First Draft: The Back Story on a Tremendous Fish

“I caught a tremendous fish,” begins the speaker in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish.” And so did I catch a tremendous fish, last Friday night. But for every tremendous fish—well, not every; there’s something called beginner’s luck, where some novice will sit down with a monstrous hook, ancient line, and his grandfather’s pole and reel in a tremendous fish on his first cast. Huh! What a great time he will think fishing is—until the next time he catches a tremendous fish, twenty years hence! No, for many tremendous fish that are caught comes a tremendous input of time, wasted time some would say, of waiting and praying.

I perfected the latter skill as a young lad. I prayed for fish, nearly wept and prayed. As my bobber danced along the rocky dikes of Lake Shetek I appealed to the Almighty, “Please, please let the fish bite! Please, please, PLEASE!” watching my line intently, willing it under with my faith in His answer. I also tried looking away, thinking maybe God liked to answer prayers when you weren’t looking, to add to the surprise.

I also tried incantations, rhymes that integrated my dad’s theories about the habits of fish. One went something like this: “Walleyes, walleyes, come to shore, so my life won’t be-such-a bore.” I should have tried something a bit more like “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,” but what did I know about incantations or their effect on the hidden underworld that is a lake?

I’ve only started to realize how fishing spurs the imagination as I listen to my son talk. By this time in my life, I’ve read enough fishing magazines to think I have a sense of how fish work, and so now I craft our fishing spots and techniques around my own theories: fish into the wind because the wind drives baitfish up on shore; fish current because game fish will lay just off the current and wait for baitfish swept downstream by the current as easy pickings; fish the inside turns of points rather than the points themselves because this is the part of structure that will hold fish, etc. It’s all faith—or very nearly faith. Still, it sounds like surety, and so I can extend my son’s patience by spewing such a theory: “This hour before sunset is the best time to fish.”

“Why dad?”

“Because this is when fish like to feed.”

“Maybe we’ll catch a hundred.”

Other times he’ll make up a scene that he thinks is occurring underneath the surface of the lake: “Maybe they’re just all swimming around my minnow deciding who’s going to bite it first!”

Yes, it very well could be. I really have no idea most of the time.

All of this type of experience—prayers, theories, transactions of intergenerational knowledge—is behind a “tremendous fish.” During just the late afternoon and evening of my tremendous fish, we had casted and retrieved, jigged, bottom bounced, drifted, and trolled away time. Sunset had forced us to retreat to lighted bobbers: hollowed out plastic bobbers that have a thin battery inside which you can turn on so that your bobber produces a warm glow when it’s too dark to see it on the surface of the water any longer. With our lighted bobbers and minnows we were catching all the walleyes we wanted—10 inch “cigars,” walleyes just past fingerling stage when they’re easy pickin’s for northern pike.

Then my bobber went out, as in, it stopped working. Perhaps some water from my fingers had adversely affected the battery, perhaps the battery was wearing out, perhaps lights aren’t meant to be inside bobbers and fisher people are meant to go home to their spouses. Whatever the case, mine got finicky and I couldn’t make it stay lit. I took the little metal cylinder that was the light and pushed and pulled it, stuck my fingernail into several crevices to trigger the on-off switch, and got it lit several times only to have it turn off again when I screwed the top back on. Once, it even was lit all the way through the air on a beautiful cast, only to go out upon impacting the water. Finally, I got it to stay lit and cast it out as far as I could from the boat.

The bite had stopped. Our steady diet of “cigars” had completely disappeared; only a flicker of light remained on the horizon; the adolescent walleyes had gone to bed.

Another theory that I’ve heard is that walleyes bite at night, especially under moonlight. We were a week past a full moon, although I had tried out that theory last week with no success. Still, I’m easy prey for the fishing theory that says, “Just a little longer; wait a little longer and you will be rewarded.” It’s this theory more than any other that makes fishing unpopular with spouses. All this was on the backside of tremendous fish.

When my little light got blurry because it had been carried below the surface of the water, however, my faith had been rewarded. I reeled line to make sure when I set the hook I didn’t just pull against my own loose line, alert the fish to my presence and have him spit out the bait. No, I reeled up so that when I set the hook, I felt his (her) weight at the other end.

“Is it a better one?” my cohort Kevin asked.

“I think so.” Never count your chickens.

There was more weight there at the end of the line, yes. I was just hoping for a keeper to add to the one keeper we already had, a fifteen-incher, the unwritten minimum length for walleyes. My pole was bent and bobbing as the fish shook his head. I could hear regular metallic clicks from the drag on my reel, which meant it was giving some so that my line wouldn’t break, and I expected it to fully sing when the fish neared the boat, realized his predicament, and made a run to get away, but for the most part the fish came right toward the boat as I reeled.

“Do you need the net?” Kevin asked. I tried to remain noncommittal. Still, it was heavy.

“Yeah, I do.”

It lightly shook one more time and then there it was on the top of the water, a wide silver slab that Kevin dipped with the net.

“That’s a big fish,” he said. I wish he’d have said “tremendous”; it’s more poetical.

“I bet it’s twenty-four,” I said, already moving on to measurements.

“It’s bigger than that,” Kevin said.

The first odd thing about the “venerable” fish in Bishop’s poem is that the speaker tells us, “He didn’t fight./ He hadn’t fought at all.” It was the same for my fish. I’ve had two-pounder’s fight harder. It hadn’t even made one run, just held back as I reeled and shook its head a time or two.

How’s that for complacency and entitlement? Had he learned it was pointless to resist? Was he a fatalist? Or was he just old and tired or perhaps fat and out of shape, a fish equivalent of a couch potato who didn’t have it in him to do more than shake his head a time or two? After all, he was the only fish out hunting right now, no doubt preying on perch and other fish whose eyesight is notoriously bad, gobbling up a quick meal of easy pickings. Maybe in the dark he just couldn’t see us and he got disoriented from what was happening.

Then again, what was I looking for? If I was looking for a fight, a legendary struggle to tell the grandchildren about, then why was I fishing walleyes which are anything but notorious for their fight. Was I out here simply for my own ego?

Bishop’s fish—or the fish in her poem—is a survivor. He’s “speckled with barnacles” and “infested/ with tiny white sea-lice.” The speaker looks at his “frightening gills” and thinks of his miraculous innards, culminating with his “pink swim bladder/ like a big peony,” and finally notices “that from his lower lip . . . hung five old pieces of fish-line . . . with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth.” Surely, a fish story, I think, though I have caught a couple of fish that had one old hook in their mouths, and once Kevin had his line bitten off three times before he finally caught the northern that was doing the biting. When I filleted the fish, I found the three lures in the fish’s stomach and gave them back to their owner. Still, the five-haired beard is no doubt poetic license, but Bishop’s rendering makes me think that my fish, too, is still grandiose for not fighting. There’s still something wise here, still something impressive in the large, never-blinking eyes, the laid back girth of the golden sides.

I removed the hook which was lightly embedded behind his tongue in the arrow point of his white plastic gill apparatus and held him by the external slit in his gill just under his mouth.

“You wanna measure him?” Kevin asked. There’s a yardstick-like sticker on the side of the boat for just such a purpose. I stepped over a bench to get near it and held it up. You’re supposed to measure walleyes from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail pinched together. Once you have the measurement you can find a chart that will convert the length to a weight. I carefully put the nose at zero and stretched the tail out, propping up his underside with my hand so he wouldn’t sag. The tail, spread out, reached to the 27-inch mark before he wriggled out of my hands onto the aluminum back bench and then over into the space between the orange gas tank and back of the boat. He was in a tight corner, but shaking himself to move. Sure, now he fights. I had to move the gas tank in order to get him out, then held him up again quickly to the measuring stick.

“I’ll give you 27 ½,” Kevin said.

Yes, it’s all a matter of measurement.

“Do you want a picture?” he asked.

“Yeah, could you?” I said. “Oh, what about the flash?” I asked. This would be a cellphone pic and it was now after ten o’clock.

“Oh, I’ve got an app for that,” he said, smiling. “This thing’s got everything.”

And so I presented the fish, and smiled, and Kevin’s phone, a “Droid,” flashed weakly; then he leaned back for a wider angle and I presented it even more Vanna White-like, extending the tail against my leg with my empty hand.

“I’ve gotta put it back, right?” I asked, sheepishly.

“It’s up to you,” Kevin said.

Consensus around serious walleye fishermen is that you should put the biggest fish back. Big walleyes are almost always females and produce an incredible amount of eggs—many more than small ones. Also, since big ones are not the best eating, unless you’re going to mount one on your wall, you should put them back. Thus, Minnesota instituted a law last year that allows you to keep only one walleye over 20 inches. It allows for one “trophy fish.”

I didn’t know off the top of my head what 27-inches translated into for weight. I knew that 29-30 inches approached 10 pounds, but even then I don’t think I want a dead fish on my wall forever and ever. No, if I was going to keep this fish it would be to eat it. Walleyes taste good. At 27-inches this would be like a Thanksgiving turkey: it could feed a whole family. We like to eat fish at our house: battered in Shore Lunch and pan fried; eaten in a corn tortilla with lime, onions, cilantro, cabbage and salsa as a fish taco; panfish kept whole and deep fried and eaten with rice, with my children eating the eyes, which get crunchy in the deep frier; larger fish broiled or grilled with lime and salt and eaten Thai-style in lettuce wraps with noodles and herbs and peanut dipping sauce.

In short, when I bring fish home, I’m a . . . producer of sorts. I hesitate to say “producer.” The hunter-gatherer enterprise is simply a lot more hit-and-miss than that. There are few sureties, which is why you need prayer and theories. In fact, coming home with fish seems more like the gift of fate than anything, producing a feeling in the producer of humility, of being in the right time at the right place when providence smiles. But when you stay out late, past the time when it’s beautiful and comfortable to fish, when the light is gone and your bobber doesn’t work and the mosquitoes set in en masse, and then you come home and your wife says, “Did you catch anything?” and you say, “No,” and she says, “Then why’d you stay out so late?” there’s no possible answer. But when you pull out a 27-incher, she says, “Wow!” Problem solved.

But there’s another strike against me as producer in catching fish in the great outdoors. Toward the back of the Minnesota Fishing Regulations handbook, several pages explain the dangers of eating fish. “Most fish are healthy to eat,” the page begins, to assuage any fears from the get-go. “But any fish (store-bought or sport-caught) could have contaminants such as mercury and PCBs that can harm human health—especially children and fetuses” (74). I have no idea what PCBs are, but they sound scary. I do know what children and fetuses are, and I’m not too keen on producing mercury and PCBs for them in the fish I catch. For the modern would-be hunter-gatherer, this represents another factor at odds with our would-be hunting and gathering, a different kind of fate with a different kind of expression on its face.

Later pages give guidelines for the same group of child-bearing women and children when it comes to eating fish: Panfish—one meal per week; walleyes under 20-inches—one meal per month; walleyes over 20-inches—do not eat (76). Well, I guess that solves it. What’s the point in staying out late to catch a 27-inch walleye that fights like a log and is carrying mercury death in his muscles? It’s a matter of measurement and pictures. (Incidentally, for “other adults,” eating panfish is “unrestricted,” and all other species of fish are “one meal per week,” so I could go ahead and ingest the mercury myself if I so desired.)

So Bishop’s poem doesn’t give you the backlog on the “tremendous fish,” a backlog that might make the ending of that poem even more powerful. Near the end of the poem, the speaker, after admiring the “great grunting weight” of the fish for some time, and after looking closer to find his “five-haired beard of wisdom” and realizing both what this fish has survived and that now it’s in the speaker’s boat, is overcome by a tremendous feeling. “I stared and stared,” the speaker says,

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

It’s somewhat surprising at first that Bishop turns our attention to the ugly little boat, to the sheen of oil it’s left that certainly has a rainbow tint to it as it lays on the water but which is anything but glorious, anything but pristine. Still, this poem teaches us not underestimate the power of beauty, either of the survivor-beauty of the “venerable” fish or the unexpected location of rainbows, which still may still “shine out” to us from the most unexpected places.

But after this transformative power has spread over everything, comes the final line: “And I let the fish go.” After all that back story, after all that conquest where others had failed to conquer, the tremendous fish goes back in the water, without so much as a measurement or a picture.

I, too, let my tremendous fish go. I rested him in the water with two hands, one under his body just behind his gills, the other on the tail. I eased him back and forth, letting the cool water run over his gills and restore him to alertness, if he ever was alert, this lethargic old-timer. Eventually, I saw one of his ventral fins flutter, but when I began to let go he lurched to port, still imbalanced, so I kept easing him back and forth until he righted himself, like a boy on a bike, and then slowly he swam away and down into the depths again, out of reach of the flashlight beam.

Victory did fill up the little boat, I suppose. I had had my hands on a tremendous fish, had overcome the great urge to possess him, and had given him back to the lake, back to the smiling if tainted providence from which he’d come. Everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. And so, as the darkness deepened and stars peaked through the canvas of cloud overhead, since neither of us had anything pressing in the morning, we decided to stay out just a little bit longer.