Back Seat with Fish

When my father and brother drove out to visit the following Thanksgiving, they brought me a twelve-foot jon boat like the one I had as a boy. “Why don’t you call it Number Two China,” Jin Lei suggested. She’d heard about my old boat, China Cat, and thought it prophetic that I eventually traveled to China and made it a part of my life. Walking around the docks on Long Island, she also noticed that people often carried cherished names to their second loves—Annie II, Cricket II, Day Off II. So on a golden November afternoon, my brother, Jin Lei, and I launched the China, too, and the chilly waters of the North Pond gave up a few silvers that we admired and gently released.

China, too freed me to row around the ponds and up and down the river when flows were manageable. An hour of steady rowing against the current worked my chest and back, and after a few weeks muscles reappeared in my upper body. I also took longer jogs along the river trails, jumping over sinkholes, garbage, and dead beavers. I did a lot of thinking during these long runs and hours spent fishing. Jin Lei and I hadn’t made love in many months, and it was clear to me that our relationship was in a platonic state. It was a form I could live with. We got along well as friends, roommates, and colleagues, and I was happy to stay together and safeguard her green card application. But I was also desirous of more erotic contact with women.

Feeling better about my body always gave me the confidence to talk with women, and so I did. A couple of the younger secretaries in the office, including the very cute Debbie, were reading Mary Karr’s Liars’ Club, and they asked me if all fishermen exaggerated and lied. “Never,” I lied. I quickly read the engaging memoir and learned that one of the happiest moments in Mary Karr’s hellish childhood was an afternoon out fishing with her father.

“Wanna go fishing?” I asked Debbie as she put mail into the department boxes.

“Well, I only date men who are really single,” she shot another envelope into a pigeon hole. “Besides, I haven’t been fishing since I was a girl. I wouldn’t know what to do.”

One of the great joys of my sport was taking people out who didn’t fish or hadn’t fished since they were young. Matthew Vollmer, an emerging writer at Purdue, told me stories about fishing as a boy in North Carolina’s creeks, but it had been years since he’d wet a line.

Matthew, Willard, and I planned an afternoon on the North Pond, but Willard had a terrible argument with his wife and had to cancel. Matthew and I unchained the China, too from the tree where I kept it locked, wiped off the seats, and slid the boat down the bank into the coffee-colored water. I rowed out to the middle of the pond, and we jigged near the bottom, talking about school and writing, wondering about Willard. Then I hooked a fish. The rod doubled and line peeled off the reel. It was a light Shimano bait casting outfit low on eight-pound test and I dared not tighten the drag. Holding on and smiling, I tried to regain a few feet of line when the fish came off the bottom, but the shallow spool was emptying fast. “Here, take this.” I handed Matthew the rod. His eyes widened, and he squared his shoulders behind the run. “Keep tension and reel if you can.” Coaching—even useless coaching—relieved some of the nervousness I felt when a friend was fast to a big fish. “That’s it. Stay with him,” I said, pulling gently on the oars and following the force.

Over the years, I’ve hooked big snapping turtles, but they didn’t swim this fast. I’ve caught snakes, bullfrogs, bats, birds, and boats. I even snagged one scuba diver who was safely released. But this was a fish.

“Could be,” I nodded, watching him raise his rod against the strain and then reel down to the fish. “That’s it,” I coached on. “You’re doing great.” I rowed after the fish for fifteen minutes, then shipped the oars and watched Matthew—mid-twenties, fit, with a Tintin haircut and a handsome farm-boy face that blushed between delight and panic when the fish made a move. For the next half hour the creature towed our boat around the pond, bolting suddenly for the river inlet and taking line. “Oh, no you don’t,” I said aloud. “See if you can rein him this way, Matthew.”

The fish steamed halfway through the channel then suddenly turned tail in the opposite direction.

I took the rod for five minutes while Matthew rubbed his hands and slaked his thirst with a soda. We heard the university’s six o’clock bells and a flock of geese somewhere downriver. I handed the fish-bent rod back to Matthew. “It’s all yours.” After an hour and a half, we had to get tough. “Steady lift of the rod, and then reel down to the fish,” I went back to my coaching.

Soon the fish was directly below our boat, and we got the first glimpse of a long dark form. “Catfish”—I identified the creature. These moments are important in a fisherman’s life. To see the hooked fish—just to see it—is often enough. If the line breaks or the hook comes free, at least we have witnessed the miracle of connection. The fish sounded, line rolled off the reel, and I advised Matthew to tighten the drag slightly.

“I want to hold this guy,” Matthew said, as if desiring consecration by touch.

“Hell, let’s bring it to Burnham’s,” I went further. “We’ll make the papers.”

I normally never worried about records or trophy photos taped to the walls and counters of tackle shops or printed in the newspaper, but this fish might be a record. Would I be willing to kill an old fish just for the record? Toxins accumulate over time in the fatty tissues of some fish, and it wouldn’t be wise to eat a portly old catfish from the Wabash River—but a state record might fill us with pride.

Matthew lifted the rod and reeled, lifted and reeled. There it was again—easily four feet long, a massive dark head tapering to a mustard mottled body. I told Matthew about the mythical Onamazu, a giant catfish that lives under the islands of Japan, guarded by the god Kashima. But not even a god can manage complete control over Onamazu, and the fish’s periodic thrashings caused terrible earthquakes. Our catfish rolled, and its tail thumped the boat like a drum. “Jesus,” Matthew gasped, thrilled and amazed. “My God, that’s a fish.” It was a flathead catfish—the largest I had ever seen. “You’ve caught a god,” I said.

Matthew was raised in a strict Adventist family, but he had gone his own way. When he moved to Indiana, he started visiting a different church each week—Presbyterian, Church of Brethren, Episcopalian, Quaker, and Unitarian—and found the varieties of worship fascinating and enriching. He even explored other mystical paths, such as Buddhism and Taoism. His mother grew worried. “She cried,” Matthew told me, “fearing for my wandering soul.” Matthew’s mother felt he had jeopardized his promised place among the family when Christ returned and raised the faithful dead. “I just want us all to be together in the end,” his mother wept.

The catfish came up, the little gold jig pinned to the side of his monstrous head. Small eyes and thick whiskers trembled on the surface in a grotesque, fearsome, beautiful display of the aquatic primitive. Matthew touched its back and smiled. The fish measured forty-eight inches, an estimated fifty pounds. If it were a channel catfish, we’d have the Indiana state record, but the record flathead catfish, I’d later learn, tipped the scales at seventy-nine pounds, eight ounces in 1966. “We gotta let it go,” Matthew said. “This guy has lived such a long life.”

I reached down with my pliers, easily removed the hook, and we watched the great leviathan return to the murky depths.

I told Jin Lei that my visions came true. “God is a fish. And we saw him today.”

When we told Willard the whole story—God and all—he said, “That catfish had great prana.” He was writing a dissertation on the sublime in nature and used the Sanskrit word, prana, a kind of élan vital, to describe the fighting life force of fish. Different species of fish fight differently. Cod come up like old tires; steelhead rage like burning maniacs. But even among the same species of the same size from the same waters, there can be individuality in the way a fish fights. Anglers sometimes receive these exceptional exertions as divine messages. I can’t tell you exactly what Matthew heard over the line, but his blue eyes glowed, and with the zeal of the newly converted, he repeated Willard’s pronouncement, “That catfish had great prana.”

Matthew, Willard, and I shared long talks about fishing, religion, literature, and life. We talked about relationships and women. Matthew got along well with his wife, Kelly. Willard and his wife, Maddy, were having troubles. They had years of happiness and a beautiful young son, but their union was on the rocks. My drifting relationship with Jin Lei did not seem as painful, but Willard told me that Jin Lei and he walked back from the library, and she cried and confided her heartache. “She really loves you, man. It wasn’t just an arrangement for her. She wants to be your wife.”

The Indiana winter of the new millennium was very cold, and in January the Williamsburg Ponds froze over. I walked along the bank and a few feet out on the ice and marveled at the crystal transformation. Crows chipped away at frozen shad; feathers, leaves, flecks, and bubbles glistened in suspension; I traced a long blue subway trail that suddenly darkened with the chugging engine of a beaver. Life under the ice. I called Willard, who knew ice-fishing from his years growing up in Maine.

“Come on,” I pleaded. “Get out of that damn apartment. Imagine pulling a walleye through the ice.”

Willard came over with a hand augur and a dozen tip-ups. We slide-stepped out on the ice, testing its thickness, and I followed his cues, eyeing the pale cracks like veins in granite. Our drill gnawed through six inches before the dark rush of water. “Good,” Willard said, scooping out the chips and shavings with Jin Lei’s dumpling ladle. He showed me how to rig the tip-up, setting the cross over the hole, the red flag tucked-in and ready to snap up and signal Fish! when the spool ran. Jin Lei came out on the ice in her beige wool coat and red scarf. “It’s like trapping rats!” she exclaimed. She walked around for a while, peered down into the holes, said we’d turn the pond into “swede cheese,” then went inside. Willard and I set tip-ups baited with nightcrawlers and mealworms, sat on overturned plastic buckets, and looked at each other. Cold and windless, winter spoke in crows, whale-like booms, and moans that startled me. “It’s just the ice,” he said.

Willard started talking about his wife. She left with their son, Max, a few days ago.

“It’s been bad for a couple years. I kept thinking it was being in school and just the changes we were going through with Max. But she hasn’t been very loving. Then she met someone.”

“Shit, one night she went out to get groceries. I was home waiting with Max. And it was like hours. She was probably at this guy’s house. I almost fuckin’ lost it, man. That kind of anger is scary. One of us had to leave.”

Thin panes closed around our lines. No bites. We patrolled each hole, broke up and skimmed the fresh ice with the dumpling ladle. Back at our station in the middle of the pond we tried jigging little blue teardrops. Nothing. Willard talked about catching big lake trout through the ice in Maine and how sometimes they had cigarette butts in their stomachs. I told him that New Orleans catfish will also eat cigarette butts. “Why would such a beautiful creature eat such filth?” he wondered. We speculated that the warm water fish of central Indiana had tucked themselves in for a long winter’s nap. In summer, these ponds were full of biting game, but today we aroused nothing but the pain of our relationships.

“You were right about Jin Lei,” I said. “We had an agreement, but she took things much more seriously—more emotionally—than I did.”

“Wake up, man,” Willard looked at me with something like disgust. “She’s in love with you. The marriage is real to her. Or was real.”

“I feel terrible about it.” I dropped my head. “She’s such a good woman.”

I walked up to our apartment on the second floor and pulled a half-empty bottle of Old Crow from the cupboard. Jin Lei was typing away at something. “Catch anything?” she asked without looking up.

I looked out of our sliding glass doors and saw Willard standing there alone on the ice. I had gazed at the ponds so many times, and now it seemed bizarre to see a man standing on water simply because it was cold.

A month later I slept with a friend, a graduate student in psychology who liked to drink and talk at the Knickerbocker Saloon in Lafayette. I avoided drinking and driving, and one night walking her home she invited me up to her room where we just consumed each other. It felt great to have those carnal passions reignited in my body and mind. I left her place at six in the morning, took a shortcut across the still-frozen South Pond, and plunged through the ice. Blue shock and fear. Water over my shoulders. Ice cutting my neck and arms. But my toes touched bottom, and I thrashed madly through the remaining ice to the shore. Cold, bleeding, head ablaze, and suddenly confused about what I’d done all night, I stumbled into the apartment. Jin Lei woke in a panic and helped me undress and get into bed. I slept until two in the afternoon and woke to find her reading. She put down her book and asked where I was all night. I told her some of the truth. “I don’t want to be with you anymore,” she said and started to cry.

Jin Lei moved out of our Williamsburg apartment. I helped, dividing our meager possessions and lifting the heavy end of her desk onto Sean’s truck. She avoided my eyes and was quieter than I’d ever known her to be.

A couple months went by, and we didn’t talk. Then I saw her in the library, and she smiled. Our friendship slowly healed. I read and edited her essays and put up shelves at her new place; she translated Chinese sources for my research and taught me how to braise eggplant, Yunnan style, with soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, and garlic. Jin Lei finished her master’s in comparative literature, secured an assistantship teaching Chinese, and was well on her way to the doctorate.

“You’re really doing it, Jin Lei,” I raised my glass over lunch at Harry’s Chocolate Shop. “To you!”

On September 11, 2001, I was finishing my dissertation and looking out over a painful highway construction project that had filled part of the South Pond when a knock rattled the door. It was Jin Lei. “Did you see what’s happening? We need to call your family and see if they are all right.”

We followed the news on the web and then went to Sean’s house to watch CNN. My father and brother were safe on eastern Long Island. I tried calling Eugene and a couple other friends who did business in lower Manhattan. They were also safe, but thousands were dead, and another war over religion, power, and oil had begun.

Like Jiang Taigong at the bloody end of the Shang dynasty, Guy de Maupassant during the senseless Franco-Prussian War, and Ernest Hemingway after the earth-shattering World Wars of the twentieth century, Jin Lei and I looked to water and fishing for a little healing. I borrowed Sean’s pickup, hauling us and the China, too toward the Tippecanoe, turning off the radio news. “Don’t think about that right now,” I said. We arranged for a shuttle and launched into the clear running river, drifting and rowing downstream, casting and swinging lures and flies. “Tippecanoe and China, too,” I sang, enjoying the word play, then realizing it was another paean to battle and slaughter.

The air and water were still warm, and I rowed up on a gravel bar where we stepped into the river wearing our shorts and old sneakers. It had been a while since Jin Lei and I fished together, and she was happy to see me using a Yuanwei fly reel that her father sent me. The reel was made in Shandong, the home province of Confucius, and it felt good to be pulling line from another legacy. The first mention of fishing reels comes from Chinese writing in the fourth century, and now the Chinese were making them again.

“Of course,” I said, showing her the basics. She soon found the rhythm, looping out a decent cast that placed the streamer behind a swirling logjam where a bass waited. The fish struck, ran, tailed-danced, and then disappeared. “Whoa!” she yelled.

We worked our way downstream, raising a few small fish but mostly our presence with each other. Jin Lei climbed atop a large rock, made a long cast, watched, and retrieved with jaguar concentration. She looked beautiful and strong. A lady of limitless reach.

By spring we would be legally divorced but good friends. Jin Lei was heading back to China to visit her family, and I was leaving for a teaching job in Oregon, but I felt close to her in words and feelings. The poet Seamus Heaney visited the university in late April, and Jin Lei and I went to the hall early to help setup. Mr. Heaney was warm and friendly, offering us a glass of whiskey from a bottle he’d just received. I accepted an amber inch in a plastic cup and told him that I loved his poems, reciting a couple lines from “The Salmon Fisher and the Salmon.” He gave us that squinty smile.

“It’s good to get out,” Heaney said. “I’m not much at it these days. Do you know Ted Hughes’ work? Now he was a real angler—heart and soul.”

We talked about Ted Hughes and his son, Nick, fishing for pike in Ireland. Then Mr. Heaney turned to Jin Lei. “Do like to fish, my dear?”

“Yes,” Jin Lei said and recited a couple lines from a Tang dynasty fishing poem we were translating together. Heaney chuckled and sipped his whisky. “You two are perfect for each other.”

It was painful to hear the great bard pronounce us “perfect for each other.” But we formed a near perfect friendship that endures to this day. Indiana was in full May bloom when Jin Lei handed me a folder and floppy disk of those Chinese fishing poems. I turned to our translation of “Green Creek” by Wang Wei, an eighth-century master of many arts.

In the clear, stilling waters,

My heart and the river are equally at peace.

Let me sit upon a large, flat rock

And drop my line and hook forever.

Jin Lei was high in my heart, above the river on that shining stone, making impossible casts and raising fish after fish. “Zai jian, lao pengyou,” she whispered and hugged me. “Goodbye, old friend.”

“And don’t be afraid,” she told me. “Our lives are starting over again. Keep your heart open.”

Thinking I’d take the China, too for one last trip, I got my oars out of the closet and walked down to the pond. Over the weedy berm and down through the trees I looked and looked again. The boat was gone. Then I saw that someone had cut the rusty chain from which she depended, leaving only a flat trail through the mud toward the ever-giving and taking water.