese teachers with whom I worked. We asked Second Chief about the fishing. His soft voice was hard to hear over the jukebox, so we leaned in close, and he told us about the mountain lakes to the south, “Good fishing. Nobody ’round. But you’ll need horses. Take a few days.”

“Better try a plane,” Larry interrupted. “Go see the bush pilot, Ray Atkins. He’ll fly you in.”

At 5:30 in the afternoon we were drunk but full of energy. We brushed our teeth in the camper and followed Larry’s directions to Ray Atkins’ house. His pleasant wife answered the door and showed us into the living room dominated by a television set and a massive moose head, the animal’s taxidermied face glued to endless reruns of Cheers and Frasier. Ray and his wife must have known we’d had a few, but we held it together, asked his advice, and hired him to fly us to Caribou Lake for lake trout. “Pack light,” he said.

We drove our camper down the rough road to a long pond where Ray docked his plane. In those days we drove drunk too often, regretting it the next day and swearing never to do it again. But when you’re drunk, it seems fine, even necessary.

Ray’s plane filled quickly with a cooler, shotgun, ammo, fishing gear, and our heavy selves and seemed to barely lift off the water before the ground smeared below. Eugene and I looked anxiously at each other. “She was a little dead under that left wing,” Ray spoke calmly into his headset.

Ray flew us south through deep, craggy canyons and pointed out mountain goats and bighorn sheep. It was grand, but the long day of fishing and drinking had stirred my pool. Hunched in the back seat, shifting to the banking turns and turbulence, I felt increasingly sick and uneasy. The plane suddenly dropped, and I clawed Eugene’s shoulders, saw the approaching ridge, heard the engine accelerate, turned away, and nearly vomited as we cleared the rock. We flew another ten minutes, and Ray put us down smoothly on the lake. “Thanks, Ray,” I said. “That was a lot of fun.” A few years later Ray and a client crashed in those mountains but survived.

Above four thousand feet under a leaden sky, Caribou Lake winked against a bare shore of lichen and moss-printed rocks. Amid the low brush and a colony of curious ground squirrels, our cabin was a simple wood frame covered in tent plastic with a stove and cots. With plenty of light and our heads clearing, we stepped down to the water, threw small green spoons, and caught a brace of lake trout for dinner. Grizzly bear tracks followed the shore, and I glanced back at our shotgun leaning against the cabin.

The little lakers turned out bright orange fillets that I fried in some bacon grease glommed from a jar above the stove. We ate, poured light vodkas, and talked. “God’s country, all to ourselves,” Eugene said, chewing a piece of lake trout.

I nodded, knowing what he meant, but skeptical about there being any God, any sort of mystical realm beyond the human imagination that could conceive of a metaphor like “God’s country” and our rights to it.

“So, trips like this bring us closer to God?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“What about people around the world who can’t fly to Alaska or some pristine wilderness for a little spiritually uplifting fishing? How are they gonna see God?”

“A park, television, shrooms? I don’t know. Church?”

“Seriously, man. Not many people could afford to take a trip like this. Do we really deserve it?”

“Hell, yeah,” he said. “There’s no shame in spending money on a fishing trip.”

“So it’s like money well spent on your spiritual enrichment?”

“Sure.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m having the time of my life. But just think of the fuel alone it took to get us here. For what? A little recreation?”

“No, to get us closer to God. Aren’t you paying attention?”

I lay down confused, thinking maybe we should have ridden up here on horses like Second Chief counseled. This country and its fish needed to be earned more physically, more intimately. But we were modern, first-world pilgrims who had to get back to our jobs and credit card statements. I slept fitfully and rose hungover, stepping out of the cabin to the mad chirping of ground squirrels. Then, on the ridge behind our cabin, a wolf—its unmistakable silhouette a sharp symbol of—what? Wildness? Maybe. And perhaps even the rightness of my being here to see and feel it. “We need the tonic of wildness,” an educated but financially strapped Henry Thoreau declared. I watched the wolf until it disappeared and then put away my guilt about being a privileged American and grabbed my fishing rod.

Eugene said he needed some exercise, and he headed off on a long fish-walk to the west. I worked the lake before me, fly casting a high floating White Wulff and raising fish after fish. They were heavy-headed, lanky lakers—each one fourteen inches long—from a long lean lake. Although Alaska has a reputation for big game, high altitude waters surrounded by so little flora and with a long winter freeze just manage to sustain their fish. Conversely, shaggy shallow ponds in the South get too hot—the oxygen drops, and the fish gulp at the surface, dodging herons and good ole boys with bows and arrows. It’s a tough world at all latitudes, I thought. Gray clouds massed and shifted behind dark ridges, a peregrine falcon glided high and away, and I felt far from the peopled world, drinking in the “tonic of wildness,” both humbled and exalted by its sublimity. A good feeling, a spiritual feeling, at least while it lasted. After a few hours of casting, I walked back to the cabin and mixed myself a Bloody Mary. One good tonic deserves another. Our light packing did not exclude olives and celery. Eugene walked up with a stringer of fish and a huge caribou rack over his shoulder. “Yea, I wrestled it right off the beast,” he said and smiled.

“Well done, man. Have a drink.” He had gone several miles to the next lake over, glimpsed the wolf, caught fish, napped in the sun, and found some fresh antlers. Ray Atkins picked us up in a couple days. We handed him a bag of fillets, lashed our antlers to the wing strut, enjoyed the return flight to Cantwell, and rested on the warm rocks beside the Jack River, watching grayling rise.

Back in Japan in the autumn of 1993, I brought Teiko persimmons and a bottle of sake. She smiled and thanked me, but I knew she wasn’t happy.

“I don’t want to be your girlfriend anymore,” Teiko said.

“Your father is still angry?”

“No, me. You just want to play. It’s hard for me.”

I had been with other women during the time that Teiko and I were together, but there were no stated expectations or exclusivities in our relationship. On one extended weekend in Tokyo, I met a younger woman who asked if I had any marijuana—extremely illegal in Japan. I did, and we got high in her little apartment. She had magazines depicting women with elaborate tattoos, and she said she wanted a phoenix or a koi on her back. “They’ll think you’re a gangster,” I said, and she ran her fingers over my mouth to close it. We underdressed, and I traced a koi across her lower back, its wide tail caressing the rise of her ass, my hand a pale fin over smooth stones at the base of a waterfall. We spent a few wild hours together. When I tried calling her the next day there was no answer. I called again and discovered it was the wrong number.

I had been reading the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, who described emancipation using the term todatsu, a fish slipping from the net. Dogen referred to the Buddhist-inspired freedoms from desire, materialism, and selfishness, and I twisted the application to sexual freedom from social conventions. When I tried to explain some of this to Teiko, she laughed at me—“You are too selfish.” She was right. The desire for independence is a selfish desire. Then later she told me, “You hurt my heart.”

I did not want to hurt Teiko’s heart, but I could not marry her. Through many talks and my apologies we remained friends, but it was never the same. There were other women, Japanese and gaijin, delights, disappointments, and some downright regrets.

Under the pretext of English lessons, a Niigata housewife invited me over while her husband was away on business. Like King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, I knew that many a man has “his pond fish’d by his next neighbor,” but when this woman served me glass after glass of whiskey and a bowl of whale stew—the dark meat tasting like soapy corned beef grazed on seaweed—I felt like the prey. Like one of those sharks Frank Mundus of Long Island chummed in with ground grampus. I vaguely remember rolling around on the futon, and I’ll never forget waking up in the middle of the night on the salty sheets with an earthquaking hangover, the agonizing, seismic cries of a dying whale sounding through my brain.

There were love notes from Caitlin, and we talked about getting back together. Would I meet her in New York for Christmas? She even sent me a photo of herself in a tight top, licking her lips, the inscription, “You’ll never catch another like me,” drawn out in luring, looping pink ink. I wanted to send her the ring I bought in Alaska, but I couldn’t find it. She was always beautiful in my mind, and I thought long and hard about Caitlin, but I didn’t want to settle down.

I got handwritten letters from Aunt Lil. She was receiving radiation treatment for cancer, but her words were full of life from home: the mums were in bloom, my brother caught two big blackfish, she liked the scarf and silk slippers I sent, the cat ate some old bait in the garage and threw up, a dusting of snow made the oaks in the backyard glow. Lil’s letters pulled on me. Friends and family from New York urged me to come home, even my colleagues in Japan suggested I be with my family at a time like this. My supervisor, Sagi, said he’d understand. The Japanese honored family responsibilities. But when I spoke to my father on the phone he said I should stay in Asia, travel around, “See how Korea is doing.”

“It’s your life,” my father said. “You gotta do what you really want to do. Don’t live your life for other people—not now, not at your age.”

“What about Lil?” I asked.

“She’s sleeping,” he said and fell silent. “Go on. Go.”

My father knew what I wouldn’t admit—that I wanted to see and fish more of the world. His words, “It’s your life … do what you want,” stayed with me. I know some of my Japanese friends saw my actions as selfish, even reckless, but I packed my bags and tackle and headed to South Korea, where a friend, Jon, and I hiked through Seoraksan National park and down into the fishing town of Sokcho, where I caught herring off the dock, tossing a few to a pride of cats that had gathered around me. They clawed the flipping fish, biting off pieces, chewing and purring loudly.

Jon and I found a seafood restaurant in Sokcho, knocked back a few glasses of the local firewater, soju, devoured a seaweed salad, and then stared at a flatfish pulled directly from a glass tank and sashimied, still breathing, before our eyes. I’m not sure how we ordered it, but the neatly sliced flesh was replaced on the fish’s horizontal bones so the living creature became its own platter. I had eaten living sashimi in Japan but without Jon’s imagination comparing it to an Aztec priest cutting the beating heart out of a sacrificed slave and showing it to him in the last moments of his life.

“Fish and people are very different,” I said.

“Yeah, still,” Jon said, nodding. “Can’t they just put the thing out of its misery?”

I had read several studies arguing that the simple nervous system of a fish did not allow it to register “pain” the way it is experienced by mammals. Perhaps that’s true, but fish express an obvious physical reaction to being bitten or hooked. They don’t like it. Maybe the human words “pain” and “like” are impossibly distant from what this flatfish was feeling. “Who knows what birds and fish feel?” Basho wrote in a seventeenth century haiku, “Or how the year’s end party will feel to us,” suggesting that the inner workings of nature are as unknowable as our own means of handling sorrow, aging, and death. I suddenly thought of Aunt Lil lying in her sick bed and my father encouraging me to make this trip instead of returning home. I looked at the pulsing flatfish and recalled my father’s conflicted feelings on killing foxes and eating veal, his only advice, “If you can live with it, go ahead.” Living flesh between my chopsticks, I chewed and swallowed an allowance that I’d never fully digest.

In December, I traveled alone to Malaysia, walking the colorful streets of Kuala Lumpur, past throngs of people, mosques, and Chinese altars, stopping at Yong Soo Pets Shop, hung with Moorish wooden cages, fluttering chocolate brown finches, tear-eyed thrushes, and brilliant blue and green leafbirds plucked from the trees of Southeast Asia. Deeper into the dark store, I studied fish glowing in glass aquariums. There were tanks of tarantulas, and turtles in tile tubs. Near the back door, guarded by a goose on a foot leash, gasping eels thrust their heads out of a dirty aquarium while a flat black catfish glummed below the tangle. I wanted to let them go. You might ask how the same person who eats a still quivering flounder could worry about a bunch of choking eels? I don’t know, but this felt like neglect. The animals’ suffering was completely unnecessary. From a barred window I could see a canal running down the alley behind the store. I might be able to tip the whole tank into the canal, at least giving the eels and catfish a chance. When I reached to test the back door, the goose honked.

Down the road from Yong Soo’s, I stopped at a restaurant that rivaled the pet shop with its wide glass tanks of live arowana and catfish. I sat down, flipped through my phrase book, and ordered what sounded like “bee chew,” (I would later learn it was the Chinese word baijiu) the popular spirit among ethnically Chinese Malays and a good buy at fifty cents a glass. Antique refrigerators hummed away with shelves of Coke, Sprite, and Carlsberg Beer. One of the men spoke some English and noticing I liked to drink, pointed to museum-like jars of baijiu infused with hairy ginseng roots and whole snakes. “Good for man,” he said, gesturing a fist in front of his groin. “Okay,” I said, waving in a glass. The sapor of musty root was fine, but I felt no special effects from the reptilian promise except a growing sympathy for creatures crowded in glass. I ordered stingray, flapping my arms for clarity, and it arrived grilled and very dead, wrapped in banana leaves and topped with a sweet and sour sauce. I ate, paid, bowed to the staff, and sailed into the cooling night alone with my freedom.

On Christmas day 1993, during an hour flight to Malaysia’s Langkawi Island, a stewardess in a blue hijab delivered a “Meddy Christmas Mister Hug-gess” over the intercom. I smiled and picked up a magazine advertising “Tundra to Tropics—Make You A Cool Hot Chance,” and thought of the wild Alaskan tundra and the broiled confines of the Kuala Lumpur pet shop. How does one ever make sense of the wide world, compressing space and time inside a jet, the place we stand, or right inside our own head? I once dated a brilliant and overweight nutritional psychologist. We were talking about conflict and contradiction, and I quoted F. Scott Fitzgerald from the “The Crack Up”—“The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” She smiled, chewed a buttery hunk of lobster, swallowed, wiped her mouth, and said that a mental breakdown is more likely to occur in a first-rate intelligence because the person is aware that so many ideas are opposed and still true. Unable to reconcile the constant barrage of contradictions in the human condition, I simply dismiss them with a cocktail and a nap, saving myself from the dangers of a first-rate intelligence or insanity.

Langkawi’s December jungles were insanely hot and wet. A civet cat sprang behind a bamboo fence, and I watched leggy, eye-ringed myna birds, so like our common starlings, pick crumbs from the yard where I sat sweating, eating nasi goring—fried rice and veggies that tasted like something Caitlin once made from a recipe snipped out of her mother’s Good Housekeeping. Everything felt both exotic and familiar, and I wasn’t cracking up.

The next morning I took a long fish-walk to a swampy village and arranged for a boat trip through the root-tangled mangrove swamps. I had walked several miles and was glad to be sitting in the wooden pirogue watching rusty red sea eagles, iguanas, turtles, and mudskippers—small fish that walk on shore and breathe air—while my guide rambled on about a snake in his wife’s bed. The blue-spotted, bubble-eyed mudskippers flashed their high dorsals and pulled themselves in and out of holes, sometimes jumping for joy or something that seemed like joy in this wild world of possibilities.

The Malay guide spoke a few languages, and after he calmed down about the snake we started talking about fish and fishing, using some French and Japanese words to fill in the gaps. Knowing this was a wildlife preserve, I asked him about some men pulling nets starred with crabs and small fish. My guide was easy. “Chari makan,” he said. “Everybody has a right to get their food.” I told him I was also looking for some fish to catch and eat. “Go to the restaurant,” he laughed, gesturing cash fanned from a fat wallet. I felt a little embarrassed and quickly mimed the actions of a man casting and reeling. “Oh, okay,” he said, wriggling his ropey arm. I thought he was back on the snake, but he described an aggressive fish called murrel swimming through the rice fields and marshes.

After we docked, my mangrove guide set me up with a handsome young man in a splashy green sarong and Hard Rock Café T-shirt who drove me to a village where two older men agreed to walk me to the reedy edge of a murky, steamy pond fed by a slow river. They had bamboo poles, and I extended the telescopic spinning rod I brought from Japan. Using minnows on rusted hooks, within a few minutes one man pulled in a foot-long fish that I recognized by reputation—snakehead, a dreaded invasive species in the United States but rightfully at home here in Southeast Asia. I tossed and retrieved a blueish plug, raising something on the third try and hooking one on the next cast. Dark and long, like a meaty eel, this seventeen-inch snakehead fought well and made the men smile. “Ikan hantu,” they said, “fish for dinner.” A number of children had gathered around, and they asked me questions in Malay and English: “What is your hometown? Do you like soccer?” They giggled when I turned to answer. The snakehead was well-toothed and slick, but I wrangled it into the plastic laundry basket with the other fish and carried them up to an open pavilion-style eatery where a woman scrubbed off the slime and large scales. She asked me questions I could only answer with a smile. She smiled back, sliced fillets, and dropped them into a wok crackling with oil and red pepper. Despite its muddy home, the fried, pink flesh was firm, fine grained, and mild. I thanked the woman and ate heartily.

A growing taste for Southeast Asia also drew me to Jakarta, Indonesia, and on to Bali Island the following spring. The beautiful, saronged Balinese woman at the losman where I lodged kept an almost equally beautiful blue betta fish in a pickle jar on the shelf. The villages and temples were green and calming, but I couldn’t resist spending a couple days in the touristy southern city of Kuta, checking out the clubs and bars full of young men and women from Australia and Germany. After a night of too much drinking and some reckless sex, I took a long shower and visited a Hindu temple to light incense and reflect. A young man outside the temple said he was a driver and could show me the island.

Andres was bright and friendly, chatting away as we crossed terraced rice fields and cascading jungles. Stopping at another Hindu temple with luxuriant lotus ponds, I reflected further on my promiscuous lifestyle, watching a swirling school of pretty striped cichlids. Was I as simple and milt driven as these cavorting fish? I certainly admired their beauty and freedom, cherishing their fishy place in the world. I loved to catch fish, feel, see, and hold them for a moment. Sometimes I killed and ate them. I admired and sought women for their intelligence, beauty, and difference, and I loved having sex with them, but I would never coerce or force a woman into my bed. I admit to using some deception, to playing down one relationship in hopes of securing a new one, to making claims about myself that weren’t entirely true. I am not proud of these lures, these deceptions. Although comparable desires at some playful metaphoric level—There are a lot of fish in the sea—fish and people are very different.

Andres’ English was excellent, and when I told him that I loved fish and women in different ways—in ways I couldn’t yet fully understand—he squinted in confusion, paused, and then explained that Vishnu once appeared as a great fish and warned of a world-cleansing deluge, instructing the good king, who was tender to Vishnu-the-fish when he was just a minnow, to build an ark and spare the useful creatures of the land and few decent people. The story rang some Christian bell buoys, to be sure, but I wondered how a fish eating, philandering fisherman from afar would fair under an admonishing Hindu fish god. Vegetarianism and sexual abstinence honors the gods and brings us closer to Nirvana. When I explained my quandary to Andres, he laughed. “You’re not Hindu, so don’t worry.”

Andres dropped me off near Tulaben, where I planned to scuba dive on the wreck of the Liberty, a US Army transport ship that was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in 1942. The remains of the ship lay just off the northwest shore of Bali in thirty to a hundred feet of water. Getting my gear ready on the beach, I saw and heard several Japanese travelers, including a couple from Niigata, and we chatted a bit. The Indonesian dive master came over, buddied me with a German named Herman, and we dove the wreck, following each other under rusted archways that scraped my tank. Although the wreck was heavily encrusted in coral, we could still see portals, chains, ladders, and the guns of the old ship. The profusion of fish life was remarkable—striped angels, parrotfish, snappers, sweetlips, grouper, anemonefish, and a beautiful, poisonous lionfish hovering in an orange cave. Gazing up with our bubbles into the silvery-blue light, we watched a circling school of bigeye jacks and, above them, a small boat. It was a fish’s view of the world, and I saw myself in the boat, dropping a line and hoping again and again for something I believed in but often couldn’t see.

Herman and I had a beer together on the beach, talked diving, and joked about the Japanese and Germans returning to Bali with a better attitude. The Germans I knew were always more willing than the Japanese to talk about history’s darker chapters. Herman and I hiked up to a village of bamboo houses and rickety little shops with signs for San Miguel Beer and Salem Cigarettes. Small black pigs and brown chickens scavenged, and people came down from the coffee plantations and napped in elevated pavilions. We walked out on a promontory and looked down on the Bali Sea. Herman said his friend went on a fishing charter and caught giant trevally and red snapper. But right before us we could see locals using Bali jukungs, outrigger canoes with crab claw sails, plying their nets and hand lines. “You should join them,” Herman pointed to the beach. “That’s real fishing.”

I spoke to a young man who said his father would take me out fishing with hand lines. I left my fishing rod in my hut and at midmorning met the father, who I called Nelayan, Fisherman, which made him laugh. He was in his forties, dark skinned, and sinewy with great veins running down his biceps. He wore light cotton shorts, a worn T-shirt, and a Japanese-style jungle hat with a neck flap that read “Bali Fun.” Freshly painted in red, white, and green, his wooden jukung stretched a narrow fifteen feet crossed by two timbered outriggers pontooned port and starboard with bamboo. Nelayan, his son, and I, with the help of another man, picked up the boat and carried it the forty feet down to the water. I hopped in, and Nelayan followed, grabbing his double-ended paddle and moving us out. A couple hundred feet from the shore, something dark breached, and I shuddered—sharks?—but it was a pair of spinner dolphins gracefully coasting the island. When we got to a spot he liked, Nelayan handed me a bamboo spool wrapped with monofilament that ended in a well-used hook weighted with a spark plug. We pulled salted sardine-like baits from a round cookie tin.

Nelayan spoke no English except “Okay” and “No,” and I knew only a couple polite expressions in Bahasa Indonesian, but we got on fine. Fishing often found the shared language that sustained my travels. I dropped the baited hook down, letting the line roll off the spool and holding it out with my right hand, feeling for the bite. We caught a couple small snappers and tossed them into a reed basket. Most Balinese ate fish.

But it was a slow morning. The sun got high, and flies buzzed around our bait as we drifted closer to shore. We paddled in and were greeted by Nelayan’s son. I told him that I enjoyed myself, but I wanted to try it again, “Tomorrow morning before daybreak, 5:30 am, okay?” The son translated, and Nelayan smiled and nodded. I would pay him twenty dollars.

That evening I skipped drinking, wrote in my journal, set my travel clock, and woke to the sound of roosters in the cool ocean air of Bali. A couple geckos scurried up the bamboo walls of my rented hut, and I dressed and brushed my teeth. Out on the dark beach, men were preparing boats and equipment. Nelayan and his son helped me put my camera in a plastic bag and tuck it under the bench. There was a little bit of surf that morning, and we had to make a piercing launch into the waves. I was given a paddle this time, digging hard as we arrowed through the breakers and into the moon-frosted roll of open water. Nelayan directed us to a different spot, a better spot, I reasoned, now that he knew I was serious, and by sunrise we were catching some hearty reef fish and filling our basket.

I liked the physical intimacy of the hand line but can’t deny that I missed the fishing rod, a wonderful instrument that seems to amplify and heighten life at the other end while also absorbing its shock and power. With the hand line, I could hook fish easily with a firm jerk of my wrist, but fighting the fish had less of a sensory thrill. And with a large grouper, it was harder to absorb the fish’s power and administer drag.

Sitting comfortably, spool in my left hand, line played out in my extended right hand, my mind was musing on the virtues of fine graphite drawn to a smooth, progressive taper, and I was yanked off balance and nearly pulled overboard. Something huge had my bait. Line blistered out, burning my fingers and sending the bamboo bobbin bouncing across the belly of the canoe. I grabbed the spool with both hands and tried to pay out line, but there were stops and runs and our canoe was jerked sideways and then towed backward. Nelayan yelled something and gestured, but I had no idea what to do other than give some line and hold on. The monofilament was pretty heavy, maybe forty-pound test, and with our canoe underway I felt like Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea or Ishmael in the whale boat. The Bali sleigh ride lasted a hundred feet and then everything went slack. “Oh God,” I moaned, my legs shaking from the adrenaline. I pulled in the line and saw that it was bitten through. Nelayan made more painful sounds and then put his flat hands together and pointed over his head, like a tall prayer. I recognized the diver’s sign for shark. We must have hooked a big shark or ray. “What else could it have been?” I asked his son when we pushed up on the beach. “Nobody know,” he said. I sucked my scored fingers and picked up our basket of fish. “Good it got away, maybe,” the young man said. “My father try to catch everything. He crazy.”

My father seemed quite the opposite of Nelayan. Stories tell of a wild teenager, dropping out of high school to play ball, work, drink, and tear around Port Jefferson on his Harley. But the man I knew was careful and measured. He was faithful to his wife and job. He never remarried after my mother’s death, telling us, “One good marriage is enough for me.” And he declined offers for more challenging work or promotions with heavier responsibilities. When his aging boss offered him the small crane business, he said “No thanks,” accepting easier work on oiler’s wages with other outfits. “I want nothing to do with running a business,” he told me. My father was steady and hardworking but not emotionally or professionally adventuresome or ambitious. Maybe there was something dangerous about trying to catch everything, but I was willing to try. Younger than Santiago and older than Ishmael, I wanted to be close to something wilder and bigger than myself.

It must be this hubris in some men that leads them to greatness or dramatic failure—or worse, shame.

Other fishermen came ashore and held up some small tuna and shouted to us. Nelayan, his son, and I walked over. One of the men filleted the tuna and set it out on an old board and then someone else doused the red flesh in lime juice. We all picked up hunks and started eating. It was good. One of the men carried a few pieces up the beach to a thatched hut where an old woman was pulling fishing nets off the potted plants outside her door. When the man walked up, the woman threw down the nets in anger. It looked like the man was trying to apologize as he offered the fish. Island to island, I thought, things are different and the same. Back on Long Island I remembered Aunt Lil getting frustrated with me as she pulled yards of monofilament from the vacuum’s roller brush. “Damn this fishing line,” she cursed. “It’s all over the place.” But I had just gotten a hot tip on weakfish close to shore, and I dashed out of the house to grab my surf gear, pick up a friend, and head to the beach. Now I wanted to go back to that moment as a different kind of man. I wanted another chance. “Sorry Lil,” I’d say. “I’ll take care of it. You relax.” Maybe bring her some pickled herring on a cracker.